Our Bible is a book of lives. It is a book of men praying rather than a book of prayer, of men believing rather than a book of beliefs, of men sinning and repenting and righting themselves rather than a book of ethics. It is a book, too, of men loving: it is full of faces turned towards faces. As in the procession pictures frescoed on rich old walls, the well known men and women come trooping though its pages in twos and threes, or in little hands of which we recognize the central figure, and take the others to be those unknown friends immortalized by just one mention in this book. Adam always strays with Even along the footpaths of our fancy. Abram walks with Sarah, Rebecca at the well suggest the Isaac waiting somewhere, and Rachel’s presence pledges Jacob’s not far off. Two brothers and a sister together lead Israel out from Egypt. Here come Ruth and Naomi, and there go David and Jonathan. Job sits in his ashes forlorn enough, but not for want of comforters, — we can hardly see Job for his friends. One whole book in the Old Testament is a love song about an eastern king and one of his dusky brides; although, to keep the Bible biblical, our modern chapter headings call the Song of Solomon a prophecy of the love of the Christian Church for Christ. Some persons have wished the book away, but a wise man said the Bible would have lacked, had it not held somewhere in its pages a human love song. True, the prophets seem to wander solitary, — prophets usually do; yet though we seldom see their ancient audience, they doubtless had one. Minstrels and preachers always presuppose the faces of a congregation.
But as we step from Old Testament to New, again we hear the buzz of little companies. We follow Jesus in and out of homes; children cluster about His feet; women love Him; a dozen men leave net and plough to bind to His their fortunes, and others go forth by twos, not ones, to imitate Him. “Friend of publicans and sinners” was His title with those who loved Him not. Across the centuries we like and trust Him all the more because He was a man of many friends. No spot in all the Bible is quite so overcoming as that garden scene where the brave, lonely sufferer comes back, through the darkness under the olive trees, to His three chosen hearts, with a stone’s throw of His heartbreak, — to find them fast asleep! Once before, in that uplifted hour from which far off he described Gethsemane, — we call it the “Transfiguration,” — we read of those same three friends asleep. The human loneliness of that soul in the garden as He paused by Peter’s side, — “You! Could you not watch with me one hour?” — and turned back into the darkness, and into God! Then came the kiss with which another of His twelve betrayed Him. No passage in the Gospels makes Him so real a man to us as this; no words so appeal to us to stand by and be His friends.
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