The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1908-10-19

The entire life of Jesus and his historic
influence in the world not only are con
sonant with the modern view of wo
mankind but they stand to it in the
basal relation of cause and effect.
| How then shall we interpret this an
eient document in our sacred scriptures
First by trying to get something of the
point of view of those who shaped them
into their present form. Back some
200 or $500 years ago, in the so-called
schools of the prophets, the process of
interpreting the traditions current
among the Hebrew tribes so as to make
them vital with religious force went
forward from generation to generation.
The very language of Israel, poetic, in
exact, hazy, childlike, marvellous vehi-
Gle for the religion then in the max,
ing, forbids all thought of scientific ex-
actitude. Any translation into our
prosier cleancut English clouds the
original. Adam and Eve to us mat
| ter of fact moderns stand for a
definite man, the first human, and
his wife. But to the writer's of Gene,
sis Adam was the Rudy One, Eve
the Living One, OSCILLATIONS which
serve as vehicles of truth rather than
historic personages. When they inter
pref these early scriptures, most Christ
ians forget their childhood with it's
| dreamland of unreal realities or real
unrealities, where as yet the notion of
historicity is unborn. So these authors
| took the old stories of beginnings and
put into them the truths of sin and sal
walton, truths whispered by God in
their own experiences. Noting the fall
of every man from the innocency of
babyhood, they sketched it in the Eden
myth so graphically that 200 years of
study and of human experience can
find not one untrue color nor one false
stroke therein.
After sin comes deliverance. How I?
In the experience of the Hebrew
prophets the process was not simple
but complex. Salvation was rope of
blended strands. The royal thread
therein was God IS power in man, power
which the ancient Hebrew for more
than eight hundred years believed, with
growing clearness was to be manifested
through a man sent by God for that
purpose. This faith was chorused in
the prophecy, "the seed of the woman
shall brnise the serpent s. head -; some
day man will come who shall give
humankind victory over sin''-that is
our English translation of this ancient
song.
The second strand in the life line of
salvation is suffering. All, here was
revelation made by God in the expert.
ence of the Hebrew prophets worthy
of a place in the opening chapters of
the Book of books-redemptio through
pain, the triumph of weakness, victory
by submission. With rare vision the
seer pictured it as woman s special
share in the saving of the race
:" Unto the woman, God said
l will greatly multiply thy pain and
thy conceptions;
In pain thou shalt bring forth children;
And thy desire shall be to thy husband,
And he shall rule over thee"
Millions have called this woman S
eurse-doOmed to perennial pain be-
cause of sin. And thousands today
with no such theological excuse deem it
a curse, and meet it with fierce 81 II
not bear it." If curse, then Jesus, the
Man of Sorrows, was the Chief Sinner.
Wrong, all wrong!
Far off in the dim backward of the
world God laid His hand upon the
mother and babe her suffer that in her
pain she might find Him. 1t is no acct |
dent that the creature who bears not |
children, whose sinews are iron, who |
loves roaming, despises the restraint of |
fixed abode, should be coarse, warloving |
and earthly. A casual connection binds |
pain to purity, suffering to spiritual
vision, enforced quietude to meditation
upon things high and eternal. The |
Roman sibyl was woman, the Greek |
pythoness at Delphi was woman The
sex which was to give birth to the per
feet man must itself learn the lesson of |
pain. If it was privilege to be the
Messiah of mankind, motherhood must |
also be privilege-divine, unspeak-
ably pregnant with blessings for the
race.
Thy desire shall be to thy huband,
And he shall rule over thee
This sounds hard. 1t looks like the
sentence of a judge. Put beside it the
great saying of the seed of the woman
who was to bruise the head of sin
The Son of Man came not to be min
istered unto,
But to minister, and to give his life,
A ransom for many. +"
Is there no note of harmony as you