LIBRARY OF THE Theological Seminary, PRINCETON, N. J. . Case. Dry.^S 2-4-2,0... ' Shelf, Sectioni.r.^.P.r , Hook, f ^^> — - JESUS CHEI8T: its Cimts, f ift, anb Mark, ERRATA. Page 17, line IG, for spedjic read categorical . Page 26, last line but one, for " original sin," read ihr entrance of sin. Page 99, line 9, for " tchich governs " read governing. Page 51, Hue 21, for " Holy of holies " read " nuist high and holy One.'' Page 187, last line but one, for NaassenianR read Nauscnes. Page 188, line 1, for Perates read Peratinc. JESUS CHRIST: QWV i> * IS , mxh Q / E. DE PEESSENSE, UfjoQ rav-a rig ikuvoq ; (2 Cor. ii. 16). z-?r-^^r^, :f^ Q^ Waniian ; JACKSON, WALFOED, & HODDER, 27, PATERNOSTER ROW MDCCCLXVI. TJie Itif/ht of Tnnislalion is reserved to Messrs. Jackson, Walfokd, & Hoddee, Loudon. M. Waisenhaus, Hcdle fPrussin). M. Kemink, Utrecht f Netherlands j. ]\Ics>srs. ScRiiJNER, Xar York. TRANSLATORS PREFACE. It might seem almost an impertinence in these days to offer to the public a translation of a French book; but there are still among us readers, to whom the English language is so emphatically " the king's highway," that they reluctantly turn aside into other paths of literature. Their feet move uneasily over the stones of a foreign language, and in picking their way they pass by the flowers and lose the prospect. To such this translation will need no apology- The character of M, Pressense's work itself is, no doubt, adapted to make a more direct appeal to the religious mind of France than of England, as the book to which it is, at least in part, an answer, has excited a degree and kind of interest in that country, which it would hardly have awakened in our own. It cannot, however, be an idle study to any Christian mind, to ob- serve attentively the progress and issues of an intellectual move- ment, by which the spiritual life of a neighbouring nation has been stirred to its depths, and apathetic indifference turned into a living interest in the character, person, and work of a living Saviour. It is unnecessary to enlarge upon the remarkable impulse given to religious thought and enquiry in France by M. Kenan's Vie de Jesus, with its finely-wrought tissue of ingenious error. M. Pressense comes forward to arrest the newly-awakened attention, and to direct it into healthier channels, by presenting from his point of view, the old Gospel of Jesus Christ in its true, natural, and historical setting, and in all its human and Divine simplicity. a n TRANSLATOR 8 PREFACE. It is only just to the translator and the publishers of this work in English to say that they are in no way responsible for all the views of truth held by the author, especially in reference to the human nature of our Lord, and the great mystery of the atonement. The book has been translated from the proof sheets of the original as they were ready. There has been, there- fore, no opportunity of judging of its tenor as a whole before preparing it for the public. We are learning in our day to recognize with growing reve- rence the many-sidedness of truth, and to appreciate more and more fully the Master's broad charter of liberty to all true teachers and workers, " Forbid him not ; for there is no man that shall do a miracle in my name that can lightly speak evil of me." On this principle this Life of Jesus is sent forth to the English public, in the hope that He who is the Truth will make truth strong and error weak by His accompanying Spirit. Annie Harwood. Matlock, February, 1866. PREFACE. This book is not the result of any j)articular circumstances, nor is it an answer to any contemporary work which has left its impress on the mind of our age. It forms a natural part of my series of works on primitive Christianity. It was always my intention to write it. If I have entered on the great undertaking sooner than I had purposed, it has been in obedience to the imperative call of our day. The religious question, and more especially the question — " What think ye of Christ?" has come before our times with a directness which reminds us of the six- teenth century. I do not hesitate to admit how much the reoent work of one of the most brilliant spirits of our age has contri- buted to this revival of interest. I said, candidly, what I thought of that work on its first appearance. I retract nothing from the judgment I then formed of M. Kenan's Vie de Jesus; but it would be impossible to deny that his book has given an impetus to thought, and fired the public mind with an enthusiasm for questions, which twenty years ago would assuredly have been pronounced superannuated. Let it be freely granted that this immense success, indicating as it does amongst us, a great ignorance of the essential character of Christianity, and of religion in general, carries a severe lesson to the defenders of the Gospel. Why have they left it to their adversaries to bring Christ near to man, by representing Him in the historical setting of His age ? No doubt, under pretext of restoring to Him His human character, these have deprived Him of His divinity and His sanctity. But He had been too often presented as an abstract dogma ; here we have only exag- geration carried to the opposite extreme, and a romantic fiction a 2 4 V-iii PEEFACE. substituted for a theological treatise. Let it be our endeavour to arrive at the true history, by transj^orting ourselves to the Judaea of the times of the Herods — that troubled epoch wheu so much good blended with so much evil, and so many pious aspirations clashed with low ambitions. Upon this background of real human life, the divine and holy beauty of the Redeemer shines forth more gloriously, than from the golden nimbus which encircles the passionless face of the conventional Christ. Too often the manhood of Jesus has been entirely sacrificed to His Godhead ; divines have forgotten that the latter is insepar- able from the former, and that the Saviour-Christ is not God hidden in a human form, but God made man ; the Son of God humbled and become obedient, in the bold language of St. Paul ; a Christ who veritably submitted Himself to all the conditions of human life. From this point of view alone is it possible to attempt a history of Jesus. I venture to hope that it will be found to harmonize both in the minds of my readers and my own, with that entire faith in His Di\Tiiity, which has been the universal belief of Christians for eighteen centuries. It may, perhaps, be asked — "What end is to be gained by a new history of Christ ? Have we not the Gospels ? What can be added to those incomparable narratives, so vivid and artless, the pure and transparent mirror in which the image of Jesus is reflected in all its gentleness and majesty ? Is it not enough for us to have, as a historian, John, the friend and brother of the Master whom he worshipped ?" None can be more ready than I to recognize the inestimable value of this primitive testimony — that w^hich is alone authoritative, that which alone bears the impress of the creative age of the Church. Those who have essayed themselves to draw the life of Jesus, are most prepared to appreciate the unique worth of the Gospels, and count them- selves happy in being able to turn from all the imperfections of their rough delineation, to those inspired painters who reached the climax of art without any artistic methods, and whose perfect simpHcity brings us into direct contact with the living Saviour. And yet, I believe, that there is a use in taldng up after them, and under their authority, a subject on which they are for ever our masters. For, in the first place, the attacks made on Christianity vaiy PEEFACE. ix from time to time ; and we are therefore constrained to reconquer, again and again, the disputed ground from the enemy. Now the Gospel history has heen one of the points most strongly assailed from the very dawn of criticism. Then, we must not forget that the first historians of Jesus addressed themselves to readers who were their contemporaries, and who were perfectly acquainted with the scenes and circumstances amidst which Christ lived, with the condition of His country, and the character of His age. A few brief indications in their writings sufi&ced to enable Jews and Komans to represent to themselves, not only the drama of the Gospel history, but also the theatre in which it was enacted. This acquaintance is absolutely necessary in order to give anything more than a vague and abstract idea of the ministry and work of Jesus. It is evident that what was then understood intuitively can now be grasped only by a vigorous effort of mind. Knowledge is indispensable to restore colour to the past, because it alone enables us to re-ascend the stream of time, and make ourselves, in a manner, witnesses of the events. Lastly, as Christ is above all the ages, no single century can exliaust the riches of truth which are in Him. Every period discloses some new motive for love and adoration. It is not that any age can go beyond the Gospel ; this contains all that we can ever know of Jesus ; but it is like the treasury in the parable, from which the householder brings forth new things after the old. Our conflicts, our griefs, our strivings, disclose to us truths hitherto unexplored, though standing in close connec- tion with those previously known. It is thus that the office of evangelist is perpetuated in the Church, and that each new generation relates the old story of redemption from its own point of view, with its own peculiar bias and experience. Thus the ages repeat, each in its own tongue, " the wonderful works of God." Christian art has never been weary of reproducing the scenes of Gospel history ; the subject is ever the same, but it lives again in the freshness of its youth, as the painter touches with his luminous pencil one or another portion of his canvas. Thus is it with the successive historians of Jesus. We are free, then, to repeat the attempt of those who have gone before us ; and our successors will have the same right, or rather will be X ' PREFACE. bound by tbe same duty, on tbe sole condition tbat the Gospel remain for all and for ever the touchstone of truth, and the final authority. The plan of my book is simple. I have first treated the preliminary questions which hold the approaches to the subject. Is it true that the cause of the supernatural is, as is asserted, a lost cause ? Is there no escape from the necessity of mutilating, from the very outset, a history which loses its proper character, so soon as it is divested of the idea of a sovereign God, capable of interposing in our destinies by unforeseen acts ? I have endeavoured to set reasonable arguments against the pe- remptory affirmations, which are the weapons used in our day by the adversaries of the supernatural. MM. Kenan and Strauss, and all the disciples of the Tubingue school, deny to Christianity any character of originality ; according to their version of it, it is the off'spring of the wedded genius of Greece and the East. I have set aside this theory by a rapid glance over the religions w^hich preceded the Gospel. I have drawn as complete a picture as I might of the Judaism of the Decline in Palestine and in Egypt ; and I hope to have established, that Jesus, so far from drawing His doctrine from the schools of Jerusalem, or the transmitted influences of Alexandria, was the living contradiction of all that surrounded Him. The importance of such a result, if it is really attained, cannot be misconceived. The preliminary questions are brought to a close with the chapter entitled The Gospels. It is very essential to vindicate against contemporary criticism, the credibility of the documents from which we draw the history of Jesus. This is the only means of laying a sure foundation for the building. Are we dealing with legend or history? this is the grand question. In the succeeding books, I have endeavoured to unfold the life of Jesus, without much discursion from the thread of the narra- tive, referring disputed points to cursory notes ; further than this, I have not paused in my history to take any account of the disputations of the schools. After treating the events which belong to the period preceding the entrance of Jesus on His public ministry, — the period including His infancy, His tempta- tion, and His relations Avith John the Baptist, — I proceed to give an outline of His plan, His teaching, and His miracles, before PREFACE. XI entering on the consecutive history of His public ministry. The heads of the three books devoted to this part of the subject will sufficiently indicate their contents : — I. The Time of Public Favour. II. The Period of Conflict. III. The Great Week — Death and Victory. My aim is not so much to demonstrate any theory, as to show Jesus such as I see Him, such as He appears to me in the Gospels, such as I worship Him ; and to say to my contempora- ries— Does this image of Christ seem to you to correspond better with the truth of facts than those forms under which He has been recently rej)resented to you from the naturalistic point of view ? Is it more in harmony with the psychological laws which demand the unity of the moral being? Have we faithfully observed the principles of the philosophy of history, which refuses to admit effects without a cause, and to assign as the motive power of the wide and deep revolution which marks the commencement of our era, an intangible myth, a religion without any fixed doctrine, a faith without a God ? It is not for me to reply. I have spared no researches which might make me less unworthy of so great a subject. I have journeyed through Judaea and Galilee, not that I might garnish my work with lavish descriptions of nature, and merge in the dazzling radiance of the East that calm and quiet beauty of the Gospel which belongs not to this world ; but that I might engrave, as deeply as possible, that seal of reality which is the token of every true history. The reader will find in my book, at least, entire sincerity ; I have not cloaked any of the difficulties I have met ; I have faithfully given my thought, and my whole thought, without bending to the bias of any school. I am more and more convinced of the necessity of coming into closer contact with the great fact of Christianity. The nineteenth century has as full a right as the sixteenth to go back to the fountain-head of the faith, unhindered by any tradition of men. But this does not prevent my bowing before the everlasting Gospel. It is no slavish submission, it is the act of a free man to acknowledge, on sufficient grounds, a Divine authority.. I know well how this Xll PEEFACE. acceptance of the snblime foolishness of the cross, — which is indeed, the climax of the supernatural — stirs a smile of pity on the lips of those who do not behold in it the wisdom of God, and the marvellous response to the deepest needs of man. I only ask of my opponents not to pronounce, in my case, that judgment without a hearing, which is so readily awarded to the defenders of the preternatural, and which dispenses with any fair trial. I appeal, by anticipation, against those summary sentences which are unworthy of science. I demand libert}' of thought and conscience for every man. I repudiate all privilege and all coercion, especially in matters of faith. My whole soul yearns for the full consecration of religious liberty, for that absolute severance of the two powers, which shall establish the equality of all beliefs in the eye of the law. I desire, for my own opinions, neither dole nor protection from the civil power ; for, in my view, none have more reason to rest content with the common rights in the domain of thought, than enlightened Christians. There is implied weakness in the very semblance of protection. This book has been written in troublous times, when a strong wind is blowing the men of our generation further and further from my most cherished convictions ; it will soon be seen that this icy wind sows seeds of death on its passage, and blasts all on which it blows. Upon the shores towards which it is driving us, we shall find none of the best blessings of life. Liberty, social justice, generous care for the feeble and the fallen, will all be lost on that fatal day when the cause of Christ shall suffer shipwreck ; for — for the honour of humanity be it said — this transitory life of earth owes all its grandeur and beauty to that higher world whence man came. Christians hold, as their first article of faith, that this higher world should be sought after for itself, and that Christ's restoring and elevating work begins with the individual, who finds at His feet alone, peace and a power victorious over evil. They plainly avow that they are not disin- terested in thjs question of religion ; it involves for them all that is worth living for. Thus, while they carefully maintain the individuality of their personal faith, they combine, ever more and more, in spite of all that yet divides them, in the defence of their common standard. PREFACE. Xlll I have certainly not abandoned my own peculiar beliefs in this apology for the Gospel, but I have rejoiced to feel the close bond uniting me to the great company of the disciples of Christ in all ages. I have a firm faith in the issue of this crisis. I believe not only in the triumph of Christianity, but in the purification of the churches by the fire of conflict. This is my stedfast hope. My most ardent desire is to contribute, in my feeble measure, to dissi- pate some of the misconceptions by which the God-Man is veiled from the eyes of my contemporaries. TABLE OF CONTENTS, BOOK I. PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS, PAGE Chapter I. — Of the philosopliical and religious bases of the Life of Chi'ist. — Of the supernatui-al ... ... ... ... 1 I. — Refutation of objections made to the Supernatural from the Natm-alistic j)omt of view ... ... ... ... 5 — 21 II. — Refutation of objections made to the Supernatural from the Theistic pomt of view ... 21 — 31 Chapter II. — Jesus Chi-ist and the Religions of the Past ... 82 I. — Historical glance at Ancient Paganism. — Asiatic Pagan- ism.—Hellenic Paganism. — Grecian Pliilosophy. — The Greco-Roman World 38—49 II. — Religion of the Old Testament. — Conception of God amongst the IsraeHtes. — Idea of evil. — Holuiess, — Divine origin of the Old Testament. — Israel separated from other nations. — Mosaic institutions. — The law. — Prophecy ... 49 — 65 Chapter III. — The Judaism of the Decline ... 66 I. — Judaism under the Persians. — Temple on Moimt Gerizim 71 — 74 II. — Judaism under the Greeks. — Book^ of Jesus Sirach. — Beginnings of Sadduceeism. — Beginnings of Pharisaism, — The Psalter of Solomon 74—79 III. — The Maccabees and the Roman Empke. — Messiah a new Maccabeus.— Messiah of the Sibylline oracles. — Fresh subjugation of the Jews. — The Roman yoke. — The Books of the Maccabees 79 — 87' rV. — Alexanch'ine Judaism.— Philo. — Absolute contrast be- tween Pliilo and the Gospel. — Hellenistic Jews 87 — 95 V. — Sects and parties in Judaea. — Essenes. — Sadducees. — Pharisees 95 — 99 XVI CONTENTS. PAGE VI. — Movement of thought in Palestine before the birth of Jesus Christ. — Growing importance of the Rabbi. — Course of Rabbinical studies. — Jewish tribunals. — Doctrine of the Rabbis. — Vehemence of Jemsh prejudices. — Incompre- hensibility of God. — Tendency to place God at a distance fi-om man. — Pliai-isaic morality; its mercenary character. — Materialism of the Jemsh hopes. — Apocalj^itic dreams. — Book of Enocli. — Fourth book of Esch'as. — Contrast of the Tahnud to the Gospel. — Superstitious ideas respecting de- mons.— Political agitators. — The mdifferent — True Judaism 99 — 128 Chapteu IV. — Soxu'ces of the history of Jesus Christ. — Credi- bility of the Gospel liistory 124 I. — General proofs of the reaUty of the Gospel history. — Testimony of Pliny the Younger. — Testimony of Sue- tonius and of Tacitus. — Testunony of Josephus. — Testi- mony of the Talmud. — Testimony of the Church. — Testi- mony of the Chiu-ch of the first centuiy. — Character of the primitive witnesses. — Uncontested letters of Paul. — Testunony of the Revelation. The Gospels recognised in the third centuiy ... ... ... ... ... ... 125 — 134 II. — The first century, the date of our foirr Gospels. — Testi- mony of the second centiuy. — Testimony of heretics. — Determination of the sacred text in the second century. — Language of the synoptics. — Difference between the S}Tioptics and the fourth Gospel 134—142 m. — Origin of the synoptics. — Their fundamental agi-ec- ment. — Correspondences and divergences of the sjmoptics. — Origin of the sjTioptics. — Various explanations. — Gospel spoken before wi-itten. — The Apostles guardians of pi-imi- tive tradition. — Tradition em-iched by successive memories. — Fidelity of these memories. — The written narratives. — Formation of one tj^pe of narration. — Appearance of the Gospels. — Canonical Gospels. — Gospel according to Mat- thew.— Hebrew and Greek Gospels. — Fii-st Gospel not Judeo-Christian. — Gospel according to Mark. — Testunony of Papias. — Relations between Mark and Peter. — Gospel of Mark WTitten at Rome. — Correspondences of Mai-k and Matthew.- Third Gospel. — Represents the teaching of Paul. — Luke author of the third Gospel. — Date oi tliis Gospel 142 — 174 rV. — Fourth Gospel.— State of the Chiu-ch at the close of the first centuiy. — Adaptation of the Gospel of John to the requii-ements of the times. — Sketch of the life of St. John. — John alone able to wnte the fourth Gospel. — External eAddence.— Authenticity of the fom-th Gospel.— Unity of its plan. — Refutation of objections. — Conclusion 174 — 205 Chapter V.— Doctiinal bases of the life of Jesus 206—209 CONTENTS. XVll LOOK II. PKEPARATION OF JESUS FOR HIS WORK. GENERAL CHARACTER OF HIS PUBLIC MINISTRY. PAGE Chapter I. — Childhood of Jesus ... i 210 I. — Birth of Jesus Chiist, year of Rome 750. — Anticipations i of the great event. — Vision of Zacharias. — The Annun- / ciation. — Mh'aculous conception of Jesus. — Song of Mary, j — Birth of John the Baptist. — Fii-st census in Judaea. — Journey of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem. — Birth of Jesus Christ.— The Shepherds 210—226 II. — Childhood of Jesus. — The presentation. — Adoration of the Magi. — The star. — Massacre of the cliikben.— Cliild- hood of Jesus at Nazareth. — The cliild Jesus and the doc- tors of the Temple. — Development of Jesus ... ... 226 — 236 Chapter II. — John the Baptist. — Baptism of Jesus Christ ... 237 I. — Preparation and first preachmgs of the Forerumier. — John the Baptist the new Elias. — Preparation of John the Bap- tist for his mission. — John the Baptist iti the Desert of Judtea. — Preaching of Jolin the Baptist. — Baptism of the Forerunner. — Effects of his preaching. — His humility ... 237—248 II. — Baptism of Jesus Christ, year of Rome 780 ... ... 248 — 252 III. — John the Baptist and Herod Antipas. — Fresh testimony of Jolin the Baptist to Jesus. — Jolm the Baptist and Herod. — Doubts of John the Baptist. — Testimony of Jesus to John the Baptist 252 — 257 Chapter III. — The Temptation in the Wilderness. — Jesus con- queror over temptation ... ... ... 258 — 266 Chapter IV. — The plan of Jesus 267 I. — Reality and unity of the plan of Jesus 267—270 II. — The kingdom of Jesus. — Fulfilment of the old covenant. — The plan of Jesus inseparable from His person... ... 270 — 279 III. — The titles which Jesus claims. — Son of David. — Son of God. — Son of man ... .. 279 — 283 rV.— The Chm-ch and the Apostolate.— The Chm-ch.— The Apostolate .. 283—287 Chapter V. — The Teaching of Jesus Christ 288 I. — The subject of Christ's teaching. — Jesus the subject of His o-svn teaching. — Infallibility of Jesus 288 — 291 II.— The form and method of the teaching of Jesus Christ. — Calm majesty of His language. — Popularity of His teacliing. — Its un scholastic character. — Its moral cha- racter.— Authority of the word of Jesus. — Variety of His teaching. — Parables. — Conclusion 291 — 306 Chapter VI.— JVIiracles of Jesus Christ 307 XVlll CONTENTS. PAGE I. — Miracles of Jesus Christ in general. — The miracles inse- parable from the discourses. — Difference between miracles and prodigies. — Miracles reveal Jesus Christ. — Divers sorts of Mu-acles. — Intention of Miracles ... ... ... 307 — 313 II. — The healing of the Demoniacs. — Reality of cases of possession. — Healing of the Possessed ... 314 — 317 BOOK in. FIRST PERIOD Of THE MINISTRY OF JKSUS CHRIST. Chapter I. — Public Ministiy of Jesus, from His baptism to His return into Galilee after the feast of Purim. (Year of Rome 780-781.) Tlu-ee periods of the Ministry of Jesus. Unity of His Ministry 318 I. — Political condition of Judiea ... ... ... ... 321 — 325 II. — Commencement of the Ministry of Jesus. — The first Disciples. — First Miracle of Jesus. — Jesus diives out the sellers from the Temple. — Conversation with Nicodemus. — Jesus passes through Samaria ... 325 — 333 III. — Return of Jesus into Galilee. — Meeting with the Samaritan woman. — First pubUc Preaching. — Jesus in the Synagogue at Nazareth 333 — 339 IV. — The Feast of Purim at Jerusalem. — Heahng of the / Paralytic. — Apologetic Discourse ... 339 — 343 Chapter II. — INIinistry of Jesus in Galilee during the time of pubhc favoiu" ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 344 I. — General character of the Ministry of Jesus in Galilee. — Early Mii-acles and early pubhc Discoiu'ses in that country. Call of the Disciples. — Lake of Tiberias. — Christ's man- ner of hfe. — One of the days of Jesus. — Healing of a Leper. — Time of public favoiu-. — Discontent of the Pharisees ... 344 — 356 II. — Choice of the Twelve Apostles 35() — 361 III. — Sermon on the Mount. — The Beatitudes. — The new Law 361—367 Chapter III. — Preparation for the Crisis in Galilee 368 I. — Sojourn at Nain. — Raising of the Widow's Son. — The Sinner of Nain. — Compassion of Jesus for the despised. — Parable of the Protligal Son 368 — 372 II. — Various Parables and Miracles. — Parables relating to the Idngdom of God. — The Demoniac of Gadara. — Raising of Jairus' Daughter. — First Mission of the Apostles ... 372 — 380 Chapter IV. — The Crisis of the faith in Galilee 381 I — The Multiphcation of the Loaves at Bethsaida Julias. — The Tempest on the Lake. — Discourse at Capernaum ... 381 — 388 CONTENTS. Xix BOOK IV. PERIOD OF CONFLICT. PAGE Chapter I. — Delegation sent by the Pharisees at Jerusalem into Galilee. — Journey into the Lands of the North. — From the Spring of the year of Rome, 782, to the Autunin of the same year 389 I. — First proceedings of the Pharisees in Galilee ... ... 389 — 394 II. — ^Journey into the Lands of the North. — The Woman of Canaan. — Journey to Caesarea Pliilippi. — Peter's great confession. — " Thou art Peter." — The Transfiguration. — Healing of the Demoniac Boy. — Various Exhortations. — The Lord's Prayer 394—403 Chapter II.— Sojourn at Jerusalem on the occasion of the Feast of Tabernacles. (Autumn of the Year of Rome, 782.) ... 404 I. — Attitude of Jesus during the Feast. — Discourse of Jesus. — Discussion with, the Members of the Sanhedrim ... 404 — 413 II. — Healing of the Man born Blind. — Inquiry of the San- hedrim.— The Good Shepherd and the Hireling ... ... 414 — 417 Chapter III. — Last Sojourn in Gahlee. — Solemn return to Jerusalem through Samaria. — Feast of the Dedication. — (From October to December, 782.) 418 I. — Last Sojourn in Galilee. — The duty of Charity. — Mission of the Seventy. — Sui'render of Earthly Possessions. — Characteristic Sayings of Jesus ... ... ... . . 418 — 430 n. — Return to Jerusalem tlirough Samaria. — Feast of the Dedication 430 — 432 Chapter IV. — Sojoiu-n in Persea. — The Family of Bethany. — Resun-ection of Lazarus ... ... ... ... ... 433 I. — Sojom-n in Pergea. — Words of Jesus on the question of Divorce. — The Rich Young Man. — Law of renunciation. — Compensation for Sacrifices. — Jesus blesses Little Children 433 — 438 II. — Resurrection of Lazarus. — Deliberations of the San- hedrim 438 — 447 BOOK V. the great week. the close of the struggle. DEATH AND VICTORY. Chapter I. — Departure for the Feast. — Journey to Jericho. — The Supper at Bethany. — Triumphal Entry ^ 448 I. — Journey to Jericho. — Healing of blind Bartimseus. — Jesus at the house of Zaccheus. — Parable of the Talents. 448 — 453 XX CONTENTS. PAGE II. — The Adoration of Mary of Bethany. — Indignation of ■ Judas 453—458 III. — Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem. — The Barren Fig-tree cursed ... • 458 — 462 Chapter II. — Relations of Jesus with the authorities of His country. — The new religion and the State 463 — 47JL Chapter III. — The day of Captious Questions 472 I. — Attempt of the Pharisees to ensnare Jesus. — His Reply. Attempt of the Sadducees. — Jesus' Reply. — Indignant words of the Master. — Denunciation of Pharisaism ... 472 — 480 II. — Jesus and the Greek Proselytes. — Parables enjoining Watchfulness.— The Final Judgment 480—488 Chapter IV. — The Scenes in the Upper Chamber ... .. 489 I. — Preparations for the Last Supper. — Character of the Jemsh Passover. — Jesus washes His Disciples' feet. — The Traitor is pointed out.— The Lords Supper 489 — 497 II. — Warnings and Consolations. — The Sacerdotal Prayer... 497 — 503 Chapter V. — The Agony in the Garden. — The Trial 504 I. — Gethsemane 504 — 506 II. — The AiTest. — First Trial. — Jesus in the house of Annas. — Peter's Denial. — Jesus before the Sanhedrim 506 — 511 III. — Jesus before Pilate. — Jesus before Herod Antipas. — Re- tvim to the Prgetorium. — Condemnation of Jesus ... ... 511 — 516 IV. — The Crucifixion and Burial. — Significance of the Death of Jesus. — The Death of Jesus is redemption 616 — 534 Chapter VI. — The Resiu-rection of Jesus Clmst 535 I. — The Facts. — Fii-st Appearances. — Peter and John at the Sepulchre. — Interview of Jesus with Mary Magdalene. — Noli me tangere. — The Disciples at Emmaus. — Jesus appears in the Upper Chamber, — Doubts of Thomas. — Jesus shows Himself by the Lake of Tiberias. — Second appearance in Galilee. — The Ascension 535 — 546 II. — ReaUty of the Miracle 546 — 552 III. — Significance of the Resm-rection. — Conclusion 552 — 500 BOOK FIRST. jrdiminarrr ^mBtmxB. CHAPTER I. OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL AND RELIGIOUS BASES OF THE LIFE OF CHRIST. OF THE SUPERNATURAL. ON the very threshold of the great subject before us, we are confronted by two commandmg but opposite points of view between which it is necessary to choose. As the supernatural is admitted or rejected, the whole life of Jesus is transformed from its commencement to its close. In the former case testimony and texts retain their evidential value ; in the latter they are beforehand branded with suspicion, and what is left is not fact to be verified, but fable to be interpreted. It is impossible, therefore, to bend too careful a study to a problem so vast and fertile in results ; it is the very foundation-stone of the whole building which has to be laid. Now we are at once struck with one patent fact which greatly com- phcates the point at issue between the opposing partisans, or rather, which prevents their entering closely and seriously into controversy at all. This is the haughty B 5L> Z BOOK FIRST. and contemptuous refusal of the naturalistic school to put to a critical test the opinion of its opponents ; — its claim to lay down at the outset, as a fundamental axiom, the negation of the supernatural. This contempt for faith is in its essence also a contempt for science, a limit imposed on free enquiry, and the first step in the path of prejudice, which is but a blind adherence to a preconceived and untested opinion. It is a flagrant deviation from those great experimental methods winch for three centuries have been so constantly increasing the sum of human knowledge. Bacon was right when he pointed out as a source of error '• the exaggerated and almost idolatrous respect for human intellect ; a respect v;hich turns men away fi*om the contemplation of nature and of experience, and makes them revolve, as it were, in the circle of their ot\ti meditations and reflections." If the same peremptory method had been applied to the natural sciences by which the supernatural is now put out of court without form of trial, we should find our- selves to-day maintaining the theory of vortices vdth Descartes against Newton, and treating the circulation of the blood as a fiction of the fancy. Free enquiry has no worse foe than trenchant dogmatism, which eludes the test of proof equally in what it affirms and denies. Are we doing injustice to our adversaries ? Let their own words be the judges. '" The countries and conditions in which the supernatural is received," says M. Kenan, " are of secondary importance." " " If we do not enter upon this discussion," writes M. Havet, ''it is from the impossibihty of doing so without admitting an inad- missible proposition, namely, the mere possibility of the supernatural. Our principle is to hold ourselves con- "-'■'■ Chair of Hebrew in the College of France PBELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 6 stantly aloof from the supernatural, that is, from the imagination. The dominant principle of all true history, as of all true science, is, that that which is not in nature is nothing, and can be counted as nothing unless as an idea/'"' " Positive philosophy," says M. Littre, " sets aside the sys- tems of theology which suppose supernatural action. f We ask whether it is possible to elude examination and escape debate in a more pointed manner than by such words as these ? A judgment without law is the only possible result of such polemics. This revolutionary procedure is even more convenient than it is summary ; that which is treated thus is no legend born of yesterday, but a mode of thought which has had the greatest spirits for its defenders, and which has ever moved mankind "with an incomparable sway. It can be no argument against the supernatural that miracles have never consented to submit themselves, like dubious drugs,]: to the crucial examination of learned bodies. Such an argument implies so utter an ignorance of the moral and religious character of Christianity that it does not deserve *to be met. That handful of men who believed, eighteen centuries ago, in the Gospel mira- cles, were not brought, it is true, before official examiners, but they went down with calm conviction, in presence of a furious populace, into the arena, and sealed with their blood their faith in a risen Lord. Evidence thus attested ceases to be contemptible, and deserves to be at least examined. But no ; the miraculous and the incredible are bound together at the very threshold of the enquiry. Strauss, in his new " Life of Jesus," declares * " Revue des Deux Mondes," 1st August, 1863, •f- Littre. " Conservation, revolution, et positivisme," p. 2G. + " Vie de Jesus." M. Eenan ; Introduction, p. 21. B 2 4 BOOK FIRST. that the most direct testimony is inadmissible when it has reference to a fact which does not bend to the laws of natm-e, and he recalls this dictum of the Romans — " I would not beheve that story though Cato himself related it ;"* which is equal to saying with one of old, " Even though thou shouldest persuade me, I would yet not be persuaded." Such an attitude renders all enquiry impossible, and shuts us up to a blind credence. These assertions tend to nothing short of imposing upon us . authoritatively a system of philosophy which is as fairly matter for dis- cussion as any thing which has its date within the his- tory of human thought. In fact, this negation of the supernatural, or rather of its possibility, springs from a fixed doctrine of the whole nature of things. If this doctrine be justified to the reason, the cause of naturalism is gained, but not otherwise. It is then to this height that the debate must be carried if it is to have any real issue. But this is just what is not done. The appeal is made rather to modern reason, and to the results of the scientific move- ment— a mode of proceeding which " leaves the real ques- tion still vague, and passes over in silence, difficulties which would have to be met in a philosophical discussion ; — a new and striking proof this of that enervation of reason of which Christians are the first to complain. "We will not follow the example of our opponents and meet them with high and trenchant affirmations ; we wish to show more respect for science ; and without entering on a complete demonstration, which would require an entire volume, we will give our main reasons for rejecting * " Das I.eben Jesu fiir das Deutsche Volk bearbeitet." 1863. MM. Nefftzer and Dolfuss have given us a very good translation of this book. I quote, however, from the original. PRELIMINAEY QUESTIONS. b those philosophical principles in the name of which those who differ from us eliminate the supernatural. The supernatural is ousted in our day, in the name of two opposing doctrines between which we make a wide distinction. Naturalistic philosophy, or pantheism, rejects it, repelling with it all order, spiritual and moral. Theism, in its different degrees, opposes it on the ground of the very perfection of that order, which appears to it to imply the inviolable fixity of the first laws of nature. We shall maintain the possibility of the supernatural against the one and the other school, not hiding from ourselves that the first has with it the rising tide of opinion ; while the second is led, by the very gravity of its position, to recognize ever more and more, the close bond of solidarity, which exists between the cause of true spiritualism and that of Christianity. 1. Eefutation of objections made to the Supernatural from the Naturalistic point of view. We will remark, at the outset, that we attach very little weight to the argument borrowed from the development of science during the last three centuries, which con- cludes, from its vast advances, the negation of the supernatural. We ask, What are the sciences spoken of ? Are they those which bear on the knowledge of nature ? We freely admit that these have advanced with giant strides, and one of the most incontestable glories of our age is that of having discovered a multitude of new phenomena in the physical order of things, and of having classed them under demonstrated laws. The domain of the unknown, contracts its bounds day by day, and the part which imagination has to play in the explanation of natural facts is reduced almost to the minimum ; physics and chemistry have slain the false magicians who cast 6 BaOK FIRST. their spells upon uations, in their childhood or their ignorance. But how does the widest acquaintance with nature react upon the belief in the supernatural ? The very word supposes an order beyond and above that of nature. What matters it from this point of view that man has discovered the secret concatenation of pheno- mena of a lower order ? Does it follow that the chain may not be broken or interrupted by a sovereign power ? When all the links in the chain of natural causes and effects have been brought to light, will it follow that the first link may not be in the hands of a wise and sovereign God ? Doubtless, if the supernatural were confounded with the marvellous, if it implied a capricious activity, working by perpetual prodigies, so that there could be no fixity in the lower order, the progress of science would be fatal to it. But, rightly understood, it presupposes natural order and lav;s, since it claims to be recognised . precisely in the suspension and interruption of those laws.(^If there were no fixed natural order, there would be, properly speaking, no room for the supernatural ; the extraordinary supposes the ordinary, the exception implies the rule. Let science scrutinise as she may the secrets of nature, and go on till she forms of nature herself a vast and admirably classified museum for the spirit of man ; faith in the supernatural has nothing to dread from her researches. It would be otherwise if some new and con- siderable facts, decidedly contrary to final causes, had been produced in support of naturalism. But men are farther than ever from such a demonstration, so that we have a right to affirm that the theses of naturalism appear the less plausible, the more they are confronted with advanced science. What have we then to fear from its progress ? I admit that knowledge brings its intoxication ; the intellect which has grasped a planet in its span is fain PRELIMINAKY QUESTIONS. 7 to lay claim to universal knowledge, to recognise no limits to its dominion, and to ignore those wiiich outly it. Hence the too frequent tendency of ages of scientific discovery to narrow the horizon of thought, to bring it within the lower sphere of things ; so as to sj^are itself the humiliation of acknowledging that above and beyond all the known, stretches the region of the infinite and the divine. Thus by a singular contradiction, a boundless ambition leads to an ignoble limitation of the human faculties, (it is not then the progress of science --^ which threatens faith in the supernatural, but the insen- sate infatuation of some of its votaries, a thing as wholly distinct as is wild enthusiasm from rigorous logic, The fact remains, however, that under the shelter of this kind of scientific frenzy, naturahsm has entrenched itself strongly, not only in the domain of the natural sciences, properly so called, but even in that of philosophy. It is a swelling flood, which carries along on its rapid tide every one who abandons the terra firma of moral truths. It behoves us to examine carefully into its sources, and to trace its transformations in our own time. At the commencement of the century it makes its first appearance in the magnificent and poetic pantheism of Schelling ; he affirms in brilliant utterances the identity of natural and spiritual order, clothes with delusive images a determinism as positive as that of Spinosa, and holds up again to the dazzled gaze the mirage of a false infinite, which does not in reality pass the bounds of the vv^orld of phenomena. Hegel gives to it its most perfect form ; he pretends to find in human reason the very formula of the absolute, which is not distinct from the created world, but develops itself through universal life in an evolution regulated by fixed laws, of which logic shows us the sequence. It is thus that from kingdom 8 BOOK FIRST. to kingdom in nature, from sphere to sphere in human existence, from era to era in histor}^ the absolute is revealing itself, ever more perfectty, till it arrives at the full consciousness of itself, as the idea of all things in the reason of man. There, on the highest step of metaphysical abstraction, is its icy throne, from which it descends incessantly to recommence its eternal evolution, under the impulse of that famous dialectic method which brings negation out of affirmation, and from their repeated collision evolves new categories, to be themselves again carried along m the vortex of a ceaseless development. Thus is the woof of the uni- verse and of our destinies woven under the hand of an inflexible logic more weird and wan than the ancient Fate ; thus does our world revolve upon itself, tightly bound within its own limits, for its totality constitutes the absolute ; there is nothing beyond it ; it is at once divine and circumscribed ; there is not left one fissure, small or great, through which free action might pass athwart the dialectic network which shuts it in. Sound to the depths of this philosophy ; you ^nll find no other element ; it has been able, for a time to make an illusive show to superficial observers by emplojdng Christian symbols; but the fatalistic and naturalistic idea, which is its essence, has not succeeded in confining itself within a mould too narrow for it ; it has broken it, and Feuerbach spoke candidly when he repudiated resolutely the notion of religion. The learned structure of hegelianism was soon abandoned ; it cost too great an effort to the modern mind, and especially to the French. The pantheistic idea, with its ingenious method and bold deductions, was quickly cast aside, but the influence of the system remained no less considerable. The school of Hegel had first to learn that the absolute is not beyond this PRELIMINAEY QUESTIONS. 9 world, and then that this ever self-elaborating absolute absorbs into itself the most flagrant contradictions, and dwindles to the eternal relative. Henceforward fall all marked distinctions between the false and the true, between good and evil ; they are not ; they arise only to be inces- santly unmade and remade, for there is no fixed type of the true, the beautiful, the good, since there is no God. Moral freedom is crushed under the grinding wheels of system. Hegelianism, thus vulgarised and despoiled of the deep and hardy speculations which made its grandeur, has crept into our intellectual atmosphere ; we trace its influence in the principal sections of the naturalistic school, which is only unanimous in rejecting peremptorily the idea of supernatural order. Thence proceeds that scepticism of the scoffer or the atheist, which is ever repeating that everything is relative, that we are but a shadow projected on the eternal illusion. It is graceful truly in those who have reached this negation of thought, to assume a position of proud superiority and to dispense their scorn, as if there were in all the world of intellect a situation more miserable and pitiable than theirs. Positivism is only a less agreeable form of this scep- ticism. It also, by its elimination of causes from the world, most of all of free and moral causes, has retained the great lesson of hegelianism, that the absolute does not exist beyond the finite ; it thence concludes that there is nothing reliable but outward fact, that metaphysics is but a lure to the mind, a dangerous relic of theology ; it supposes itself to have discovered the essential order of things because it presents a new classification of the sciences ; it afiirms with startling audacity that all which does not come under this classification has no existence ; consequently, neither conscience, nor the sense of the divine, nor the inextinguishable thirst after moral 10 BOOK FIRST. and religions truth — at once the rack and the glory of the human soul — have any right to be ; a creed \vhich does not prevent it, nevertheless, from mocking our highest needs with I know not what ridiculous worship of humanity, upon which the actual adherents of the school voluntarily preserve a prudent silence. In vain does a noble and vigorous mind essay to re-conquer from posi- tivism the realm of metaphysics, while yet maintaining that the absolute has no personal existence ; he arrives only at an ideal which is the contrary of the real, which vanishes when he v^^ould give it life, which only is on condition of not being, so that the first article of this strange theodicy might be defined thus : God is the opposite of Being ; and he reduces himself to pure abstraction. The spiritualism of M. Vacherot is only dis- tinguished from positivism by a sterile good intention, for wdtli him the category of the ideal is confounded with that of the non-existent. It is not easy to grasp the hegelian atheism atlivvart the sensibilities, the lyric and mystic effusions, the prayers to the Celestial Father, which abound in M. Kenan's books ; but under this unctuous surface is soon perceived the hollow void, the abyss wdience we have emerged, the impersonal ideal of which the name of God is a heavy and vulgar translation. He has taken pains to come forth from the gilded cloud in which he chooses to enwTap himself with such words " as these. ^ " The historical sciences are based on the supposition that no supernatural agent comes forth to trouble the progress of humanity ; that there is no free existence superior to man, to whom an appreciable share may be assigned in the moral conduct, any more than in the material conduct of the universQ^^ For myself, I believe that there is not in the universe an intelligence PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 11 superior to that of man ; the absolute of justice and reason manifests itself only in humanity ; regarded apart from humanity, that absolute is but an abstraction. The infinite exists only when it clothes itself in form."* Here is something definite .(Since his preface to the translation of Job, it has been well known that the immortality of the JU.>» soul means for M. Kenan nothing more than the beneficent memory left by a noble life upon humanity. Morality, like the rest of religion, is confounded with aesthetics, and the worship of the beautiful is the only serious worship. M. Taine, the brilliant rival of M. Kenan, professes naturalism with infinitely more simplicity ; he does not embarrass himself either with Hegel or with the ideal ; he returns to the sensualism of the eighteenth century, stripping Condillac of his periphrasis. It was needful to show in what name of philosophy the supernatural is in our day eliminated with so much boasting ; nothing better proves to what an extent it is bound up with the most elementary principles of theism. We will content ourselves with just recalling these principles to our anta- gonists, maintaining that they demand from the reason far greater sacrifices than any required by the pro- founder mysteries of religion. To the positivists who eliminate not only such or such solution of the metaphysical and religious problem, but who suppress the problem itself, and not content with denying supernatural order, forbid it to intrude on the mind w^e reply : You, who pretend to explam all which is observable to man in this world, are not consistent with yourselves ; you do not carry out your programme, for unless you recognize as positive fact only that which is sensible and tangible, you cannot deny that there is in ^:= " Ee^Tie des deux Moudes "—I860, p. 383. 12 BOOK FIRST. humanity as well in our clays of civilization as in mytlio- logic ages, an all-puissant instinct which urges man to seek a moral satisfaction beyond the temporal and finite, an unconquerable aspiration towards that which is eternal. There is no fact more positive than the religious sentiment. Qn the eloquent words of M. Guizot, " You may interrogate the human race in all time and in all places, in all states of society and all grades of civiliza- tion, and you will find man everywhere and always, believing spontaneously in facts and causes beyond this sensible world, this living mechanism called nature." *v Positivists, men of the outward fact, here is a positive fact which, of all the rest, has exercised the weightiest influence on the destinies of our race ; here is a fact universal and incontestable, appreciable not only in the individual but in the race, and you take no account of it. In vain you seek to substitute it with " the astonishment of feeble and thinking humanity plunged into the immensity of the universe." \ This ''feeble and thinking humanity" soars perpetually beyond this immense universe seeking its God ; your attempted substitution does not avail, and the fact remains unexplained, or rather set aside and denied by you. Strange positivism that, which gives no place in science to the human yearning which has worked most mightily on history, and has troubled and agitated the race to its depths, not like a passing breath which swells the waves, but like that mysterious law which day by day heaves the whole heart of ocean. Positivism rejects supernatural and divine order, on the pretext that it is without the world ; and behold, this supernatural order invades the world itself, at least by the passionate * " Meditations sur la Religion," p. 95. f " Cours de Philosophie Positive," par Augusta Comte Nouvelle Edition. 1864. Preface par M. Littre, p. 26. PRELIMINABY QUESTIONS. 13 longings which it excites, and thus asserts its right to be placed in the category of appreciable facts to be verified and explained. The school of fact thus shows unfaithful to itself, and it is not needful in order to establish its insufficiency, to invoke the rights of soul and conscience which it ignores ; it is enough to prove to positivism that it sets aside the positive facts which fetter it, and thus is untrue to its own method. To re-conquer moral and divine order from pantheism, we adduce numerous and weighty facts which are not compatible with the explanation given by it of the uni- verse. This explanation is found in all its systems, under whatever elaboration, propped up as they may be by dialectics imposing as those of hegelianism, or invested with the elegance of our literary metaphysicians ; in all comes out this declaration, that nature is self- sufficient, that she is not the work of an intelligent, per- sonal cause, distinct from the world itself, and finally, that there is no place in universal life or in history for moral freedom. Material order is everytliing. Hence the impossibility of admitting supernatural order. Well, but what if the science of nature, metaphysics and con- science give the lie to this solution, which only appears satisfactory because it suppresses all that would embar- rass it ? The science of nature in its wide and mighty current sets aside the hypothetical systems which have essayed to endow matter with the faculty of transforming itself and originating life. Neither the theory of natural selection j nor that of spontaneous generation has been able to stand the test of a close and impartial examination. Nature presents herself to us ordered upon a uniform plan ; she forms a Uving ladder upon which existences are disposed by ranks, but in such sort that they cannot of them- ]4 BOOK FIRST. selves raise themselves from one step of the ascending line to another, — nay more, each species supposes a creative act. A plan marvellously wise is unfolded in the general arrangement of the series, and the hand of the Creator appears in each new link/'' The work cannot, then, be confounded Ti\ith the worker, since nature is powerless to pass alone the space comprised between any two species. It follows that even into the domain of necessity shines the light of the moral world, — the world of free agency and of mind. Matter only arrives at life and organiza- tion under the action of a free and spiritual cause. " The perfections of God look forth as from the eye of creation." Further, spirit itself appears in the v\'orld not simply in the impress of intelligence and goodness v.diich is reflected even in the lower organisms, but again in a direct manifestation, — I mean in man. Here is thought, here is reason, here is moral life. Ha^dng never suc- ceeded in bringing a bird from a reptile, a mammal from a rodent, how shall it be supposed that man is developed from the lower animals ? Not a single fact has been successfully adduced in support of this abject hypothesis. *'From all bodies together," says Pascal, " you cannot di'aw one thought." How should spirit be born of mat- ter ? The appearance of life in the inorganic world was a new fact, or to speak more correctly, an act of creation, for it could not leap from the insensate stone like the spark from fretted pebbles. The appearance of animal life was equally a new act, for plant never gave forth other than vegetative life. Surely from the life of the animal to that of spirit, the leap is more wide and sudden still, and creative energy must have manifested itself with * See M. Janet's work on " Materialisme Contemporain." PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 15 greater glory to produce this higher form of Hfe, or rather to reproduce itself in it. Thus it is that without having recourse to the briUiant tablets of earth and sky, by which we are wont to be led from the admiration of a work so perfect to the adoration of its Author ; without invoking from the shining day and starry vault, that triumphal hymn to the Creator of which the sweet singer of Israel wakes for us an echo ; without appealing to poetry, — less false than the vulgar prose which, while it means to banish the false ideal, banishes the true idea of all things — it is enough to invoke the science of nature in order to recognize even in this lower realm, the great, free, mighty cause which we call God. Supernatural order has set its seal on the natural which, without it, would have no existence. The science of metaphysics is not less opposed than that of Nature to the pantheistic idea. First, reason refuses to admit that the perfect and infinite of which she has the conception, can be inseparably bound to the imperfect and the finite, that the imperfect and finite form part of God Himself ! ''' For if it is objected that the distinct existence of God is a limit to absolute being, and consequently takes away that character of infinitude which theism attributes to Him, we reply that there are two conceptions of the infinite, — one which confounds it with the totality of things and beings, and which destroys in the very process of stating it ; another which makes it consist in omnipotence, omniscience, independ- ence of all which is relative and incomplete, in the in- tensity and plenitude of being and not in its extension, in one word, in perfection. If God, after having created the world contingent and finite, remains without and beyond * See on this subject the ablfi I'emarks of M. Jules Simon in his book on Natural Eelierion 16 BOOK FIKST. it, His will is none the less absolute ; beside and before Him are only the creatures whom He has been pleased to call into life/'- Hence the essence of being is vdW. But this is just the redoubtable metaphysical difficulty over which pantheism stumbles. It recognizes no cause free and transcendant to the world, to nature, and history. For it, there is no other absolute than the universe arriving at the consciousness of itself in our reason. But evidently universal life does not begin with this highest form ; it does not open with thought, which is rather like the flower of this vast development, for it is not the cause of it, but the product. That which is at the start- ing point, at the origin of things, is not the idea, not mind, but abstract being — a Being so vague that it most resembles non-existence. Thus the greater results from the less, life from death or from inertia ; the immense column of universal existence springs from sheer non- entity. For what, in definite terms, is the abstract Being of hegelianism, or that fathomless abyss, whence the universe is made to arise, if it is not non-entity ? Thus the famous axiom. Ex nihilo nihil cannot be applied to Christians, or to the spmtualistic philosophers who place absolute being before the world, but it falls with its whole weight on the systems of pantheism. It is idle to suppose myriads of centuries elaborating this non- entity ; time, as has been well said, has nothing to do with the question. Millions of years cannot make fruitful that which has itself no existence. Behold then, a grand and gorgeous effect, — the world with its har- monies, humanity with its highest life, born not even of Thales' drop of water, but of a void ! Reason protests against such a doctrine, and to accept it, she must needs * See " Philosophes Contemporains," by M. Eugune Poitou, and ' L'Idee dc Dieu," by M. Caro. PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 17 deny the principle of causality which is one of her essen- tial elements/'' Th3 moral consciousness protests yet more loudly ; it could not survive the suppression of Divine order. It affirm:; it with authority, every time that it enjoins the right on us, and upbraids us for the wrong ; for what it commands is often that which we have no Avill to do, and what it condemns is that which our inclination has prompted. It is not, then, the simple echo of our hearts ; it speaks in the name of a law, which is neither that of our senses, nor of our mobile and impassioned soul ; ifc brings us into the presence of another than ourselves, of one greater than ourselves, who has an absolute right over us, and its " Tliou slialt" sounds yet above the wrecks 'of all our other convictions, estab- j^ lishing in us an immovable certitude. The sptcijic ^ ^^^ 1 imperative, to employ the manly language of Kant, is the rock on which rests the whole moral life of individuals and of societies, and which sophistical speculation has no. real power to fret away, even when it pretends to have '^, ground it to powder. The metaphysician who has /ignored conscience is compelled to lean on it every j instant ; so soon as he relaxes his watchfulness over him- I self he returns to his instinctive and universal beliefs ; I and every time that, in view of crime or treachery, he utters a cry of indignation, he acknoAvledges that moral order which he has sought to confound with the order of necessity. Yes, the human soul believes in liberty, in responsibility, in law and its sanction ; she believes that there is something which is the good, the true, the right ; and some one who enjoins this upon her, renders it pos- sible to her, and watches over its accomplishment. Pan- * See tlie noble remarks c. 5 in " La Raison et la Christianisme," of M. Charles Secnjtan, anltlie Lectures of M. Naville on "La Vie Etemelle." C 18 BOOK FIRST. theism, applied truly and iipou a large scale, even by its best representatives, would cover with a plenary indul- gence all infamies, would unchain wholly the powers of evil, and would render life impossible. It would find its most terrible refutation in its very application, which would be the daring negation of right and duty, the justification of every deed done, a sort of natural selection carried on in the bosom of humanity, for the benefit of the violent and the froward ; it would be the reign of force over a servile and degraded race. Thank Heaven, this frightful reductio ad ahsurdmn of pantheism is not needful ; even should all the tribunals which rest on the idea of responsibility and of justice be abolished, the inward tribunal would still remain ; conscience would lift its voice to attest that the human race is not mistaken in believing that good is not another name for evil, and evil another name for good ; that the will is not a spring moved by the law of necessity ; that responsibility is real and earnest, and that freedom, far from being an illusion, is the perilous and glorious gift bestowed by Him who created man in His own image. Everything within us proclaims His being. I ask no other proof of it than those quenchless aspirations, that need of an infinite love," that boundless void which nothing avails to fill, that holy agony so admirably expressed by the inspired Hebrew, who spoke for the v/hole race when he cried, " My soul thirsteth for God ! " Contemporary pantheism has against it not only all that is elevated and noble in the human heart, but also the abject position to which it sinks so rapidly in Germany and France. As we have already shown, the most outspoken materialism is its natural successor and its legitimate scourge ; it cannot long remain on the steep declivity where it is placed by its negation of a personal PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 19 God, and of freedom ; its false and artificial idealism yields quickly to sensualism. It is enough in our days, in order to refute those who have made of man the sole God of the universe, to confront them with those who, with M. Taine, make him "the human beast." -'Man," says he, "is an animal, save in exceptional moments ; blood and instinct are his guides ; necessity lashes and the beast goes forward — the moral translates the physical." This cynical and unblushing materialism walks as proudly as if it were not a blot on the generation which retro- grades to it ! It has been a hundred times victoriously refuted ; it has been called upon to explain how matter, which we know only by our perceptions, that is by the exercise of our mind, should be found to have greater certainty than that mind itself, wliich is not only the first organ of know- ledge, but also its most direct object. It is notorious that while the corporeal existence is undergoing a per- petual process of renovation, molecule by molecule, mind preserves its identity. If a close correlation between the manifestations of thought and the physical organs which serve as its instruments cannot be denied, this correlation is never in an exact proportion with its development."' Let us then have it explained how the molecules which enter day by day into ' the corporeal organism can suddenly be invested with spiritual qualities, which they did not before possess. How, from the atom, ever divi- sible and finite, there should come forth the thought which has none of its attributes; how, if there is nothing beyond the physical, the reactions of the moral on the physical are as indisputable as are the inverse reactions ; how, finally, two orders of facts, often in contradiction, ■■:-- See M. Janet's article " Le Cerveau," in the "Revue des Deux Mondes," June and July, 1865. c 2 20 BOOK FIRST. are to be brought into a factitious unit}-. But material- ism is not a doctrine, it is a ditch into which fall the spiritually blind ; it is the shallows which engulf the pretended philosophers, who, having first denied God in Heaven, next deny Him in man. The insoluble mys- tery is, that there should be found souls enamoured of liberty, to applaud this shameless sensualism which counts in our day so many adherents. Such a mental condition reminds us of the prophecy of a philosopher at the beginning of the century, " Our age will become so cultivated that it will be as ridiculous in its eyes to believe in God as it is now to believe in ghosts. Then shall the sweat of holy conflict be dried on every brovr. Then shall tears of lofty aspiration fail to every eye ; nothing but ringing laughter shall be heard among men, for reason will have reached the term of its work, and humanity attained its goal."* Let us hope that many misguided spirits will recoil finally from a theory which makes humanity emerge from the steaming sloughs of chaos only to return to them again. All whose dignity it hurts to be the descendants of monkeys, will recognize what a price is paid for the surrender of supernatural order, and will return to it in the name of science, and of conscience, as to the sole sufficing explanation of the enigma of the universe. f The advocates of freedom will remember the cruel lessons of history, and whoever owns a deadly dis- gust with the era of the Caesars, will repel with indigna- tion the abject philosophy which gave it birth, remember- ing that, as has been said by a great publicist, " There is * Lichtenbei-g. " Vermisclite Scliriften," I., p. 16G. t Since these pages were written, M. Ernest Naville has published his beautiful work entitled " Le Pere Celeste." It is needless to ob- serve how entirely I am at one with him. PRELIMINAKY QUESTIONS. 21 a sure and secret understanding between materialism and despotism." II. Befutation of objections made to the supernatural from the theistic point of view. It follows from the preceding considerations that the historians of Jesus, who, in the name of pantheism, have at the outset eliminated the supernatural, without dis- cussion and without examination, liave started with an it iniovi thesis which they have not made good. We have the right to establish, in opposition to them, the existence of a Divine order, beyond and above nature, which w^e may call the supernatural order. This once recognized, v^e cannot beforehand limit its action and in- tervention in nature, and it is logical to admit, at least, the possibihfcy of miracle. Here the theistic school arrests us, and wdiile admitting with us this Divine order, pretends to dispute the possibility of miracles, in the name of the very perfection of order, w^hich implies the immuta- bility of the laws of the world. It is to this objection that we proceed nov/ to reply. It will not embarrass us much. It is necessary first to come to an understanding about these laws. Does science permit us to confer on them an absolute value ? Are they other than' formulas designed to generalize the sum of facts hitherto estab- lished ? It is well to be careful not to overpass the bounds of certainty, possible in this region. Beyond this, the greater or less fixity of these laws matters little. There are other laws, the immutability of which is evident in quite another manner ; I allude to the very conditions of the Divine life. Absolute being, precisely because it is absolute, distinct from the world, is sovereignly free and independent. Now, if in creating the world it had ahenated its ovm liberty, enchained its independence 22 BOOK FIRST. by the very laws which it is supposed to have given to nature, it would follow that the Divine order must have been profoundly shaken and changed ; the immutability of natural laws would involve the transformation or rather the perturbation of the supernatural order which is the order of absolute freedom. Divine sovereignty recognizes no limit in the order of nature, wdiicli is the order of necessity. If the creation limited its author, He would be enshrouded and enchained by her, and theism would be definitively compromised. Therefore has Nature been so organized as to be in no wise closed against new inter- ventions of Divine power. Have we not inarked the trace of successive acts of creation in the various ranks of beings which followed each other up to the appearance of man ? And is not this appearance itself the great miracle of creation ? What is there to hinder creative power from mauifes^ing ihself anew for the realization of its designs '? Above the special laws of nature, is the law itself of natural life, which consists in absolute depen- dence upon God for its maintenance. The worst disorder would arise from the abrogation of such a law. The choice, then, is between the invariable fixity of the laws of nature and the maintenance of Divine sovereignty. It is of no avail to bring forward the immanency of God in nature ; we grant that we live and move in Him ; but it is another thing to believe in His incessant opera- tion, and to identify Him with natural laws, as if the law of gravity or of electricity were the necessary mode of His existence. Such a conception of immanency leads straight to pantheism, and implies the confusion of the Creator and the creation. If it is objected that we ourselves impair His absolute sovereignty by admit- ting that He has created beings in His own image, whose freewill He respects, we reply that these beings PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 23 belong wholly to another domam than that of nature, and that it has pleased God to exempt them from the pas- sivity which characterizes the lower orders. Besides, it is from Him that they hold this liberty, in which He respects His own creative will, and He has in nowise bomid Himself not to act directly upon them and to inter- pose in their moral history, while ever maintaining in the mode of His action the marked distinction between moral order and the order of nature. Vf hat, then, is this talk about the overthrow of natural laws ? No one disputes that Grod is exalted in virtue of His omnipresence and omniscience above all the laws which limit created beings, by the revolutions of time, and the divisions of space. Why should He not be as independent of other natural laws as of these ? More than this ; moral and free agents modify ceaselessly the application of natural laws ; they combine and utilize them so as to call forth from them new effects, which would not be pro- duced by their habitual and regular action ; it may be even said that they suspend them by their operation. When my hand throws a stone high in air, it withdraws the stone for a moment from the law of gravity, which nails it to earth or attracts it thither. Thus is it in a mul- titude of indifferent actions. What shall hinder me from admitting that the absolute Being who holds in 1-1 is Almighty hand the keyboard of all the forces of nature, the known and unknown, may draw from it chords wdiicli pass our calculations '? Hence it follows that miracles which suppose the combination of natural forces, known or unknown, have nothing in them in opposition to nature's laws. We go further ; we admit absolute miracle, that is the direct manifestation of the creative power without a medium. There is nothing impossible from that point of view of theism which recognizes a free 24 BOOK FIRST. creation, one which is uot simply the organization of eternal matter. Are the laws of nature violated because a fact is accomplished by the direct exercise of Divine power ? Must the vine needs be withdra^^i from the laws of vegetable growth because, at Cana, water was once changed into vdne ? Must the miracle of the multiplica- tion of the loaves hinder the sown earth from bearing, that year, its harvest ? No general law then was violated ; it would be otherwise if it was established that Divine power could not have produced such effects : then it would follow, that it is no more sovereignly free ; it Vv'ould have lost its essential characteristics, and there vrould ensue a perturbation of the order of the universe of more weighty import than the most amazing prodigy, for — let us not forget it — the supernatural is the freedom of God, and it can only bo abandoned, or at least its pos- sibility contested, by abandoning a personal God/'- Theism replies to these considerations by appealing to the wisdom of the Creator. How, it cries, suppose that God, sovereignly wdse, has not realised His own idea by the best means, and that He needs to re-touch His work as a poet corrects his verses, because they are defective ? The objection would hold if we were in the world of necessity instead of belonging to that of freedom. Yes, if the entire creation liad been complete when it issued from the hands of God, and universal life had been meant to flow on an untroubled course between insurmountable banks, a new and extraordinary intervention of divine power could no more be conceived than the touch of an ahen chisel to marble sculptured by Phidias. But, in this sense, creation was not complete ; the free creature, man, had to determine his ov/n destiny by an act of will, * See, on this subject, tlie lem.Tiks of M. Rotlie, in liis opuscule, " Zur Dogmatik," p. GG, and following. PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 25 which impHes tlie possibility of evil being introduced into a perfect work. Thus the divine poem of the creation, to borrovv^ the image of a father of the Church, has been interpolated ; the determination to be free has had fatal consequences for man himself and for the earth vvdiicli, given to him as the theatre of his activity, has become that of his perpetual chastisement, till he mingles dust with dust. It is not, then, Flis work that Clod has to correct, as if it had been originally imperfect and wanting ; it is a helping hand which He holds out to a creature lost and miserable through his own fault. The case thus states itself in far different terms ; divine wisdom is not the point in question. If the fall of manldnd is disputed, we ansv*'er that, short of an optimism as superficial as it is untenable, it must be impossible to contest its misery and degradation. To all whose eyes are not blinded, the human race appears a thing fallen and debased. It has its joys, its grandeurs and gleams of nobility ; its miseries are the miseries of a lord of creation ; it is not a parvenu animal, but a being- celestial and divine fallen from his high estate, and still mindful of it. In spite of spring with its smile, and youth with its enchantment, in spite of short felicities and glowing dreams, we see the race panting under its load of suffering, till one by one its children yield up their breath in a last agony. For the majority of men, existencer- is t)ne long battle with hunger, in protracted ignorance and thankless labour. Bread is a conquest always dearly bought. To all death is preceded by a long procession of bodily ills, and to some it appears almost a remedy, so has their life been smitten and wounded. One mighty groan has been rising for six thousand years from this earth, watered with svv^eat and tears. It is, as says the poet, the voice of men who 20 BOOK FIRST. weep ; they curse the day when they were bom, every time that a new stroke of destiny recalls them to the poignant verity of their situation. Doubtless, in the midst of all these woes, the chariot of progress advances, but there are stains of blood on its wheels, and we know but too well what it crushes in its course. Vain is it to seek for it a smoother road ; it must ever leave each generation on the funeral field of which the fairest discoveries of science cannot smooth a single furrow. Side by side with the sorrows of mankind are its crimes, its basenesses, explosions of hatred, fevers of voluptuousness. It is not needful to multiply deeply coloured pictures, or to track far the miry, bloody course of history. Is not the destructive force ever being unchained among men, let loose by themselves, and ever equally terrible whether assuming the guise of pleasure which is death, or that of hatred enkin- dling fratricidal war ? Without widening our horizon, it is enough to contemplate the crimes of one single city — the most brilliant let it be, and the fairest to the eye — and to remember what one single night there covers with its wings ! It is enough to lift that other veil, not less dark, which hides the life of each man, to descend into the depths of one's own being, and to own courageously to oneself that which none would confide to dearest friend. If this was the normal state of humanity, if tliis the primal work of God, what, then, is that God ? and why guard with so anxious a care a wisdom so cruelly belied ? The Christian solution which places at the source of history a terrible falling away of the moral creature, appears to us, notwithstanding its mj^stery, alone com- patible with the conception of a God holy and free. Ori^^a*ftl sin opened the world to evil and to sorrow ; and it is only too certain that both are ceaselessly renewed by PEELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 27 hereditary influence. This is a fact that can only be denied with the denial of evil itself, and with it of good, of God, and of moral order. All the explanations of evil given by deism, fall before a rigorous examination ; they are forced to weaken it, to reduce it to being only a privation of the absolute, which is a necessary condition of the creature ; they finish always by making it some- thingf natural and simple, to be softened down as far as possible, and thus they fling a roseate tinge upon our heavy shadows. But none the less does the maleficent power carry on its ravages in the heart of humanity, which, incapable of exorcising, ceases not to curse it. And were all outward forms of suffering removed, the soul would raise to heaven a yet more despairing cry, because she would then be delivered wholly to the inward torture, consumed by the thirst after righteousness and the infinite ; hke Rachel, she will not be comforted because her God is not, or rather because she is no more her God's. All great poetry is_ in its essence the poetry of sorrow. Vain is it, as Plato beautifully expresses it, to seek to banish from man's memory the time when, in the light, he celebrated the di\dne mysteries ; he remembers that he is of the race of God ; therefore he is inconsolable. This incurable regret, mingled with an ardent though indefinite aspiration, is at the foundation of religion as of art. It is to be traced in the fables of all the ancient religions. All unite in proclaiming that primitive natural order has been overthrown, not by deed of God, but by deed of the estranged moral creature, and that it has become an order against nature. Thenceforward the supernatural is only the restoration of true nature, a return to the truly natural order ; it loses thus all sem- blance of arbitrariness. 28 BOOK Fir, ST. If the Fall is but a delusion, if evil is oul}- the imper- fection necessary to the harmony of the whole, I can understand the objections of the deist to miracle. But if it is true, that God's free creature is unhappy through his own fault, and has placed himself under the yoke of a calamity as tremendous as it is terrible, in the name of what principle can those who recognise a sovereign Deity set aside the supernatural ? After all, miracle, which must not be regarded exclusively in its secondary manifesta- tion, is nothing else than the intervention of divine liberty to save man, conformably v/ith the laws of moral order. What ? You admit that God is free master of the creation which He called out of nothing, and to this free God you yet deny the right to arise from His rest to restore His fallen creature, because, to this end. He must needs break the chain of cause and effect, and introduce a novel fact in history ? But if He cannot save, hov/ could He then create ? Creation is apparently an act of love which reveals the depth of His being. If you ques- tion His sovereign right to save His creature when fallen from happiness, you refuse Him that which is the very essence of His being ; you level an aim at His moral immutability, which must be in no wise confounded with immobility or inertia. The supernatural is, then, not only the freedom of God, it is also His love. I Imow no other definition of it more rigorously exact. Of what avail would His freedom be to God, in the sense in which it is accorded by theism, if He were unable to use that freedom for good ? God is not dependent on natural order. Let it, then, be admitted that nothing is more conceivable than His sovereign intervention in that order, to restore it when it has been overthrown. What more untenable, in good logic, than the inconsistent theism which admits a free PRELIMINAltY QUESTIONS. 29 Deity, but forbids Him to use His freedom, and compels His wisdom to restrain His love ? Such a system must either ascend or descend ; its only refuge is above itself in Christianity, which alone realises fully its high con- ception of God, or below itself in pantheism, which, suppressing all transcendent and divine order, admits nothing but natural law. In deism this natural law acts as a sort of ma ire dit iKilais, which governs in the name of ^faineant king, v/ho is himself governed by it. There is nothing left but to depose such a sovereign. " Dauduin est Deo," said Saint Augustine, '' euni aliquid facere posse quod nos investigare non possumus." ''We must grant that God is able to do that which we are not able to search out." There is one school more inconsistent still than the deistic ; it is that which pretends to give us a Christianity without miracles, and seriously maintains that the super- natural is an indifferent element in the religion of the Gospel. Such is the confusion of spirits in our day, that theologians are to be found who, repudiating overtly the notion of a personal God, yet make use of the name of Jesus Christ. When the Church shall have enlarged her borders wide enough to enclose these, there will cease to be a Church, for she will then have cast away that which has hitherto made her a company of Christians. The deists who claim to belong to her, and whom we are far from confounding with pantheists, do not less miscon- ceive her distinctive character. Since miracles, or, to speak more properly, since marvels have been made to give place, as conclusive proof, to moral evidence, they conclude that the supernatural is of no importance in the Christian Creed. The conclusion is singular, since miracle, instead of being simply the proof of rehgion, is its very subject. Christianity rests entirely on the idea, or rather on the 30 BOOK FIRST. fact of the supernatural intervention of Divine love to save a ruined world. When the doctrine of the fall and t'.iat of redemption have been eliminated, to substitute for them the system of the simple development of human nature, reaching its perfection in Jesus Christ, its very foundation is sapped. Christianity is bound up with the folly of the supernatural, and with it must either conquer or fall. To attempt to maintain it, while robbing it of this its truly characteristic feature, is to introduce into- lerable anarchy into the world of thought. Our Chris- tian deists are but timid representfitives of the tendency we have been withstanding ; they are bound to Jesus Christ only by a memory which, respectable as it may be, Avill not be able to hold its ground against the deeper elements of their creed — a creed which is at the farthest pole from the Gospel. The conclusion of this chapter then is, that the modern historians of Jesus have unjustly set aside at the outset the notion of the supernatural. We have established its possibility against pantheism, which only repudiates it because it denies God ; and against deism, which in rejecting it, is false to its own principle of Divine liberty. There is no justification, therefore, for the a priori inter- diction of the Gospel evidence. We may approach the sources of Christianity without going in quest of abstruse hypotheses to bring it within the scope of natural order. It is not only this glorious history which is wronged by such a course ; it is history itself in its widest acceptation. Let liberty be ignored, w^hether in God or man, and there remains but the shock of blind forces, or a sort of geometry, producing only abstract formulas, or a veritable natural history, in which physical conditions play the fore- most part ; fatalism is the universal law, and all the interest and all the morality of the drama disappear. PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 31 Under the influence of such pnnciples the history of the human race speedily becomes a confused chronicle. Deism doubtless rises higher than this, but it admits no other combatants but feeble creatures. How far more beautiful and touching is history, when it represents to us the fruitful wrestlings of Divine with human freedom, the former striving to assimilate the latter to itself, and to bring about that positive reconciliation, which, embraced in all its consequences, will be the issue of this sublime conflict. I know no thought more elevating, more satis- fying than this. God in history, a free God, a God of love, the God of conscience and of the Gospel, God carrying on His o^vn scheme of restoration, icith man, when man submits to Him, in spite of man when he rebels ; this is the grand thought which should inspire these studies of history, the purest literary glory of our age. The life of Jesus then fills its central place as the capital event to which all was tendmg in the ages anterior to it, and from which all proceeds in subsequent times ; it is the very key of the drama, which is neither a mise- rable farce nor a tragedy without a climax, but the mag- nificent development of a Divine thought of pardon and salvation, wrought out through the conflicts and reactions of human freedom. 32 BOOK FIRST. CHAPTER II. JESUS CHRIST AND THE RELIGIONS OF THE PAST. HISTORY, according to the Christian statement of it, opens with a grand conflict between God and man. The free being, made king of the terrestrial creation, and who was to become its priest, falls under the mysterious ordeal through v/hich he has to pass in order to learn that he is a free agent, and capable of good and evil. Confounding liberty with the violation of the moral law, forgetting that this moral law is the basis of the higher life, he is untrue to his destin}', and falls under the heavy and degrading yoke of nature. His rebellion has made him a slave, which is the fate of all false emancipation ; for the creature cannot exist in absolute independence ; either she recognises the moral law, and then is divinely free, or she becomes the victim of her lower instincts and passions. Cin alienating him- self from his Creator, man severed himself from the very principle of life ; this fact tells what must be his fate if he is left to himself. J Christianity teaches that the free love which had called him into existence, sovereignly inter- posed a second time to recover and save him. The gene- rous pardon which covers his offence and breaks the fatal and logical sequence by which death is the issue of evil, — this is the supernatural apprehended in the very heart of God, at its origin, and in its j)rinciple. PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 33 But moral life cannot be restored, as it Avas given, by a simple act of Divine Omnipotence. God created a free being with a word^ but liberty once given cannot be violated even for the accomplishment of the work of restoration ; else the restoration would be in reality the annihilation of the moral creature. It is necessary, then, to bring about, progressively, a new harmony between the human will and the Divine, and this harmony will be a reconciliation not only of God with man but of niRn with God. God renounces His right to punish, but man must renounce his false claim to belong wholly to himself; he must retract his rebellion, and die to himself to give himself to God. Thus the recon- ciliation will be a double sacrifice, the Divine sacrifice of love which pardons, laying aside the right of irre- missible punishment ; and the sacrifice of the human heart, wdiich renounces itself, breaks or makes itself an offering, penitently confessing past rebellions and accept- ing all their bitter consequences in the present. Now, according to Christianity, humanity by itself is incapable of this return of holy penitence. Hence the reason why God does not leave it to its own impotence any more than to its condemnation ; He acts upon it from without by the stern lessons of life, and by facts which serve as revelations ; He acts upon it from within by the mysterious operation of His Spirit ; He penetrates it more and more, till at length His eternal word, life and light of the moral world, descends into it and assimilates it to himself, so as to be truly its representative. We shall see later what is to be understood by this assimilation and by the reparative work of which it is the condition. For the present we will content ourselves with saying that the God-Man is the representative of humanity not only because He took upon Him its likeness, but also because 34 BOOK FIKST. He answers its deepest aspirations ; confused and impure in the masses of mankind, these appear pure and kiminous in the moral elect, who are in all ages the type of true \ humanity, I mean that which alone fulfils its destiny. Hence a patient work of preparation precedes the coming of Christ. It is carried on in two parallel hues, that of direct revelation in Judaism, and that of free experiment in paganism ; the point of convergence is the universal expectation of the world at the time of the birth of Christ. It is thus that the Kedeemer deserves to be called the "Desire of all nations," according to the sublime expression of Scripture, which comprises the highest philosophy of history. Such is the Christian statement. We are not called upon to justify, but simply to put it. It will be admitted that it is lacking neither in gran- deur nor respect for humanity. It does not need long dissertations to establish that it explains better than any other theory the history of our race. It alone gives an account of the general facts, universal indeed as humanity, which are found in all the systems of ancient civilization, and the rudiment of which is discernible even in extreme barbarism. Keligion is one of these universal facts ; in forms gross or refined, it everywhere rules the life of man ; it fashions it to its image, and no impress is to be compared with that which it leaves upon ages and nations. By this name of religion we do not mean simply a collection of behefs or of ideas about the Deity ; religion is above all else an imperious instinct of the soul ; a need of the infinite, of peace, of pardon, of consolation, which becomes a torture, a possession before it is appeased. It is not born of physical fear, but of the terrors of con- science and the dread of the unknown ; it is inspired, first by the consciousness of guilt and pollution, and is PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 35 thus impelled to sacrifices and purifications. The universal human fact is then not a vague natural religion, consisting of two or three dogmas ; it is the pas- sionate endeavour to re-unite the broken link between humanity and Deity; it is the quest after a sufficient atonement, and a certain reconciliation with heaven. The succession or transformation of ancient religions proves the energy of the religious impulse ; it is a thirst too intense to be quenched by a few drops of a troubled wave. Each imperfect religion is only a halt in the ardent pursuit of an end ever retreating, but for which it is evident that man v/as made, from the impossibility he proves of stopping short of it. The appearance of art, wherever a new civilization arises, reveals the sa.me unrest, the same aspiration. According to the sublime and profound interpretation of Plato, man seeks to forget the cold and meagre reality of things to find the ideal beauty which lives in his memory. All great poetry is a rainbow formed of teare wrung from us by our actual miseries, and rays of glory from our noble origin. Phi- losophy, especially in the form which it wore in the ancient days of its glory, is the search after absolute truth, beyond all mingled and delusive opinions ; it car- ries into a graver region the same regrets, the same aspi- rations which give birth to art. ' TJie succession, like the multiplication of schools and of systems, evidences after its manner the same unalloyed thirst which we have proved in the domain of religion. Thus we find that man, in conditions favourable to his development, is an essentially religious being, but unsatis- fied with his actual condition, ever seeking something better, feeling after a pacified God. Far from finding these aspirations to be dependent on external circumstances, we recognize their dimmed reflection even in the lowest D 2 36 BOOK FIRST. religious conceptions. Their birthplace, then, is the soul itself. Man docs not lift himself out of materialistic sensualism to the conception of the Deity ; such a thought \YOulcl never be educed from the whole collected body of phenomena ; man only infuses into these a Divine idea, because the idea- was previously wdthin him. It may be concluded, from the universality of this Divine idea, that it formed part of the primeval treasure of the race ; not borrowed from the outer world, it descends from a higher sphere ; it comes from God, and leads to Him again. So far from the first rude forms of nature -worship being the foundation of religion, these owe all their sacred character to the pre-existence of religion in the human heart. Assuredly, man fallen so low as to bow to the forces of nature, would never dream of deifying these, if the Di^dne idea were not deeply inrooted, and if it had not at an earlier period possessed him wholly. Natural religions are only possible, in the degradation which is their basis, on the supposition that man lived in the first ages of the world a life so profoundly religious, that even in the depths of his fall, he cannot lose the memor}^ or the need of it. Side by side with the religious is the moral instinct, the consciousness of obligation, of dependence, of relation to a higher and Divine law ; — conscience, in short, which convulsed and darkened as it often appears, is nevertheless the very foundation of social life ; supposing it wdioUy absent, neither the relations of family or state would be possible for a single day. It is at the basis of the most defective legislation ; banish the idea and the feeling of moral obligation, and all human relations become but conflictirg elements of disorder. The moral united with the religious sentiment prevents man from living a mere animal existence, from sinking into the PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 37 sleep of sloth or sensuality ; it is a sharp double spur, which urges him paiufullj onwards in the eager pursuit of pardon and of righteousness. Mankind is then evi- dently placed under conditions most favourable to the work of restoration, and to be persuaded of the possibility of his recovery, it is enough to hear his plaint, and to catch the sigh which escapes even from the very heart of outward prosperity. This race thus religiously organized has a history; God is constantly acting upon it to prepare it for perfect union with Himself. A single glance over the develop- ment of ancient religions reveals this progressive prepara- tion, retarded often by the false steps of the free creature man, but carried forward no less through his experiments and gropings after light in the depths of paganism, than by the direct revelations lodged in the bosom of Judaism. Here there must be no misunderstanding. The natural- istic school pretends that Christianity was not prepared but horn of the ancient world, that it is the product of its various elements, and as it were the confluence of its streams, so that it can be explained by the simple con- currence or combination of natural causes. Christianity, on the contrary, proclaims itself a Divine work, a super- natural creation. Against such a claim are adduced the ideas and sentiments of the old world which had some analogy with its doctrine ; but it is only just to claim these as on its side, and to find in them a proof in its favour ; for if Christianity is not the product of humanity, it is none the less made for humanity, and promises to answer its inmost needs. If this is the definitive religion, is it strange that there should have been desires after it and presentiments of it ? These analogies adduced against it are its points of contact with the race which it came to raise and save. Doubtless this 38 BOOK FIRST. could not be maintained if it had been preceded by any thing more than a presentiment of the good it brings ; if there had been before it a rehgion or philosophy, which had been able to (jire that which it promised. But there is none such ; it is found that the very epoch of loftiest aspiration is that of most radical and degrading impotence. Christianity is then so much the more neces- sary to the human soul, since the soul cries out for it the more loudly by all its aspirations and presentiments. To call up before a fallen race a '^noble ideal, which yet the race left to itself is powerless to realize ; this is the whole work of preparation ; for from the moment when man becomes conscious at once of his high destinies and of his utter helplessness, he is prepared to receive the Deliverer. We may not even attempt to sketch here the history of the religions of antiquity. We will limit ourselves to marking in a few touches the principal stages of this long voyage of human thought. 1. Historical glance at Ancient Paganism. When man attempted to raise himself from the depth of the dark deep into which he had fallen after the mys- terious ordeal which precedes and inaugurates history, he began by the worship of nature ; unable to raise himself above her, equally unable to abjure entirely the Divine instinct within him, he deifies nature and seeks in one and another of her manifestations that higher power on which he feels himself dependent. Now, at the lowest stage of his development, he contents himself with a roughly-hewn fetish ; now he adores the unknown power in the sun, which seems to him to pour life and fertility into the earth, or in the moon, which bathes the night with its serene splendours. Under this latter form, com- PEELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 39 pleted by a very simple anthromorpliism which appHes to the gods the law of the sexes, the religions of nature weighed during long ages upon Western Asia. From Babylon to the deserts of Arabia ; from Tyre to Carthage ; there are ever the same divinities under the various names of Bel and Melitta, of Baal and Baaltis, of Mil- earth and Astarte ; ever the same confusion of the kindly and severe attributes of nature, ever the same san- guinary and voluptuous worship, mingling murder with prostitution, to celebrate the divinity of birth and death. Grrave, immobile Egypt, by the banks of its sacred stream, under the changeless blue of its sky, enfolds in fables of Asiatic origin, the dream of a dim and uncertain immortality, ever bound to the permanence of the mortal remains. She breathes a new inspiration into the legend of the young god, dead and made alive again, who is no longer Adonis but Osiris. The purely natural symbolism of the flux and dessication of the Nile no more contents her ; a vague hope glimmers in the pale realm of the dead since Osiris has penetrated it, and there sits enthroned as judge and king of souls. But Egypt goes no further ; she only half shakes off the fetters of Asiatic materialism, which revives in her gross symbolism. We rise a step higher with the religion inaugurated by Zoroaster six centuries before Christ ; we escape from the incoherent blending of good and evil, which was fatal to the moral consciousness at Babylon ; in nature as in human life, a great combat is waged between two de- cidedly hostile powers ; religion is a holy war, and its chief manifestation is through the noble organ of thought, — language, which by prayer ascends to heaven ; the con- ception of immortality and of judgment becomes more pure. Still this noble religion hovers between dualism and pantheism ; it has not truly cleared the circle of the 40 BOOK FIRST. religions of nature, for it psrpetiially identifies moral facts with tliose which are natural. The fatal circle of naturalism is completed in India, in the heart of that Aryan race so richly gifted, with mind so subtle and brilliant, which from the most remote ages has given birth to the metaphysics of pantheism, and pushed it to its farthest issues. When this race awoke to the life of thought, it was at the foot of the Caucasus, where it was still clustered in a fi'esli dawn, under a radiant sky, and by murmuring waters ; it saw its gods in the natural phenomena which charmed it ; it praised under the name of Indra, the young and dazzling light ; it had hymns for the two first rays of morning, those first-born of the day ; hymns, too, for the dew and for the limpid, life-giving stream. Fire is worshipped as the wdnged being which shines on the hearth, as the golden bird which rests upon the earth, as the sovereign victor who has smoke for his standard. Thus was born in the Vedas that naturalism which had all the freshness and poetry of childhood, and which was the common source whence the Aryan race drew their widely diflering reli- gions. While the Gaul and the Teuton, in their sombre forests and under often-clouded skies, are inaugurating a solemn, sometimes even tragical worship, directed to the invisible, coloured with thoughts of expiation and of immortality, and transfused with a consciousness of decay ; the Indian race, nursed in the lap of a luxuriant and lavish nature, breathes an enchanted life. There it seeks the infinite, and discerns it not in the various manifestations of nature, but in its hidden principle, which is Brahma, and burns to be united to him in the heart of that silent deep whence streams the flood of universal life. Hence its yearning to be lost in the vague and intangible deity which is everything and yet PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 41 nothing, to merge in it the consciousness of individual being ; hence its ascetism, and that ecstacy, — the closing utterance of Brahminism and the opening word of Buddhism — which, with its designs of reformation and purified moral ideas, aims at annihilation, which it calls Nirvana, and only breaks the inflexible framework of caste to plunge the whole race into the infinite void. The later elaborations of Buddhism, the most remarkable of which is the Triniurti, or the Indian Trinity, are only varied attempts to realize this absorption of the finite in the infinite and the absolute. The multiplied incarna- tions of Vishnu, who takes novv^ one human form and now another, like an actor changing his part, denote a strange contempt for moral personality; the sparkling poetry of Hindoo pantheism covers a wide, troubled sea of negations. It is not less removed from Christianity than Asiatic naturalism, and if it appeals to it by its ardent aspirations after the union of the human with the Divine, it presents no other point of contact than this vague sentiment. Naturalism as it touches the shores of Greece undero:oes a transformation ; we see it narrowing and contracting its vague horizon lines, as it touches that wondrous land, which seems in its very natural conformation the worthy amphitheatre prepared for heroic conflicts. The idea of symmetrical beauty breathes in its pure harmonious lines, which stand out in all their clearness of perspective in the tender light. It is there, on the shores of that sea of countless creeks, under that heaven brilliant but never burning, that man awakes to know himself as more beau- tiful, more mighty than the outer world, and makes gods in his own. likeness. In place of engulfing himself in an absorbing vortex of deity, he seeks to find himself in the object of his adoration ; he carves his own idealized 42 BOOK FIRST. image iu the marble, and this is his god. The heroic age liad Hfted him above himself; the god was only a hero placed upon the altar. The Hellenes worshipped themselves in the ravishing types of marvellous beauty. Thus Greece opposes the apotheosis of the heroic to the Indian incarnations, and solves the religious problem in a directly inverse manner, for instead of absorbing the finite in the infinite, she enshrines the divine in a fair but finite form. It might seem that she was doomed by this wholly ter- restrial tendency to an ever frivolous religion. Far other- wise ; the Divine shines out much more clearly in man than in nature, for he possesses moral life, and in virtue of that, touches the higher sphere. Hence humanism proved not solely a religion of artists ; the moral element appeared in it with greater power than in any other worship. The conception of the Deity became more pure. The Olympian gods represented not simply passions but virtues. Conscience lifted her voice, and proclaimed those unwritten laws in which lives a God, who ages not. With Eschylus she fulminated the mysterious anathema, just meed of crime, which hangs over the most fortunate of royal races ; she showed, under the brilliant garniture of earth, that blood shed by the murderer's hand which never congeals. She dared even to predict, by the voice of poets, a grand religious renovation, the victory of a young god of the future, whose dart should transpierce Jupiter, and set free the ancient captive of the Caucasus, the faithful image of humanity quivering under the bon- dage of a worn-out worship. With Sophocles conscience evoked a moral ideal full of purity and delicacy, grand and touching as devotion — I had almost said as charity.^'' * See Antigone. PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 43 This noble poetry had tones truly prophetic to represent the passage from life to death, which makes our twilight shades give place to the calm glories of eternity.* But the true prophet of Greece was Socrates. He appears as a reformer of thought and manners in the most brilliant, the most active circle of civilization, in an age corrupted by the scepticism of the sophists. Bringing man back to himself, not to intoxicate him with pride, but on the contrary, to show him his weakness, he led him to find in his own consciousness the basis of all assurance, and the revelation of the just God veiled by so many myths. " The soul of man," he said, "is a partaker of the Divine." If he reminded him of his obligations and his immortal destinies, he insisted on the solidarity of the true and the good ; he exalted the moral character of learning, and the holiness of truth, in an age when philo- sophy was little more than a frivolous sport. Thus he lived according to his lights, and died for his doctrine. "We do not hesitate to hail in him a precursor of Christ ; he went before preparing His way, in the midst of much darkness and uncertainty. His teaching, interpreted and expanded by Plato, has become at once the most active solvent of polytheism, and the highest manifestation of the moral idea among the ancients. But in order to hail in this great school even the initiative of positive religion, we must forget its blanks and above all its dualistic errors, so marked in Plato, who could not arrive at the idea of a God truly free, master of matter ; and who finally confounded him with the abstract and impersonal unity to which he sacri- ficed all individual rights, and even the moral personality itself. This philosophy was powerless to reform Greece ; by its Hellenic and aristocratic exclusiveness it voluntarily ='•= Close of (Edipus at Colonus. 44 BOOK FIRST. enclosed itself within the boundaries of a little country, and the limits of a privileged class. The odious theoiy of the conquest and subjection of the barbarians, the justiiication of slavery, and even of the slave trade — did not these receive their most exact statement in the sys- tem of Aristotle very few years after the death of Plato ? This noble philosophy could indeed reveal better things, but it had no power to deter from the accomplishment of the worse. It blasted the ancient faith, and for the honour of deity it was right ; but it substituted for it only a high ideal and a creed incapable of enkindling the heart. Men accepted its negations, and passed by its grand moralities, and the sceptics reappeared, only girded with better armour. Epicurism repeated in its manner the famous maxim, ''Know thyself," and conducted man to a merely sensuous life. Stoicism started from the same basis to abut in a life of severity, but it never assumed in Greece that austere character which made it so grand at Rome. Tn vain the troubled soul fell back upon the secret modes of worship, which were only a return to the old natural religion somewhat purified ; the mysteries of Eleusis, beautiful and touching in their recognition of the immortality of the soul, gave no more real satisfaction than the purifications attached to the worship of Apollo at Delphos, or the hidden doctrines which permeated all the mysteries, and which, under the name of Orphism, re- vived oriental pantheism. Of all this grand movement of thought, of this civilization, so versatile and brilliant, the final utterance in the time of Alexander was still the Socratic doctrine ; this remained the culminating point of Hellenic development. It was a very elevated ideal, but incomplete and often contradictory ; it superseded the popular religion without replacing it, and without making a really powerful impression on souls, on private or public PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 45 life. It is then a vast exaggeration of the influence and scope of the work of the great master of ancient wisdom, to attribute to him the honour of having laid the foun- dation of Christianity. To do this, the Gospel must be reduced, as Baur* reduces it, to a mere return to the inner life, and all the weak points of Platonism must be passed over in silence as they are by Strauss. f The conquests of Alexander had the effect of breaking, in some measure, the narrow mould of nationality, in which till then pagan civilization had been held. By mingling races and religions, by founding a city which was as a point of junction for the difl'erent currents of hu- man thought, he contributed to bring about the new era, in which the great idea of liumanitij should rise above all local distinctions. The conquest of the world by Rome, and the terrible levelling line which she stretched over all the nations that she subjugated, tended to the same end. We do not deny the providential character of these events, which were to facilitate the progress of Christianity, by opening a wider field to its mission ; but it must not be forgotten that the idea of the unity of the human race was always very imperfect before the Gospel. It was favoured under paganism, rather by the growing .feeble- ness of the patriotic virtues than by higher and wider views. It is certain that Epicurism with its desire for repose and its worship of pleasure, corrupted while it softened manners ; and while it stifled the fiercer passions, extinguished at the same time the love of country. Humanitarianism, sceptical and voluptuous, was coincident with the loss of liberty, and the oblivion of those manly virtues which had stirred and ennobled public life in the democracies of Greece. It was not so * " Baur Geschichte der clrei ersten Jahrh der Kirche," p. 4. t Strauss' " Leben Jesu," p, 182. 40 LOOK FIRST. much the recognition of a new and more exalted claim as the weak surrender of perilous obligations.'^ Energy and vigour were all on the side of the proud and hardy race, which had patiently pursued its fixed de- sign of conquering the world. We must admit that the Eoman people was an apostle, of a strange order, of the unity of the human race. Its conception of this unity was singular ; it held, beyond question, that humanity had but a single head, but that head was to bow under its iron yoke. It aspired to reunite all the nations of the universe, but this aspiration was much more the expression of its vaulting ambition than of its expanded views. When in the Circus, crowded with the Roman populace, the captive Gaul was made to mingle his blood with that of the Teuton and the Parthian, it would be hard to trace, in the brutal scene, the progress of the humanistic idea. No ! not in this school of fierce rapacity and implacable severity could the ancient world learn the great lesson of the moral unity of mankind. That a great spirit, like Cicero, felt a presentiment of the truth, we admit, but this did not prevent the advocate of Sicily, so eloquent against Verres, from defending the exactions of which the pro- consul Fonteius had been guilty in Gaul.f The love of the human race was a sublime utterance — a lightning gleam in the darkness ; but in order to reach the popular con- science, such sentiments needed other exponents than blase Epicureans, implacable concjuerors, or half-sceptical Platonists. * See, on all this movement of Greek philosophy, the beautiful book of M. Jules Deuys, on " L'Histoire ties idee morales dans I'antiquite." Convinced as the author is, that morals had already reached their purest form at tliis time, his sincerity and learning lead him to admit very important limitations. I Denys, ii. 44. PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 47 A refined philosophy opposes the divine unity to the fables of polytheism ; it speaks of the rights of the slave, and makes itself the shield of the feeble and unhappy. The ideal shines out with all the purer radiance for being so foiled by the real. That the games of strength had never been more bloody and terrible, that oppression had never been heavier, and the respect for common super- stitions more loosely held, let Cicero be the witness, who made a social necessity of the official observance of the religion of the state, and who concealed himself in the Garden of Tusculum, in order to express doubts as bold as they were prudent. Thus, on the eve of Christianity, fervent aspirations are rising from the midst of universal impotence and degradation : devouring flames they are, which, having no other aliment, fall back upon the hearts whence they spring, and consume them. Under the load of misery, of tyranny, of scepticism and corruption, which oppresses it, pagan humanity heaves a long sigh of weariness and woe : now it seeks in material pleasures the satisfaction of its infinite craving, and plunges into depths of sensu- ality, which reveal its blind and restless intensity ; now it curses its gods with a sort of frenzy, and rises into an impiety born of despair ; or, again, it sits in mourning over that mythology, fair but futile, of wdiich the ap- proaching end is foretold in poetic legends ; now, by a secret instinct, it turns its gaze tov/ards the east, asking deliverance from the arts of the magician, or from mys- terious oracles, the echo of which has reached it. Thus the commencement of our era is marked by a very pecu- liar condition of soul, represented in the literature of the times — a blending of degradation, morbid voluptuousness, effete scepticism, and restless aspiration. This attitude of the spiritual world found its most perfect symbol in 48 BOOK FIliST. the inscription, " 7o the Vnlnumn God,'' which Paul read at Athens, over one of the countless altars of that idola- trous city. It is not, in fact, a more complete doctrine, but a new Di^dne manifestation that the world is waiting for. We do not deny that some few of the social reforms of the Gospel were faintly anticipated at this time ; but of what avail is a floating, cloudy idea which is incapable of transfusing itself into the heart and act ? What is it, after all, but a distracting ideal invoking a manifestation of power to realize it ? The higher the ancient world is lifted in an ideal point of view, without losing sight of its uncertainties and mortal errors, the more palpable is the need for a new religion, which with li(jht should bring strength. If we press more closely this ideal, or this aspiration of pagan humanity, we shall see that it goes far beyond the vague intuition of the Divine unity or the presenti- ment of some social reforms. That which the soul asks is a reconciliation between herself and God ; it is the resto- ration of the union between the human nature and the Divine. Under the most diverse fables, and athwart gross errors, we discover the same fixed and ardent craving for a great expiation. There is more than this. The idea of a deliverer, of a Messiah, is not less universal. It is found in India, in the legend of Buddha, the saviour reformer ; in Persia, in that of Mithra, the future vanquisher of evil powers ; in Greece, in the fable of Prometheus ; and in Scandinavia, in that god, mightier than Odin, who is to save the world, and whose name may not be uttered. Thus does the general aspiration of humanity find expres- sion when freed from all the ancientr forms of worship, and when these old faiths were drawing near to each other in a common decay ; when to the exultant youth of valiant races succeeded a premature decline, an era of slavery PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 49 and decadence, tliongh abundant in material and intel- lectual riches. The Greco-Komanpaganismof this epoch might have used, to express itself in its better tendencies, that mournful utterance of a young Koman : " Tossed from doctrine to doctrine, I was more unhappy than ever ; and, carried along by a whirlwind of conflicting ideas, from the depths of my soul I sighed."* 2. The religion of the Old Testament. A strange people appeared in the very centre of the ancient world, a people wholly separated from all which surrounded them ; solitary, and yet conscious of a uni- versal mission ; the jealous guardian of its religious traditions, and yet wholly turned towards the future. Such is the people of Israel. It has neither the brilliant and metaphysical genius of India, nor the artistic fecun- dity of Greece, nor the conquering ardour of Eome : it is rude and obstinate ; it becomes an object of animadver- sion as soon as it is known to other nations. And yet it has obtained, in the realm of religion, the pre-eminence which belongs to Greece, in the domain of art, and to Kome, in that of power. It has conquered mankind, of which it was the scorn, and has cast down before its terrible and invisible God, all those idols of marble and gold, all that graceful and poetic paganism which had flourished in the midst of the most favoured races. Israel, in fact, is devoted wholly to the highest religious idea : take away that idea, and it ceases to be anything even in guarding its own hearths ; while, proscribed and exiled, it finds a fatherland in the strange country, so soon as the great thought which constitutes its nationality revives within it. The Jew is neither soldier, nor poet, nor philo- sopher : he is priest and prophet. This is his part in * " Recognitiones " — (chap. 1.) E 50 BOOK FIRST. the old world, and it is for this that his nation is made peculiarly the forerunner, the preparer of paths for the Kedeemer. Doubtless, there is to be found elsewhere that blending of fear and hope which characterises religion before Christ, when it is still a desire and a quest rather than a calm assurance. The work of preparation consists, as we have seen, precisely in inflaming this desire, and carrying it to the point at which it becomes an intense, urgent supplication, crying out not only for Divine succour, but for God himself, to supply an absolute need. Hence, through all the ages, and all the civilization of the ancient world, in the midst of out1)ursts of evil and violent convulsions of the outward life, arises this uni- versal language of the human heart, this cry of grief and anguish, this utterance of hope — in a word, all which is most elevated in poetry, in art, and in reli- gious fable. Hence, that universal institution of priest- hood and sacrifice,- which proves that mankind feel themselves, as a body, afar off from God, and unworthy to approach Him, but that they cherish, nevertheless, the hope of mediation. The existence of a priesthood is the widest and strongest expression of the desire after salvation, for it betokens at once the natural estrangement in which man finds himself from God, and the presentiment of a future reconciliation. Now, this idea of priesthood is the very essence of Judaism, since there is not one of its institutions which does not rest on the separation of a people, chosen from the rest of mankind for the ser- vice of the whole race. It realizes, therefore, the universal idea of the priesthood ; but, in doing so, raises it to a height where it is freed from all which marred it in the pantheistic and polytheistic religions. Thus Judaism is nothing else than the general religion of the period of pre- paration, purified indeed and spiritualised, but resting on PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 51 the same ground of feeling and inspiration as all the other worship of that age. Only, there is a difference so great between the form which this general religion has assumed in the Holy Books of the Jews and the degraded forms under which it appears elsewhere, that it is impossible to attribute this superiority to a mere historical and natural development. We know what the conception of God becomes, in the religions of nature, even in the more refined. Greek humanism fails to free it from the bounds of the finite : it compromises it in the confused and impure encounter of human passions ; and when philosophy tries to release it, she changes it but into an abstract idea without life. What an immeasurable distance between the Jehovah of the Bible, and the Indra of the Vedas, the Jupiter of the Iliad, or the God of Pindar and of Plato ! From its first utterance Scripture claims dominion over the world of mind by a free creation. God is not the sun, for He made it. He said, " Let there be light, and there was light." He is the absolute, the free, the sovereignly wise. Is His majesty terrible ? is He called the Holy of holies ? — the Father which is in heaven appears even in the midst of severities tempered with pardon. " And God said unto Moses, I Am that I Am : and he said. Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I Am hath sent me unto you. And God said moreover unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the Children of Israel, The Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent me unto you : this is my name for ever" (Exodus iii. 15, 16). What metaphy- sical formula will embrace in fewer words a more sublime idea ? The Lord, who calls Himself I Am that I Am, is the God of the fathers : He is Himself the Father who punishes and who protects. The Old Testament through- e2 52 BOOK FIRST. out is resplendent with His glory, like the sanctuary which Isaiah beheld in vision ; in it, too, are heard those voices answering to one another, and crjdng, " Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God of Hosts : the earth is full of his glory." The Bible does not reveal to us only the one sovereign Deity, but also the God of conscience. Him whose eyes are too pure to behold iniquity, and who yet is " slow to anger ;" " and pardons abundantly, knowing that we are but dust." (Psalm 103.) On the idea entertained of God depends the idea that will be formed of sin and of purification. Whatever, therefore, may be the part accorded to the intuitions of conscience, outside the bounds of Judaism, it should be admitted that they are incessantly adulterated by pagan superstition. The natural religions identify moral evil with physical ; or, as in the extreme east, they con- found it with finite existence itself, so that moral purifi- cation is only a cabalistic act, to appease a malefi- cent power, or a wild asceticism, designed to destroy individuality. Greece, in spite of her fine flashes of light, and noble institutions, knew neither the secret of a worthy repentance, nor of efficient consolation. There can be no comparison between the moral life of Greece and the pathetic drama which has its theatre in the heart of a pious Israelite. The conceptions of the latter of the highest development of holiness are still very incomplete, but his ideal leaves far behind the best aspirations of the pagan world. The Divine law is his absolute rule, his constant aim, and also his torment, because he measures the distance which separates him from it. He lives in the presence of a righteous God, under the terror of His judgments, but with his whole soul pervaded by a grati- tude which can never equal the benefits received. Thus a moral life deep and earnest is formed and moulded, a PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 53 life which is grandest in its sufferings, and in that ardent demand for purification, which finds but an incomplete answer in the sacrifices and holocausts through which con- science catches a dim glimpse of a definitive satisfaction. At length, in place of vague presentiments, arises a stead- fast hope, which illuminates the future with growing splendour. Whence comes, then, this superiority of the religion of the Old Testament, which is even more striking on the first glance than that of Christianity ? Judaism, in fact, by its isolation, rears itself m the ancient world like a solitary and arduous summit, while the Gospel extends its empire over mankind far beyond the point where positive faith ceases ; for it has permeated with its influence the moral atmosphere which we breathe. Was it on the barren sand of the desert where he first pitched his tent that the Semite read the name of his One Holy God ? Can it be true that it was more easy to him to lift his soul to the Invisible One from the arid solitudes of Syria and Arabia, than if he had had to rise above the enchantments of a richly gifted land ? One might conceive him led by these gloomy wastes into a mournful pantheism ; but were they more apt to declare the God of conscience than the starry sky where the Chaldean found only his solar God ? The desert is a blank page upon which the soul writes that which she carries within herself ; by itself it reveals nothing to man ; rather it overwhelms him by its vague, melancholy vastness, which could never originate the thought of a personal God, that is of the Infinite living and free. If the genius of the race be invoked to solve the problem, we ask how the Hebrew, with a mind far from supple, and without philo- sophic inspiration, should have been able, at one bound, to leave behind Plato and Aristotle, and all the subtle 64 BOOK FIRST. dreamers of India ? Again, if there is one well-attested fact, it is the constant predisposition of the Hebrew to idolatry at the very period when his religion was being developed ; he was only held to monotheism by constraint, and needed incessantly the most severe chastisements to bring him back from his idolatries. So soon as he yields to his own bent he becomes a worshipper of Baal, and ten tribes out of the twelve go over definitively to a modified paganism. If, then, his religion comes to him neither from the earth which he treads, nor from the blood which flows in his veins, it must have descended from heaven. We recognize on it the seal of a revelation not given all at once, but progressive, adapted to the times, the ignorance and the feebleness of the people who were to assimilate themselves to it so as to be its guardians. We find then in Judaism, in a purified and spiritualized form, the true religion of the epoch of preparation, of which we have traced elsewhere the crude idea ; the general action of God upon mankind at large, is concentrated upon one privileged people, but this concentration itself is for the good of all the other nations, who along the path of free experiment and by repeated gropings in the dark, are to arrive at the same point as the chosen race under the discipline of a more direct education. The election of Israel expresses perfectly the normal relation of man with God before the Kedemption, and this great religious fact, which has in it nothing arbitrary, but is founded on the reality of things, is to contribute in an effectual manner to develop that desire after salvation, which is the best preparation for salvation itself. Israel is the priest of humanity in the preparatory period. It is widely separated from all surrounding peoples, enclosed within the land of promise as in a sanctuary, forbidden PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 55 all unholy intercourse, even more positively by the stern interdictions of its law, than by its high mountain barrier and the inhospitable strand of its coasts. (Ex. xxxiv. 12.) Still this people, accused of hating the human race, knows that in its posterity all the nations of the earth are to be blessed (Gen. xii. 31), and it is this grand element which constitutes its priesthood. Its moral isolation does not prevent its acting repeatedly on the nations of history with which it comes in contact ; thus, despised as it is, it exercises a considerable ascendency, especially towards the close of the old world ; its influence is like leaven hidden in the universal fermentation of thoughts and aspirations. The priesthood of Israel is an absolute consecration to a holy God. The chief of the race v/as called out from his family by a mysterious and sovereign command ; he walked among men as a pilgrim without a country, a servant of the most high God, pitching or taking up his tent upon a sign of the Divine will. The sojourn in Egypt, thanks to the cruel persecutions of the Pharaohs, entailed no unholy intermingling with the heathen upon the descendants of Abraham. They came forth fi'om the land of bondage, as they had entered it, ever marked with that strange seal, which is at once their reproach and their glory. Moses, in the desert, impresses this seal yet -more deeply upon them by the institutions which he gives, every one tending to bind them more closely to the holy and dreadful God. His law sounded to them like thunder from Sinai, and its terror remained upon them. That law consists not alone in those great general precepts, which raise to such an elevation the moral idea ; but in a thousand prescriptions of detail and minute ritual which are to shut them in; it takes possession of their whole life, as well of the most 66 BOOK FIRST. indifferent actions as of the most important, bringing the whole within the scope of a Divine consecration. Whether they are celebrating worship or sitting at the famil}^ table, whether they are at their ordinary occupations, cultivating their fields and vineyards, or paying funeral honours to their dead ; upon every scene breaks a moral reflection like a flash from Sinai ; ever}"\vhere the law demands that which is not yielded to it, and leaves in its wake dread and repentance. That which appears small and superficial in the legal appointments is just that which constitutes the unity of this truly sacerdotal life. The especial priesthood of the family of Aaron is only a delegation of the priesthood of the entire nation, as is evidenced by the offering of redemption which was brought to God on the birth of every firstborn (Exod. xiii. J 3). The erection of the Sanctuary, the Sabbath, the solemn feasts, are all designed to set forth still more prominently the idea of sanctity, by the redoubled consecration, if one may so speak, of the place, and the days in which Jehovah is especially worshipped. The centre of this worship is sacrifice. A deep, conscious need of expiation possesses this people, who are con- fronted with so stern a law, and who walk under this terrible sentence, " Cursed is he that continueth not in all the words of this law to do them " (Deut. xxvii. 26). Thus the blood of bulls and of goats flows ceaselessly upon the altar of Jehovah mthout ever allaying the thirst for pardon, even on the great day of expiation, when, amidst magnificent solemnities, the high priest, not content with the first slain victim, lays the sins of the people on the scapegoat, and sends it into the wilderness. All these purifications were but symbols and types, and seiTed only to arouse and keep awake the want of PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS, 57 pardon and of an efficacious sacrifice. Thus did the law, by troubhng the conscience, fulfil its stern but salutary mission in the work of preparation. The grand prophetic thought which is the soul of Judaism is to be found at the very basis of its permanent institutions; these, in fact, incompetent as they are, to satisfy the feelings which they help to foster, can have only a symbolical or typical value. It is needful, how- ever, that this thought should be constantly disengaged from the rites and forms under which it might else remain buried. Prophecy, properly so called, performs this necessary function. Like the Aaronic priesthood, it is only the more forcible expression of a characteristic which belongs to the entire people. Israel is the great prophet no less than the great priest of the ancient world. It has not only preserved, like other nations, a faint echo of the promise given in Eden; it knows that this promise will only reach its accomplishment through itself ; with gaze turned towards the future, it is in an attitude of mysterious expectation, ever asking itself if the deli- verance is not at hand. Each generation clothes the great event in the colours most familiar to it, idealizing its own present. A grand hope illuminates the oldest documents of the Hebrew religion ; it goes far beyond the temporal benedictions in which it is enwrapped ; hence, when these blessings are realized, the waiting soul is in no wslj satisfied, because the more excellent promise is yet unfulfilled. It is evident, for instance, that after the conquest of the land of Canaan and the multiplication of the race of Abralmm, the most glorious of the prophecies made to the father of the faithful is not yet accom- plished ; all the families of the earth are not yet blessed in Abraham's seed (Gen. xii. 3). Each partial accom- plishment of the promises is like the starting-point for a 58 BOOK FIKST. larger hope, Avhicli grows in a manner on successive disappointments. It is thus that prophecy goes hand in hand with history. Vague and general in its beginnings, it is ever tending to greater precision ; soon it is not only a deliverance which is looked for, but a deliverer. The hope of Messiah is the very soul of the Old Testament ; everything in nature and in history is made to symbolize Him. When, in the breath of spring, Carmel puts on her glory, when the hills, clad in their dazzling vesture, shout for joy, when the fir-tree and the myrtle fiing their aroma on the air, wdien the springs from the hill-cham- bers carry new verdure into the fertile plains ; by such a scene — the full beauty of which can only be appreciated by one who knows the mournful barrenness which goes before it — the pious Israelite pictures to himself the new earth wherein shall dwell righteousness when Messiah's great renovating work is done." But history has yet brighter gleams to cast upon the future. Each of her periods furnishes a new symbol to represent the Divine deliverer. In the most ancient oracles preserved by the holy books of the Jews, when mankind consisted of but a single family. He calls Him- self " the seed of the woman," and it is He who is to crush the power of evil (Genesis iii. 15). Iij the patri- archal age, a child of Abraham is promised, who is to bring deliverance to all the nations of the earth (Genesis xii. 3). After Moses, He appears in the aspect of a prophet, like the mighty lawgiver of Israel, " A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you like unto me ; Him shall ye hear " (Deut. xviii. 18). In the time of the kings, Messiah is to be the King of * See Isaiali Iv. 12, 13. PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 59 the future, the ideal David ; to Him are applied in a pre- eminent sense all the glorious or pathetic ascriptions with which the royal prophet has filled his psalms, for in the theocracy every event, trouble or triumph, is only an augury and preparation of the definitive era. Every thing 'in the Divine books points to Messiah without the necessity of supposing in the soul of the prophet a factitious double personality, which would make Him pass without transition, from the utterance of his own sentiments to an impersonal oracle. No ; Da'vdd sang truly his own joys and sorrows, but he, none the less, spoke also in prophetic utterance for that mysterious descendant, who alone was to realize in its perfection, the type of the man of God. In the period which follows the full develop- ment of the theocracy under a single sceptre — a troubled epoch in which the worship of Jehovah was often eclipsed, and idolatry and corruption made perpetual inroads upon the chosen people in both its divisions — Messiah is contemplated as the servant of the Lord ; the righteous reformer of religion who should restore justice and con- cord, should put an end to violence and establish universal peace on a renovated earth. " The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon Him, " The spirit of wisdom and understanding, " The spirit of counsel and might, " The spirit of knowledge, and of the fear of the Lord. " And shall make him of quick understanding in the fear of the Lord. " He shall not judge after the sight of his eyes, " Neither reprove after the hearing of his ears, " But wdth righteousness shall He judge the poor, *' And reprove with equity for the meek of the earth. 60 BOOK FIllST. " And He shall smite the earth with the rod of His mouth, "And with the breath of His lips shall He slay the wicked. " And righteousness shall be the girdle of His loins, " And faithfulness the girdle of His reins. " The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, "And the leopard shall lie down mth the kid." — Isaiah, xi. 2 — 6. He it is, this king who shall reign in righteousness, who is to be " as an hiding-place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest, as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land " (Isaiah xxxii. 1, 2). He shall write the law of the Lord, not again on tables of stone, but on the heart of the true Israel (Jeremiah, xxxi. 33, 34). He shall gather all nations and set up his standard in the midst of the people (Isaiah xlix. 22). 'When the rebellious nation is carried into exile, when the long procession of its sons and daughters is led into a strange land, when the captives hang their " harps on the willows by the Vv^aters of Babylon," prophecy has but one symbol, as Zion has but one thought — return to the be- loved country. " They shall come with weeping," says ' Jeremiah, " and with supplications will I lead them : I will cause them to walk by the rivers of waters in a straight way, wherein they shall not stumble " (Jeremiah xxxi. 9). The second part of Isaiah is a touching and sublime picture of the return of the exiles, but a picture so grand that it plainly embraces a deliverance infinitely greater than that from the captivity of Babylon. In fact, all nations are to share in the triumph of the people of Abraham and of David. Like doves to their windows, they shall flock from all parts of the world, to shelter in PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 61 the refuge divinely opened for all. The desert which " shall rejoice and hlossom as the rose," is the forgiven earth. The daughter of Zion stretches the covering of her tent, and pacified heaven is the pavilion which guards the enlarged family of God. Messiah was given for a witness to all people ; he calls the " sons of the strangers," and opens the fountains of life to all who are athirst (Isaiah Ix). The visions of Ezekiel no less than the later Isaiah, compel us to admire the lofty scope of the prophecy of the exile, although they bear the impress of a complicated and clearly Chaldaic symbolism. The prophet insists forcibly on a moral renovation, on the inward change, which is to replace the heart of stone by a heart of flesh. Jeremiah has no more touching tones than these : " As a shepherd seeketh out his flock in the day that he is among his sheep that are scattered, so will I seek out my sheep, and will deliver them out of all places where they have been scattered in the cloudy and dark day I will feed my flock, and I will cause them to lie down, saith the Lord God " (Ezekiel xxxiv. 12 — 15). In the whole of the Old Testament there is no broader picture than the vision of the dry bones, — the symbol of the spiritual resurrection of Israel (Ezekiel xxxvii). The most important result of this prophetic period is the new feature added to the type of Messiah, the feature of sufi'ering. This deliverer, this king who is to establish the throne in righteousness will be at the same time that servant of the Lord, who " shall not cry nor lift up nor cause his voice to be heard in the street," that gentle Saviour who will not " break the bruised reed," nor '* quench the smoking flax " (Isaiah xlii. 1 — 7) ; He will be the pure and spotless victim by whose sufferings we are to be healed, the Lamb slain for His people. The 62 BOOK FIRST. royal Branch of Isaiah will be like " a root out of a dry ground;" Messiah shall be called a " Man of Sorrows " (Isaiah liii). This is the great lesson which prophecy gathers in the school of humiliation and suffering, and it is from these days of storm and darkness, to employ Ezekiel's image, that the Divine Spirit sends forth His most vivid splendours. The prophets of the return only prolong the echo of these great oracles of the seers of the exile. The tribulations and humiliations of that period are the strongest evidence that in the future must be sought the realization of those magnificent promises, wliich were followed by the gradual decline of Judaism. The function of the prophet is not alone to bring to the people the oracles which proclaim chastisement and deliverance. He is the witness of God in their midst ; he is not a son of the sanctuary by hereditary priesthood ; his is a more direct call, received sometimes on the steps of the throne, as in the case of Zephaniah, sometimes among the sheepfolds as by Amos ; he is raised up in Israel to breathe perennial life into that round of institu- tions, which might easily become petrified into the leo"alism of the formalist. He represents the spirit ever animating the letter. He is the present and living word of the Lord, uttering his protest against all the deviations from the theocracy. He writes down the sin of the people with a pen of iron, and lays the axe of divine justice at the root of every tree which Jehovah has not planted. When Israel, forgetful of his vocation, will lean upon the stranger, the prophet interposes ; he announces the judg- ments of God on idolatrous nations, and makes them recoil in all their weight on the stiff-necked people, wdiose wanderings and rebellions he depicts with burning fervour. The prophet is thus as much the representative of law as of mercy ; he unites in his person the double office of the PRELIMINARY QUESTIONR. bd old covenant which is at once fear and hope, and which brings consolation only out of the terrors of conscience. The national histor}^ interpreted by the prophet, sets in full light the abomination of sin, the wrath of God, and His mercy. Thus a deep repentance is produced in the heart, a bitter dew^ which alone can fertilize the soil, out of which shall grow the divine Branch promised to man- Idnd. Prophecy is in no way hostile to the priesthood, but it marks the insufficiency of this jealous guardian of the institutions of Moses. When Hosea says that God " desires mercy and not sacrifice " (Hosea vi. 6), he only gives formal oracular utterance to that which was from the first the cry of the penitent ; " Thou desirest not sacrifice," exclaims David in the bitterness of his repen- tance, " else would I give it ; Thou delightest not in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit ; a broken and a contrite heart, 0 God, thou wilt not despise " (Psalm li. 18, 19). Assuredly the work of preparation was far advanced when the revelation of con- science came to confirm that of the law and the prophets, by that agonizing cry which is still the truest expression of penitence, "Have mercy upon me, 0 God, according to thy loving-kindness; according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies, blot out my transgressions. Wash me throughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I acknowledge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me. Against thee, thee only, have I sinned. .... Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow " (Psa. li). The progress was still more marked when, in the name of the whole nation, was offered that prayer of confession, which loses none of its value whatever may be its date. "0 Lord, the great and dreadful God, keeping the covenant and mercy to them that love him, and to them that keep his com- G4 BOOK FIRST. mantlments; We have sinned, and have committed iniquity, and have done wickedly, and have rebelled, even by depart- ing from thy precepts and from thy judgments : neither have we hearkened unto thy servants the prophets, which spake in thy name to our Idngs, our princes, and our fathers, and to all the people of the land. 0 Lord, to us belongeth confusion of face, to our kings, to our princes, and to our fathers, because we have sinned against thee. 0 my God, incline thine ear, and hear ; open thine eyes, and behold our desolations. 0 Lord, hear ; 0 Lord, forgive " (Daniel ix). It is impossible to enter now into the controversy raised upon the book from which these beautiful words are taken. It cannot be questioned that in it, prophecy assumes an entirely new character of precision, especially in its relation to the general history of mankind, for, for the first time, the succession of the great empires is pointed out with minute detail. The symbolism is less simple than that of the classic prophets ; it is complicated and sometimes fanciful . The animal typology familiar to Persia plays a great part in it. No book has founded more schools than that attributed to Daniel ; it has been like the tran- sition stage between the prophetic, properly so called, and the apocalyptic. But the inspiration which animates it is so pure, that we do not hesitate to give it its rank in the truly sacred literature of the Jews; Jesus Christ explicitly recognized its religious value by invoking its testimony. We have set ourselves to elicit the general and domi- nant thought of the Old Testament. We admit that it comes out often from the midst of the barbarism into which it was thrown, and which is depicted with an un- shrinking candour. The falls and crimes of the most illustrious founders of theocracy are related with no pru- PRELIMINAEY QUESTIONS. 65 dent reticences ; but we see also their chastisements, and witness their poignant repentance. Thus we have a fearful and salutary demonstration of sin. Stern se- verities were necessary to arouse the stifled moral sense. Let imagination picture the rude infancy of a fallen race, left to the wild impulse of instincts, and we shall better understand the terrible rod by which it was curbed under the hand of the divine educator. The Old Testament is not the idyl of innocence ; it is the desperate conflict between good and evil in their first collision. Something was still wanting to the work of preparation; this was the total ruin of all the glories of the theocracy, so that it might be well demonstrated that the Old Testa- ment " could make nothing perfect" according to the expression in the Epistle to the Hebrews, ch. vii. 9. This decline was coincident with an extraordinary fermentation of minds. Thus was prepared one of the most amazing eras of history, characterized by the singular interblending of the most opposite tendencies. It is important for us to form an exact idea of it, that we may rightly comprehend the condition in which Chris- tianity took its rise.* * It is not my province in this short sketch to touch any of the critical questions raised upon the books of the Old Testament. I can only refer readers to special works, among the first of which I should mention Bleek's introduction on the transformations of the people during the exile. See also Ewald, " Gesch. Volkes Israel," IV. p. 117 ; this is a broad and admirable picture. 66 BOOK FIRST. CHAPTER III. THE JUDAISM OP THE DECLINE. JUDAISM at the commencement of om- era presented more points of resistance than of contact to Jesus Christ, because He came, in fact, to contradict and oppose all the beliefs and wishes of His contemporaries. Thus, the new religion, so far from being simply the consumma- tion of an anterior development, only fulfilled the past by abolishing it. None the less do we maintain, that it was the response to all the best aspirations of the soul, and that the true people of God, those who listened to its claims, in a manner outran the future, borne onward b}^ an ardent and exalted faith. We shall have to distinguish this double current of spirits, in the troubled flood of an epoch of unparalleled moment." The moral and intellectual condition of Judaism on the * See the following works: Josephus' "Antiquities" and his " Wars of the Jews ;" " Histoire des Juifs," by Prideaux ; " La Palestine," by Munck : Ewald's " Gesch. Volkes Israel," Vol IV.; " La Kabbale," by Franck; Reuss' " Histoire de la Theologie Chretienne," Vol. I.; Nicolas' " Les Doctrines Religieuses des Juifs pendant les deux siecles anterieurs a I'ere 'chretienne;" Gfraerer's "Das Jahrhundert des Hcils," Vol. II. See especially the Apocryjjha of the Old Testa- ment. Fabricius' " Codex Pseudepigraphus Vet. Testament." " Das Buch Enoch," uebersetzt und erklaert v. Dillemann, Leipzig, 1853. " Das Buch Esdras," uebersetzt und erklaert v. Volkmar," Zurich, 1864. PRELIMINAEY QUESTIONS. 67 eve of the birth of Christ can only be understood by a knowledge of the complex causes by which it was pro- duced. Of these causes the most powerful was undoubt- edly the nation's exile in Babylon and the political and religious situation which resulted from it. This situation gave rise to one of those violent contradictions which prevent a nation from falling into a state of slum- berous repose. It may be summed up in two words ; dependence on and hatred of the foreigner. Judea from the time of the first destruction of Jerusalem had only brief periods of real emancipation ; she was absorbed in the great empires which by turns dominated Asia. It was under the yoke, that this powerful race rose morally to the consciousness of her high destiny ; in the times of her kings she was always inclined to culpable alliances and impure idolatries. In the bitter days of her captivity it was so no longer. By the waters of exile, the Jew, far from his beloved Zion, of which there remained only the smoking ashes, found another holy city, not built with stones, but with divine words, and the inde- structible sanctuary of which was the law given to his fathers. Having lost the material, he reconquered the spiritual patrimony, by his re-established faith ; he felt that the worship of the true God was the very essence of his nationality. Thus, when he returned to the land of his ancestors, as he was never able completely to recon- quer it, and had the constant grief of feeling himself still subject to a foreign sway, he continued to bind in close connection his religion and his patriotism ; he knew that, his God once abjured, he was nothing more than a vile slave, like those human herds which the conquerors of Asia dragged in their train or trampled under foot. To this feeling may be traced that noble religious restoration undertaken by Ezra and completed by F 2 68 BOOK FIRST. Nehemiali ; the peo^^le shrank from no sacrifice, and broke ^dthout hesitation the family ties formed during the period of disorganization and exile. Henceforward the Jew was invariably attached to his faith and his rites ; the theocracy flourished again on the ruins of a political glory for ever overthrown. It is no more under the image of a mighty king, a new Solomon, that his people represents Messiah; it sees in Him rather a supreme high priest, as He appears in the oracles of the prophet Zechariah (Zech. iii.) The reign of the saints has begun, for legal sanctity is the sole superiority and the sole liberty that can be preserved. Assuredly this moral reconstruction is a great advance upon the past, but it conceals one fatal germ. Piety being confounded with patriotism, the mass of the people will be disposed to regard it rather as a means of main- taining pre-eminence over other nations, than as an end excellent in itself. Holiness will then be but an external legalism, a conformity to the sacred letter without effect on the heart and conscience ; then, the law far from fulfilling its main design, which is to break the pride of man by placing before him a supreme ideal, will only nourish and strengthen it. Here was the peril, the gravity of which the future was to show. The close alliance between patriotism and religion tended also to excite beyond all bounds, the political passions and the national pride. The Jew felt himself at once the favourite of heaven and the sport of pagan despotism ; he knew himself superior to the nations, whose idolatry justly appeared to him abominable, and he was yet com- pelled to submit to the rule of those whom he despised. How great was his temptation to hold himself erect before masters — his inferiors — and to requite them scorn, for all the outrages he received at their hands ! He, the founder PKELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 69 oftrue religion in the world, was forced to bow beneath an idolatrous sceptre ! Could such a thought be entertained and not stir in Ins heart a wild ferment of revolt and hate, and j)i*ecipitate him into violent attempts, even more perilous to his religious life than to his temporal interests ? Evidently the hope of the nation must undergo a great transformation under such influences ; it will become impregnated in this heated atmosphere with wholly human passions ; it will tend to become itself a firebrand of political agitation ; the horizon of the future, illumined by the great prophets with calm and holy glories, will be coloured with the hot and burning tints of apocalyptic visions ! The complete cessation of prophecy, a short time after the return from the exile, contributed much to the religious decay of Judaism. "After the death of Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi, the last of the prophets," we read in the Talmud, " the Spirit disappeared from the midst of Israel."* When once this vast organization with its minuteness of ritual, ceased to be constantly vivified by the breath of prophecy passing often over it, like a divine whirlwind, to shake its entire fabric, its tendency was to petrify into immobility. The past was no longer looked upon as prefiguring the future, by its magnificent symbols. It was made itself the object of a servile attachment ; it was preserved as a dead institution, and the Jew, making himself its jealous guardian, inaugurated the reign of the " letter which killeth." Tradition became increasingly predominant. The doctor of the law took the place of the prophet ; the rabbi became, par excellence, the guide of the people. There was a manifest tendency to substitute knowledge for feeling in the order of religion. Hence * Ablatus est Spiritus sanctus ex Israeli." — Gfroerer I., p. 135. 70 BOOK FIRST. that apotheosis of wisdom which appears in the earhest apocryphal writings of the Old Testament. From these icy heights blows a withering mnd, which blasts the life of the soul, and takes the beauty and the grandeur from rcA^elation ; its most touching features disappear under the commentary. The dispersion of a large number of Jews in Asia Minor, Egypt, and the West, as commercial relations multiplied, strengthened the influence of the rabbi. Far from their sanctuary, unable to offer to God the Levitical worship, the Jews who lived in foreign lands had no other means of preserving their religion, but the study of then law. The sacred Book was to them what the Tabernacle had been to their fathers in the wilderness, and during *the period of the conquest, before the altar of God had a splendid temple for its shelter. To read the law, to comment upon it, to fix its meaning, to keep the tradition of the elders, this was all that they could do in the far countries where they dwelt. They returned, no doubt, at certain intervals to the holy City, but the ordinary course of their life was spent at a distance ; they were no longer under the constant action of that great religious symbolism, which expressed so forcibly the need of purification and redemption. Sacrifice played but a small part in their life ; religion, habitually despoiled of those solemn ceremonies which set forth its positive character, dwindled little by little to a doctrine, an idea, a book. The Temple lost in importance as the synagogue gained. There was in all this a revolution, the import of which was beyond calculation. The Jew of the olden time was wont to fall with ease to a point lower than that of the Jew at this period ; he became ensnared by idolatry and its unholy rites ; but when he repented at the stern voice of the prophet or under the strokes of Divine justice, he PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 71 returned to a deepened piety ; he felt an earnest need of cleansing, of expiation, and the blood of bulls and of goats was not enough to give him peace. From the time of the restoration under Ezra, the Jew leads a life habitually more pure and more correct, but also he eludes more lightly the trouble of conscience. For the sacrifice which expresses the consciousness of sin and the hope of pardon, he rather substitutes almsgiving, that is, the fair outside work, by which he aims to set himself right with the divine law. In the Book of Tobias we see what paramount importance is thus attached to this kind of reparation. It is not only the left hand knowing what the right hand does ; it is the heart which applauds itself and imagines that it has fulfilled all righteousness. Contact with foreigners had also a modifying effect upon Judaism in many respects. Sometimes the Jew would imbibe an admixture of altogether heterogeneous ideas ; sometimes he would abandon himself to loose concessions ; or again, he would exalt his patriotism, and stiffen into a rigid devotion and an obstinate resistance to all influences from without. We have thus very early the germ of the trenchant partition lines, which we shall find later producing themselves and giving birth to sects and parties. Within a very short time after the restoration we find ourselves already confronted with the elements which will clash or combine in the great final crisis. 1. Judaism under the Persians. The Persian empire, which extends from the year 536 to the year 332, e.g., exercised less influence over the Jews than is often supposed. The religion of Zoroaster, at least before the manipulations to which it has been subjected, is coloured, as we have already seen, by 72 BOOK FIRST. dualism. The idea of a God greater than Ormuz and Aluiman, makes only a tardy appearance, and remains but as a metaphysical idea without any real influence on the moral life. The world of spirit is only dimly discerned ; spiritual light is confounded with the brightness of the sun, good with fruitfulness. The good law of Ormuz is honoured alike in good actions and in abundant harvests.* Sin is constantly regarded as a simple corporeal defile- ment. The expectation of a deliverer is very vague ; it is only little by little that the part of Sosiosch, the valiant champion of Ormuz develops into magnitude. The article of the resurrection of the body does not seem to belong to primitive mazdeism.f The Persians regarded corpses as the property of evil spirits ; they therefore exposed them in desert places to be devoured by wild beasts. This cus- tom is little compatible with the idea of the resurrec- tion. Cyrus the First had a great sepulchre built for himself. It is certain that mazdeism has undergone great changes ; the traces of Jewish and Christian influence are evident in the "Bundehesch," its last sacred book. The passage of Theopompus, quoted by Plutarch, in which mention is made of the triumph of the good over the evil god after a formidable conflict, belongs to a late period. No one will deny that the idea of Messiah had taken a much more definite form among the Jews than among the Persians at the epoch when the two nations were brought into contact at Babylon. It would be idle to compare some vague allusions with the oracles of the Old Testament. On one point only, the Jews borrowed something from * The principal work on mazdeism is the commentary of Eugene Burnouf on the Yarna. f The fragments of "Theopompus," quoted by M. Nicolas (Doctrine des Juifs) are very vague. In any case they belong to a time subse- quent to the exile in Babylon. PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 73 their conquerors ; this was in reference to the doctrine of good and evil angels. Not that this was a strange idea to them ; we need no other proofs to the contrary than the account of the Fall in Genesis, and the prologue to the Book of Job ; the Book of Tobias, however, recalls in many points the minute classification of good and evil sj)irits in the "Avesta.'"'' The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah, which give us such a faithful picture of the religious condition of the Jews on the return from Babylon, are like the oracles of Zechariah and Malachi, among the most authentic productions of Hebrew inspira- tion. The prophets of the exile, no doubt, borrowed new symbols from the countries in which they lived ; but the old spirit found utterance in this new language, which, more laboured, was less grand than that of earlier days. The doctrine of the resurrection of the body connected itself very naturally with certain facts recorded in the first books of the Old Testament, such as the translation of Enoch and Elijah. It was easy to draw from these narratives the permanence in the future life of the trans- figured corporeal element. The most important religious event under the Persian rule was the erection of the Samaritan temple, on Mount Gerizim, at the gates of Shechem, by Manasseh, brother of the high-priest Jaddus. Manasseh had refused to conform to the legal prescriptions which bound on him as a duty, the repudiation of the strange woman he had married. He took refuge with his father-in-law, Sanbal- lat, governor of Samaria, and, taking advantage of his priestly origin, retired to the mountain, signalized by the blessings of Deuteronomy, to build there a rival * See the remarkable pages devoted to this subject by M. Nicolas, pp. 340—350. 74 BOOK FIRST. sanctuary to that at Jerusalem. There he celebrated a modified worship, and gathered around him a certain num- ber of Jews who were wishful to escape the austerity of the restoration under Ezra, and all that remained of the old Samaritan population.* The emigrants from Jerusalem brought with them the Pentateuch, which they made their one sacred book, and thus founded a kind of bastard Judaism, which could not fail to excite the keenest ani- mosity in their brethren of the holy city. Authority to build a temple on Mount Gerizim had been asked of the last of the Persian monarchs, and it was granted by the conqueror of Darius. 2. Judaism under the Greeks. With Alexander began the Greek empire, which extends from the year 337 to 167. Judea shares in all the revo lutions which overturn Asia under the successors of the conqueror. This troubled political life could not fail to increase the fermentation of national passions. One of the first effects of the new condition of things was the breaking down of the barriers, which had separated the Jews from other nations, and the development of their commercial genius. In Egypt especially, they founded an important colony. A large portion of the people fell under the influence of Hellenic culture, without, however, renouncing their religious traditions. The necessity of bringing into unison the new ideas and the old customs gave birth to that famous allegorical method, which was to render such dangerous service, and to be the parent of so many absurdities. The appearance of the Greek Bible in Alexandria, under Ptolemy Philadelphus (284-247), the illustrious patron of letters and founder of the great * Josophus — (Arcb. II., 7, 2.) PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 75 library, was an important event : the isolated and posi- tive genius of the Hebrews contracts, for the first time, a sort of marriage with the subtle and brilliant genius of Greece. This new influence is betrayed in the Septua- gint version by certain systematic modifications, which indicate the presence of the Platonic notion of the char- acter of absolute transcendence in the Deity.* This Hellenic influence, which was to acquire increasing importance in Egypt, is less perceptible in Judea, though, even there, it has left its traces, as is proved by the book of Jesus Sirach. The author chooses, both in morals and religion, the via media which is without greatness and without peril. He presents the apotheosis of wisdom, that is of religion considered solely as doctrine. He makes it utter these words: — " I came forth from the mouth of the Most High, and covered the earth like a cloud. I dwelt in the high places, and my throne was on the pillar of clouds. I sought rest, and asked myself in what heritage I should abide. Then he who created me pointed out my dwelling-place, saying : Abide in Jacob, and let thy heritage be in Israel. I took root in the midst'of a new people : I grew like a cedar in Lebanon, like a palm-tree by the rivers of water. All these things are the book of the Testament of God, the law given to Moses. f ='■= Thus the earth " without form and void,'' in the Hebrew text of the account of the creation, becomes, in the translation, an earth invisible and without form — aopnroc (cai aKara7Keva(Trog. (Genesis i. 21.) In the 5th verse, the translation reads — " And God created all the grass of the field before it existed on the earth." This transports us at once into the world of ideas, types of created things — we are in the heart of Platonic philosophy. The Septuagint translation also disguises, as far as possible, theophanies, everywhere substituting an angel for God. I 'Eyw ctTTo (TTonaTOQ vipi(Trov i^fjXdov. (c. xxiv., 5.) The last words of this panegyric of wisdom show that the author intends by it nothing else than the Mosaic revelation personified. 76 BOOK FIRST. Jesus Sirach exalts supremely the dignity of the scribes and doctors. *' As to the man," he says, " who devotes his mind to the law of the Most High, and searches out the wisdom of all the ancients, he exercises himself in the prophecies. The Lord will direct his counsel and his knowledge, and will make known to him his secrets. Many shall praise his prudence, so that his memory shall never be blotted out nor cast away, but his name shall endure from generation to generation."* Jesus Shach celebrates in magnificent terms the greatness of the priest- hood ; but it is evident that he has lost the deep meaning of the worship, and no more comprehends that sublime sym- bolism w^hich was meant to express the need of pardon. With him almsgiving truly expiates sin.f He exalts the authority of tradition. " Abide," he says, " in the as- sembly of the elders, and hold fast by the wise man ; forsake not the instruction of the elders, for they have learned it of their fathers." The Book of Sirach may be regarded as the first rough sketch of Sadduceeism, or of the party of the foreigner. The author resigns himself to the abrupt revolutions of emphes on the reflection that man is but dust and ashes ; and, in one significant passage, he denies the immortality of the soul. To him the dead ceases to be anything.]: Thus he is profuse in counsels of cowardly prudence. He advises no contest with the powerful and rich. The consciousness of our own culpa- bihty is to arrest on our lips every vehement protestation against crime. § Jesus Sirach can conceive nothing beyond the Mosaic, which he calls an eternal covenant. |1 * (Chap. XXXIX,. 1-13.) i" 'E\er]i.iofTvyr] i^iXaaerai a^apTiaq. (Chap. III., 3b.) J 'Atto VEspov'wQ jJLrjdK OVTOQ CLTroXkuTcn e^ojjioXoyijcnQ. (XVII., 26.) § (Chap. VIII., 1.) il (XLV., 9.) PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 77 This tendenc}^ which weakened and corrupted mere}'- by making it a mere matter of policy, took a new develop- ment in Antigonus of Socho. From him is quoted a noble, and almost evangelical precept. " Be not," he said, " as servants, who will serve the Lord for wages, but as servants who serve Him with no mercenary view, and let the fear of heaven be upon you."* Truly, a most beautiful maxim, and one denoting a legitimate reaction from the legal formahsm which was in process of develop- ment. Unhappily for him, Antigonus of Socho was the master of Zadok, the founder proper of Sadduceeism. The opinions of Zadok can only be gathered from the party Vv4iich claimed him as their leader, and which soon rallied round itself the men of easy life, by reducing Judaism to its elementary institutions, and setting aside the austerities and fervencies of the old prophetic epoch. Sadduceeism showed itself always disposed to submit to the yoke of foreign powers, while hghtening it as far as pos- sible. It denied to Grod any permanent and direct action on the human soul ; and if it vindicated with urgency the play of free human activity in the terrestrial domain, it closed to it the higher sphere. Already at this epoch there arose, by a natural reaction, the party of the chasidim, or the pious, who united pas- sionate patriotism with the strictest adherence to the Mosaic institutions. We have here the germ of Phari- saism, which wdll unfold under the fires of terrible perse- cution in the days of Antiochus Epiphanes. Nothing could be more adapted to inflame the national * Pirke Aboth ; or Treatise on Principles — (p. 483.) This is one of the most important portions of the Talmud : in it are found the most ancient traditions of doctrine and morals. I quote from the ritual of "Daily Prayer?," published by Anspach. 78 BOOK FIRST. passions in a fierce and indomitable race than the shame- less outrages of this despot, who seemed touched with the mad folly of boundless power, and who might be a CfEsar anticipated. What a spectacle for the Jews was that of their holy city in ruins, of their sanctuary invaded, and the altar of Jehovah defiled by an idol ! What indignation must have consumed them when they found themselves compelled to follow the procession in honour of Bacchus with brows crowned with ivy. The resistance offered was that which might have been expected from such a people reduced to despair ; but the hand of ' repression was implacable ; the blood of the worshippers of the true God flowed in floods through the streets of Jerusalem. Antiochus was to the Judaism of the restoration, what Nero was to the primitive Church, the personification of diabolical power, the hideous image of a world at enmity with God. We shall find him playing in the coming apocalypse the same part as the first persecutors of the Christians in the Revelation of St. John. As the result of this bloody tyranny, the Jews prepared for one supreme conflict, which was to inaugurate the definitive era ; this is what they afterwards call the anguish of Messiah, or the painful birth-throes of the Deliverer. An apocryphal writing of this date is full of these sentiments ; it is the book called the "Psalter of Solomon." After the manner of the times, the aspirations and griefs of the pious Israelites are placed under the protection or the sanction of an already illustrious name. The desolation and profanation of the holy city are depicted in vivid colours. "Jerusalem has been trodden under foot of the nations. She has changed her vest- ment of glory for sackcloth. The blood of the sons of Israel has been spilt like an impure stream. Strange PRELIMINAEY QUESTIONS. 79 nations have gone up to tliine altar. A fierce wind has smitten our land and laid it waste."* The unknown poet protests vehemently against the cowards who seek to please men, " Reveal thy works, 0 Lord ; let the saints execute thy judgments by driving the sinners from before thy face, and foremost the man who professes thy law deceitfully." Thus in these terrible afflictions the party of the saints, or the pious, lifts its voice against the party of the foreigner. The expectation of Messiah is expressed with new fervency. "Behold, Lord, and raise up in thine appointed time, David thy son to reign over Israel ! Deliver Jerusalem from the nations which oppress her ! Destroy thou the unrighteous nations with the word of thy mouth ! Let them flee before him ! Let him gather together thine holy people to lead them into all righteousness."! 3. The Maccabees and the Roman empire. The cry was heard. The deliverer was raised up ; it was not yet the divine Son of David who was to answer the great desire of mankind, but one of those incomplete precursors who after their disappearance became new types of Messiah. There is nothing so beautiful in the history of Judaism at this period as the war of giants, waged by the handful of patriots who gathered round the Maccabees. The intense grief of the faithful Jews at the sight of the abominations of the holy place, that mixture of deepening indignation and panting aspiration, which breathes in the obscure and mutilated strains from which we have quoted some fragments ; in these we have the * Fabricius " Codex Pseudepigraphus," I., pp. 918, 922, 963. t Kadapitjov lepovfTaXfi/j, cnro tdviHv tcaraTrarnvyTwy. , (pp. 965). 80 BOOK FIRST. inspiration of that heroic insurrection which sprang full armed from the humble hamlet, where the old priest Matthatias with his sons had kept the faith of Israel. It might have been the very lion of Judah leaping from the mountains of Ephraim. It is not our province to describe that noble conflict, in which material force shatters itself against the moral, in which the vast armies of the Seleucidae melt like snow in the sun, before the fer-vdd courage of Judas Maccabeus and his brothers, in which reverses and disasters only inflame resistance, and render it more obstinate and invincible. This magnificent outburst of Jewish patriotism was to create an ideal full of grandeur but also full of peril. How could Messiah assume any other form than that of Judas Maccabeus to a people possessed by the noblest of human passions ? The pathetic symbols of Isaiah and Jeremiah paled before the image of the young warrior, crushing the might of Antiochus and bathing the steps of the sanctuary with the blood of the sacrilegious. This vision of the warrior archangel was thenceforward ever to float before the eyes of the Jews. We may judge from the portion of the Sibylline oracles which belongs to this date and is of Hebrew origin, what was the fascination of these first triumphs of the war of independence."^ These * " Oracula Sybillina," Alexandre's Edition. Paris: Didot, 1841-55. We may not enter here on the curious question of the sybilliue oracles. The word "sibyl" is a contraction of two words, Aiuc (3ov\ii, which mean, oracles of God. The origin of the myth is, doubtless, the superstitious interpretation of certain subterranean sounds heard in caves and considered as bringing divine revelations. A kind of pro- phetesses of nature were placed in these caves. We know from ancient Roman history that these were regarded as the receivers of oracles, the rejection of which involved the greatest misfortunes. It is easy to understand that the idea of making use of this fable might occur to the Jews of Alexandi-ia, who were desirous of exalting the gloiy of their PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 81 famous oracles were composed in Alexandria about the year 115 B.C. Completely foreign to the Platonic and theosophic tendency which was soon to become dominant in the Egj^ptian synagogues, they are thoroughly animated by the exclusive patriotism then prevalent in Palestine. They only borrow from the Greeks the well-known legend of the Sibyls. They put their favourite dreams into the mouth of these prophetesses of nature, who are thus made to confirm the great oracles of the Old Testament, and to contribute to the glory of the people of God in the heart of paganism. The Sibyl is, then, only the com- plaisant echo of the aspirations and hopes of the Jews at the time of the Maccabees. It is this which gives a high interest to this monotonous rhapsody. We find in it just that expectation of a wholly warlike Messiah and of a purely earthly salvation, which was the natural conse- quence of the events recently transpired in Judea. This strange poem fulminates terrible menaces against all idolatrous nations, and in particular against the Greeks, who were then the dominant race oppressing Asia, but it speaks only of Divine vengeance. The Jewish nation is distinguished by the worship of the true God, from the corrupt masses of the Gentile world. To her alone the great God has given wisdom in counsel, faith, and holy thoughts. Deity, outraged by an idolatrous nation. It is certain that the third book of the Sibylhne Oracles is by a Jew ; this is convincingly proved by the praises lavished on the people of Israel, and the punishment denounced on pagan nations. The date of the third book is not doubtful. The historian Josephus makes a clear allusion to the passage on the Tower of Babel (" Anti- quities," I. 43). The unknown author lived under the seventh Ptolemy, called Ptolemy Physcon, that is, from the year 170 to 117 b.c, as may be gathered from verse 618 of the third book. See the paper by M. Alexander, Vol. II. p. 318, and M. Reuss' article on the Sibyls in Herzog's " Encyclopcpdia." G 82 BOOK FIRST. world, will visit it with the most fearful scourges ; His rod will smite the king of Asia who, under the seventh Ptolemy, desolated the earth ; like a fierce eagle, he made the ground tremble beneath his cavalry, and the heavy tread of his infantry carried everywhere ruin and destruction. It is easy to recognize in this description Antioclms Epiphanes. The Hebrew poet sees in the tragical events of his reign, the precursive signs of the universal deliverance of which the Jews are to be the instruments. The earth, piled with human corpses left to be devoured by wild beasts, and spoiled of her harvests, bears witness by her hideous nakedness to the crimes of her inhabitants. " Then from the land of the sun * God will send forth a King who shall put an end to war in the whole earth, by destroying the wicked and bringing the righteous into his covenant." Evidently this is a warrior king, who is to establish universal peace by his con- quering sword. A second Maccabeus shall achieve the work commenced by the first. The happiness of man- kind when it shall have been brought (thanks to the Jews) under his laws is represented in lively imagery. The people of the great God will roll in gold and silver, will be clothed in purple, and earth and seas will pour their treasures at their feet.f One last conflict, announced by terrible signs from heaven, will be waged by the jealous nations, who will seek to invade the Temple at Jerusalem ; but God himself will interpose and rain down fire and brimstone from heaven. After this final triumph the nations will bring their ofierings into the sanctuary, which will be filled with the smoke of their incense ; then will com- * 'Att' I'leXioio (v. 650). ■f Aabg h'av /xtyaXoio Oeov TTEfjiKaXXtt wXavrto (v. 657 and following). PEELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 83 mence the eternal reign of the samts in uninterrupted feHcities. The leopard shall lie down with the kid, the olive-tree shall be covered with never-withering fruits, the springs shall flow with milk whiter than snow, and the child shall play with the serpents We see how earthly have become the hopes of the Jews ; they do not rise beyond an entirely material happiness, founded on the triumph of monotheism. The part of Messiah is become only secondary, since the supreme deliverance is ascribed to Divine power. In Judaea, the religious ideal is not more exalted, as is proved by the Book of Judith, which breathes an infatuated patriotism which does not recoil from murder. The one expectation is salvation by the sword, and for that they will perish by the sword. The Maccabees had almost realized the dream of the pious party, henceforward- designated by the name of Pharisees, or separatists, and forming a sort of religious aristocracy, fanatic and disdainful. From their ranks had come forth the first deliverers ; their party had been their stay, and by their courage success had been achieved. But victory was fatal to the Maccabees. To assure an ever-disputed triumph in the midst of incessant wars provoked by the different pretenders to the throne of the Seleucidse, they were obliged to have recourse to artful policy and to seek their centre of support now in one camp, now in another. They made of the high priestly ofl&ce rather a civil magistracy than a religious function. Already under Johannes Hyrcanus, the nephew of the great Maccabeus, they began to subordinate the cause of religion and country to their personal ambition. It was still, however, a glorious epoch of independence and power. But from the day when Aristobulus, son of Hyrcanus, put on the diadem and took the name of king, g2 84 BOOK FIRST. the heroic inspiration which had made the fortune of his family vanished. The new race of kings underwent the same revohitions of the palace, as other Asiatic royalties of those* times. Aristobulus starved his mother to death. Alexander Jannaeus, his brother and successor, assassi- nated his brother Anitgone on a false suspicion, and then went over to the Sadducees. It was a cruel disenchant- ment to the Pharisees when they saw the successor and heir of the Maccabees assisting in the midst of his harem, at the infamous torture of eight hundred of their adherents. Such a spectacle and such bitter experiences served only to exasperate their resistance. Their influence on the people continued great, in view of the sanguinary atrocities of a divided and degraded court. The last of the Maccabees, in their desperate rivalries, invoked more than once the support of the great Eoman republic, towards which their illustrious ancestor had already turned his eyes, when it seemed yet too remote to menace the independence of Judaea. Circumstances had changed : Roman armies had already trodden the soil of Asia. The infallible result of so dangerous an alliance was the ultimate subjugation of the Jews. Called in successively by the two sons of Jannaeus Alexander — H}Tcanus and Aristobulus — who were disputing for power, the Romans invaded Jerusalem the first time under Pompey, in the cause of Aristobulus ; then they were brought over to the party of Hyrcanus, through the artifices of his perfidious counsellor, Antipater, the Idu- mean, who was artfully laying the foundations of his own greatness. His second son, Herod, uniting tlic most consummate political cunning with prowess worthy of a Roman general, and never staggered by a crime, suc- ceeded in manoeuvring so well in a time of changing fortune, that after having received the crown of Judaea PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 85 from the hands of the Senate (thanks to the protection of Anthony), he saw his kingdom aggrandized by the favour of Augustus. He had shaken off, by treason or violence, the last of the Maccabees ; he had had drowned before his eyes the young Aristobulus, his wife's nephew, who had a right to the sovereign high-priestly office; then he made a mock tribunal pronounce sentence on his wife, the beautiful Mariamne, niece of the old Hyrcanus who had been so long his protector ; soon after, he immo- lated the two sons he had had by her, dreading in them the avengers of their mother. He trampled fearlessly under foot all the national customs, built cities in honour of Augustus, and adorned them with circuses and theatres, as if he had been the king of a pagan country. Such was the king of the Jews at the time when the religious and national fermentation reached its highest point. This protege of the Romans, this descendant of the hated race of Esau, this insolent contemner of the religion of the country, this cruel despot covered with the blood of his kindred, a debauchee and a murderer, united in himself all that would exasperate the national party. Seated on the throne of David which he profaned, he became to the Pharisees, and to the people whom they animated with their passions, an object of unutterable loathing ; the Sadducees alone were satisfied. A short time previously the account of the exploits of the Maccabees had been written.* In it lived and acted * We have four books in the Jewish Apocrypha which bear the name of Maccabees. The first is like the epopoeia of the glorious revolt of Mattathias and -Judas. It was written some time after the death of Johannes Hyrcanus, for the conclusion of the book alludes to the chronicles relating to him, thus supposing some lapse of time since his reign (Mace. xvi. 2i). The favourable manner in which the author speaks of the Eomans leads to the belief that he wrote before their direct interference in the conflicts of Syria. The second book of Macca- 86 BOOK FIRST. the heroes of the holy war. These proud and noble re- presentatives of victorious resistance were painted in vivid colours before the eyes of a people down-trodden and fettered, but animated at heart with the same aspirations. The contrast between so glorious a past and a present so humiliating, contributed to develop in the mass of the nation the desire after a Messiah, but a Messiah bearing the impress of an earthly and feverous imagination, as is evident from this significant passage in the first book of Maccabees — " The Jews and their priests had con- sented that Simon should be their chief and sovereign high-priest for ever, till there should arise some faithful prophet ; till that epoch they would that their general should have charge of the holy places, and should be obeyed by all."* This was indicating clearly that the power of the sword was to belong later to Messiah, since Simon was but His precursor. The family of Simon had disappeared, and the Great Prophet, who was to restore the theocracy, was not yet come. The portion of the people, therefore, who had remained faithful to the tradition of the fathers, was cherishing an ever-growing desire after Him. bees is a letter to the Jews in Egypt, designed to bind them to the temple at Jerusalem. It is of later date than the first, as shown by its legendary character. It dates, however, from an epoch anterior to Christianity, for the epistle to the Hebrews (xi. 31) makes allusion to 2 Mace. vi. 19. The third book has no historical value ; it is a mythical account of the miracle which prevented Ptolemy Philopater from penetrating into the Holy of Holies on his journey to Jerusalem. The composition of this book belongs, perhaps, to the epoch of the impious follies of Caligula. The fourth book of Maccabees, which continues the works of Josephus, is a cold dissertation on the martyrdom of the seven brothers, already recounted in the first book, * "Ewe Tov avaartivai ■KpotpijTr/v tticttvu kqI tov tlyai W avTwv tTTparrfyoy (1 Mace. xiv. 41, 12). PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 87 Now that we know the political circumstances which pressed with so heavy a weight on the pubUc mind, we may form some just idea of the moral condition of the Jews in their own country, and in the synagogues of foreign lands. IV. Alexandrine Judaism — Philo. We have seen Jewish colonies steadily multiplying in the great centres of civilization. The most important of these colonies was settled in Egypt ; its first nucleus had been formed after the conquest of Ptolemy I., 342 years before the Christian era. From that time it had not ceased to grow. After the murder of the high-priest Onias 11. , his eldest son obtained of Ptolemy Philometor permission to build a temple at Leontopolis ; he did not dare to build it exactly on the model of the sanctuary at Jerusalem, but he raised there, nevertheless, an altar of sacrifice, taking his stand on one of Isaiah's oracles (Isaiah xix. 19). This new temple gradually lost its im- portance, when the Maccabees had purified the holy city ; it continued, nevertheless, in high honour in Egypt, and preserved to the Jews of that country a certain indepen- dence. They were much happier than their brethren in Judaea, for the protection of the Ptolemies never failed them; they possessed the same civil rights as the Greeks. Their schools and synagogues became flourishing, but they were also largely influenced by Hellenism. We have already pointed out the traces of tliis in the Septua- gint translation, which was itself a powerful means of preserving and developing Greek culture among them. They were quickly led in Egypt, into that movement of universal coalition which constituted the glory of Alex- andria. Judaism lost there the true meaning of the religion of the fathers ; while the Pharisees in Palestine 88 BOOK FIRST. were burying the spirit under the dead letter, the Egyptian school lost sight of the letter under subtle interpretations, and ended b}^ dissolving the positive realities of the Mosaic dispensation in the crucible of sjiicretism. Platonic philosophy was gradually substituted for the monotheism of the Old Testament. The book of the Wisdom of Solomon, which was v^-ritten at Alexandria two centuries before Christ, bears the im- press of this metaphysical dualism. The author in vain appeals to the most significant facts to aid him, he never rises above a mere general notion of righteousness ; the breath which animates his lengtli}^ exhortations is that of Plato rather than of Christ. He believes in the pre- existence of souls,"'' in the eternity of matter,f and is an advocate of asceticism.]; Wisdom, of which he gives such beautiful descriptions, he confounds with the divine but impersonal prototype, upon which the world has been modelled. It is an idea and not a person ; it fills all things, permeates the souls of the holy, and is diffused like a luminous ether throughout the universe. From all the images employed to exalt it, nothing more than this can be gathered, § Messiah will have no other mission than to establish the dominion of the Jews over the other nations, and their Lord will reign for ever. Alexandrine Judaism took a more decided form with Aristobulus, who sought to win honours for it among the Greeks by arbi- trarily interpreting or manipulating the Orphic hymns, * MctXXov 2f ayadoQ wv I'lXdov tig (Tuifia afiiavrov (viil. 20). f ** God is the ordainer of that which is " {rexyirriQ twp ovtu>v, viii. 6). \ "Blessed is the barren" (iii. 13). "The mortal body enchains the soul " (ix. 15). § It is a breath (ar///c) of the divine virtue, an emanation (cnroppoia) of the glory of the Almighty, a reflection of His splendour (Eaivcvaa (vii. 27 — 30). PKELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 89 and by leading the way in the bold use of the allegorical method ; he hoped thus to eliminate from the Old Testa- ment all that would not square with his system. The chief representative of this tendency was Philo, the celebrated contemporary of Christ. The Old Testament, like the Gospel, keeps to sohd moral ground ; liberty plays the first part in the destinies of our race ; it alone explains the fall of man and his restoration. We have before us a living history, a real drama, which had its beginning as it will have its close. With Philo we never leave the region of metaphysics. History is a continuation of the cosmogony ; it is nothing more than the eternal realization of the necessary laws which preside over the formation and organization of the world. The two sys- tems are thus in manifest contradiction on all the essential points of religious doctrine, whether relating to the origin of things, to the principle of evil, or the salvation of man- kind. Between Oriental dualism and Jewish or Christian theism, the opposition is radical. Now Philo only re- vived this old dualism, enveloping it with ingenious alle- gories as with a veil ; it is easy to recognise it under the sincere homage which he pays lavishly to the religion of his fathers. His God, let him say what he will, is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who reveals Himself to His worshippers, and guides and protects them while He claims their obedience and their love ; He is an abstract Being, raised above unity itself ; He is placed above the good and the true, and all the categories of thought.* He did not produce the world from nothing by a free act of creation ; He can never cease to produce any more than "'■= 'O deuc fioyoc, etrrl Kai ti' riraKrai (caret to ev kui ti)^ [xoraSa (Leg. Alleg. ii. 1). To ov o Kal ayaOov Kpelrroy Lgti Ka\ tiOQ tiXinpiviGTepov {De Vita Contemplativa, 1). 90 BOOK FIRST. the fire can cease to bum, or the snow to chill/'' Light and life emanate from Him like the beam from the star. Matter cannot be an emanation from Him, it would else represent the element of diversity, disorder, passivity, which is in direct opposition to absolute being. It exists, then, eternally before Him, and has, like Himself, neither beginning nor end ; He educes from it a perfect world by a process of organization. As God cannot come into direct contact with matter. He uses as media the ideas or powers which emanate from Him, and which are the types of all the realities contained in the world ; these are the divine seals which, impressed upon matter without order, give to it form and beauty, and bring out of it the Cosmos. f These ideas, these powers, are called angels, when regarded in their multiplicity ; they form, in combination, the ideal world of architypes, or the world of the Word. In vain Philo ascribes to this Word the most eminent attributes, calls him the Son of God, the Sove- reign Priest ; he never for a moment lifts him out of the frozen ocean of abstractions.;!: Evil is not born of the estrangement of the will, it re- sults from the very nature of things ; it is inherent in the * Ylnverai ■yap ovhiirort iroiQv u dsoc, aW wiTTrep 'iSiov ru KaUii' ttvooq Kai \iovoQ TO ■^'uytLv, ovru) Kai dsoii to TroLtiv (Leg. alleg. i. 3). f 'E^ iKEirijQ TTUVT lyivvr}(T£i' b Oeug, ovk i(pcnrT6/XEvoc avTOc, oh yap 7ii' dinig a-KEipov Ka\ Tre