SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE
Robert Meyers

It is an enviable profession which allows a man to be paid for reading widely in early American literature, especially if his twin profession has to do with religion. The first literature in this country dealt often with religious themes, and one of the most interesting things about them is that they so strikingly resemble modern problems.

Thomas Hariot’s A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588) was one of the first “promotion tracts” to encourage Englishmen to migrate to America. Hariot says in it that he tried to tell some of the Indians about the Bible and that he found many of them “glad to touch it, to embrace it, to kisse it, to hold it to their brests and heades, and stroke over all their bodie with it; to shew their hungrie desire of that knowledge which was spoken of.”

How strikingly this illustrates the human tendency to interpret as they wish, rather than to consider possibilities which would make them less happy. Consciously or not, Hariot probably misread the intentions of those Indians. They were not so concerned to have the knowledge he spoke of as they were to exploit the magical potency they thought his book must possess.

It was obvious that the white man attached some special reverence to the small black book. Undoubtedly, the Indians thought of it as an amulet to ward off disease, and a charm to confer the peculiar powers of those who brought it.

The Bible still carries some of that same potency for some people. I recall a good friend at Freed-Hardeman College many years ago who dropped his Bible, picked it up, and reverently kissed it. He explained that his mother had taught him to do this.

I would guess that it is this sense of the magical potency of an object that causes some people so much difficulty when the Bible is studied critically and analytically. The doctrine that there is not a “single error of any kind” in the entire Bible, as one of our Bible department heads once said to 1500 college students in chapel, serves to create an object which it would be blasphemous to study critically.

One is lead to wonder, from Hariot’s remarks, how often we say things are such-and-such because we want them to be so. Perhaps even Hariot may have known the true interest of his Indian acquaintances if he had taken time to think, but he so ardently wanted them to want Biblical knowledge that he was willing to construe their actions in terms of his desire.

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John Winthrop, governor several times of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, refers to some people who wanted “the Indians rooted out, as being of the cursed race of Ham.” It is interesting to find, so soon in our history, the Biblical curse invoked to get rid of some undesirable element in the population. Later it would be the Negro who would be put under the curse of Ham by white supremacists with a flair for invoking the authority of Scripture. We talk of progress because we have television and picture-taking rockets flying by Saturn, but the truth is that it is still more fashionable in some circles to use the Bible for selfish interests than to seek expert opinion as to what it may mean.