Lux Mundi

IV Preparation in History for Christ

Edward S. Talbot

The paradox of Divine mystery implied in the words ‘The Word was made flesh,’ is not exhausted by a right understanding of the Person of Christ. It extends to the relations between Christ and History. On the one hand, the Incarnation of the Son of God appears as supreme, solitary, unique, transcending all analogies of experience, all limitations of nationality or generation, determined before the world was, beyond the power of any antecedents to produce, the entry of a new thing into the world. It appears, in short, as a miracle. But, on the other hand, it appears as an historical event, occurring at a particular date, appealing to the feelings and fulfilling the hopes of the time, a climax and a new point of departure in the historical order. It does this, necessarily, because this is involved in the act of taking flesh, of entering simply, literally, naturally into the conditions of human life. Such a thing occurs, and must occur, in the natural order. To say this is not to dictate what a Divine revelation must be, but only to shew what Christianity asserts of itself. In this way it was good in God’s sight that His revelation should come.

It follows from this, in the first place, that there must be two ways, both valid and necessary, of approaching in thought and study Christ manifest in the flesh. We may treat the fact of His appearing with little or no reference to historical relations, for its own inherent unchanging truth and meaning. We may also treat it as clothed in historical event, to be understood in its relations with what went before and followed after and stood around. The two methods supplement one another. It may be true that the simple personal claim which the solitary figure of Jesus Christ makes upon us, by its unalterable moral dignity and beauty, its typical humanity, its unearthly authority, is the strongest that can be made: none the less may that claim be confirmed and reinforced if we see the same figure as it were upon an historical throne; if it should become clear that what went before (and what followed after) does, in any way, pay homage to Him; if the manner of His appearing in place and time be calculated to heighten the impression which the fact of it makes.

And in the second place, it follows that to start in any historical treatment of the subject of this paper from the central twofold assertion as to Christ, made by S. John in the phrase ‘The Word was made flesh,’ is to obtain at once the right clue to the lines which it should follow.

(1) To do so is not to beg the question or to fetter the enquiry, but only to define what kind of evidence, if any, the study of Christ’s relation to foregoing history can yield. We see that it must be such as works in us the conviction that He both does, and does not, occur ‘naturally’ at the time and place when He appeared; that history leads up to Him and prepares His way, and yet that no force of natural antecedents can account for Him or for His work. It is true that evidence for either side of this two-sided impression may have sufficient weight to determine faith especially with individual minds. The contrast between Christ and all else in history, arresting the attention and suggesting the thought of special Divine presence, may of itself be a spring of faith: or, upon the other hand, a clear discernment of His natural supremacy in history may lead a man on to higher truth. But the true evidence, as corresponding to the true and full claim, will be that which suggests the conclusion with simultaneous and equal force from either side.

(2) If the aim is not evidence but instruction, and we desire simply to understand better what is true of our Lord’s relation to history, it will still advantage us greatly to start from the same point. We shall be able to recognise freely and without fear of contradiction or confusion, on the one side, the way in which the lines of history, of human experience, aspiration, achievement, character, need, lead up to Christ and issue in Him: and on the other, the unearthly and peculiar greatness of Him Who spake as never man spake, Who taught as one that had authority and not as the Scribes, Who was not convinced by any of sin: Whose daily intimacy with a disciple issued in that disciple’s confession, ‘Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God.’ Such a method, starting from the Christian claim, and trying to trace out all that it involves, need not be only for the believer, any more than the quest for evidence or witness is for those only who do not believe. The Christian tests the foundations, and welcomes every corroboration, of his faith: while, in dwelling on the character of the work and of its relations to all else, the non-believer may come to find the conviction grow upon him that it was indeed ‘wrought of God.’

(3) From the same point, we see at once to what double misunderstanding or double attack the Gospel not only may but must be liable. On the one side, it may be refused a hearing as miraculous; it may be understood as violating the natural order which it transcends; it may be regarded and resented as an anomaly in history. On the other side, a consideration of the aptness of its occurrence when and where it did occur, and of its harmonious relations to many lines of tendency will suggest the suspicion that it may be after all only a result, though a supreme and surprising result, of historical forces. In a word, it may be accused at once from separate, possibly from the same, quarters as too supernatural and too natural to be what it claims to be. It is all-important to notice at the outset that liability to this double attack is an inevitable incident of its true character and of that which makes its glory, viz. the presence of true Godhead under truly human conditions.

But to return to the main point.

The importance and interest of the subject of this paper may be inferred, as we have seen, directly from what the Incarnation claims to be. But we are not left to infer it for ourselves. Nothing is clearer or more striking than the place which it occupied from the outset in the declaration of the Gospel. Jesus Himself spoke of the Scribes of the kingdom as ‘bringing forth out of their treasure things new and old’; and laid it down as a first principle of His kingdom that He was ‘not come to destroy, but to fulfil150.’ While with surprising and commanding clearness He centres men upon Himself, and distinguishes Himself from all who came before Him, from ‘the prophets and the law which prophesied until John’; He yet with evident care draws the new out of the old, and fits it on to the old: He delineates His own mission as a climax in a long appeal of God to Israel151, and the opposition to Him and His, as a chapter of dénouement in the history of an old conflict between God and the ungodly152. He sees a ‘necessity’ for the happening of things to fulfil what had been said of old153. The very pith of the disciples’ ignorance is their failure to see how the features of His work and character had been traced beforehand, and the supreme teaching which they receive from Him is that which discloses His correspondence to the whole tenor of the Scriptures of the past154. The teaching of the Apostles, and of those who followed them, is faithful to these lines. Though they have to convince the world of an Event which works a revolution, which is to turn men from darkness to light: though their perfect confidence in their own truth makes them see the things that went before as elements, ‘weak and beggarly elements155,’ and they have moreover battles to fight against these ‘elements’ set up again as antagonists: though their adherence to the Old Testament was an ever fruitful source of difficulty and attack (of which Judaizing and Gnostic controversies are the record), yet nevertheless they unswervingly maintained the inspiration of the Old Testament, and stood upon it; and we distinguish without hesitation as their normal, primary, characteristic method that of appeal to the correspondence between their Gospel and every hope and word of Israel’s faith: the ‘revelation of the mystery... is... by the scriptures of the prophets... made known to all nations156.’ The Hebrews who wistfully look back to their temple, law, and ritual, are not taught a stern forgetfulness of what had been, nor led vaguely to spiritualize its meaning, but are led to recognise in each part of the ancient system a line which leads up to Christ. Finally, the disciple who sets the true being of his Master in monumental and awful splendour as the Word who ‘was with God and was God’ now made manifest in the flesh, in the same breath carries us to the very core and source of all that can be implied in preparation by declaring the same Word to have been ‘in the world’ before, to have been the author of all things, and the unseen light of men157.

The relation of Christ to history, or the preparation for the Gospel, is then no afterthought of our own or any recent time. It was Augustine’s saying that Christianity was as old as the world158: and Tertullian’s (one of almost venturesome boldness) that in the previous history Christ was schooling Himself for incarnation159. But it is not difficult to see that our own time is one which is specially fitted to appreciate and handle this aspect of the Christian truth. Our cultivation of the historical method, our historical realism or sense of the relation of persons or events to historical setting, our recognition of the part played in forming structure, function, character, by gradual process, by heredity, by evolution, our developed understanding of the links by which the parts and successions in all nature, and not least in what is human, are bound together—all these go to form a habit of mind which in presence of such a Revelation as that of the Gospel will at once busy itself, whether for satisfaction, for edification, for controversy, or for interpretation, with the relation of the Truth to the world into which it came, to all from amongst which it sprung. In such a time it is natural that attack should try to shew that facts which historical criticism has done much to secure, and a Life which it has become impossible to treat as a myth, are simply explicable according to the natural laws of historical causation. It is natural that Christianity should be explained as the flower and bloom of Judaism, or as sprung from the fusion of Greek and Jewish influences in a Galilean medium. Such explanations may not be new, but they are urged with new resources and a more subtle ingenuity. They have the advantage of being the sort of explanations which are naturally most congenial to the time. But out of the very stress of such attacks may come a special corroboration of Christian truth. The experiment is crucial: it can hardly be expected that attack of this kind can ever command greater skill and resource than it does at present. If therefore it should be proved to fail: if we are able to look men in the face and ask whether when all allowance is made for the subtle ‘chemistries’ of history and for the paradoxical way in which historical results spring from what precedes them, it is possible to think that Jesus Christ and His religion were a mere growth from antecedents—then we have here the prospect of such a confirmation of faith as no age less historically scientific could, in that kind, give and receive.

But this negative result, great as its value may be, can only be part of what Christian science may yield in this sphere for the elucidation and support of faith. It should surely be able to display with greater breadth and delicacy than ever before that correspondence between the Revelation of Christ and what went before it, which was of old indicated by saying that Christ came in the ‘fulness of the time.’ It should be able to enhance, and not (as men fear) to impair, the evidence of a Divine presence and influence, preparing for that which was to come, moulding the plastic material of history for a ‘far-off Divine event.’ It may seem as if this was not so. It may seem, for example, as if the severity and activity of historical and linguistic criticism had dimmed the clearness of those correspondences between prophetic utterances spoken centuries before Christ and the points in Him or His work whereby they were fulfilled, which were once so clear. It may seem, it is evidently true, that stricter canons of interpretation forbid for us that unbounded use of the happy expedient of allegory which could make everything in the Old Testament speak of Christ. But even if this were so (and with regard to prophecies we only partially grant it), is there no countervailing gain to reckon? The hand of God may be seen in what is marvellous, startling, exceptional, unexplained. Can it not be seen as distinctly and as persuasively in what is orderly, steadfast, intelligible, and where our reason, made in God’s likeness, can follow along in some degree with the how and the why of His working? It was Christ’s will to give special signs, yet the curiosity which ‘sought after a sign’ was not honoured by Christ like that wisdom which ‘discerned the signs of the times,’ and so could see the force of the special signs that were given because it saw them in their true moral and spiritual context160. Have we any reason to hope that our time may be suffered to do (and even be doing) something for the interpretation of the witness of history to Christ which has not been done before, and which is even an advance upon what has been done? Let us consider for a moment (in order to answer this question) what it is which specially engrosses the interest and admiration of all of us in the different branches of modern study and enquiry. It is the beauty of process. The practical men among us watch process in its mechanical forms as contrived by invention. The naturalists and the men of science have to an extraordinary extent developed our perception of it in nature: they shew us its range, and its incredible delicacy, flexibility, and intricacy; they shew us its enormous patience in the unceasing yet age-long movements which by microscopic or less than microscopic changes accumulate the coal, or lessen the mountain; they shew us the wonderful power of adaptation by which it accommodates itself to surroundings, and appropriates and transforms them to its need. The embryologist developes its wonders as it makes ‘the bones to grow in the womb of her that is with child.’ And the historians in their sphere do the like: it is for them, if not the beginning and end of their work, at least the most powerful of their methods, to shew the processes by which institutions, customs, opinions, rise and decline; to arrange the facts so as to display on their chart the steps of growth, the stages of decay; to shew influences blending to form events, and parting again to destroy or re-shape them.

There is beauty in all this, more than we can, perhaps, altogether analyse or explain. As living beings we sympathise with the life and movement of it all (or, as in the case of intricate machinery, with the imitation of life) compared with what stands stark, solid, unchanging; as intelligent beings we revel and delight in its intricacy, and, further, we are gratified by the way in which it subdues with explanation what would be anomalous, abrupt, motiveless, in the way of change or event. It gives us something like the pleasure which we take in the beauty of the exquisite subtle curves and shaded surfaces of a Raphael figure compared with the rough outline of a Dürer woodcut. But we could not long rest in the admiration of mere process, whether delicate or colossal. There is a rational element present in, or controlling, our sense of beauty, which asks whence and whither, which demands unity in detail; and this finds altogether new and delightful gratification when it can see a relation, a meaning, a grouping, a symmetry, of which processes are the ministers and instruments.

It is, then, this idea of beauty in process that we bring with us as we approach to behold the facts and method of God’s Redemptive Work. It is altogether too strong in us to be left behind as we cross the threshold of this region; it is too much connected with all our thinking and experience. It is very possible that there may be exaggeration about it in us: and it is indispensable for us to recognise this, ‘le défaut de notre qualité.’ But all the same we cannot disown, though we must control, what is so specially our own. And if our love of process is prepared to be critical, it is also prepared to be gratified: and there is opened a prospect of fresh witness to the truth of the unchanging Gospel, if it should be found that its introduction into this world is ushered in by all the beauty of process, with all the grandeur of slow unhasting preparation, the surprises of gradual transformation, the delicacies of combination, which process allows.

Such a sight is much more than wonderful, and has in it, if our ideas of what is Divine are not very narrow, much more evidence of God’s hand than any mere wonder can have. But it is as wonderful as anything can be. And if we still plead that our sense of wonder stipulates for exceptionalness, it has its own way of satisfying this—the way of uniqueness. For those features which we admire in process are capable, if combined with a certain degree of grandeur, completeness, and particularity, of conveying to us the impression of a unique thing. We may dismiss as a dialectical refinement the objection which has been made that, as is doubtless true, ‘everything is unique.’ None the less, there is a meaning in our ordinary language when it applies the epithet ‘unique’ to certain persons, classes, or things. A man of science may properly speak of a certain uniqueness in the way in which natural conditions are combined so as to make life possible: a historian will certainly miss truth if he does not recognise a special uniqueness in certain historical epoch-making moments. In proportion as we believe in Mind ordering the things of nature and history, such uniqueness will have speaking significance. And as uniqueness has its degrees, and rises according to the scale, quantity, character and completeness, of that which goes to make it up, so its significance will rise proportionately, until at last, arriving at uniqueness, which seems to us absolute, we gain evidence that there is before us a Supreme Thing, a true centre to the world. The evidence is not indeed demonstrative, but it is in a high degree corroborative, and it is the highest which history can offer. It is this evidence of uniqueness which, as it seems to me, we of the present day may with special fitness seek, and shall with special welcome find:

(1) in the shaping of world-history towards the Christian era,

(2) in the special preparation of the Jewish nation.

Within the compass of a paper like the present, it is impossible to do more than indicate the lines which, even without any high degree of special education, a Christian’s thought may travel in tracing the Divine work of preparation and witness.

I. In the first part of our enquiry the distinction between an outward and an inward working suggests itself as convenient, though necessarily imperfect: the one consisting in a moulding of the material facts of history, such as the geographical distribution of peoples, and the political and social order; the other in a like use of the changes in thought, feeling, and the like.

(1) It can never be altogether too hackneyed to dwell on the strange value to the world’s history of the two peninsulas which we know as Greece and Italy, thrust out into that Mediterranean Sea, which was itself so remarkable as a centre and ‘medium’ of the western world, binding its many nations together. They share with other lands of the temperate zone all its possibilities of hardy and vigorous life: but, besides this, their sky and sea, their conveniences and difficulties, had a special stimulus to give to their early inhabitants. They were extraordinarily well suited to be the seed-plots of civilization. And these seed-plots were aptly fertilized, first by the Phoenicians, those carrier-birds of antiquity dropping seed along the Mediterranean coasts: and then by the happy contact between Greece and the other Greece opposite, to which the island bridges of the Aegean linked it, where, on the narrow strip of coast plain and rich river valley between the sea and the high plateaus of Asia Minor, the Ionians enjoyed, as Herodotus says161, the fairest climate in the world. Upon this debouched, with the rivers from the interior, the highways along which travelled westward the civilization or the power of the dimly known but highly important early Phrygian monarchy, or from yet farther east, of the mighty Assyria. The recent discoveries of Prof. Ramsay and others re-interpret and emphasize to us this early connection between the Asian lands and Greece in Europe, of which the Lion Gate of Mycenae is a monument. What Greece thus took with her left hand she could pass across with her right to yet another Greece, ‘Great Greece,’ in Sicily and Southern Italy. But we may easily fail to recognise how much all this delicate and tender growth depended on favourable circumstance, and we cannot too carefully mark how space was made awhile for it to spring. The ‘hills stood about’ both peninsulas on the North to shelter them from intrusion: but this barrier, sufficient for ordinary times, would hardly have resisted the heavy thrust of the later pressure of population from the East and North-East, which, when it did begin, so nearly crushed Rome, and which, if it had come earlier, might have easily stifled Greek and Roman civilization in the cradle. The reader of the Persian Wars will watch almost with awe within how little Greece came of what appeared alike to Asiatic and Greek a certain subjection to the Persian. A difference of twenty years earlier, the chance of a different temper in the little Athenian people, the use by Darius of the methods of Xerxes, would, humanly speaking, have decided the other way the fate of western civilization. It is easier again to admire than to explain the happy fortune which brought the mountain kingdom of Macedon to its moment of aggression just too late to hurt the flowering and fruitage of Greece, just in time to carry its seed broadcast over Eastern, Syrian, and Egyptian lands. From all the sequence of the Graeco-Roman history which follows, and in which nothing is more important to all the purposes of Providence than the simple fact of the order of these two, Greek first, Roman second, we can here select only one feature of capital importance, viz. the transformation of a world intensely localized and sub-divided into one as singularly united and homogeneous. Follow S. Paul and see his circuits, watch him claiming the safeguard of the same Roman citizenship in the Macedonian town and in the capital of Palestine, laying hold at Caesarea on the horns of a central tribunal of justice at Rome, borne thither by the sails of the carrying trade in the ‘ship of Alexandria,’ meditating a journey into Spain, numbering among his Roman converts, as seems probable, one who had a direct connection with Roman Britain, writing in the same Greek to Rome and to the highlanders of Galatia, never crossed in his journeys by any track of war, never stopped by any challenge of frontier or custom-house: these are so many object-lessons to shew what the ‘Pax Romana’ and the Roman unity of power and organization imported for the growth of a world-religion. This was the time when it could be complained that it was impossible to flee from the Caesar’s wrath because the Caesar owned the world. And to make the impression more distinct, let the eye travel backward a little, or forward a little: backward into the second or even the first century B.C., when this same Mediterranean world was still in greater part an unconsolidated chaos of political débris; when the tumult of the Macedonian and Syrian wars of Rome and then of her desolating civil strife filled the world with noise and occupied its thought and destroyed its peace; when the sea was impassable because of pirates, and when the West was still in great part unsubdued and formidable barbarism: or forward, across the space during which the Gospel had spread its influence and struck its roots and won its power, to the time so soon following, when the lands that had known no war were again traversed by the armies of rival emperors, and the barbarians began to dismember the West, and the gloom of a great fear preoccupied men’s hearts. To say nothing of the middle ages, what unity of the Mediterranean world and the lands affiliated to it has the whole of later history got to shew, that can compare for a moment with the unity of the early Empire, focussed in its cosmopolitan capital Rome?

And in this there is much more than a mechanical provision for the progress of a world-religion. It is not merely that its heralds find a complete facility of communication, peaceful conditions, and a ‘lingua franca’ ready for their use. We must realize how the unity had been obtained. It had been by pulverizing separate nationalities, separate patriotisms, separate religions; by destroying or leaving only in a municipal form the centres round which human energy and loyalty had been wont to gather. Thus the world had been turned into that ‘cold and icy plain’ of which M. Renan speaks. And it is not too much to say that this process had destroyed just so many barriers to the entrance of Christianity. We have only to realize what had been previously the universal character of the worships of the western world, viz. that they had been local, the common and exclusive possession of the citizens of one place or state, and inextricably bound up with the being and welfare of that particular community. Such religions, and people bred under them, would have met Christianity, not so much with criticism of its doctrines, or with rival doctrines of their own, as with ideas and a frame of mind so alien to a spiritual and universal religion like the Gospel that it would have found no foothold in attacking them. Conceive the force with which what even in the second century after Christ the heathen objector urged, ’it is not creditable to alter the customs handed down to us from our fathers162,’ would have come from the Roman of the earlier Republic, or the Greek of the times of freedom. Nay, we may without rashness hazard the conjecture that had it been possible for the Gospel to overcome these conditions it would have done so prematurely and with loss: that they were in their time and place ministers of good: that they were bound up with that vigorous energy of development within one small limited horizon, by which, as we shall see, the preparation of the heathen world was carried out.

It was the negative aid of the Empire to Christianity that it destroyed these. But it lent more positive help. It created a demand, or at least a need, for a universal religion. Of this there are several proofs. The religious phenomena of the time other than Christianity supply the first. There is an attempt, or more than one attempt, to provide such a religion. There is the attempt by way of comprehension, of making all the gods live together as joint inhabitants of a common Pantheon. There is the attempt by way of construction, in the worship of the one Power about which there was no doubt, the Goddess Rome, and of the Emperor her deified representative. There is also, we may perhaps add, the attempt by way of philosophic thought. For philosophy at this time had a religious bent which increased not improbably as the circulation of Christian thought stole unknown through the veins of society: and it felt after the One Being whose Personal existence and Fatherhood it waveringly discerned, but whom yet it could not steadily distinguish from a personified order of nature. Such a religious idea, needed to complete Cicero’s commonwealth of the Universe comprehending Gods and men, may be seen with increasing clearness in Seneca, Epictetus, and Aurelius. The need of a universal religion is thus directly shewn. But other proofs, as clear though less direct, are to be drawn from the other departments of human thought. For literature was already a unity, into which whatever the genius of provincials like Lucan, or Seneca, or Pliny contributed was gathered up. And it is a commonplace that the greatest constructive result of the imperial period was the creation or development of a universal code of law.

(2) In what has been last said we have almost crossed the imaginary line by which we were to divide the preparation in external fact from that which was more inward in thought and feeling. To deal with this latter may seem almost ridiculous: since to do so must involve the presumption of summarizing in a few lines the drift of the literature and thought of antiquity. Yet, in the briefest words, it may be possible to suggest a few true outlines of the shape which an account of that drift should take. It would certainly represent the mental history of the classical world in its relation to the Gospel as supplying a double preparation, positive and negative: a positive preparation by evolving ideas which the Gospel could work into its own fabric, or a frame of mind which would make for it a suitable ‘nidus’ and a receptive soil: a negative preparation by the breakdown of human nature’s own constructive and speculative efforts, and by the room thus left for a revelation which would unite the broken and useless fragments of thought and minister to unsatisfied needs. And of these the negative seems the more predominant and the more direct. In so saying we are guided by what appears to be the teaching of the New Testament. It seems as though the main upshot of that time was, and was meant to be, the failure of the world ‘by wisdom163’ to find the truth: though when this has been recognised and acknowledged, then the world might find, as we may find, that all the while in this unattaining and abortive thought God had put impulses from His own wisdom, and prepared materials for His own coming work. It is the typical history of the ‘natural man’: and though what is primary and indispensable is that the natural man should learn the poverty and misery of his own state, and be ready to die to his life, yet the natural man too is the true though perverted work of God, and in his thoughts and instincts, his emotions and speculations, must be found a witness to which the revelation will appeal, and a response which it will elicit. It is impossible not to follow the track so suggested, and to see in the early stages of Greek life, the lusty youth-time of the natural man. Casting off the bright and truthful simplicity, and the happy story-telling of its childhood, it begins (we speak of the times between 600 and 450 B.C.) to try its young energies upon the problems of the world: it suggests its explanations, quick, ingenious, one-sided, changing, of how the world came to be: ‘it came from water,’ ‘from air,’ ‘from fire:’ ‘it came from the dance of atoms:’ ‘nay, but these give us only the how, it came from something more than these, it came from mind:’ ‘are you sure what it is? fix upon any part of it and you will find it slip through your fingers, for all is change, and change is all we know;’ these are the quick premières ébauches of its young speculation. But already there is a sound of alarm in the air. That challenge asking whether there was an ‘it’ at all; and if so, whether by parity of cavil there was any solidity in the other assumptions of thought, in ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood,’ ‘beauty’ and ‘ugliness;’ or at least anything beyond such mere relative and convenient meaning as there is in ‘big’ or ‘little,’ ‘thick’ or ‘thin,’ ‘wet’ or ‘dry’—this sobers men. Thought feels its own dangers. It must try its hand more seriously at some true constructive work: and so there follows that great period in which, steadied by the strong grip and sharp discipline of the great prophet of natural conscience and natural instinct, Socrates, it addresses itself to its great task of wringing her secret from the world. It is done and necessarily done in the sheer self-reliance of the unaided mind, yet of the mind in the fullest sense of the word; not the mere critical understanding, but the whole spiritual and rational energy of the man, not disowning its dependence on a discipline of character and a severe and painful training of its own powers. The results, so splendid and yet so inadequate, so rich in great intuitions and suggestions, so patient and successful in much of its detail, is preserved to us in the work of Plato and Aristotle. Christian thought can never be interested in disparaging that work: Christian thinkers at different times have done special honour to different aspects of it: and the position of Aristotle in the works of Dante, and of Aquinas, and in the frescoes of the Spanish chapel, is the sign of the ungrudged admiration given by what in our modern way we might regard as among the least appreciative and discriminating of Christian times. But the most ungrudging admiration cannot prevent our seeing, and history compels us to see, what it lacked. It lacked a foundation upon a Rock. It had the certainty, if certainty at all, which belongs to profound intuitions and to a wide interpretation of experience, not that which makes a definite, settled, and above all communicable conviction. All the while narrower, pettier, more captious, or more ordinary minds had been asking ‘what is truth’ in a very different spirit; had displayed the independence and captiousness of youth, and not its hopeful and trustful creativeness. And more and more this lower element began to prevail. When it became a question not of projecting systems which should impress and absorb the higher minds of a few generations, but of providing that which should pass on with men, the common run of men, into the advancing years, and stand the strain of the world’s middle life; then it was found that the human mind unaided was more powerful to destroy than to build or to maintain. The dark horse of Plato’s chariot pulled down his fellow: in the unaided human understanding the critical faculty proved stronger than the constructive: without the point of attachment in a central truth to which men’s high thoughts could reach and cling, or (to change the figure) without a clearly-disclosed goal of truth towards which they could be seen to tend and converge, they could not maintain or justify themselves: ‘the carnal mind’ was against them and unworthy of them: as regards any real adoption of them by mankind for fruitful and trustworthy convictions, they passed away, according to that law of which the modern poet speaks:—

         Eternal hopes are man’s
Which when they should maintain themselves aloft
Want due consistence: like a pillar of smoke
That with majestic energy from earth
Rises but, having reached the thinner air,
Melts and dissolves, and is no longer seen164.

We shall not be wrong in saying that the course of philosophy after Aristotle displayed increasingly the collapse of the experiment of speculative self-reliance. Scepticism was not confined to the ‘Sceptics,’ nor even shared only by the Epicureans: it deeply underlay the philosophy of the Stoics. But as with advancing life men baffled in their early sanguineness fall back (both for good and evil) and content themselves with the energies of practical life, so the mind of that day baffled and despairing of the speculative problem did not abandon, but transferred, its self-reliance; men threw themselves with a sort of defiance into the organization of conduct; ‘imperturbableness’ and ‘self-sufficiency’ became watchwords of their thought165. This is the character of Stoicism: this explains its vogue and wide indirect influence; its curious likeness to its apparently quite alien contemporary, Epicureanism, in a common cultivation of self-sufficingness; and, finally, its ready alliance with the natural tendencies of Roman character when it passed from Greece to Rome.

Here again was a great experiment, which had no mean success. We admire almost with awe its unsparing thoroughness, its austerity, its unworldliness, its courage, its endurance. In its later forms, when some power has touched it with gentleness, we yield it even a warmer and tenderer admiration. Only what we cannot do is to disguise its failure as a great spiritual experiment. We cannot forget how it left the mass of men untouched, how it concentrated strength by what it neglected of human sympathy and effort, how it revealed a disease and palsy of human nature which it could not cure: how at its heart it had no certainty of conviction to give peace and to resist the forces of decay. Humanity will never, perhaps, wind itself higher. But it was a height on which human strength is insufficient to stand. There lacked a sure word of truth: the joy and fruitfulness of an inspiration: a grace which could minister to the weakness, as well as summon the forces, of human nature. We cannot be blind to its failure unless we share it: unless, that is, we are trying to satisfy ourselves by some philosophy of life which misses its secrets, has no key to many of its problems, and at heart despairs of its solution. The experiment of moral self-reliance, then, failed in its turn.

But we spoke of a positive as well as a negative upshot to all this Gentile history: a positive contribution to the preparation for Christ. Where shall we look for this? Surely alongside of, and in the same plane with, the failures. If one chief result of the history of the ancient world was to exhibit the insufficiency of man’s efforts to find truth and righteousness and life, this must be completely shewn in proportion as the efforts were noble, and therefore in proportion as they realized (though, at the moment, only for disappointment) the capacities, the possibilities, the true desires and ideals of man. If man the race, like man the individual, was finally to find salvation by dying to himself, to his own natural man, he could only do this when it had been adequately and magnificently proved both that he could not save himself, and how splendidly worth saving he was. He must do his best, that he may despair of his best. Do we not feel that this is just what was worked out by the histories of Greece and Rome? They are splendid experiments of human power. Diverse in their method, they combine in this result. In Greece the experiment is by way of spontaneity, of free lively development, conditioned only by its own instincts of taste and beauty. And Rome represents the alternative plan of seeking strength by discipline, by subordination, by distrust of novelty, by sacrifice of individuality to the corporate life, and of sentiment and opinion to the rule of law. Both realize deathless types of matured human life, of its beauty, its brilliant graces, its dignity, its honour, its strength. Perhaps, according to the one-sidedness which limits so severely the works and lives of men, it might have been impossible that these possibilities of his nature should have been first realized with the same solidity and fulness in presence of those mighty truths, speaking of what was above man, which brooded over the history of the Jews and came forth into the world with the Gospel. Yet they are indispensable to the fulness of the Christian work: they are the human material: and that material must be first-rate in its kind. We owe it perhaps permanently to Greece and Rome that we recognise fully the grace of God’s original workmanship in man, the validity of his instincts, his individual value, the sacredness and strength of all his natural social bonds, the wisdom and power possessed by his incorporated life. These are things which we could never have realized if all the world had been brought up in the barbarous societies of ancient Europe or under the great despotisms of Egypt and Asia. The religions of Asia may perhaps shew us by contrast the immense importance to a religion of being able to build with sound and adequate materials on the human side. That Greece and Rome did contribute specially in this way to the work of the true religion may be shewn by the way in which men have again and again turned back to these original sources for fresh impulses of liberty or vigour.

But these things had their day and passed. The age of Pericles and of Demosthenes, the great days of the Roman Republic, are only epochs in the history, long past at the era of our Lord. We look to see whether there is any positive preparation for Him and His Gospel in the whole drift of that history, and especially in tendencies which took a developed form closer to the era of Christianity166.

General and popular impressions about the character and course of the history will put us on the track of a true answer. It is impossible to look at the history of the classical world without getting a double impression, that it is a history of failure and degeneracy, and yet that it is a history of bettering and progress. If we take the world at the Christian era, the times of political brilliancy and energy are over, and men are sinking into a uniformity of servility and stagnation: morally the ancient severity is lost, and the laws of Augustus are feebly coping with the results of a general dissoluteness as to morality and marriage: economically society is disfigured by a vast slave system, by the disappearance of honest and thriving free labour, and by great developments of luxury and pauperism: in literature, though it is the ‘golden age,’ the signs are not wanting, in artificiality and the excessive study of form, of imminent rapid decline into the later rhetorical culture: in philosophy speculation had run itself out into scepticism and self-destruction: and in religion a disbelief in the ancient gods and a doubt of all Divine providence is matter of open profession. And yet there is a bettering. The laws of the Empire become a model of humanity, equitableness, and simplicity. Seneca and Epictetus rise to thoughts of moral purity and sublimity and delicacy which at times seem hardly unworthy of the New Testament: and their humane and comprehensive ideas have cast off the limitations which the narrow life of Greek cities set to those of their greater predecessors.

Here then is a great clearing of the stage, and a great predisposing of thought and sentiment, for a religion which proclaimed a good tidings for all men without distinction of ‘Jew or Greek, Barbarian and Scythian, bond or free’; for a religion of compassion; for a religion wholly spiritual and unpolitical. There are traces distinct and widespread of special tendencies to such a religion, and they are connected with the best side of the life of the time. The enormous diffusion of the ‘collegia’ or clubs, in which the members were drawn together without distinction of rank, or even of free and slave, in a partly religious bond, shews the instinct of the time feeling for a religion of brotherhood. There is a delicacy of family life as seen in Plutarch, in Pliny, in Fronto, which shews readiness for a religion such as should regenerate the simple instincts and relations of humanity. In the position and function of the philosophers (who sometimes half-remind one of mendicant friars167, sometimes of the confessor or chaplain in families of rank, in their relation to education and to the vicissitudes of later life) there is implied a concentration of thought and interest upon character and upon the discipline of individual life, a sensibility to spiritual need, which all indicates a ground prepared for Christian influence. And, finally, whether it be from the stealing in of Eastern influences, or from a reaction against the cold scepticism of Ciceronian times, or from a half-political half-genuine sense of the necessity of religion to society, or from a sort of awed impression created by the marvellous fortune of Rome, or from the steady impact of the clear strong deep religious faith of the Jews scattered everywhere, and everywhere, as we know, to an extraordinary extent leavening society, or, as time went on, from a subtle influence of Christianity not yet accepted or even consciously known,—there was, it is notorious, a return towards religion in the mind of men. The temples were again thronged: priests became philosophers. In Neo-Platonism thought again looks upward, and the last phase of Greek philosophy was in the phrase of the dry and dispassionate Zeller168 ‘a philosophy of Revelation’ which sought knowledge partly in the inner revelation of the Deity and partly in religious tradition. This movement was indeed a rival of Christianity; it came to put out some of its strength in conscious rivalry, or it tried in Gnostic heresies to rearrange Christianity on its own lines: but it was the result and witness of a disposition of men’s hearts which made way for the Gospel.

It was not, then, merely true that the failures of the heathen world left it empty, hungering, distrustful of itself; nor merely that the world of that particular epoch gave extraordinary facilities of an outward kind for the diffusion of a world-religion: but also that in some of its most characteristic and deepest workings, in thoughts and dispositions which it had purchased at a great cost of ancient glories and liberties and of all that was proud and distinctive in Greek and Roman religion, there was that which would make men ready for Christianity and cause it to be to them, as it could not have been to their ancestors, intelligible, possible, and congenial.

II. Dr. Westcott has drawn, in a useful phrase, the invaluable distinction between a tendency towards, and a tendency to produce, the truth of Christianity169.

If we have been able to trace a real shaping of the lines inward and outward of the world’s order disposing it for a true religion, the impression which this makes on us must be enormously increased if (1) we can see that that religion, when it comes, is most obviously a thing which comes to the Gentile world, and does not grow out of it either by blending of tendencies, or by constructive individual genius: and if (2) we are able to indicate another and perfectly distinct course of shaping and preparation which at the required moment yielded the material and equipment for the religion which was to go out upon the world.

That this was so is in a sense upon the face of history. The Christian Church, it has been said, appeared at first as a Jewish sect. ‘The salvation’ Christ declared was ‘of the Jews.’ He came (‘not to destroy but) to fulfil’ the system amidst which He arose. Such sayings put us upon the track of a special preparation for the Gospel. Let us follow it. And (as the phrase is chosen to imply) we look here for something kindred indeed in many of its methods to that general preparation which we have hitherto traced, but yet more coherent, positive, and concentrated. For we pass in a sense at this point (to use language of the day), from the preparation of an environment suitable to the Gospel, to a preparation of the organism itself. Such language is obviously open to criticisms and misconceptions of more kinds than one. But it is sufficiently defensible historically and theologically to justify us in gaining the clearness which it gives.

I shall attempt to present the signs of this preparation by considering successively these three points.

(1) The relations between Israel and the world at the Christian era.

(2) The fitness of Israel to be the seed-plot of a world-religion, and of the world-religion given by Christ.

(3) The character of the process by which the Israel, so fitted, and so placed, had come to be.

(1) Many a reader of Mommsen’s History of Rome will have been surprised by finding that the ideal political construction which the writer’s knowledge and imagination have ascribed to Caesar was to consist of three elements—the Roman, the Hellenic, and the Jewish170. Yet striking as the paradox is, it is chiefly in the facts themselves. Whether we look at the ethnological character of the Jews amidst a system whose strength is from the West; or at their historical position, as a nation in some sense in decadence, with a history of independence and glories long lost; or at the minuteness of their original seat, and its insignificance at that time as (ordinarily) a subordinate district under the Roman province of Syria, it is alike surprising that it should be possible to speak of them as the third factor of the Roman Empire. Yet, in the main, the same surprise is created by any acquaintance with the circumstances of the Jewish Dispersion, as it may be learnt from easily accessible books, such as Edersheim’s or Schürer’s171. There is first the ubiquity of the race: testified alike by Josephus, Strabo, and Philo, and by the witness of inscriptions. They are everywhere, and everywhere in force, throughout the Roman world. Outside the Roman world their great colonies in Babylon and Mesopotamia are another headquarters of the race. They are an eighth part (one million) of the population of Egypt: they yield 10,000 at the least to one massacre in Antioch. To numbers and ubiquity they add privilege in the shape of rights and immunities, begun by the policy of the successors of Alexander, but vigorously taken up and pushed by Rome as early as 139 B.C., greatly developed by Caesar round whose pyre at Rome they wept, and maintained by the almost consistent policy of the earlier Empire: rights of equal citizenship in the towns where they lived, and equal enjoyment of the boons granted to citizens: rights of self-government and internal administration: and rights or immunities guarding their distinctive customs, such as their observance of the Sabbath or their transmission of tribute to Jerusalem. The opportunities thus secured from without were vigorously turned to account by their trading instinct, their tenacity, their power of living at a low cost, and above all by their admirable freemasonry among themselves, which bound Jews throughout the world into a society of self-help, and must have greatly assisted the enterprises which depend on facility of information, communication, and movement. So far we merely get an impression of their importance. But there are other points which, while they greatly heighten this impression, add to it that of remarkable peculiarity. To ask what was their influence plunges us into a tumult of paradoxes. They had, for example, everywhere the double character of citizens and strangers, speaking the language of the countries where they dwelt, ‘being Antiochenes,’ as Josephus says, ‘at Antioch, Ephesians at Ephesus,’ and so forth: possessing and using the rights and franchises of citizens, and yet every one of them counting the Holy Land his country and Jerusalem his capital: respecting the Sanhedrin of Jerusalem as the supreme authority of the race: sending up their tribute annually, flocking thither themselves in vast numbers to keep the feasts, or again not seldom returning there to die. They possessed in fact the combined advantages of the most elastic diffusion, and the strongest national concentration. Such a position could hardly make their relations to their neighbours entirely simple or harmonious. It ‘involved an internal contradiction172.’ It could not but be felt that while enjoying all the advantages of citizenship, their hearts were really elsewhere. From all the religious and social side of the common life, which in the ancient world was far less separable from the political than it is now, they were sensibly aliens. They were visibly making the best of two inconsistent positions. And accordingly the irritation against them in the towns (we have a glimpse of it in Acts xix. 34) and the ensuing encroachments and riots, form as chronic a feature of the position, as does their protection by the Empire. But the causes of irritation went wider and deeper. It has been said that ‘the feelings cherished towards the Jews throughout the entire Graeco-Roman world were not so much those of hatred as of pure contempt173.’ Their exterior was doubtless unlovely: a Jewry, as M. Renan reminds us, was perhaps not more attractive in ancient than in modern times. But what was even more offensive, especially to that cosmopolitan age, and what struck it as altogether the dominant characteristic of the Jews, was their stubborn and inhuman perversity. They would be unlike all the rest of the world. Tacitus has even formulated this for them as the principle guiding their whole action, reduced to practice in details which were singularly well fitted to exhibit its offensiveness174. His picture should be read by any one who wishes to realize how cultivated opinion thought of them: and, even if evidence were lacking, we can see that this was just the kind of dislike to be shared by all classes, cultivated and uncultivated alike. Yet it is against the background of this intense prejudice, ever more scornful and irritated as it was exasperated by the incidents of daily contact at close quarters, that we have to paint the phenomena, as striking and as abundantly testified, of the vast and penetrating influence of the Jews over their neighbours. These also lie upon the surface. In very various degrees multitudes (of whom women doubtless formed a considerable majority) adopted the customs and brought themselves into connection with the religion of the Jews. The boasts or claims of Josephus, who refers any sceptical contemporary to ‘his own country or his own family,’ are confirmed by the admissions of classical writers, by the indignant sarcasms directed against the converts, and by the vivid touches in the Acts of the Apostles175. ‘Victi victoribus leges dederunt’ is the strong phrase of Seneca, and it was a very persuasive influence which could cause it to be said that in Damascus ‘nearly the whole female population was devoted to Judaism’: which could give S. Paul’s Jewish opponents in the towns of Greece and Asia Minor the power at one time of raising the mob, at another of working upon the ‘chief’ and ‘honourable women,’ the ladies of the upper classes: or which could bring ‘almost the whole city’ together in a provincial town because a new teacher appears in the Jews’ synagogue176. This influence had its results in a considerable number of actual proselytes who through circumcision received admission, somewhat grudging indeed and guarded, within the Jewish pale, but still more in a much larger number of adherents (the ‘devout persons,’ ‘devout Greeks,’ &c., of the Acts177) attracted by the doctrines, and acquainted with the Scriptures of Israel, who formed a fringe of partly leavened Gentile life round every synagogue.

We hardly need evidence to shew us that to this picture of the influence of Jew over Gentile, there need to be added another which will shew how the subtle, persuasive, and powerful culture of the Graeco-Roman world made itself felt upon the Jews of the Dispersion. The contrast between the Jews of Palestine and those of the Dispersion, the translation of the Scriptures into Greek, the rise of a literature which in different ways tried to recommend what was Jewish to the heathen or to fuse what was Jewish with what was Greek, the single figure of Philo at Alexandria, are all evidences of an influence, which must have told continually with penetrating power on all that was ablest and most thoughtful in the Jewish mind. It was not the least considerable result of this that all the great thoughts and beliefs of Israel learned to talk the language of the civilized world, and so acquired before the time of Christ an adequate and congenial vehicle.

Such was the position of Israel at the Christian era. It was one which had been gradually brought about during the last three centuries B.C.; but it only came to its full growth in the last few decades (the Jewish settlement in Rome may date from Pompey’s time) under favour of the imperial policy and the peace of the times: and it was soon to change; indeed the fall of Jerusalem A.D. 70 altered it within and without. Thus it stood complete during the half-century in which the work of founding the Christian Church throughout the Empire was accomplished, and then passed away. We remark upon it how admirable an organization it offered for the dissemination of a world-religion, originated upon Jewish soil. The significance of this, occurring at the time when such a religion actually appeared, is heightened when we observe that the position had continued long enough fully to try the experiment of what by its own forces Judaism could accomplish for the world. As S. James argued178 ‘Moses had,’ now for a long time, in every city them that preach him, being read in the synagogues every Sabbath day’—and it might have so gone on for ever without any conversion of the Gentile world. That world could never have been drawn within a system, which, however zealous to make proselytes, had nothing better to offer to those whom it made than that they might come in, if they liked, and sit down in the lowest place, tolerated rather than welcomed, dependents rather than members of an intensely national community, leaving father and mother and all that they had, not for a position of spiritual freedom, but for a change of earthly nationality.

(2) But we trench upon the second question. What was the nation that held this position of vantage? What signs are there about it which suggest a special preparation for a purposed result?

It is one answer to this question to say that this wonderfully placed people had, alone among the nations, a genuine faith, a genuine hope, and a genuine charity. They at least, says Seneca, when he complains of their influence, ‘knew the reasons of their customs.’ There was a raison d’être to their religion. In a world which still kept up the forms of worship and respect for gods whose character and existence could not stand the criticism of its own best moral and religious insight, any more than that of its scepticism; or which was framing for itself thoughts of Deity by intellectual abstraction; or which was betraying its real ignorance of the very idea of God by worshipping the two great powers which, as a matter of fact, it knew to be mighty, Nature and the Roman Empire,—the Jew had a faith, distinct, colossal, and unfailing, in a Living God, Maker of heaven and earth. This we may be sure was the inner secret of the true attraction which drew the hearts of such men as Cornelius the centurion to the despised and repulsive Jew. This God, they further believed, was their God for ever and ever. ‘Let us kneel,’ they said, ‘before the Lord our Maker, for He is the Lord our God.’ And therefore, let them have gained it how they may, they had an indomitable hope, or rather, confidence, which all unpropitiousness of outer appearances had only served to stimulate, that He would bring them through, that He had a purpose for them, and that He would bring it to pass: that the world was no mechanical system of meaningless vicissitudes, but an order, of which indeed they little realized the scope, moving under the hand of a Ruler for a purpose of glory and beneficence. That the confidence of the extraordinary destiny which, under this order, was reserved for Israel, as well as the present possession of the Divine law and covenant, should have produced an intense sense of unity and fellowship was a matter of course. The Roman is obliged to recognise their mutual charity, however deformed, as he thinks, by their antipathy to all who were not of their kindred and faith.

But such an answer to our question, though it brings before us a sign, and a sign of the very highest, that is of the moral and spiritual, order, does not perhaps set us at the point from which the whole meaning of the position opens to us most naturally. It may do this more effectually to ask whether there was any material in Judaism for a world-religion, and for that world-religion which grew out of it?

Perhaps if we performed the futile task of trying to imagine a world-religion, we should, with some generality of consent, define as its essentials three or four points which it is striking to find were fundamentals of the religion of Israel, and at that time of no other. We should require a doctrine of God, lofty, spiritual, moral: a doctrine of man which should affirm and secure his spiritual being and his immortality: and a doctrine of the relations between God and man, which should give reality to prayer and to the belief in providence, and root man’s sense of responsibility in the fact of his obligation to a righteousness outside and above himself, a doctrine in short of judgment. It needs no words to shew how the religion of Israel in its full development not only taught these truths, but gave them the dignity and importance which belong to the cornerstones of a religion.

But then along with these that religion taught other beliefs as clearly conceived, which seemed to be of the most opposite character: just as distinctive and exclusive as the former were universal. It taught the obligation in every detail of a very stringent written law, and of a ceremonial and sacrificial system, centred at Jerusalem, and forming the recognised communication between God and man. It taught a special election of Israel and covenant of God with Israel, a special purpose and future for Israel. Nor was the conception of the participation by other nations in the blessings of Messiah’s rule, (to which we, reading for example the prophecies of Isaiah in the light of the sequel, cannot but give a dominant place,) more to an Israelite than a striking incident in a distinctively Israelite glory.

It would seem then, combining these two sides, that there was in Israel the foundation on which a religion for the world could be laid, but that it could only be made available under stringent and, as it might appear, impossible conditions. An attempt to make a religion by extracting the universal truths in Judaism would have been simply to desert at once the vantage-ground which it was proposed to occupy, because it would have conflicted directly with every Jewish instinct, belief, tradition, and hope. If the thing was to be done, it must be done by some power and teaching which, while extricating into clearness all that was truest in the theology and morality of Israel, was also able to shew to the judgment of plain men and earnest seekers, that it constituted a true climax of Israel’s history, a true fulfilment of the promises and prophecies which Jews had now made matters of notoriety everywhere, a true final cause of all the peculiar and distinctive system of Israel. It must be able to take Israel to witness, and therefore it must be able to convince men not only that it had a high theology and a refined morality, but that God had ‘visited His people’: and that ‘what He had spoken unto the fathers He had so fulfilled.’ It must produce accordingly not only doctrine, but fact. It must carry on, what was implied in the whole discipline of Israel, the assertion that truth was not a matter of speculation, but a word from God; or the knowledge of a dealing of God with man clothing itself with reality, embodying itself in fact, making a home for itself in history. It is true that the Judaism of the synagogue in its idolatry of the law, had assumed the appearance of a paper system, but in that form it had no promise or power of expansion: and on the side where the religion of Israel admitted of development into some higher and wider state, it was distinctly a religion not of theory or teaching only, but of Divine action revealing itself in history.

It will not escape any observer of the beginnings of Christianity that it was precisely this attempt which the Gospel of Jesus made. If we watch S. Paul speaking to his Gentile audiences at Lystra or Athens, he brings to bear upon the instincts of his hearers the strong magnet of a clear and definite Theism. But these addresses themselves implicitly contain another element: and we must now look to them for examples of the process, the careful earnest process, by which the Gospel did its rapid and yet most gradual work of conversion. Unquestionably, as S. Paul himself affirms, and as the Acts and the early apologetic writers shew us, it was done by asserting, and making good the assertion with careful proof and reasoning, that in the historical appearance and character of Jesus Christ, in His treatment while on earth, in His resurrection and heavenly exaltation, was to be found the true, natural, and legitimate fulfilment of that to which the Scriptures in various ways, direct and indirect, pointed, and of that which the hope of Israel, slowly fashioned by the Scriptures under the discipline of experience, had learnt to expect. This could be pressed home most directly on Jews, but it was available also for the large prepared class among Gentiles, to whom the pre-existence of these prophecies and anticipations was known matter of fact, and to some of whom the Jewish Scriptures had been a personal discipline: the truth of the Gospel was one ‘now made manifest and by the Scriptures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the everlasting God, made known to all nations for the obedience of faith.’ The double requirement was fulfilled, and a religion, intrinsically universal and eternal, was seen by spiritually clear-sighted eyes to be in a most real and organic sense the flower of Israel’s stalk.

(3) If it has appeared that in the placing of the nation at the era, and in its character and belief, there was something much to be ‘wondered at,’ and, more definitely, something marvellously suited, not indeed to generate such a religion as that of the Gospel, but to foster and assist its growth when the seed of Divine fact should be sown on the prepared soil; then we shall ask, finally, whether there is anything of like striking significance in the way in which this state of things had come about? Let us pass by the causes by which the people of Israel obtained their external position. These, even including a thing so remarkable as the spontaneous restoration by an Oriental Empire of a deported people, are not in themselves different from the ordinary workings of history; though in combination they may contribute to deepen the impression of a hand fashioning out of many elements, and in many ways, a single great result. But how had the Jews come to be what they were? how had they gained the religious treasure which they possessed, and the tenacity of religious and national life which played guardian to it? The whole course of Israel’s history must, in one sense, give the answer to this question: and there are no controversies more difficult or more unsolved than those which are now raging round the problem of that course, its origin, stages, and order. But it may be possible to make some reflections on it without entangling ourselves very much in those controversies.

(a) At the outset it is impossible not to be struck by the interest which the Jews themselves felt in the process of their history. That interest belongs to the very centre of their life and thought. It is not an offshoot of national vainglory, for (as has been so often remarked) it resulted in a record full-charged with the incidents of national failure and defection: it is not the result of a self-conscious people analysing its own moral and other development, for though the moral judgment is indeed always at work in the narratives and the poems, it is more occupied in drawing out the teaching of recurring sequences of sin and punishment than in framing a picture of the whole. The result is to lay a picture of development before us, but the aim is to treasure and record every detail of God’s dealings with the nation of His choice. This is what gives continuity and unity to the whole: this is what lends to it its intense and characteristic uniqueness. And when we look steadily at this, we perceive afresh, what familiarity almost conceals from us, the distinctive quality of Israel’s religion; that it is not a system of teaching, nor a tradition of worship, nor a personal discipline, though it may include all these; but that it is in itself a belief in the working of God, Who is the God of all the earth, but specially the God of Israel, and Who works indeed everywhere, but in an altogether special sense in Israel. In reflecting on their history they contemplate the object of their faith. Hence truth is to them not a philosophic acquisition, but lies in the words which had come from God faithfully treasured and received: it is revealed in word and act: goodness, in man or nation, is the faithful adherence to those conditions, under which the good purpose of God can work itself out and take effect: it is a correspondence to a purpose of grace: and the centre and depositary of their hope is neither the human race, nor any association for moral and religious effort, but an organism raised by Him who raises all the organisms of nature from a chosen seed, and drawn onwards through the stages by which family passes into nation and kingdom, and then through that higher discipline by which the natural commonwealth changes into the spiritual community of the faithful ‘remnant.’ If any one will try to realize the impression which Christianity made upon the heathen world, he will not fail to see how the new truth was able to impress men because it found these conceptions of revelation, grace, and an organic society of God’s choice and shaping, all so strange and so impressive to the heathen world, ingrained as the natural elements of religion in the men whom it made its instruments.

But why did the Jews so regard their history? For the answer we may revert to the other question, What made them what they were at the Christian era? For they had gone through a crisis calculated to destroy both their existence and their religion. It has been in fashion with some writers to emphasize the resemblances, and minimize the differences, between the religion of Israel and that of its neighbours. In view of this it becomes important to note the specific peril of ancient religions. That peril was that the close association of the nation with its god caused the failure of the one to appear a failure of the other, and to endanger or destroy the respect paid to him. The religion of a subdued or ruined people was, as we may say, a demonstrated failure. Sennacherib’s defiance of Hezekiah urges this with a conqueror’s irony179. The case of the Ten Tribes had, probably, given an illustration of it within the circle of Israel itself. And in Judah, upon any shewing, there was enough of the feeling that Jehovah was responsible for His people, of the conviction that He would certainly protect His own, of the confidence resting on prosperity and liable to be shaken by its loss, to make the downfall of the state, carrying with it that of the Temple and the outer order of religion, an enormous peril to the religion itself and with it to the very existence of Israel. It is not difficult to discern the agency by which the peril was averted. That agency was Prophecy. Modern criticism, though it may quarrel with the inspiration or predictive power of the prophets, has given fresh and unbiassed witness to their importance as an historical phenomenon. Kuenen180, for example, points out how at every turning-point in Israel’s later history there stands a man who claims to bring a word of God to the people. Prof. Huxley181, in a recent article, has told us that ‘a vigorous minority of Babylonian Jews,’ that is, the Jews upon whom the full forces of prophecy bore, ‘created the first consistent, remorseless, naked Monotheism, which, so far as history records, appeared in the world... and they inseparably united therewith an ethical code, which, for its purity and its efficiency as a bond of social life, was, and is, unsurpassed.’ Of whatever fact may underlie this description, the prophets are at once evidence and authors.

Now prophecy confronted the impending peril in the name of Jehovah: on the one side it displayed the enemy (whether as by Isaiah it prescribed a bound to his advance, or as by Jeremiah announced the catastrophe to be wrought by him) as himself utterly in Jehovah’s hands, His axe or saw for discipline upon the trees of the forest; on the other side it shewed that Jehovah’s obligation to Israel was conditioned by His essential righteousness; that national disaster might be Jehovah’s necessary vengeance, and that His purpose for Israel—which it re-asserted with fullest emphasis—might need to be realized for an Israel purified by such discipline, a shoot from the stock of the felled tree, the remnant of an ‘afflicted and poor people182.’ And prophecy was beforehand with all this: it was not an afterthought to explain away a calamity: and so it fashioned in Israel at least a core of spiritual faith, to which outward disaster of polity and religion, however destructive, was not confounding, and which had stamina enough in it to draw wholesome though bitter nourishment from the hard Captivity discipline. This, when the flood came, was an ark for Israel’s religion, and, in its religion, for the national life, which re-organized itself under new conditions round the nucleus of the religion.

Thus, at the crisis and hinge of the historical development which issued in the wonderfully placed and constituted Israel of Christ’s time, and which was crowned by the New Religion, we find this agency, which in itself would arrest our wonder. The more we look at it, the more wonderful it is. Every suggestion of comparison with heathen oracles, divination and the rest, can only bring out with more vivid effect the contrast and difference between it and all such things. It claims by the mouth of men transparently earnest and honest, to speak from God. It brings with it the highest credentials, moral, spiritual, historical: moral, for it spends what at first sight seems all its strength in the intrepid and scathing rebuke of the evils immediately round it, especially in the high places of society, against the lust, cruelty, avarice, frivolity, insolence, foul worships, which it found so rankly abundant: spiritual, for it speaks the language of an absolutely unworldly faith, and accomplishes a great spiritual work, such as we can hardly over-estimate, unless indeed with Prof. Huxley we distort its proportions so as to prejudice the earlier religion from which it sprang or the Christianity to which it contributed: historical, because occurring at the very crisis of Israel’s history (750-550), it gained credence and authority from the witness of events, and dealt with an emergency of the most perilous and bewildering kind, as not the most skilful opportunist could have dealt with it, by a use, as sublime as simple, of the principles of righteousness and faith. If we compare what the prophets did for their contemporaries and what they did for the future of Israel and the world, and see that this was done, not by two sets of utterances working two different ways, but by a single blended strain of prophecy, we gain a double impression, of which the twofold force is astonishing indeed. It is gained without pressing their claim to predictive power, at least beyond the horizons of their own period. But it is impossible for any careful and candid reader of the words of the prophets to stop there, and not to feel that there is another element in them, not contained in a passage here and there but for ever reappearing, interwoven with the rest, and evidently felt by the prophets themselves to be in some sense necessary for the vindication and completion of their whole teaching. It is an element of anticipation and foresight. We see that this is so, and we see in part the method of it. It is bound up with, it springs out of, all that is spiritually and morally greatest in the prophets. Their marvellous, clear-sighted, steady certainty that the Lord who sitteth above rules all, that He is holy, and that unrighteousness in man or nations cannot prevail; their insight piercing through the surface of history to underlying laws of providential order; the strange conviction or consciousness, felt throughout the nation but centring in the prophets, that this God had a purpose for Israel:—these deep things, which, however they came and whatever we think of them, make Israel’s distinctive and peculiar glory, were accompanied by, and issued in, anticipations of a future which would vindicate and respond to them. Just as the belief in a future life for God’s children was not taught as a set doctrine to the Jews, but grew with the growth of their knowledge of the Living and Holy God, and of man’s relation as a spiritual being to Him, so with the predictions of which we speak. As it was given to the prophets to realize the great spiritual truths of present because eternal moment which they taught, it was given to them also to discern that these truths pointed to a future which should bring them vindication. The cloudy time of trial and confusion would one day come to a close; the Sun whose rays they caught would one day shine out; the partial and passing deliverances in which they taught men to see God’s hand must one day issue in a deliverance of deeper moment, of lasting and adequate significance; there would be an unbaring of God’s arm, a manifesting of His power to decide, to justify, to condemn, and it would be seen in some final form why and how Israel was, in a distinctive sense, the people of the God of the whole earth; that union between God and His people, of which the prophets were themselves mediators and which was so miserably imperfect and so constantly broken, would one day be complete; and, finally, even the very instruments which He was using in the present, the Anointed King, the chosen Royal House, the Prophet-Servant of God, the holy hill of Zion, were charged with a meaning of which the significance was only in the future to become clear. Thus, in this free, deep, spiritual—let us say it out, inspired—manner the predictions of prophecy emerge and gather shape. Thus among the people which was most conservative and jealous of its own religious privilege, the promise most deeply cherished was one in which all nations of the earth should be blessed, and there is heard the strange announcement of a ‘new covenant.’ Thus it comes about that the most satisfying and satisfied of all religions becomes the one which, in its deepest meaning, in the minds of its most faithful followers, strains forward most completely beyond itself. Thus, as it has been said, ‘Prophecy takes off its crown and lays it at the feet of One who is to be.’ Thus a people who have become intensely and inexorably monotheistic and to whom the Deity becomes more and more remote in awful majesty so that they do not dare to name His Name, carry down with them Scriptures which discover the strange vision of a human King with Divine attributes and strain towards some manifestation of God in present nearness. Thus amidst the pictures in which, with every varying detail, using the scenery, the personages, the nations, the ideas of its own day, the instinct of prophetic anticipation finds expression, there emerges, with gradually gathering strength, a definite Hope, and some clear lineaments of that which is to be.

For, be it observed, at this point interpretation, declaring what the prophets seem to us to-day to mean, passes into and gives way to historical fact. The most sceptical cannot deny either that the words in which the prophets spoke of the future, did as a matter of fact crystallize into a hope, a hope such as has no parallel in history, and of which distorted rumours were able to stir and interest the heathen world: or that they were, long before the time of Jesus, interpreted as sketching features, some general and shadowy, some curiously distinct and particular, of Messiah’s work and kingdom.

And then, face to face with this, stands another fact as confessedly historical. For, ‘in the fulness of the time,’ it did appear to men of many kinds who had the books in their hands, men with every reason for judging seriously and critically, and in most cases with the strongest prejudice in favour of an adverse judgment, that these prophecies were fulfilled in a King and a Kingdom such as they never dreamt of till they saw them. It would be a strange chapter in the history of delusion, if there were no more to add. But there is to add, first, that the King and the Kingdom whereto, (in no small part upon the seeming perilous ground of this correspondence with prophecy,) these men gave their faith, have proved to win such a spiritual empire as they claimed: and, further, that men like ourselves, judging at the cool distance of two thousand years, are unable to deny that in the truest sense of ‘fulfilment,’ as it would be judged by a religious mind, Jesus and His Kingdom do ‘fulfil the prophets,’ fulfil their assertion of a unique religious destiny for Israel by which the nations were to profit, of a time when the righteousness of God should be revealed for the discomfiture of pride and sin and for the help of the meek, of a nearer dwelling of God with His people, of a new covenant, and of the lasting reign of a perfect Ruler.

To some minds it may weaken, but to others it will certainly intensify, the impression thus created, if they are asked to observe that now and again there occur in the Jewish Scriptures words, passages, events, in which with startling distinctness, independence, and minuteness there stand forth features of what was to be. It is as if the anticipation which fills the air with glow focussed itself here and there in sparkling points of light which form and flash and fade away again. We may confidently assert that in the case of such passages as the 22nd and 110th Psalms or the 9th and 53rd Chapters of Isaiah the harder task is for him who will deny, than for him who will assert, a direct correspondence between prediction and fulfilment. If they stood alone, general scientific considerations might make it necessary to undertake the harder task. Standing out as they do from such a context and background as has been here indicated, the interpretation which sees in them the work of a Divine providence shaping out a ‘sign’ for the purpose which in each Christian age, and especially in the first, it has actually subserved, is the interpretation which is truest to all the facts. They are the special self-betrayal of a power which is at work throughout, of which the spiritual ear hears the sound, though we are often unable distinctly to see the footprints.

It seems then impossible, upon such a view of the phenomena of prophecy as has been here roughly and insufficiently indicated, to deny that whatever appearance of preparation we may discern in the condition outward and inward of the Jews in the time of Christ, is strongly corroborated by a like appearance of preparation in the process by which they had become what they were.

(b) We have selected out of all the foregoing history the epoch and the influence of the prophets for several reasons. They preside over the most critical period of Israel’s history. They seem to bring to most pronounced expression the spirit and character which pervades the whole of that history. They are known to us through their own writings: and we are therefore on ground where (comparatively speaking) the premises are uncontroverted. And as it is the fashion perhaps to discredit the argument of prophecy—partly, no doubt, on account of the technical form in which it was ordinarily presented—it is important to re-assert that in all its main strength that argument holds its ground, reinforced indeed, as we think, by the increased power to apprehend its breadth and solidity which our more historically trained modern minds should have gained. But selection of what is most salient should imply no neglect of the rest; and the argument, or view of the facts,—which has here for clearness sake been abbreviated, and mainly centralized upon the work and implications of prophecy,—can be deepened as the drift of the great lines of Israel’s discipline is more deeply realized. Thus, for example, little or nothing has been here said of the Law. Yet, without foreclosing any discussion as to its sources and development, we can see that the law of God was a factor in every stage of Israel’s history, and that in the making of the prepared Israel of Christ’s time, the law in its fullest and most developed shape was, and had been for ages, a paramount influence. No influence more concentrated and potent can be found in history. And to see the deepest drift of it we have no need to speculate on what might have been, or was sure to be. Historical documents point us to what was. The Epistles to the Romans and the Galatians, and the Epistle to the Hebrews, lay open respectively two ways of its working. On the one side it appears as a great witness for righteousness. Men were schooled to live under a sense of peremptory obligation; to comply scrupulously, exactly, submissively with an unquestioned authority. This sense and temper is liable to great abuse: it lends itself when abused to a mechanical morality, to a morbid casuistry, to the complacency of an external perfectness. It was so abused very widely among the Jews. But it is nevertheless an indispensable factor in a true morality, to which it lends the special power of command: and in Israel it conferred this power because it connected obligation with the will of a righteous God. This is expressed in the repeated sanction ‘I am the Lord your God,’ following precept after precept of the law, and in the summary claim ‘Be ye holy, for I am holy.’ Evidently here there is that which transcends all mechanical schemes of obedience; there is an infinite standard. As such it pointed and impelled onwards towards the true religion in which faith and holiness should be entirely at one. As such meanwhile it stimulated and dismayed the deeper spirits: stimulating them by the loftiness of its demand, dismaying them by the proved impossibility of that perfect compliance which alone was compliance at all. Thus the foundations were laid of a temper at once robust and humble, confident and diffident; though they were laid upon a contradiction which the law had in itself no power to resolve. There was indeed (here we take up the guidance of the Epistle to the Hebrews) one part of the law which acknowledged that contradiction, which half promised to resolve it, but having no real power to do so, could only shape and deepen the demand for some solution. This was, of course, the sacrificial system. The sacrificial system opens up quite other thoughts from those of strict demand and strict obedience. It points to quite another side of religious and moral development. Yet it starts from the same truth of a Holy God Who requires, and inasmuch as He is holy must require, a perfect obedience. Only it acknowledges the inevitable fact of disobedience. It embodies the sense of need. It appeals to, and as part of the Divine law it reveals, a quality in the Supreme Goodness which can go beyond commanding and condemning, to forgive and reconcile. It creates in a word the spirit of humility, and it feels, at the least, after a God of love.

What a profound preparation there is in this for the life which Christ blessed in the Beatitudes and inaugurated by all that He was and did, and for the truth of the Divine being and character which was set forth in Him. Yet the law only prepared for this, and made the demand which this met. It made no answer to its own demand. It could not reconcile its own severity, and its own hopes of mercy: its apparatus of sacrifice was in itself absolutely and obviously insufficient for any solution of the contradiction. It was a marvellous discipline which, while it trained its people so far, demanded the more urgently something which all its training could never give nor reach.

(c) The work of prophecy and the work of the law was also (if we can distinguish causes which were so much affected by one another) the work of history. To the work of the prophets, indeed, the history of both the past and the succeeding times was essential, the former to supply their work with a standing ground, the latter to engrain its teaching into the life of the nation. We look back, and we ask, What gave the prophets their advantage, what was the fulcrum of their lever? Trained to observe the processes of religious evolution, we must refuse to believe with Professor Huxley that a lofty monotheism and a noble morality sprang out of the ground among a ‘minority of Babylonian Jews.’ But we shall be prepared to find that the rudimentary stages differ much from the mature. The beginnings of life, as we know them, are laid in darkness: they emerge crude and childish: the physical and outward almost conceals the germ of spiritual and rational being which nevertheless is the self, and which will increasingly assert itself and rule. It may be so with that organism which God was to make the shrine of His Incarnation. We may have to learn that the beginnings of Israel are more obscure, more elementary, less distinctive from surrounding religions, than we had supposed. We need not fear to be as bold as Amos in recognising that what was in one aspect the unique calling of God’s Son out of Egypt183 was in another but one among the Divinely ruled processes of history, such as brought up the Philistines from Caphtor and the Syrians from Kir184. We need not be more afraid than Ezekiel to say that the peculiar people were an offshoot (if so it should be) of natural stocks, with the Amorite for father and the Hittite for mother185. But all this will hardly take from us that sense of continuous shaping of a thing towards a Divine event which has always been among the supports of faith. We shall see that the prophetic appeals imply a past, and that their whole force lies in what they assume, and only recal to their hearers; the special possession of Israel by Jehovah, His selection of them for His own, His deliverances of them from Egypt and onwards, giving the earnest of a future purpose for which they were preserved, and for which His definite promises were committed to them, to the seed of Abraham, the house of Israel, the line of David. These things the prophets imply, standing upon these they speak with all the force of those who need only bid the people to realize and to remember, or at most to receive from God some fresh confirmation and enlargement of their hopes186.

Or again, from the work of the prophets we look forward, and when we have recovered from our surprise at seeing that a dreary interval of five centuries separates the Evangelical prophecy, which seemed so ready for the flower of the Gospel, from the time of its blooming, we discern how the processes of that interval were utilized in realizing, ingraining, diffusing the great truths of prophetic teaching. The return without a monarchy and under an ecclesiastical governor, and the dispersion through many lands, necessitated in act that transformation of the political into the spiritual polity, almost of the nation into the Church, of which Isaiah’s work was the germ. The institution of the synagogues, which belongs to this time and in which public worship was detached from all local associations and from the ancient forms of material sacrifice, was, as it were, the spiritual organ of the new ubiquitous cosmopolitan Jewish life. Yet contemporaneously the centralizing influences gained strength. The conservative work of Ezra and of the Scribes and Rabbis at whose head he stands, gathered up and preserved the treasures which gave a consciously spiritual character to Israel’s national loyalty; and guarded with the hedge of a scrupulous literalism, what needed some such defence to secure it against the perils implied in being carried wide over the world. By the resistance in Palestine under Syrian rule to Hellenizing insolence, and in the Dispersion to the fascinations and pleasures of Hellenizing culture, and by the great Maccabean struggle, the nation was identified with religious earnestness and zeal in a way of which we only see the caricature and distortion in the Pharisaism which our Lord denounced.

Thus, if we compare our Lord’s time with the great age of prophecy, we see how much has been acquired. Time has been given for the prophetic influences to work. There has been loss, but there has also been gain. That conscious, explicit, and magnificently uncompromising Monotheism, which in the mouth of the Evangelical prophet was quivering with the glow and passion of freshly inspired realization, has by ‘the end of the age’ had time to bring everything in the sphere of religion under its influence. It had discovered its points of contact with the highest aspirations of the Greek thought which on intellectual lines felt its way towards God. And it had unfolded its own corollaries: it had drawn along with it the great spiritual truths which cohere with the belief in one Living and True God: and Israel in the Pharisee epoch had passed, we hardly know how, into secure if not undisputed possession of the belief in a future life, in a world of spirits, and in the spiritual character of prayer.

But there was another and more direct manner, in which the work of history interlaced with what we have indicated as the work of the law. In the formation of the temper of chastened confidence which is so characteristic of later Israel, a part must evidently be given to the discipline of national experience saddened by departed glory, and with the shadows thickening over it. Just as we can see that the populations of the Empire were in a sense more ready to learn of Christ than the young self-reliant Greeks of Sparta or Athens could have been, so we can see in such language as that of the 119th Psalm or of the 9th chapter of Daniel a temper to which the meek and lowly Christ would make an appeal which might have been lost upon the rough times of the judges or the prosperous age of the monarchy. Old age has come and with it the wisdom of a chastened spirit. This is not difficult to see, and it is important to take it into account. It means that the comparatively normal discipline of life has brought with it (as doubtless it is meant to do alike in personal and national life) a spiritual gain. But it is important to see how much of the process and the effect remains unexplained. The chastening is obvious, but whence the confidence?

It is in some far less normal cause, in something which seems distinctive of Israel, that we have to find the adequate explanation of the whole result. We have to ask (as Pascal so keenly felt187) why a nation records its failures and misfortunes as being chastisements of wilful, repeated, and disgraceful fault, and then jealously guards the record as its most cherished possession. It would be easy to suggest that there is in this an egotism clothing itself in humility: and to point out that this egotism would explain the confidence which still looked forward to the future, which anticipated greatness for an ‘afflicted and poor people,’ and a blessing to all the nations of the earth from its own history. Only this is just to slur the difficulty, and under the invidious word ‘egotism’ to disguise that wonderful instinct of a destiny and a mission which is so strangely unlike egotism, and which allowed, or even produced, in so profound a form the self-condemnation which egotism refuses.

Doubtless the effects of these preparing forces were felt, and their meanings discerned, only by a few. Not only were they ‘not all Israel that were of Israel,’ but the bulk of the nation and its representative and official leaders were blind. They were off the way, down the false tracks of literalist Rabbinism, or of one-sided Essene asceticism, or of earthly visions of a restored kingdom, or (as in Alexandria) of a philosophized Judaism. The issues were the crucifixion of the Lord, and all which Judaism, without and within the Church, did to extinguish the Gospel and persecute its followers in its first age. It is right to refer to this, but there are probably few to whom it would cause any difficulty. To the observer of the world’s history it is a common sight that the true issues and the distinctive work of a people is worked out not by the many or by the prominent, but by the few, and often the obscure. To the student of Jewish history that which has made Israel what it is in world-significance appears throughout the course of its history as a gold thread running through a web of very different texture. It can be no surprise that the end should be of a piece with the rest. There, in a climax of sharpest contrast, we see the antithesis which marks the history throughout. The training issues in a S. Mary, a Simeon, in those who ‘waited for the consolation of Israel’ on the one side, and in the ‘Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites,’ on the other. The natural issue of Israel’s life and tendencies is seen in the cold and sterile impotence which, because it is the ‘corruption of the best,’ is the most irreversible spiritual ruin; while beside and amidst this there was fashioned by a grace and power above nature, though in a perfectly natural way, the true Israel which realize all that ‘Israel according to the flesh’ professed yet betrayed, guarded yet obscured. And if we have at all rightly discerned as a principle of Divine preparation that it should be negative as well as positive, and should demonstrate to the world before Christ was given, how little the world’s own wisdom or effort could supply His place: we shall not wonder that time was thus given for Israel to try out as it were its second experiment, and to shew that by its selfishness and arrogance, by its ‘carnalness,’ it could warp and distort its later spiritual constitution, even more than its former temporal one, out of all likeness of what God would have it be. ‘The last state of the man’ was ‘worse than the first188.’

But the observation of these predominant currents and forms of Jewish life and thought and religion has this further value, that it shews the variety, the energy, and the unlikeness to one another of the tendencies present in Israel. They emphasize the fact that the history of Israel was in no sense working itself out towards the production by its own forces of the true religion which went forth from the midst of it. They remind us how intractable the problem of finding by human ingenuity the solution which could harmonize in one issue elements so powerful and so alien from each other; which with a perfect spiritual liberty could combine an assertion of the permanent value of the law; which with no withdrawal from and despair of the world could secure all that was sought by Essene purity and self-denial; which, itself utterly unworldly, could satisfy the idea of a restored monarchy and a glory for Israel; which while bringing no philosophy could achieve what Jewish philosophizing had desired, in a capture of the world’s reason by Jewish truth.

III. In the last words we touch that with which this essay may perhaps fitly end. If its drift has been in any sense true, there stands before us, as perhaps the most striking feature of the whole situation, the co-existence of the two preparations, the one general, indirect, contributory, and consisting only in an impressive convergence and centering of the lines of ordinary historical sequences; the other special, directly introductory, and characterized by the presence of a distinctive power, call it what we may, a genius for religion, or more truly and adequately a special grace of the Spirit of God, which is new and above ordinary experience, even as life is when it enters the rest of nature, and reason is when it appears in the world of life. The two preparations pursue their course unconscious of one another, almost exclusive of one another. Greek wisdom and Roman power have no dream of coming to receive from the narrow national cult of humbled and subject Israel. And Israel, even taught by the great prophets, could hardly find a place in her vision of the future for any destiny of the nations of the world. To this antagonism, or more strictly this ignoring of one another, there are exceptions, exceptions of the kind which emphasize the character of the situation which they hardly modify. Two streams of such force and volume as those of Jewish religion and classical life or culture could not touch and leave one another altogether uninfluenced, though the influence was characteristically different. On the side of the world the spiritual needs of individuals caused numbers, not inconsiderable, to receive influences which made them ready to act as seeding ground and ferment for the Gospel. On the side of Israel, the strong sense of mission and of truth made the contact with Greek culture suggest the ambition to use it as a great instrument, to teach it to acknowledge and witness to the God of Israel, who was God of the whole earth: and the results, in the Greek of the Septuagint and in the Helleno-Judaic writings of Alexandria and elsewhere, were invaluable in fashioning language and thought for Christ’s service. But all the more distinctly, in the first case, does the antagonism, the gulf fixed, the mutual aversion, the impossibility humanly speaking of fusion between Jew and Gentile come out before our eyes. And, in the second case, the unreal romancings of the Sibylline works, the apparently isolated work of Philo, and the opportunism of a politician like Josephus, have all the character of hybrids, and shew no sign of the vital fusion by which out of a great wedlock a new thing comes to be.

The two preparations stand apart: they go their own way. There is indeed in them a strange parallelism of common human experience and human need. Both have tried their experiments, made their ventures, won their successes, gone through their disciplines of disenchantment and failure. Both are conscious of the dying of life: in Israel there is ‘no prophet more’; outside it philosophy has not the creativeness and energy of youth but the quiet acquiescence and mild prudence of age, and life, public and private, is without adequate scope or aim. In both the ‘tendencies towards’ a Gospel are as far as possible from making a ‘tendency to produce’ one. In both there is the same desire for which the Jew alone can find conscious expression: it is ‘Quicken me!’ Both need life. Both have no help in themselves. But in the lines which they follow and the hopes which they frame there is neither likeness nor compatibility. ‘The Greeks seek after wisdom189.’ The intellect, and those who are distinctively men of the intellect, can hardly imagine human advance otherwise than in terms of the intellect. Philosophy conceives of it as a conquest of philosophical result, or even as an increase of philosophical material. It is the pain of an advanced and critical time, like that of which we speak, to feel this, and yet to feel that the experiments of speculation have gone far enough to shew that by none of their alternative ways can there be any way out to the peace of certain truth. And yet it seems that, without abdication of reason, there is no possibility of going any other way: the Greeks (and in this sense all the world was Greek) could only look for what they wanted in the form of a new philosophy.

But ‘the Jews require a sign.’ Totally different, but equally exclusive, were the conditions under which the Jew could conceive of a new epoch. The dread of exhausted resources did not haunt him, for he looked not to human capacity but to Divine gift and interposition. But he thought that he knew the form in which such interposition would come; it was not to be primarily a teaching, (it is the Samaritan and not the Jew who is recorded as expecting in Messiah one who, ‘when He is come, will tell us all things190’); it must appear in action, ‘with observation191,’ with pomp and scenic display, with signs, and signs which, in a very visible and tangible sense, should seem to be from heaven192, in particular with circumstances of triumph and conquest, and with an exaltation of Israel to the glories of her monarchy many times enlarged.

Such are the demands; the things sought and needed; the conditions prescribed; definite, severally uncompromising, mutually unlike, and even conflicting. And then from out of Israel, without moral or political earthquake, without overwhelming display of supernatural force, nay even, to a superficial eye, with all the appearance of weakness and failure, without any rescue for Israel, with no attempt to present itself in philosophical form, with none of the strain and elaboration of a conscious effort to combine many in one, but rather with a paradoxical and offending ‘simplicity’ and ‘foolishness’ of mere assertion:—there comes forth a Thing in which on the one side Jews—whom we all recognise to be the best Jews, Jews in the truest and deepest sense—find the whole spirit and meaning, even down to its detail, of the life and the hope of Israel summed up and fulfilled; which left them no sense of disappointment, but rather a consciousness of having had hopes only too narrow and low; which gave them the exulting sense of ‘reigning as kings,’ with a ‘King of Israel’: while on the other side this same Thing was felt by ‘Greeks’ as a ‘wisdom’ flooding their reasons with a light of truth and wisdom (sophia), which met the search of philosophy (philo-sophia)193, but also in simple and wise alike drew forth and ministered to needs which philosophy had but half seen and wholly failed to satisfy, enabling conscience to be candid and yet at peace, building up a new cosmopolitan fellowship, and restoring to human life dignity and value, not only in phrase and theory, but in truth. ‘There came forth a Thing,’ or rather there came forth One, in Whom all this was done. The question rises, ‘Whom say we that He is?’ And though the answer must be reached in different ways by different men, and the witness to Him in Whom is the sum of all, must needs be of many kinds; yet the convergence of many lines (as we have been permitted to trace it) to One in whom they are all combined and yet transcended, to One whom they can usher in but were powerless to produce, may be no slight corroboration of the answer which was accepted, as we have to remember, by the lowly Jesus with significant solemnity: ‘Thou art the Christ,’ the Fulfiller of all high and inspired Jewish hope; ‘the Son of the Living God194,’ His Son,—as the Son of Man, in whom all that is human reaches fulness; and as the Son of God, who brings down to man what he has been allowed to prove to himself that he cannot discover or create.

Notes

150 S. Matt. xiii. 52; v. 17.

151 S. Matt. xxi. 33-38.

152 S. Matt. v. 12; xxiii. 30-37.

153 S. Mark xiv. 49; S. Luke xxii. 37.

154 S. Luke xxiv. 25, 26, 44.

155 Gal. iv. 9.

156 Rom. xvi. 26. So the pages of the early apologists are to our feeling almost cumbered by the profuseness of their appeal to these Scriptures.

157 S. John i. 1, 14, 9, 10.

158 Ep. cii. 12.

159 De Carne Christi vi. Eum Christum qui jam tunc et adloqui... humanum genus ediscebat in carnis habitu: cp. adv. Prax. xvi. ediscebat Deus in terris cum hominibus conversari.

160 S. Matt. xi. 4, 5; xii. 39; xvi. 3.

161 Hdt. i. 142.

162 Clem. Alex. Protrept. cx. init.

163 1 Cor. i. 21.

164 Wordsworth, Excursion iv.

165 Ἀταραξία (Epicurean): αὐτάρκεια.

166 The words ‘era of Christianity’ are used intentionally rather than the more precise ‘era of Christ,’ because anything which (without being influenced unless in the most impalpable way by Christianity) prepared the world through the first and even the second century of the era to receive the Gospel may be fairly included as preparation for the revelation of Christ.

167 Capes, Age of Antonines.

168 Philosophy of the Greeks: Eclectics, p. 20 (tr. Alleyne).

169 Gospel of the Resurrection (3rd ed.), p. 72. It is interesting to notice that according to so dispassionate an observer as M. Gaston Boissier (La Religion Romaine d’Auguste aux Antonins), who has done so much to trace the better tendencies of the Imperial period, the evidence suggests some such distinction, even as regards some of the main practical results of Christianity. For example, there was a tendency to ameliorate slavery on principles of general humanity, but there was no hint of a possibility of an end to slavery. There were some signs of mutual interest between classes, but no progress towards the effective appearance of a true philanthropy such as the Christian. In such cases, however, the validity of the distinctions must be debatable and fluctuating. It is absolute as regards the Incarnation.

170 Bk. V. c. xi. The New Monarchy.

171 Edersheim’s Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah: Schürer, History of the Jewish People in the time of Jesus Christ.

172 Schürer, II. ii. 273.

173 Schürer, II. ii. 297.

174 Tac. Hist. v. 4.

175 Schürer, II. ii. 308.

176 Acts xvii. 5, xiv. 5, xiii. 50, 44.

177 Acts xiii. 43, &c.

178 Acts xv. 21.

179 Isaiah xxxvi. 18.

180 Hibbert Lectures, 1882, p. 231.

181 Nineteenth Century, April, 1886.

182 Isaiah x. 15; xi. 1; Zeph. iii. 12.

183 Hosea xi. 1.

184 Amos ix. 7.

185 Ezekiel xvi. 3.

186 It is interesting to note that, according to the record preserved by Israel of their own history, that which Kuenen says of later time,—that ‘at each turning-point of the history stands a man who claims to bring a word from God.’—is exactly true of the older history too; Abraham, Moses, Samuel, David, are all in this sense prophets. Yet there is no appearance of a later age forming a past in its own likeness. The prophets do not imagine an earlier row of prophets like themselves, put in like the portraits of the early Scottish kings at Holyrood, to fill the blanks of history. The early figures are not cut to prophetic pattern; they have each their distinct individuality of character and office, only they have a unity of Divine commission and service.

187 Pensées, ii, 7 § 2.

188 S. Matt. xii 45. It should be observed that the words were spoken of ‘this wicked generation.’

189 1 Cor. i. 22.

190 S. John iv. 25.

191 S. Luke xvii. 20.

192 S. Matt. xii. 38; S. John vi. 30, 31, in each case following some of our Lord’s own signs.

193 This comes before us vividly in Justin Martyr’s account of his own conversion. Dial. c. Tryph. 3 ff. ‘Thus and for this reason I am a philosopher.’

194 S. Matt. xvi. 16.