BR 129 .V5 1923 Vial, Frank Gifford. Three measures of meal Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/threemeasuresofmOOvial_0 Three Measures of Meal BACHELOR OF DIVINITY AND PROFESSOR OF PASTORAL THEOLOGY, BISHOP’s COLLEGE LENNOXVILLE, CANADA HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW COPENHAGEN NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPE TOWN BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS SHANGHAI 1923 TO MY WIFE My Good Comrade of Many Years Printed in England kt the University Press, Oxford PREFACE The following book is intended as a contribution to the study of Christian Origins with the suggestion (strongly underlined) that the application of the principles and knowledge acquired in such a study may be helpful in the solution of the ever-recurring problems of Christian life and thought. It is my profound conviction that everything which is good and wholesome in human nature and human life is capable of being raised to higher power, its beauty and value immeasurably enhanced by being brought into touch with Jesus Christ. In attempting to show this I have reviewed history before and after the contact took place, selecting typical conditions and representative persons as illustrative of my main thesis. Furthermore, in the course of this study I have felt impelled to lay emphasis on what seemed significant both in fact and character, not in support of any preconception, but in the interests of truth as it presented itself to me. For instance, in regard to the Praeparatio Evangelica (a phrase which perhaps has an old-fashioned ring but whose idea lies imbedded in the New Testament), I recog¬ nize the value of Apocalyptic, the importance of Philo, and the (generally) unconscious leading of ‘ the nations ’ towards the Light, Then, after contact has been established it seemed to be necessary to note the effect of that contact. St. Paul furnishes a sublime example of such effect, but he stands pre-eminent because he was naturally a great iv PREFACE personality. Others are transformed according to their capacity and circumstances. Moreover, what applies to individuals applies also to communities; witness the Church at Corinth and the Christians of whom Pliny and Lucian speak. Furthermore, the organization of the Church is not something imposed from without, but is the development of its inner life in response to its needs. The writing of this little foreword gives me the opportunity of putting on record the kindness and sym¬ pathy of many friends—among them the late Rev. H. F. Hamilton, D.D., the Very Rev. A. E. Burn, the Dean of Salisbury, my colleagues, one and all, of the University of Bishop’s College, Lennoxville, and lastly, and above all, my good friend, Mr. R. J. Meekren, who gave me constant encouragement, who carefully read type-written MSS., and assisted most helpfully in preparing the index. ■ The index makes no pretence of being exhaustive, but I trust it will be found useful and sufficient. CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION.vii PART I THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW CHAP. 1 . The Religious Genius of Israel . . i II. The Philosophy of the Hebrews . . 22 III. Jewish Apocalyptic .... 31 IV. The Herodian Age.39 V. Hellenizing Influences .... 44 VI. Philo ....... 53 Vll. The Fulness of Time .... 56 VIII. Contact with Vital Force ... 66 IX. Form and Substance . . . • . 72 X. The Fruits of Contact .... 87 XL Co-operation of Palestinian and Hel¬ lenist .95 XII. The Conservative Standpoint . . loi XIII. The Multitude of the Faithful . . 106 PART II THE SECOND MEASURE : THE GREEK I. The Old Gods ..... iii II. The Mystery Religions .... 126 III. Some Early Philosophers . . . 130 IV. Socrates ....... 142 V. Plato and Aristotle • . . . -151 vi CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE VI. The Hellenistic Period . • . 162 VIL The Stoic .... » . 165 VIII. The Alexandrian School . • 177 IX. Preparation of the Masses , , • 183 X. St. Paul ..... • . 187 XL The Christian Community • . 218 XH. The Development of Christian Life AND Thought .... • . 232 XIII. Justin Martyr « . 244 XIV. The Alexandrian Thinkers . • ■ 258 XV. The Neo-Platonists 4 . 281 XVI. The Arian Controversy • • K) 00 PART III THE THIRD MEASURE: THE ROMAN 1 . A Pagan Theocracy • « 291 11 . Religious Decadence and Reconstruc- TION ..... 298 III. Pax Romana .... 305 IV. The Christian Ecclesia . 307 V. The Principle of Devolution 310 VI. The Church an Organism 314 VIL The Episcopate 320 VIII. Discipline .... 323 IX. The Church and the Empire . 327 EPILOGUE. 334 INDEX . 339 INTRODUCTION That the Christian religion has to some extent trans¬ formed the world is no matter of controversy. Every intelligent person takes cognizance of the fact; it is beyond dispute. The querulous hyperbole of the Thessalonian non-believing Jews, ‘ These (men) have turned the world upside down,’ ^ has been amply fulfilled. But the converse of this fact has not been so generally recognized though it has received some consideration at the hands of historians and more, possibly, within the present generation than ever before. The fact that the world has reacted upon the Church is vaguely felt by all, half understood by many, intelligently appreciated by only a few. It is true that no writer of any distinction dealing with the progress of religious life and thought entirely disregards it and there are some in recent years who, investigating the origins of Christianity, have ex¬ aggerated and over-estimated the reactive influence of the world. These are for the most part men of great scholastic attainments and high authority in the field of scientific history, and their judgements, and even their conjectures, are entitled to serious consideration. Apart from such investigators who are in a minority, and are regarded with suspicion by the orthodox as Rationalists, or Modernists,^ the general stream of historical research * Acts xvii. 6. “ These terms are by no means synonymous but the suspicion falls on both. Rationalism in its proper sense, not used as an epithet, is indispensable to the arrival at true knowledge ; Modern¬ ism, if by it is meant the effort to interpret God’s Truth to the contemporary age, is the only reasonable modus opevandi and is essential not only to the Church’s progress but also to its health. INTRODUCTION viii has been in the direction of discovering, classifying, record¬ ing new, or elucidating old, facts relative to the wonderful effects of the religion of Christ upon an antagonistic, or indifferent, social order rather than in observation of the influence of environment upon that religion. This is natural and right; the emphasis falls appropriately. Force is greater than matter, and—using that illustration which has the highest sanction possible—the leaven is force, the three measures of meal are matter ; ^ therefore, the leaven is the chief factor. Yet the other factor cannot be neglected ; it is essential. The active agent fails to express itself, fails to fulfil its purpose if the passive factor be wanting. So if the leaven represented all the force of Divine Love which Our Blessed Lord made available, the three measures of meal represent ‘ the mass of humanity ’ which is to be permeated, energized, and transformed thereby. It is consequently of importance to appraise the nature of the latter before it is brought into touch with the transforming force, and then to note the effects of the contact, and further to recognize and estimate the elements which ‘ the mass of humanity ’ contributes to the corpus permixtum. That these are not negligible must be inferred from the result of the contact of leaven and meal. When these two factors combine, the resultant is not leaven of greater potency than before, nor is it meal in greater quantity, but it is a new substance, a substance which But the terms have acquired an invidious meaning. A Rationalist in this latter sense is one who denies the Supernatural; a Modernist, one who so accommodates himself to so-called modern thought as to deny the facts connected with the Life of Jesus and the earliest generations of Christianity, or at least to evacuate them of signifi¬ cance, and yet to accept the Church and the Christ whom the Church preaches—a most untenable position. One is a product of German Protestantism ; the other a by-product of Latin ecclesiasticism. Karl Drews (or Strauss of an earlier generation) is typical of the one ; Loisy of the other. ^ See Allnatt, Wiiness of St. Matthew, p. 154. INTRODUCTION IX requires further treatment (kneading and cooking), and then becomes fresh breadT Thus the Kingdom of God affects the kingdoms of the world. The resultant is no longer a thing purely and remotely Divine, nor a thing futilely human ; it is a thing transformed by its concealed force from its original dry and unpalatable condition into something wholesome and nourishing. It is not leaven ; it is not meal. It is a tertium quid which the blows of discipline and the furnace of affliction have made to become the nourishment of nations and the food of saints. The ancient fabric of society, the ancient modes of thought, except in so far as they have been absorbed and assimilated through the vital force of the Christian com¬ munities, have vanished.^ On account of its wide diffusion, on account of the immense quantity of material it is-engaged in subduing, this vital force may not seem so powerful in later generations as in the earlier stages of its operation, but it remains ; and further supplies of the same Divine energy are continually forthcoming from the original Source as the Christian Society needs and expresses its ' need. Receptiveness and a kind of yearning, aspiring quality in the human element of the combination are the inevitable conditions of any new accession of spiritual power. The history of the Christian Society discounts all pessimism, and whatever fluctuations of spiritual energy there have been, and may be, the vital force is as strong ^ A figure of speech which Professor Burkitt is said to have employed en passant in discussing the action of the Christian religion upon mankind. 2 There are certain secular survivals, e. g. the framework, and many of the provisions, of Civil Law which are directly inherited from the Impcrialized Republic of Rome. It is, however, well to remember that the Empire of Rome was Christianized generations before its final collapse, and the influence of the new faith is seen in the reformed code of Justinian which humanized and elevated the old Roman Law. X INTRODUCTION as ever, and, through the transformed meal, which we may call the Catholic Church, is preparing itself for greater conquests than those of Primitive Times, preparing to overcome the dark shadows of Africa and the restlessness of what so lately was called ‘ the unchanging East By reason of this vital force, this Divine leaven, the Catholic Church is the one entity which has had a con¬ tinuous, unbroken, and majestic life. It unites us with the days of the Caesars, the glory of Imperial Rome, and the brilliance of the old philosophies. The Christian Society was the heir of the ancient world, and through it has been dispensed to modern civilization what would otherwise have been irretrievably lost, the thought, the law, the custom of Hellas and of Rome. The Church has taken these treasures into her bosom and has redistributed them among the races of mankind, who are but dimly conscious of the source from which their blessings come. Accordingly, it may be of service to attempt an investigation and to estimate the value of those treasures to which the Church fell heir ; to appraise the measure of her indebtedness to the old order at whose hands she suffered so much, and out of whose decay she has risen to such a pitch of world¬ wide pre-eminence. The three measures of meal are second only in importance to the leaven which is brought into contact with them, and the contributions of the Hebrew, the Hellene, and the Roman to the glory of the Church (and indeed those elements which hampered and retarded her growth, or temporarily reduced her spiritual power) should receive the serious consideration of students of religious history. Seldom except by writers who labour to explain away the Divine character of the Church has the human factor in the conjunction of force and material been treated at large. But by the writers to whom I have referred much is made of what they describe as ‘ the acute seculariza- INTRODUCTION XI tion ' ^ of Christianity by the reaction of the material which surrounds it or which it has partially absorbed. Dr. Harnack in his invaluable work, The History oj Dogma, implies that not only the Catholic Church of to-day but even that of the age of Constantine differed fundamentally from the Primitive Christian Society—that even the Primitive Christian Society had degenerated considerably from the teaching of its Founder, and that the only hope for Christianity in the modern world is for it to divest itself of the trappings and accretions of centuries and return naked to the simple doctrine of Jesus, the Galilaean Car¬ penter, who would not recognize it in its present garb.^ Protestantism is a failure because the Reformation was not thorough-going enough ; but Catholicism is the great mistake.^ This is all stated calmly and dispassionately. Harnack and members of his school are not violent, irrational fanatics, but sober, careful historians and theo¬ logians,^ who are as fair-minded as men can be who shut their eyes to, or depreciate, at least implicitly, the supernatural elements in the Church, and are, therefore, in despair as to its power of self-correction, and its ability to diffuse its leaven-working forces in the fabric of modern civilization.^ ^ A favourite term of Harnack’s History of Dogma ; it is also used by Deissmann {Bible Studies, p. 59), whose theory is more radical and less plausible than that of Harnack. The latter regards the writings of the New Testament as the beginnings of the seculariza¬ tion of Christianity. 2 See Harnack, What is Christianity ? The principles enunciated in this little book are also held substantially (I believe) by the great French Liberal theologian, M. Auguste Sabatier. Dr. Hatch in an earlier generation ventilated similar views though with more reserve in (i) The In fluence of Greek Ideas upon the Christian Church (Hibbert Lectures), and (2) The Organization of the Early Christian Churches (Bampton Lectures). ® I have given in the paragraph above what I hope is not an unfair glance at the drift of Dr. Harnack’s argument in The History of Dogma. * These remarks apply only partially to Dr. Hatch. INTRODUCTION xii In the process of his inquiry Dr. Harnack follows down the stream of Christian life and thought, and fails (I think) to prove any genuine loss of continuity.^ The world- environment affects the Church, changes its outer sem¬ blance, to some extent dissipates its power and weakens its appeal, but has never devitalized it, not converted it into something which it was not. In fact the gain has been greater than the loss. The spirit within the Christian Society is sufficient ultimately to override the evil con¬ sequences of association with obstinate or corrupt material and turn to its own uses the treasures of human life, each new element adding something to the richness, and tending towards the perfection and fulfilment of the Divine Purpose. This then forms, albeit hazardous by reason of its com¬ plexity, a fascinating, and in the mind of the writer, a valuable subject of investigation—the extent and the strength of the various elements which surrounded the Church in its early days, which affected and modified its growth, and which contributed something to its organic life. To this aspect of ecclesiastical history the following pages are intended as a slight contribution. As regards the active factor of the combination, the leaven, the ever¬ present, vitalizing, assimilative force, this will be con¬ sidered only as it bears directly on the subject in hand. It is not easy to do this—to keep the two factors distinct. In describing the world-environment before the contact, the task will be comparatively simple. It is after contact that the difficulty arises.^ Where does the human element begin and end ? To what extent has it been influenced by the vital element ? Is the influence of this partially affected humanity, of one kind or another, a permanent 1 This, perhaps, the great German theologian would himself acknowledge—his contention being rather that the stream took a wrong turn, and is dissipating itself, than that it cannot be traced to its source. 2 This difficulty is all the greater since the contact of the two forces results in a fusion. INTRODUCTION Xlll one ? These and other questions which might be put suggest the seriousness of the task. Few things in this world remain unaffected by their environment, and it would be surprising if the Church should prove an exception. The Anglo-Saxon, so called, despite his persistence of type, varies considerably accord¬ ing to his habitat, occupation, and climatic conditions.^ The people with whom he associates modify his racial characteristics. Moreover, the Englishman of the twentieth century differs considerably from his Elizabethan ancestor. The world-spirit changes, the social order changes. The natural, simple, and yet comparatively crude society of Alfred’s day is decidedly unlike that which flourished under the Feudal system, and that again is unlike the conditions of society to which we are accustomed where wealth is the standard of efliciency and the source of power. The change is often gradual and sometimes imperceptible, and while the plutocratic period is at its zenith, the ideals and standards evolved during the Plantagenet regime still have an appreciable influence upon human conduct and men’s manners. To what issue the present struggle between capital and labour is tending no one can con¬ fidently affirm, but we may be sure it will be as different from contemporary conditions as contemporary con¬ ditions are different from what have gone before. Yet the future will contain the life of the present as the present contains that of the past. No age stands solitary or independent, but each is a product of what immediately precedes it, and holds in its womb the germ of what shall be. The modern Englishman is his Tudor prototype, modified and moulded by the forces of four centuries of development. 1 Compare the Yorkshire Dalesman with the Yorkshire weaver, or the American of Anglo-Saxon descent, and the Australian, with the home-keeping Englishman. We might also note the growth of national characteristics which are beginning to differentiate the Anglo-Canadian and the Anglo-American. XIV INTRODUCTION Now this remarkable continuity, coupled with variation in secular history, is accepted as a commonplace and ought to be equally axiomatic in reference to that sphere where spiritual power and human life associate and mingle. Yet it is here that men grow sceptical. Either they refuse to believe that the Spirit of God has voluntarily con¬ ditioned Himself and that He is working to secure a religious end in a way analogous to the processes of the Divine Purpose on the physical plane; or else they deny His Presence in the Church, and argue that everything which has been effected by the Christian religion is the result of what, in lack of a more thoroughly satisfactory term, we must call natural causes.^ But just as it is necessary on the lower plane to postulate a First Cause for all (natural) phenomena, so on the higher plane it is necessary to postulate a spiritual Power for the production of spiritual effects. Christians identify the First Cause and the spiritual Power as God ; God working on different planes which ultimately converge and merge in One Grand Unity—this Unity when it has been fully unfolded and consummated is the final expression of the Divine Love. And just as the First Cause may be traced in all phenomena, so the Spirit of God may be traced in the energies and operations of each succeeding generation of religious life. And as we look and find in Nature and in human life, change, variation, modification, and develop¬ ment ; so it is reasonable to seek for analogous processes in the history of religion, and not less so in the history of that religion which man could not attain to except it had been revealed; for though the One Party to it is constant and unchangeable, the other, man, the receiving party, 1 Gibbon is the classic instance of this type of mind (cf. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, cap. xv, and note ‘ the five causes of the growth of Christianity ’). The type is not extinct but it has grown more humble and less contemptuous. INTRODUCTION XV is motional and variable. The parallel, as far as it is necessary for us to carry it, is exact.^ But the subject is so immense ! The adequate pro¬ secution of it might well be left to a large and learned staff of scholars such as that which has brought the Cam¬ bridge Modern History to a successful issue. Yet the pooling of all the talents, as in the task I have mentioned, possesses some manifest disadvantages. Chief of these I would place a lack of unity of purpose. Personal pre¬ dilections, prejudices, views are sure to appear and be more or less out of harmony one with the other. ‘ Quot homines, tot sententiae.’ Of course it cannot be helped. Yet it does mar the effect of the joint effort. No doubt a great object is attained; the reader possesses in one imposing series expert contemporary judgement upon a long period of history. He does not have to ransack a library to discover such an array of specialism; it is presented to him in fairly comfortable dimensions. Notwithstanding, unless he is a specialist himself of considerable ability, the student is likely to fail in obtaining a sound working know¬ ledge, a comprehensive grasp, of an extended period treated in this encyclopaedic manner. A clearer notion will be acquired, albeit a partial one, from the pages of some magnum opus inscribed by a single pen. And the bias may be more surely guarded against in that case than when it shifts with each fresh specialist. However, such is the flood of new material which recent ^ At first sight the above paragraph may appear to be contra¬ dictory to the main view of the Thesis. It is not so, however ; it rather confirms it. The Source of the vital force is constant and unchangeable—the application of the force necessitates movement, action, and economy. It is limited by the conditions of that upon which it operates. That upon which it operates, relatively lifeless, being without cohesion, without organism, moves and shifts con¬ stantly (as the particles of meal shift when in mass), and is subject to the action of external forces, so that it may be scattered and lost. XVI INTRODUCTION research has unearthed, that he would be a bold man indeed who would attempt single-handed a task such as Edward Gibbon set himself towards the close of the eighteenth century. Even then, and for one of his great gifts and amazing industry, the task was stupendous. To-day it would be impossible. It is true that Milman and de Pressense in the last generation each accomplished labours which though narrower in range may fairly be compared to that of Gibbon; and Dr. Harnack in our own times, in a field of inquiry narrower still, may be said to have rivalled the eighteenth-century historian, for though he voluntarily limited his studies, he prosecuted them with greater intensity and reached results that are more valuable to the modern inquirer than those of Gibbon.^ That the field of investigation which I have selected will be productive of much fruit I dare not say. ‘ Solvitur ambulando.’ In an attempt to make it fruitful I must place limitations on the subject and confine myself within them. First of all, in a very wide sense the subject may be described as (i) the mass of humanity before contact with the vital force, (2) the change which follows upon the contact. Does the course of development lead us to suppose that the mass diminishes the vital force in any way ? Does this force vanish, become dissipated, or corrupt ? Does it, as it were, resign its efforts in the face of material which is so obstinate in nature, or so great in quantity, that it despairs of effecting a complete transformation, and is content with a partial one ? Or, to put the question in still another form, has the mass of humanity obtained greater control than was intended in the original design, and has there come about a sort of compromise between * Not because of his superior merit, but because of his better position, in a chronological sense, and because of his concentration upon one particular aspect of history. INTRODUCTION xvii the two factors of the contact in such a way that the one is satisfied with a lesser victory, and the other rescues itself from complete subjection ? No believer in the Divine character of the religion founded by Christ could hesitate to deliver a strong negative to these questions when presented in their most drastic form. He could not, for instance, allow it to be understood that the Divine Purpose had been frustrated even partially, or that the Holy Spirit had come to a working accommodation with the world. His belief in the Divine Guidance of the Church would prevent him from assenting to the view that the vitality of Christendom had either vanished, or been corrupted, or diverted from its original aim. On the other hand, as a student of the course of Christian development he might give, and I think would be justified in giving, a qualified affirmative to the question, has the mass diminished the vital force in any way ? Or again, has the vital force become dissipated ? But he would hasten to add that this diminution, or dissipation, was relative rather than absolute ; at the worst, temporary in its character, and could not affect the ultimate result—that the nature of things would indubitably lead one to expect that a certain amount of vital force expended upon a large mass of material, or a more impregnable material, would work more slowly than when the material was less in quantity, and more amenable to influence. Moreover, the trend of history seems to bear out our apologist’s con¬ tention that the influence of the vital force has been diminished only relatively and temporarily. Periods of reformation and revival of spiritual life mark the stages of religious development, and point* to the permanent pre¬ sence of the vital force, engaged successfully in its leavening processes, absorbing and transforming the material of its environment—changing the dry meal of human nature into the fresh bread of a divinely moved mankind. Times b XVlll INTRODUCTION of deterioration, or what may seem deterioration to the casual observer, soon or late give place to greater spiritual activity, an accelerated assimilation of material, and the Kingdom of God is recognized as being among men : on other occasions it ‘ cometh not with observation But the vital force is never at rest, is always moving, always absorbing ; it is irresistible and unconquerable. History proves it to be so. However, this subject must be treated representatively and on, comparatively speaking, a small scale. Let us consider the mass of humanity as the vital force first approached it. All the elements which compose human nature were represented in the contact of the Spirit of God with the peoples of the Roman Empire. And so that contact with its consequences may be regarded as typical of later contacts with their consequences. Indeed the first contact exhibited on its human side more complexity and variation than any which succeeded it down to this age, when East and West brought face to face bid fair to repeat on a larger field the history of the early centuries. Accord¬ ingly, if we can appraise the conditions which confronted the religion of Christ in the period of its external weakness and when it possessed no adventitious aids, conditions which may have hindered but certainly never halted its onward march, we have something available to explain its later successes, and also something to guide us in meeting a situation which though greater in bulk is no greater in difficulty than that with which apostles, martyrs, and apologists grappled in the first and second centuries of our era. The power and majesty of Rome held together in a firm but external bond a most heterogeneous collection of races. But the races which counted, the races which contributed anything of moment to the life of the Empire may be easily distinguished from the rest, and it is these races INTRODUCTION XIX which were prominent in the contact with the vital force, and left the deepest impress upon the resultant. They were the Hebrew, the Hellenic, and the Latin races. The Teuton was on the fringe of the Empire and of civilization—the Celt of Britain or of Gaul was more, or less, an understudy of the Latin ; Spain was thoroughly Romanized ; Africa was Latin with a difference, which is interesting, but not sufficient to be regarded as separately typical. From Cyrene to the Euphrates the predominant influence was Greek ; other peoples were semi-barbaric and entirely local in their effectiveness. But throughout the Empire, stronger indeed numerically and influentially in the East, yet dis¬ persed generally about the Mediterranean Basin, dwelt the Jews, a race of marked individuality whose rigid con¬ victions and proud aloofness aroused general interest, and a degree of antagonism ; the Jew might be hated, and in a sense despised, but he could not be ignored. Hebrew, Greek, and Latin—these were the three measures of meal. One does not know how far Our Lord’s similitude of the leaven was intended to be applied to the actual and almost immediate situation the Kingdom was about to face. The tendency to minimize and depreciate the significance of the Saviour’s utterances in view of the fashionable theories of the day is no new phenomenon and should cause no panic.^ Wellhausen, Schweitzer, and Drews are able and acute men of learning whose labours are entitled to respect, but anything like servile obeisance to them is to be strongly deprecated. The evidence is before us as it is before them, and no one outside of Germany is intellectually bound to the theory that the Universities of the Fatherland possess a monopoly of ability to arrive at just conclusions from the evidence.^ Be that as it may, it appears to the writer ‘ Burkitt, Gospel History and its Transmission, pp. 194-9, as to the genuineness of the Parables and Sayings of Our Lord. 2 Written a. d. 1917. b 2 XX INTRODUCTION to be somewhat significant that Our Lord’s similitude should represent exactly the course of the leavening process which was imminent. This is not a matter of fancy but of historical fact. The Hebrew race first felt the contact, and the influence spread through it to the Hellene and the Latin. Here, then, are the three elements in the ancient civilization which are to be reckoned with, which gave to it its character. Syrian and Phrygian, Copt and Berber, Gaul and Teuton present many interesting racial characteristics, but they leave no distinctive and widely spread impression upon the culture of the Empire unless indeed their contributions are made available by the acquisi¬ tive, moulding, and applying energy of one or other of these three great elements of the old Graeco-Roman world; ^ the Hebrew, the Hellene, and the Latin re¬ ceived of course much more than they contributed, but still they did contribute very much to the organic life of the dry meal which had been touched by the Spirit of God. It will, however, be necessary to limit the subject even further in an endeavour to bring about an adequate treat- ^ e. g, the Mystery Cults of Hellas are supposed by many to be of Asiatic origin. Yet they flourished on Greek soil. They were intellectualized and perhaps spiritualized by Hellenic genius, and, thus transformed, to some extent satisfied the yearning of the Greek soul which was left cold and unimpressed by the native deities of official civic worship. The worship of Isis became fashionable in Caesarian Rome, and exercised a great influence—not altogether a wholesome one—within certain restricted limits. Had these rites and the religious ideas connected with them remained on their native soil (Phrygia, Egypt, &c.) they -would have been uninfluential, but their assimilation by the representative races (as mentioned in the text) caused them to be widely effective. One of the most flourishing of these cults, that of Mithra, came originally from Persia, but spread with astonishing rapidity through the Empire, appealing particularly to the military classes. Both theologically and morally it was one of the most respectable of the rivals of Christianity. INTRODUCTION XXI ment of it. Let us mark the influence of the Hebrew so far as it is clearly defined and distinguishable. As a vigorous and self-assertive element in the Church it is conspicuous in the first century, rapidly waning towards its close. It will, perhaps, be helpful to discuss this predominance and the subsequent decline of Hebraism to the vanishing- point,^ and to close this part of the subject with some comments upon the permanent contribution of the Hebrew to the Church of Christ, a contribution which is quite apart from and above, in its effectiveness and in its spiritual beauty immeasurably above, his temporary activity as an ecclesiastical political force. The influence of the Hellene was a growing one and a complex one ; from the second generation of Chris¬ tianity it extended on to the period of the Western Empire’s collapse; afterwards it more and more restricted itself to the surviving, and more thoroughly Hellenized portion of the Empire, and ceased to exert a living influence upon the vigorous West which had been regenerated by new blood from beyond the Danube and the Rhine. Since then the Orthodox Church has remained practically as it was in the sixth century, active enough in the realm of missionary effort, and in the maintenance of a conservative form of Christianity, but no longer rich in speculative thought, and standing aloof from the general life of Christen¬ dom. Even so, the subject is far too large for one poorly equipped student to essay, and on this ground I voluntarily confine myself to the period marked, let us say, by St. Ignatius on one side and by St. Athanasius on the other. When the latter personage is reached Hellenic influence has claimed its own lofty place in Christian life and thought, and further Hellenic progress is to be expected and cannot be stayed. Moreover, from that period also the causes of ^ i. e. as a distiiictive factor in the life of the Church. XXll INTRODUCTION the impending cessation of living Hellenic influence can be estimated. The last great factor is then to be considered. In some respects it is the most impressive of them all. Certainly the Latin influence is more clearly marked than that of the other two. It is that of the three which contributes most to the visibility of the religion of Christ. It is an influence exerted along practical lines ; an influence devoted to the problems of organization and discipline. The rela¬ tions of the individual Christian to the community—the relations of various Christian communities to one another— the seat of authority in Christ’s Church Militant here in earth, these are the pre-occupations of the Latin element. Not exclusively so, of course, but so predominant that they may be said to be characteristic of its genius. For obvious reasons it is what we should expect. The Jew had his ideas of law and order, but they were narrow and rigid ; the Greek felt the need of co-ordination and sub¬ ordination, but his interests were elsewhere, and whatever practical instincts he possessed were in favour of loose rather than tight administration. But the Roman possessed a genius for government which manifested itself in steer¬ ing a middle course between rigidity and slackness, in adapting means to ends, in constructing a huge and majestic edifice which abides till this day, albeit with its outer courts in ruins and its masonry scarred and dis¬ figured, yet still commanding the loving devotion of multitudes, and the admiration, in some respects grudging, of all Christendom. While the effect of the vitalizing force upon Hebrew, Hellene, and Latin cannot be gainsaid even by those who minimize and depreciate it, that effect reaches down to our own day and spreads over a far larger portion of the earth’s surface than in the period of its most conspicuous success in the first three centuries; nevertheless the INTRODUCTION XXlll influence of the material upon the compound is also very great and worthy of careful observation. Had the material been less rigid, or less volatile, or less heavy in any of its three divisions, how different would have been the history of the Christian religion ! On the other hand, if any of these three factors had opposed more instead of less of these resistant qualities, the result would again be different. The compound is certain to be modified by the material of which it is formed. The vital force can give life to the harshest material, as it gives life to the sweetest and most assimilative, but it will be a different kind of life. The bread which is produced by leaven brought into contact with the finest wheat flour is most dissimilar from that produced by a contact of the same with rye. Both may be good of their kind, but they are different. Both may be bad of their kind, the result of poor quality and unskilful handling, but they are bad each in its own way. However, it is waste of time to discuss what might have happened when we are seeking to find out what did happen. What did happen is this : the Christian Church underwent a remarkable development, and a decided modification, from her close contact with the ancient civilization, though all the time she was engaged in deadly war with it, and was destined to survive it. She absorbed from the society around her much of current thought and common custom. Indeed, a great deal which is derived from her early environment clings to her still, and may ever do so. The training and discipline of life are secondary only to the life itself. And the Spirit of God dwells in the Church not to destroy its human element, but to sanctify it. In accordance with this principle the Church absorbed from Judaism the racial reverence for holy things, its view of the sacredness of the Old Testament, some valuable ideas as to the conduct of worship, sacerdotal as connected with the Temple, ministerial as associated with the Synagogue ; XXIV INTRODUCTION and above all a consciousness of sin, a craving for reconcilia¬ tion with a Holy God which, although it is shared in by all races and all individuals who possess religious instincts, was a marked characteristic of the Hebrew. Likewise Greek philosophy seized upon the simple Christian faith and created a theology. This is of course by no means the only Hellenic contribution, but it is the most conspicuous one. Finally the Imperial polity and the Roman genius for government became the pattern, and supplied the practical talents, for the development of ecclesiastical organization. Whether these and other results of contact with the world of the early generations of Christian history are to be deprecated, or the reverse, is a subject of much interest, and offers scope for a wide divergence of opinion. For the present it may suffice to say that they occurred, that they were in some measure inevitable. As regards the results specifically referred to above, I think it is safe to say that they were indispensable to the progress of the Church, and perhaps, humanly speaking, to her continued existence. It was necessary that a certain disposition of the heart should be exhibited by the Christian community towards the Holy Father who had outpoured the treasures of his love upon mankind. To Christians of the present day it should be a matter of devout thankfulness that the Hebrew with his natural capacity for religion was at hand to supply it. It was impossible that a Revelation should be given and that men should not reflect upon its contents—that the holy mysteries should be exhibited and men refrain from speculation. We may be thankful also that the race of the most acute mental powers which the world has ever known devoted its energies to thinking out the faith. Furthermore, since the Christian religion was concerned not only in developing spiritual intuitions, and quickening intellectual life, but in shaping conduct and in moulding INTRODUCTION XXV character ; since she was engaged in teaching men how to live as individual members of One Body, we may rejoice that the Latin was privileged, above all others, to con¬ tribute the gift of order, and evolve a system of discipline based on practical common sense. Had the Hebrew influence remained paramount in the Christian Church, it may be fairly conjectured that it would never have risen to its Catholic destiny. Those Christian communities which clung faithfully to Jewish traditions contributed least to the common treasure of the Church, and dwindled gradually from obscurity into extinction. Had the Hellenic influence completely over¬ whelmed the others,^ the Church might have drifted into abstract speculation, lost its spiritual energy and its moral vigour, exerted a waning control upon the degenerat¬ ing populations of the Empire, and finally sunk altogether beneath the weight of the virile nations of the North. Certainly the vital force would have retained its power, but within painfully restricted lines and hindered by the barriers of culture and civilization from leavening the whole lump. On the other hand it is easy to appreciate 1 There was a considerable Greek population in Rome itself, and the Church of the Imperial City remained Greek-speaking for several generations. It was, however, only when it became preponderatingly Latin that it began in any decided way to exhibit its peculiar charac¬ teristics and exert its peculiar influence. In Sicily, Southern Italy, and along the Rhone Valley, Hellenic elements must have affected the Church, but only temporarily. Elsewhere in the West Greek influence was negligible. The Jew also was numerically important in every city of large population, but Semitic influences were never strong in the West. When the Jew was converted he became absorbed in the Gentile Christian community. It is only in the East that the Jewish influence is impressive, and even there in a diminishing degree. (In regard to Greek influence in Southern Gaul, sec the interest¬ ing comments of Mommsen, Provinces oj the Rom. Emp., vol. i, cap. hi, pp. 78-9 ; and, for the Jew in the West, see ib., vol. ii, cap. xi, pp. 171-4.) XXVI INTRODUCTION the effects of predominant Latinism. Western Europe has experienced them for centuries, and is still largely governed by them. Even the Teutonic and semi-Teutonic races which are formally separated from the Papal system are in great measure controlled by ideas and instincts which have become habitual, but which have been imposed upon them by the Latin genius which, deprived of its natural scope in the secular world, threw all its energies into the Church, and made the City of the Seven Hills the spiritual centre of Western Christendom, and claims both East and West. No doubt this was inevitable ; the Latin element was the only one in the West which counted for much, the only one which united to the vital force could absorb and transform the rude barbaric material of the North and North-west. Probably the trans-Rhenane and trans- Danubian savage would have remained unaffected by Hellenic culture and Hebrew piety. The stern realism, the practicality, the stress upon conduct, the power of organization and discipline were doubtless the characteris¬ tics of the Church, as it presented itself to him, which appealed most strongly to Goth or Frank or Saxon. Certainly, child as he was in culture, secular and religious alike, it was a presentation of religion which was more effective than any other. But the writer feels strongly that Western Christianity, whether of the quasi-Teutonic or Roman type, will never produce its noblest fruits until it has submitted to association with materials of which the Hebraic and Hellenic are representative.^ It is there¬ fore a matter of profound thankfulness, in the writer’s view, that among all the Christian communities of the 1 Doubtless the abandonment by the Eastern Church of its policy of ‘ splendid isolation ’ (when it comes) will give to the rest of Christendom much of what it needs. This contingency may be nearer than most of us imagine. Hindustan evangelized and sanctified will also assuredly add to the glory of the Bride of Christ. Note written a.d. 1917. INTRODUCTION XXVll West the Anglican Communion at least has made its appeal to an undivided Christendom where the three measures of meal have had in the past, and will have again in God’s own time, freedom of interplay. The high hopes and Catholic instincts which this principle has kept alive and fostered have perhaps more than anything else pre¬ vented the Church of England, and those bodies in communion with her, from lapsing into self-centred pro¬ vincialism. ^ But of course it is the vital force, round which gathers all that is essential to the Church, which has secured for it continuous and expanding life. In other words, it is the Spirit of God controlling its energies and operations which has preserved the Church from absorbing more of the world elements than it could, at least ultimately, assimilate. It is to be observed, however, that the contact of the vital force with the various elements of humanity has produced disturbance and upheaval, that the contact of one human element with the other, when each has been affected by the vital force, also tends to unsettlement as long as the elements remain discordant. The vital force, of course, operates towards final concord, but in the mean¬ time it is war. It has always been so : it is so now. In accordance with this principle we find that all through her history the Christian Society has endured reactions. At every crisis there have arisen those who have affirmed that the civitas Dei is losing her original character and her pristine purity, and is in danger of becoming merely a phase of civitas Mundi. And these aspirations towards ^ One hears much of Anglican insularity, but I do not think the charge is fairly or logically urged. The circumstances of the Ecclesia Anglicana are in some degree insular, but are less so than in the past, and this accidental insularity is diminishing with every genera¬ tion ; its spirit and its mind are in the best sense Catholic. Of course there are narrow and provincial elements in every part of the Body of Christ. XXVlll INTRODUCTION purer life, doctrine, or polity, differing markedly from one another in aim have generally been conservative, opposed to the Zeitgeist, and looking back to the simpler, pre¬ sumably purer, condition of former generations^ The Judaizers of St. Paul’s day, the Montanists of the second century, the Arians of -the fourth ; factionists, schismatics, heretics, were all more or less opposed to the principle of development and the catholicizing of the Church, endea¬ vouring to delay her progress towards that consummation when the kingdoms of this world shall become the Kingdom of God and His Christ. Moreover, it is worthy of belief that these reactions are essential to the health of the spiritual Body, and that they are, at least in the present dispensation, part of the Divine Economy. Doubtless this would be included in the mind of Our Blessed Lord when he said : ‘ I came not to send peace [on earth], but a sword.’ ^ The Church on earth is verily the Church Militant, and the Contentio Veritatis is not only with external enemies but with convinced opponents of the very household of faith. Nor must it be hastily assumed that the cause of truth is invariably and completely with the progressives : indeed the con¬ servative determination to stand fast in the old paths and maintain historical convictions, and even prejudices, is often justified. Sometimes there is danger of marching too fast with the times ; sometimes there is danger of taking the wrong turning. Earnest and vigorous dis¬ putation, apart from the frequently attendant acerbities thereof, is a sound and wholesome phenomenon. It tends to the clarifying of ideas, the removing of misconceptions, ^ Not of course consciously hostile to the fulfilment of this destiny on the part of the Church, but at variance with the contemporary currents of thought and action supposedly moving in this direction, and objecting vigorously to the means and manner of the efforts made towards it. '■* Matt. X. 34. INTRODUCTION XXIX to the edification of the whole Society. The Spirit of the Lord is the Spirit of Liberty, ^ and where there is free discussion, Truth must ultimately prevail. In spite of the by-products of uncharitableness, malice, and personal bitterness too often engendered during the progress of a great religious controversy, the Body of Christ must ultimately gain in the jar of the various elements com¬ posing it. The stress and strain are symptoms of the leavening process, and it is well that there are elements in the mass which resist, for instance, over-complexity in theology, vagueness in religion, or laxity in morals. There is peril also of turning theology into philosophy, and religion into ceremonialism, and it is well there should be outspoken criticism and resistance. Hence it comes about that the Holy Spirit has endowed the Church with a power of resistance to innovation both in the sphere of thought and practice. To some men He has given the power to stand apart from the general current of their day, and has entrusted them with the office of acting as a wholesome corrective to the world-tendencies in the Body of Christ. Through the witness of such men as Tertullian the Church is purer and sounder than it would otherwise have been. The Puritan is essential to the health of the Church, he is most susceptible to the sterner monitions of the Spirit, he brings home to the conscience of con¬ temporary churchmen standards of Christian conduct which were slipping from his grasp. So also the Nova- tianist and the Donatist did good service. However fanatical, ignorant, bigoted, and contentious such sectaries were, they called attention to the importance of discipline and high spirituality in the Christian Family. In the sphere of theological speculation even the execrated Arius was useful in helping the Church to maintain the analogy of the faith, and provided the occasion and the material ‘ Cf. 2 Cor, iii. 17. XXX INTRODUCTION for the construction of a cautious, well-weighed statement of doctrine which has become the Symbol of the Catholic Faith in all succeeding generations. At least we can be grateful to the Arian controversy for bringing forth Athanasius. If the elements which are about to compose, ’or which compose, the Church were static, the problem would be much easier of solution. In that case we should be able to say, here are elements without life ; as soon as the vital force comes into touch with them and imparts to them its own character, the operation will be complete and definite : or, here are elements vitalized and transmuted by the vital force ; they have lost their old character of lifelessness and passivity, and have become vessels and transmitters charged with heavenly, spiritual vigour. But the matter is not so simple. The human elements are not purely static. There is life and movement and fitful progress even in unregenerate mankind. On the other hand, there is a power of,resistance, an innate stubborn¬ ness in human nature, presenting itself in different forms according to racial disposition—made more complex still where there is a blending of races—which retards the assimilating processes after the contact with the vital force has been effected. Since these are the conditions of the problem the student is face to face with much that is baffling and much that is insoluble. A devotee of the exact sciences may always expect a definite result from his inquiries and his endea¬ vours. A thing is, or is not : certain chemical forces fuse, or do not fuse. But human nature is variable and un¬ certain : on one side it is merely animal, on the other it reaches to the stars. This mingling of earth and heaven makes the study of man not only fascinating but extremely difficult, even though it should be assumed that the present state of humanity is a permanent one. But since man INTRODUCTION xxxi possesses aspirations, and displays potentialities and furthermore believes that he is impelled by mighty spiritual forces external ^ to himself, the problem admits still less of an exact and mathematically satisfactory solution. For ‘ who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward ? ’ ^ Yet the man with the spirit of the true historian, even while he is delving in the records of the past, is conscious of this great spiritual trend towards some far-off divine event, conscious also of a trend in the opposite direction, conscious in fact that he is in the presence of inexplicable mysteries which hinder him from reaching easy con¬ clusions and save him from shallow dogmatism. He is content if he can establish principles, trace developments, and reach approximations. For the key of absolute know¬ ledge is not in his hands—infallibility is not the possession of any son of man, though scientific observation has made him tolerably certain of himself within a restricted area of what is called the world of Nature. Therefore he is perforce content with relative truth in reference to these subjects of thought and investigation which lie between earth and heaven, of which man, considered individually, or in the mass, may be regarded as the type. That absolute knowledge of these and even higher mysteries will some day be vouchsafed to us there is every ground to hope.^ Meanwhile, it is certainly profitable for us to exercise our minds and illuminate our spirits by such investigations. Indeed, as it is the Will of God that only those who strive after true knowledge ^ shall ever reach it, and since a study ^ External until he has become impregnated with them. Con¬ victions of the soul indicated above have ever been the possession of the higher spirits among men. 2 Eccles. iii. 21. 2 Serious efforts to reach it may be the conditions of its attain¬ ment. * Not the ypwais of mere intellectual endeavour, but that which is sought through faith, and which is the reward of those who strive xxxii INTRODUCTION like that of human history, especially when it deals with the subject in its spiritual aspects, may be regarded as contributing in a subordinate way to such a consummation, the writer trusts that Divine help may be extended to him to arrive at some tentative conclusions which will be suggestive and stimulating to others who may be enabled to carry on investigation towards a surer and safer anchorage. after communion with God. Eipijrai yap, tw ^xovti irpooTeOrjaeTai, Ty fiev marei rj yvwffis, rp 5t yvwaei 77 ayairrj, rp ayavrj 5e rj KXrjpovopiia. {Cl. Alex. Strom., vii. 10.) THREE MEASURES OE MEAL PART I THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW CHAPTER I THE RELIGIOUS GENIUS OF ISRAEL For many generations the Hebrew race possessed a deep and vigorous, if restricted, spiritual life which was exalted by Promise and controlled by Law. That Promise was more a characteristic of this spiritual life than Law is, a fact which the thoughtful student of the Hebrew writings may gather for himself, but should he require confirmation of his belief he will find it in two letters of a late date. One is addressed to certain communities of Galatia in Asia Minor which had eagerly accepted the writer’s teaching and then wavered from it : ^ the other is directed to a com¬ munity in Rome which had adopted the general faith of the author but had not yet come into personal touch with him, at least collectively. It was this ' Hebrew of Hebrews ’ ^ who fastened upon the essential thing in Judaism and exhibited its relation to the richer, fuller faith he himself had come to profess. Nevertheless, ' the Law is holy and the commandment holy and righteous and good. ‘ What then is the Law ? It was added because of transgressions, till the seed should ^ Cf. art., ‘ Region of Galatia William Ramsay, Diet, of Bible, vol. ii, pp. 89-93. “ Phil, iii. 5 (R.V.). “ Rom. V!i. 12 (R.V.). U 2 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW come to whom the promise had been made.’ ^ Here is stated for us in the texts directly quoted and in the refer¬ ences given below the character and function of the Jewish Law and its relation to the Promise.^ Evidently it was the great safeguard of the potential recipient of the Promise. It preserved the race of Promise from the contaminating influences of peoples of a higher material civilization but of lower morality and of inferior religion. It is idle to assert that Israel remained unaffected by the many nations with whom in the long course of her history she came in contact. The evidences of foreign influence are many and various, and cover her whole career. On the other hand her powers of resistance were very great indeed, and are to be attributed not only to the high hopes which were fostered, stimulated, and enlarged by a long succession of prophetic teachers, but to a complete system of enactments and ordinances which gave spiritual signifi¬ cance to the whole life of the people. Thus were the members of this ancient race taught that they belonged in a peculiar sense to their God. The observance of the Law became the distinctive mark of the Hebrew. Prophecy might wax and wane, or for long periods disappeared entirely, but the Law remained, and came to be regarded as fixed and unalterable down to its very minutiae. It also grew into a barrier upon which the Hebrew prided himself. And that which was manifestly founded to prevent the flow of contamination from one side was made an obstacle to prevent the flow of charity from the other. It is very sad, but very human. That the seed of Abraham possessed this self-sufficiency (I use the term in its scientific and not in its popular and depreciatory sense) in the early stages of its history cannot 1 Gal. iii. 19 (R.V.). - The reader is referred to Rom. i. i8-v. 21, and the main section of Galatians (iii-v. i). RELIGIOUS GENIUS OE ISRAEL 3 be maintained. It was clearly a gradual growth. We are not here concerned with questions of literary or historical criticism, but I believe that scholars of all schools would unite in agreeing that the Israelitish race was brought as a whole very gradually to the attitude of exclusiveness which was so marked a feature in the beginning of the Christian era. Even as the spiritual leaders of the nation became conscious of the necessity of maintaining a separatist policy there were many and continual deflexions from it on the part of kings, courtiers, intellectuals, and secu¬ larists generally. And the spiritual leaders, while full of warning as to the dangers of moral pollution and the degeneration of faith, occasioned by mingling with the heathen and learning their works, yet have their prophetic vision filled with the glory of the time when the danger shall be removed and the barrier be no longer needed, a time when even the beasts of the field shall lay aside their internecine warfare and dwell peacefully together in the Messianic kingdom. The more rigid exclusiveness was, ¥ I believe, a post-exilic product, and has been on the whole the prevailing attitude of orthodox Judaism from the time of Ezra until the present day.^ But the spiritual powers and gifts which sprang from the Promise, and lay conserved within the barriers of the Law as in a reservoir, gave to Judaism its vitality and mean¬ ing, and perennially freshened and purified it, until Promise issued forth in Fulfilment, and the reservoir of Jewish legalism was no longer necessary. When we ask ourselves how it came about that a single race, and that by no means a great or influential one, attained such a high spiritual standard and such moral fixity, there can be no answer thoroughly satisfying unless we accept the solution offered by the people themselves, 1 Ottley, History of Hebrews, p. 246. For connexion with legalism, see Oesterley, Books of the Apocrypha, pp. 121-3 and 262-6. B 2 4 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW developed and expounded in their sacred writings, that it was revealed to them by their God. The scientific historical treatment of the records of ancient races leads us to expect in the literary remains of the Hebrews a certain child-like simplicity of thought and expression, some chronological looseness, freedom of scruples in regard to authorship, and above all a habit of clothing great, mysterious, and spiritual conceptions of things in vivid, concrete language. And we find them. But such characteristics do not invalidate these records ; they simply testify that they belong to a primitive age. From an historical point of view they enhance their value ; from a literary, they tend to make them a more fascinating study. And in the case of the Hebrew people the wonderful unity of purpose and aim underlying the great variety of their sacred literature, which in com¬ position and collection extends over many centuries,^ points to a single source of revelation. Not anywhere else in ancient or modern times do we find the claim to be the record of the W ill and Purpose of God more solemnly and consistently set forth than in these writings. Quite apart from problems of authenticity and chronology it seems impossible to doubt the genuineness of these sacred words —that is to doubt their transparent sincerity, their noble and intense faith. This is exhibited alike in simple narra¬ tive, in impassioned oratory, and in the devout outpouring of the Hebrew lyric. Such a literature stands by itself, and to many candid minds of the highest intellectual order, the creative power, the spiritual force, the impres¬ sion of profound veracity which it induces in the reader, are to be accounted for only on one hypothesis, which is, that the writings convey, through human media it is true, but still convey, a revelation from God. But for my purpose it is not necessary to claim even so ^ Westcott, Bible in the Church, introd.; also Sanday, Inspiration, pp. 226-53. RELIGIOUS GENIUS OF ISRAEL 5 much as this. It is generally conceded that by some means or other the Hebrev/ race had acquired in its long and eventful history a set of religious ideas which in vigour, intensity, and definiteness surpassed the ideas of a similar kind among neighbouring peoples. Furthermore these religious ideas were not diffused over a number of objects but converged, or rather were concentrated upon, One Object. For other races, every high hill, every fountain, every grove held its own divinity ; for the Hebrew, the works of creation, hill, grove, and fountain, the great sea, and the starry firmament proclaimed, not a multitude of divinities, but one God. Nor was this God worshipped merely as the Creator, the Governor, the presiding genius of natural phenomena, but as the Director, Shepherd, and Judge of the souls of men. He spoke not only in the forces of the material universe but in the still small Voice which was appropriate to influence the spirit and conscience of man. The Hebrew conception of God was, therefore, that He was a Moral Being, as well as a Being of Might. Not merely was he a God of thunder and earthquake to be propitiated as the source of physical discomfort and calamity, but as the proper Object of sacrifice and prayer since he was a Good God, a Just God, a God who sought His Will to be obeyed, not in an arbitrary way, but accord¬ ing to the principle of His Being. As a Righteous God, He exacted righteousness from His servants. In addition to these ideas of God as being Mighty, Wise, and Holy (for Wisdom is comprehended among the attri¬ butes of Him Who creates, orders, and controls the universe, and Holiness in Him Who moves the spirit of man to righteousness and punishes them for wrong-doing) there is the conception of God as being Loving. Time and again the Fatherhood, and, issuing therefrom, the loving-kind¬ ness of Yahweh are described. This Fatherhood is, how¬ ever, generally limited and circumscribed to Yahweh's 6 THE FIRST MEASURE: THE HEBREW dealings with His Chosen People. But the idea of God blessing all the nations of the earth occurs very early in the sacred records, and whatever the time of the com¬ pilation of these documents, its position in the accounts of patriarchal life shows that such a catholic conception was regarded as rather fundamental, standing as it does among the basic promises of a great and noble destiny for the Seed of Abraham. At the stage in history when Jesus of Nazareth appeared, Israel was the typical monotheistic race—indeed the sole monotheistic race. Apparently there had been much sympathy between the Persian and the Hebrew in the days of their association.^ And it has been contended that Judaism incorporated many Persian conceptions into their religion. This may be so, but it is certain that this influence did not extend to fundamentals. The religion of Persia was profoundly dualistic.^ It is the root idea of the system of Zarathustra. The Hebrew religion is, on the other hand, monotheistic, and while the problem of evil dis¬ turbed the sages and saints of Israel, as it has ever disturbed the reflections of thinking men, the Dualism of their Persian masters was never accepted as a solution, though the speculations of the Orient probably attracted them and helped to develop their conceptions of the powers of dark¬ ness and the reality of the Unseen Adversary. But the Hebrew strength lay not in speculation but in intuition. On grounds beyond reason they had accepted Yahweh. Speculation upon the facts which they believed to have ^ The enthusiasm of deutero-Isaiah in reference to the great deliverer, Cyrus, seems on the whole justified by subsequent events. The Persians were the most humane and most sympathetic of all Israel's Gentile rulers. See Isa. xl-xlviii, esp. xliv. 28-xlv. 7 ; also Driver, Introduct. Lit. O. T., pp. 230-3 (8th edition). 2 See art. ‘ Zoroaster’ (Geldner), Encyc. Brit., vol. xxiv, pp. 820 fi. (9th edition). For a modification of this view, see Mozley, The Divine Aspect uf History, pp. 82 ff. RELIGIOUS GENIUS OF ISRAEL 7 been revealed to them was an after-thought, and a com¬ paratively late development, and when speculation arrived it was kept strictly within monotheistic limits. So there was no other monotheistic nation in the age with which we are dealing. There were indeed individual thinkers and philosophers among the Gentile races who had reached a speculative conclusion that behind all changing phenomena there was One Original Essence, or Sublime First Principle of things. Yet the Hebrews were the only people among whom a belief in one God was at once so intense and so universally accepted ; so much of a religion, so little of a theory. With them indeed it was really a passion. It was interwoven with their love of race, with all their hopes and yearnings.' Their past glories were associated with Yahweh ; their miseries and national degradation were the direct outcome of disobedience to Him. When the heroism of Maccabee,^ the statecraft of Asmonean,^ secured for them some measure of inde¬ pendence and some national revival, it was the favour of God again visiting His people.^ When later on petty tyrants of the Herodian type, or venal Roman Procurators, pressed sore upon them, it was felt that Yahweh would yet show His Face, would yet justify His Chosen before the cruel, scoffing world, and the mysterious Figure fore¬ shadowed by prophet and by psalm would yet come to lead the sons of Israel to victory, to triumph, and to peace. Monotheism was, then, the leading characteristic of the Jewish people at the period which is of chief importance to the subject in hand. It was the fountain-head of their 1 Cf. esp. I Macc. iii. 1-9. As exemplified by John Hyrcanus (130 b.c.). The name Asmonean is equivalent to Maccabean, but used generally to describe the family in its dynastic (and later) stage ; cf. also Fair- weather, Background of the Gospels, pp. 140 ff. ^ The rigorists, however, regarded the political ambitions of the Asmoneans with suspicion. 8 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW virtues, and the struggle to maintain it was also the cause of their defeats since a tenacious absorption in one great idea, even the greatest of all, develops an ill balanced and one-sided nature; especially is this the case when the great, idea is imperfectly apprehended, misinterpreted, or mis¬ applied. The utterances of the prophets were full of power, full of insight, full of moral and spiritual glow, but fitful and fragmentary. They stimulated and suggested, but it was not their part to interpret or apply. The result of the prophetic dispensation was that it left the Hebrew people with a firm and unshakable confidence in the One God, but with many of the connotations undiscovered which such a faith implies. When the days of prophetic leadership were gone and there was no longer any open vision, the task of interpretation and application fell into the hands of men who were partially unfitted for these functions. It was not that they lacked piety or intelli¬ gence ; they lacked the spiritual penetration to gauge the sense of spiritual declarations. It seems a pity that the seed to whom the promises were made failed to realize their full meaning, or their bearing. But looking backward we can see that it was better so ; we can ‘ justify the ways of God to men For suppose the Jewish race as a whole had been responsive in the day of fulfilment, Jesus of Nazareth would have been a national hero, and Chris¬ tianity a racial religion. To make Christ acceptable to the world. He is rejected of His own ; to make the Church of Christ Catholic, it is cut off from its source. Another marked feature of the Hebrew race was its reverence for the writings in which its knowledge of Yahweh was enshrined. Other peoples had their sacred literature. The Epics of the Heroic Age were in a sense, what they have been often called, the Bible of the Hellenes, but it can, I think, be reasonably inferred that tlie cultivated ^ Milton, Paradise Lost, Prologue (Bk. I). RELIGIOUS GENIUS OF ISRAEL 9 Athenian of the period of Pericles would solemnly quote the Homeric poems with his tongue in his cheek so far as their moral and spiritual lessons were concerned, and surely felt no reverence for gods and goddesses whose gallantries rivalled those of the loose livers of his own timed The philosophers quarrelled seriously with the ethics of the popular religion which found its basis in early Greek poetryd Part of the charge against Socrates was that he was an atheist : ® this means that he sought a firmer ground for morality than that which the normal polytheism supplied. Even Plato found it impossible to make edifying use of the sacred literature of his race except by allegorizing it,^ a method of interpretation which grew in popularity until the Neo-Platonist reduced the whole of the ancient mythology to mere abstraction and nothingness. We know nothing at first hand of the Etruscans. We can only gather from the many allusions in Livy, Cicero, and other Roman authors that they were a very religious race, that is, greatly devoted at least to the ceremonies of religion, which is not quite the same thing. It is, however, very probable that there was once a considerable sacred literature which has since perished. The holy writings of Rome were few. In the early stages of their development the Latin States clung to the superior religiosity of their neighbours across the Tiber. But the most highly prized of all the sacred records of the Romans were their Sibylline Books, and these were of Hellenic, not of Italian, origin. Yet nowhere else so much as at Rome was religion the handmaid, of the State, and in the early centuries of its existence all the machinery of religion was jealously guarded in the interests of the Patricians and ' See Mahaffy, Social Life, esp, cap. xii, pp. 348-84. - See Adam, The Religious Teachers of Greece, esp. Lect. I, pp. 1-20. “ Xenophon, Mem., Bk. I, i and iii; Plato, Phaedo. •“ Plato, Phaedo, 63 e, 81 a, 107 c. 10 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW employed to overawe the vulgar. An example of the usual procedure, and the reason for it, is succinctly given by the historian Livy : ‘ In primis foedera ac leges . . . conquiri quae comparerent iusserunt; alia ex eis edita etiam in vulgus; quae autem ad sacra pertinebant, a pontificibus maxime, ut religione obstrictos haberent multitudinis animos, suppressa.’ ^ How bitterly the Patricians regarded the straining of Plebeians after civic dignities is admirably illustrated in the speech the historian puts into the mouth of Appius Claudius.^ It was not merely an insult to the nobles ; it was an impiety, a sacrilege. A religion with its scanty literature which was chiefly an engine of self-interest, a tool of party, could not maintain a deep hold upon its ministrants, and Cicero teUs a story of the augurs winking at one another as they proceeded to perform the appointed ceremonies.^ So it did not even blind the ecclesiastical agents directly engaged, as is sometimes the case. There was, however, a considerable amount of religious instinct and moral seriousness in the ancient Latin, but it was largely inde¬ pendent of any sacred literature or official cult.^ But with the Hebrew, religion was one whole. Rites, oral teaching, the written word were all expressions of the same faith, the same hope, the same devotion to the Living God. As time went on and the people were separated from their Temple, later yet, when even the inspired voice of prophecy seemed stiUed, more and more were the feel¬ ings of reverence concentrated upon the records of Revela¬ tion. And modern Judaism is pre-eminently the religion of the Book, the sacred writings of the Old Testament. But the monotheism of the Jew was so intense a force 1 Livy, Bk. VI, i. “ ‘ Virum imbutum iam ab iuventa certaminibus plebeiis’, Bk. V. 2; also 3-7. * The passage is in my memory but I cannot locate it. * The subject is treated in greater fulness in Part 111 . RELIGIOUS GENIUS OF ISRAEL II that it affected him in every relation of his life. His very environment tended to become holy because, now here, now there, he was conscious of Yahweh’s Governance of His People. Thus a true son of Israel manifests a passionate reverence for holy things, and holy places, for everything associated with the worship of his God. This is not unique ; most races and most religious cults possess it in some degree; but in the Hebrew we find it in its most highly developed form. And in his case the emotion is in an ascending scale, mounting up towards the One Great Object of the national faith. The land of Palestine was loved by the Jew of the most remote community of the Dispersion, and loved not merely because it was the land of his birth, or of his extraction, but because it was holy ground and contained within its borders the Holy City. The Holy City, or Mount Zion, was the glory of the native of Palestine and of the exile alike, since there it pleased Yahweh to dwell; and the Holy City was hallowed by the Temple itself, the centre of monotheistic worship, within whose counts lay enshrined, or once had lain there, the most cherished treasures of pure religion, and where in happier days the light of God’s Own Presence had shone between the stooping figures of the Cherubim upon the Ark of the Covenant. No doubt the still greater calamities the Jewish race was about to undergo, casting their shadows before, prepared them to seek other means of maintaining racial and religious individuality than those of place. Since the Temple was to be destroyed, to concentrate upon the synagogue ; since the holy ground of Palestine was irretrievably in the hands of the Gentiles, to substitute loyalty to race for loyalty to place. Nevertheless the feeling springs up from time to time from the inner con¬ sciousness of the people with wonderful intensity, especially at periods when the turmoil of international politics and the warring of th(i (jentiles suggest the s'ightest possibility 12 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW of restoration to the Vale of Jordan, and the Highlands of Judea. Of recent years the Zionist Movement has acquired impetus, and the British Protectorate of Palestine has increased the yearning of the Hebrew for the waste places of his native land. But it was the consciousness of sin which, involved in monotheism and derived from it, stamped the Hebrews as a peculiar people. All races have it in some degree and all individuals possess it, at least potentially. Where the religion is polytheistic it is apt to be confused and con¬ tradictory. What is unpleasing to one god is perhaps gratifying, or at least indifferent to, another. It is hard for a man to satisfy all his masters, and so he is sometimes willing to play off one against the other ; or to rest in the idea that the gods only exact a formal and ceremonious homage. If they wish anything further let them speak. If they do speak by thunder, or earthquake, or pestilence, they can be appeased by holocaust and sacrifice, either human or bestial. It is rare for polytheistic religions to attribute moral principles to their gods, or to suppose them careful of the ethical standards of their worshippers. The teachings of many of the Greek philosophers and of the Vedic literature may at first sight seem at variance with this declaration. Yet the philosophers of HeUas, however much they clothe their ideas in terms of the current mythology and render lip-service to the popular gods, essentially represent a revolt from them; ^ the Vedic writings, on the other hand, contain suggestions of a primitive monotheism,^ which at the time of their com¬ position was in its decline, working its way down through Pantheism towards the welter of present-day popuHr Hinduism. Possibly also the early Roman religion con¬ tained ethical elements, but it is difficult to be sure of ^ Treated more fully in Part 11 . Monier Williams, Hinduism, pp. 22—31. RELIGIOUS GENIUS OF ISRAEL 13 this, for the Roman literature which has survived is of a comparatively late age, and its authors betray the ten¬ dency, a very common and pardonable one, of reading into the narratives of the remote past the sentiments and conceptions upon which they themselves have been nourished. Thus I think it may safely be said that it was left to monotheism, and to Hebrew monotheism, to present to the world an intense and profound consciousness of sin. Whatever sense of sin was possessed among the other races of antiquity, the effects of such realization were in the main ephemeral and superficial; but with the Hebrew they were both deeply rooted and far-reaching. They influenced not only isolated actions but conduct as a whole, and therefore character, in a manner most unusual. In no other literature is there displayed such self-abasement, such contiition, such desire for national and personal expiation, such craving for reconciliation as is manifested in the Hebrew writings by the national, or individual, sinner before the offended righteousness of Yahweh. Nor is this an occasional phenomenon; it is a permanent characteristic. It is to be observed in historical narrative, in prophetical exhortations, in the lyric outpourings of the Psalmist. The. Wise Men of the Hagiographa feel the burden of sin and see no way of escape ; the Apocalyptist feels it, and sees relief in the Messianic Kingdom of God. Sin, national and social ; sin, personal and internal. This is the strong undertone of Hebrew literature, and it grows in strength and volume as the People of God lose one, and then another, of the glories which belong to, and are valued by, the nations of the earth. So this is the mark of all Hebrew literature. Next to its monotheism, the consciousness of sin stands supreme. In the narrative portions it is manifested sometimes in a naive and child-like fashion ; in the legal and ceremonial 14 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW writings, the enactments seem chiefly concerned with external and formal cleanness and uncleanness. Now it is indubitable that the narrative portions, however late their final redaction, contain very many primitive elements, and that the work of the editors has left much of this freshness and simplicity intact, and presents to us the religious con¬ ceptions of a very early age. So also the legalistic writings, though their present forms may be comparatively late, are the final recension of codes which in germ stretch back to the infancy of the race and perhaps even to a common Semitic type of religion.^ And as it is difficult to discount the inherent monotheism of this body of writings, so is it difficult to dispense with its morality— a morality which in its essence is in the true line of develop¬ ment with that, say, of deutero-Isaiah, though naturally at a lower level. The morality in its earlier stages is based upon the same underlying conception as in its latest. And that conception is that God is righteous, and exacts righteousness from those who serve him. The conception of God being intensely vivid and personal, the conscious¬ ness of God’s Character and God’s claims has made the Hebrew intensely conscious of his own impurity and moral imperfection. Ever3rwhere we note this moral sensitive¬ ness and this wonderful humility in the Presence of the perfectly Pure and Holy Object of devotion. Even do we note it in the least spiritual and most formal of Old Testa¬ ment compositions. Narrative and ordinance alike conduct us into a religious atmosphere where God is not only great and wise but also Holy ; where man feels himself hope¬ lessly inadequate, but where he strives to fit himself for communion with this ineffably Holy Being. During the period of great spiritual activity the prophets were the progressives of the national theocracy. And ^ e. g. the code of Hammurabi; see Lock, Bible and Christian Life, pp. I-19. RELIGIOUS GENIUS OF ISRAEL 15 while it was the part of the priesthood to maintain the sacrificial system, and with extreme care to observe the minutiae of worship so as to hand on to succeeding generations the normal apparatus of Israel's access to Yahweh, it was the function of the prophets to be the inspirers and guides of the people. The prophet was often the pioneer blazing out the trail towards fresh regions of spiritual truth. It would be wrong, however, to assume that he had no regard for the glories of the past, nor for the great things God had done in the days of his fathers and in the old time before him. The warnings and exhorta¬ tions of the prophets are often expressed in terms of the past, and the established order of religious life and worship is generally respected. There is no settled and constant antipathy, or even antithesis, between prophet and priest, or between their several offices ; their function was different, that is all. ‘ The activity of the priests was very much more circumscribed than that of the prophets.’ ^ The priesthood was the custodian of the idea of sacrifice, and thus, in conserving this idea through the ages from the remote past, it performed an anticipatory and prophetic office as well.^ Sometimes the prophet compares ethical and ceremonial religious conduct, and, as we should expect, places the former on a higher level than the latter, but rarely does he discount the external forms of worship, or express any desire for their abolition. In fact, one of the charges which prophetic writers make is that the priests are unfaithful in their office and countenance abuses. But the prophets were before everything the messengers of a Righteous God, and understood their duty to be the inculcation of righteousness in the people and the main- 1 Davidson, Old Testament Prophecy, p. 9 ; also Theology of the Old Testament, pp. 20-1, 306-11. Cf. Epistle to Hebrews, where the prophetic aspect of Jewish rites is wonderfully revealed. i6 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW tenance of, or restoration of the people to, a proper relation¬ ship with God. And they ever seem to have realized that this relationship depended upon more than the perfunctory discharge of the external offices of religion. So early a representative of the prophets as Samuel is said to have declared, ‘ Obedience is better than sacrifice and to hearken than the fat of rams Indeed this statement may be said to reveal one of the root principles of prophetic endeavour. The idea recurs constantly among the literary prophets, for it is the allegiance of the heart which Yahweh claims. The mode and expression of this heart-fealty the prophets leave to the normal ecclesiastical agencies. Their business is to awaken and enlarge religious consciousness, not to derange the ordinary apparatus of religion. It is, therefore, no matter of surprise that when the recognized propaganda of the prophets ceased we find the People of God more intensely devoted to the forms of their religion than they were before. We have only to compare the condition of Israel in the days of the Judges with its condition in the post-exilic period to see what an immense ethical advance has been made, and yet this ethical progress has not weakened, rather has it strengthened, the hold of cere¬ monial religion upon the people. This twofold pheno¬ menon I hold to be the result of the teaching of the ‘ holy men of God who spake as they were moved The effects of prophetic doctrine are to be seen in (i) the higher conceptions of the God, Whom they worshipped through the consecrated channels, accepted generally by the people, (2) a deepened spiritual sense, (3) a fuller realization of their dependence upon God, (4) a consciousness of their own frailty and instability. But it is not to be supposed that these effects were to be obtained merely by an appeal to the past. To the prophet past and present possessed significance, but it was * I Sam. XV. 22. 2 2 Pet. i. 21. RELIGIOUS GENIUS OF ISRAEL 17 the future towards which his eyes were directed and which gave motif to his exhortations, warnings, and encourage¬ ments. He was for ever looking forward. True, there was a glory of Israel in the past, but it was a mere rush- light to the glory that Yahweh had reserved for the faithful remnant of His people. It was the Great Hope which gave force and power to prophetic utterance and which so ' strongly influenced the people. This Hope was nowhere very definite, yet became more so as time went on, a hope of redemption and triumph. Sometimes it was involved with a human deliverer; sometimes associated with God alone. Now on a plane of lofty spiritual splendour ; again strongly materialistic. Sometimes revelling in the pros¬ pects of sated vengeance upon God’s enemies; some¬ times embracing the Gentiles, the brute creation, the Universe, in the Reign of Peace and Love. But this consummation, however portrayed, was always reached through suffering and affliction bringing about repentance and consequent reconciliation with God. Nowhere more than in the prophetical writings is the * spiritual genius of Israel displayed. Here we observe a perfect passion for religion. As is natural with men of intense conviction (and such a true prophet must always be) their spiritual perception is keen ; their devout imagina¬ tion glows ; they bare their souls before God ; they strive to make themselves fit agents of His Great Purpose. Con¬ sequently when the message comes they proclaim it, as far as the matter in hand is concerned, with intense vigour and directness. ‘ While I was thus musing the fire kindled, and at the last I spake with my tongue.’ ^ They are always clear as to Him for Whom they speak, and as to them to whom the message is to be delivered, their errors and their failings. Yahweh, Who as religious consciousness develops is ' Ps. xxxix. 3 ; cf. also the more pointed application of Jer. xx. 9. C i8 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW growingly recognized as God of Heaven and Earth, demands true fealty, true spiritual worship; and these people who are pledged to worship Him either offer Him a homage which they as willingly pay to the so-called gods of the nations; or else they worship Him by external acts while their hearts are far from Him. It is this perversion or mockery of Yahweh which rouses indignation and evokes a torrent of denunciation from the lips, and later from the pens, of the prophets. They are jealous for the Lord of Hosts. And as the prophet sees with deeper, truer insight the* attributes of God—His Majesty, His Holiness, His Wisdom, His Love—he also sees not merely the positive facts of perversion and formality in religion, but he notes them as surface symptoms of a deep-seated diseased condition in which he is sometimes willing enough to recognize his own participation. The classic instance of this frame of mind is of course that involved in the Vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, ‘ Then said I, woe is me ! for I am undone ; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips, for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts.’ ^ Nevertheless this sense of unworthiness, induced by a vivid realization of the Divine Character on one side, and Israel’s failure on the other, does not lead to despair. On the contrary it builds up hope, for Yahweh is unchanging and eternal, but sin may be washed away and man restored to the favour of God. And the prophetic imagination is projected into the far future (which seems to the prophet very near) where the invincible obstinacy and sinful ignorance of man will be done away, where God will be recognized in His Perfect Beauty. The descriptions of this remote future condition and time vary according to the genius, temperament, and circumstances of each individual prophet; they also vary ^ Isa. vi. 5. RELIGIOUS GENIUS OF ISRAEL 19 according to the occasion of the message of each prophet. Moreover they are all couched in the magnificently figura¬ tive language that seems to be the sole medium whereby the spiritual aspirations of humanity can be expressed. But they all convey under simile and metaphor an impres¬ sion of triumphant peace due to the banishment of sin to which the prophets, one and all, apply themselves, labouring perhaps to remove some specific wrong; in one case the worship of a false god, in another some social or political corruption, in another a spirit of hopelessness in the face of difficulties and suffering. Always, however, there is a deep realization of the necessity for rooting out the whole body of sin before the Glory of the Lord of Hosts shall appear, and His people rejoice in the light thereof. Yahweh’s own people, or at least a faithful remnant, shall enjoy this blessedness, and through them all the nations of the earth. Salvation is of the Jews.^ Involved in these eschatological conceptions were the Messianic elements in Hebrew literature, some of which have already been touched upon. The Hope of Israel was contained in a Messianic Kingdom and converged upon the person of the Lord’s Anointed.^ The Kingdom was to revive, and to surpass, the glories of the Davidic Kingdom ; the King is generally suggested as of David’s line and as greater than his progenitor, far greater. For were we to gather up all the notices of Him through Whom the pur¬ poses of God were to be finally consummated, we should find that they indicate a Person combining all the qualifica¬ tions which could be desired in one who was to be the theocratic leader of the people.^ Kingship, priestly au¬ thority, prophetic power ; sympathy, suffering, sacrifice, ‘ John iv. 22 (A.V.). 2 Isa. vii. 14-16; Mic. iv, v; also Diet, of Bible (Hastings), vol. iii, art. ‘ Messiah’. “ See A. B. Davidson, Old Test. Prophecy, cap. xviii. 20 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW submission to Yahweh’s Will ; majesty, triumph, peace —all these characteristics, and others as well, are present when the contributions of prophets, psalmists, and narrators are assembled together. That this is a legiti¬ mate proceeding is borne out by an examination of the writings themselves and of their various contributions taken separately. The whole literature is preparatory to, and a foreshadowing of, a far-off Divine Event; while the various contributions all indulge in the same Hope, though expressed differently. There is, of course, to the uninstructed a difficulty in reconciling the Glory and Wisdom of the Messianic child of Isaiah (I) with the Suffering Servant of Yahweh in Isaiah (II).^ But there are no rational grounds for supposing that the same Person could not present both aspects.^ One prophet saw the Messiah in one aspect; the other in another. As a matter of fact He united both and more besides. It is very probable that each prophet supposed that the Purposes of God were to be fulfilled in the near future, perhaps in connexion with a person looming up in his horizon. Mes¬ sianic language is applied to the Gentile, Cyrus, whose career embraced certain Messianic features, e. g. being God’s agent, and being the rescuer and deliverer of God’s people. In these respects he may be regarded as t5^ical of the Perfect Messiah. Certainly the Messianic Ideals were never regarded as being exhausted by the exploits of any (almost) contemporaneous figures.^ Be that as it may, we know that the Hope of Israel was at its zenith when all the secular glory of the nation had departed, when its people were dispersed over the ancient world, when even the grandeur of its Temple was due to the 1 Cf. Isa. vii. 14-16, ix. 6-7, and Isa. Hi. 12-liii. - Isa. xlv. I, and see Wordsworth in loc. 3 e. g. the child through whom deliverance is to be found and whose birth is imminent ; Isa. vii. 14-16, and ix. 6-7 (as above). RELIGIOUS GENIUS OF ISRAEL 21 calculated munificence of a semi-pagan princed Yet there were many devout souls ‘ waiting for the consolation of Israel ’ and ‘ looking for redemption in Jerusalem A despised, and probably illiterate, Samaritan woman exclaimed confidently, ‘ I know that Messias cometh which is called Christ: when He is come He will tell us all things/ ^ Whence this tense looking forward, this confident expectation of a Deliverer and a King ? Is it merely a phase of the elusive ‘ hope ’ that ‘ springs eternal in the human breast or is it based upon solemn and authoritative declarations which the consciousness of the people recognizes as yet to be fulfilled ? Surely the latter, for it rests so definitely and expressly upon those declara¬ tions/ The career of John, the son of Zecharias, is a dramatic presentation of the Hope. The burden of his preaching together with his pathetic question, ‘ Art Thou He that should come ? ' ® reveal the Old Testament and its assurances as the foundation of that Hope. It was a true instinct which guided the Jewish Church to place the historical books of the Old Testament among the prophets. Not only were they largely concerned in recording the activities of the messengers of God—Samuel and Elijah, to mention no others—but from the religious point of view history is the record of God in action, of His Will working out His Purposes. Now it was the prophet's function to reveal that Will and to declare those Purposes. This was in large part done by the his¬ torical record itself. That record was prophetic in sub¬ stance if not in form, and ‘ he who runs may read ’. That 1 Herod the Great (so called), Jos., Antiquities, J 3 k. XV, cap. xi. - Luke ii. 25, 38. ® John iv. 25. * Pope, Essay on Man, i. 95 ; see also Pascal, Thoughts, cap. v, 2. ^ Matt. ii. 4-6; Luke vii. 16-17, xxiv. 19-21 ; John i. 19-25, i. 45, vi. 14 ; Acts i. 6, ii. 16-21, xxvi. 6-7. These are a few among many citations which testify to a general expectancy. « Matt. xi. 3 ; Luke vii. 19. 22 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW some of the later historical books, like Chronicles and Ezra, remain outside the prophetic division was probably due to their appearance after the idea of the contents of the division had become stereotyped. Accordingly they were placed among the Hagiographa. The same fate befell the wonderful Apocalyptic of the Book of Daniel. The third division of the Hebrew Canon is indeed a strange medley, but the variety of its contents can be easily accounted for on the ground of unwillingness to tamper with a classification regarded as fixed and established. CHAPTER II THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE HEBREWS To those who consider that the Hebrew Canon contains the last word of spiritual endeavour under the Old Dis¬ pensation, the centuries which follow its final utterances must present much difficulty. Did the Chosen Seed suddenly become sterile and remain immobile for genera¬ tions ? In the days of our fathers this was the commonly accepted view. For more than three centuries the faithful remnant of the People of God was in a state of spiritual mummification. It was a dry and barren stage in Hebrew history during which there was ‘ no open visionno religious development, nothing but the crystallization, even petrifaction, of conceptions and ideas supplied during the spiritually creative period of the great prophets. A more catholic spirit, strengthened by data supplied by modern scholarship, has completely altered the view which I have just attempted to describe. Our attention is in¬ sistently drawn to the fact that the Christian Church, as a whole, has ever treated with reverence and respect a body of writings known as the Apocrypha, which was composed and collected, to give it its widest limits, between the time PHILOSOPHY OF THE HEBREWS 23 of the Persian Supremacy and the Christian era. Thought¬ ful study has pronounced these writings to be, in varying degrees, of intrinsic value. Moreover other works of Jewish authorship have been discovered, or more fully recognized, belonging roughly to the same age and actually extending beyond it, which shed a flood of light upon contemporary events, conditions, and ideas, and, possess¬ ing some merit in themselves, also enable us to understand more clearly than ever before the environment in which Jesus accomplished His Mission, and from which the Christian Church issued on its age-long career. Most of this literature is apocalyptic in character, a small portion of it secured a foothold within the limits of the Apocrypha, but far the larger part of it remained outside, where it possessed no official recognition, but much popular in¬ fluence. ; j Another of the formative influences upon Judaism was the Wisdom Literature. Perhaps there is no Hebraic survival of our own day more characteristic of the modern Jew than that which is the product of the spirit represented by the Book of Proverbs, or the Preacher. Alike in their frank worldliness and shrewd practical ethics (qualities which are on the surface, and which make them the common¬ place books of many others besides the sons of Jacob), and in their genuine piety and acceptance of God's Will, they appeal to the modern Jew. There is no doubt a strain of mysticism, and even something which can trace its lineage back to apocalyptists and remoter prophets, in the ranks of twentieth-century Judaism, but it is not obtrusively apparent to the Gentile eye. It speaks volumes for the thoroughness of those centuries of religious training and for the developed religious tenacity of the race that, in spite of the withdrawal of spiritual creativeness—for which withdrawal Christianity was largely responsible— the Ancient People of God have maintained as their 24 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW standard the Law of their fathers, and as a modus vivendi, the pious, practical counsel of their early sages. With its hopes shattered, the day of its visitation past, with no established rallying-point, scattered, oppressed, and persecuted, the Hebrew race still clings to its ancient faith, buys and sells in the market-places of the world, and joins practical wisdom to a definite monotheism which cannot be shaken. ' The Wisdom Literature of the Jews which has come down to us comprises both canonical and uncanonical books ; but the distinction may be ignored, for all the books which belong to this literature, though each has its particular characteristics, are clearly members of one family ; they are all alike in possessing one outstanding and typical mark of differentiation from the rest of the Old Testament books, viz., in them religion has become philosophy.’ ^ In other words, the teaching of these writings is outside the general current of ancient Hebrew thought. It marks a comparatively late stage in the mental history of the race, and, while the beginnings of the Wisdom Literature may have been in the prosperous and leisurely days of Solomon, ^ it reached its zenith and acquired its great influence many centuries later when the Hebrew people were no longer a political entity, when the springs of prophecy (popularly so called) were for one reason or another dried up, and the reflections and aspira¬ tions of thoughtful men were no longer national and exclusive, but personal and universal. As far as their experience went, these men fulfilled the Latin maxim, ‘ Homo sum ; humani nihil a me alienum puto.’ ^ However, care must be taken, as we assert the dis¬ tinctiveness of this type of writing, also to maintain its ^ W. O. E. Oesterley, The Books of the Apocrypha, pp. 224-5. I Kings iv. 29-34; also Sanday, Inspiration, pp. 200-1. “ Terence, Heauton Timoroumenos, Act I. PHILOSOPHY OF THE HEBREWS 25 adherence to the ground principles of the Hebrew faith. Unlike the speculations of Greek philosophy which were bounded by no dogmas, or axioms, except those that were self-imposed, the Hebrew sage was ever true to the funda¬ mental conceptions of his religion. He felt that a large body of truth had been revealed; he could not, and furthermore had no desire to, question or tamper with it. But there was a large field of inquiry and interest which revelation had left untouched, wherein lay problems which demanded reflection and called for elucidation, problems of immense importance which bore upon the destiny of man, his relation to his fellow men, his relation to God. Not like the old historians and redactors of his race was the wise man intent upon tracing the course of national development under the providence of Yahweh, nor like the prophets burning to deliver a message which would keep his contemporaries true to the faith of their fathers, or enlarge their faith with further knowledge, or raise their hopes by visions of future glory. The Jewish philosopher was preoccupied with the problems of individual experience. He was interested in the higher levels of theology, but his fixed monotheism prevented any daring excursions into that rarefied atmosphere. Yet there is one very notable exception to this cautious reticence. I refer to the personification of the Wisdom of God. This matter will receive further consideration in its proper place. For the present it will suffice to say that the Hebrew sages enriched ‘ la haute theologie ’ in the very field where there was a possibility of growth and prepared the soil for new seed. Otherwise their limit was the application of principles to everyday life. Indeed their great discovery, mentioned just above, was in the interests of this very practical purpose. For Wisdom, which was, as it were, the Breath of God, had been transmitted in some degree to man, so that each individual had within his being 26 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW a criterion, a discriminating and judging faculty, which helped him to distinguish right from wrong, the profitable from the harmful. So from the days of King Solomon to those of Ben Sira the efforts of the sages had been con¬ centrated upon the formulation of a system of ethics, or a science of moral philosophy,^ based upon Hebrew monotheism, intended to guide the average individual through the difficulties of life, and find a working hypothesis for the great problems thereof. So much of its teaching, however, is prudential rather than ethical that it has won great popularity with the masses and received scant atten¬ tion from the leading moral philosophers. . Yet it should be remembered that to the Jewish mind prudence is but a portion of wisdom, and matters calling for sagacity and common sense, though on a lower level, require the exercise of the divinely implanted gift of wisdom not so intensely but much more frequently than do the mysteries of God and the ultimate destinies of man. Moreover, with this Jewish tendency kept in mind, a study of the Wisdom Literature will show that prudential maxims occupy only their due share of attention. The Book of Job, the noblest specimen of its class, is engaged upon the great mystery of the undeserved affliction of the innocent righteous. True, it reaches no solution except the Oriental expedient of restoring twofold what had been taken away,^ and to the Christian reader, and possibly to the Jewish writer, the reward of the righteous Job seems absurd, childish, and banal. Surely, it must have been inserted as a sort of makeshift conclusion ; something which, while it would not, could not, satisfy the philo¬ sophic or ethical mind, would appease the vulgar. Of 1 ‘ Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, together with the Apocryphal (sic) Ecclesiasticus and Wisdom of Solomon are often spoken of as the Wisdom Literature” from their references to Wisdom or Khoch- mah ' (Bennett and Adeney, Biblical Introduction, App. C, p. 472). ^ Job xlii. 10, 12 ; cf. i, 3. PHILOSOPHY OF THE HEBREWS 27 course there is no satisfactory solution of the problem which could have been presented under the Old Dispensa¬ tion. But it is the strongest, most dramatic, and most striking setting-forth of the subject in any literature. It is one which occupied the attention of many a reflective Hebrew. The Psalms are full of it.^ But there the pros¬ perity of the wicked was generally assumed to be temporary, the affliction of the righteous a cloud that passeth soon away. The shortness of man’s earthly existence, however, constituted a difficulty. Suggestions of a life beyond the grave are scanty and dubious, but the strength of tribal and racial loyalty, the descent of blood and tradition through succeeding generations, the deep-rooted inherited confidence that God had reserved a great future for the race, served in some measure to mitigate the lot of the sorely tried servant of Yahweh, and caused him still to hope, though the grave yawned upon him and Sheol received him. How sublime is the trust in God and the personal self-abnegation of the poet who said, ‘ Let Thy work appear unto Thy servants. And Thy glory upon their children ! ’ ^ But the Book of Job states the problem more thoroughly than any other writing of pre-Christian days, and contains intimations of immortality for which it is difficult to account except on the theory that they are a reaching forward, an anticipation of a further lifting of the Veil which shrouds the Purposes of God.^ Another remarkable writing which, according to the rather loose Rabbinic classification, is included among the prophetic books is the story of Jonah. It is, however, 1 Pss. i, XV, xxxvii, xlix, Ixxiii might with great appropriateness be classified as part of the Wisdom Literature. ^ Ps. xc. 16 (R.V.). Job xix. 25-7 (R.V.), and Driver, Introduction Lit. 0 . T. (in loc.), p. 418. See also, for an admirable rationale of the teaching of the book, Davidson, Theology of O. T., pp. 466 ff. 28 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW not the substance of a prophet's preaching but the telling, with a purpose, of certain incidents in his career. To my mind it has much kinship in tone and spirit with the Wisdom Literature.^ The Universality of the Fatherhood of God is most powerfully and yet most subtly set forth, and the indirectness of this presentation in the form of a narrative contributes very much to its effectiveness. It seems to me that the writing is the product of an advanced stage of literary and religious culture and of a reflective and philosophical spirit. It is true we see the same catholic - minded tendency breaking forth at intervals throughout the Old Testament in narrative, in psalm, in prophecy alike, but nowhere else do we see it as the theme of an entire writing, and nowhere else is the national instinct of privilege and prerogative treated in so cavalier a fashion, and the loving mercy of God towards man and creation so clearly understood and so boldly avowed. And in no other portion of the Old Testament literature would the Book of Jonah appear so much at home as among the Wisdom Books whose writers’ eyes have from circum¬ stances or times been diverted from hope of national glory to questions of personal import where man as man, and not man as a member of the Chosen Seed, stands before his Creator and has to make answer for himself. As the Wisdom Literature in the form in which it has come down to us stands late in chronological order among the sacred and semi-sacred writings of the Hebrew people, so it exhibits the marks of its late origin both in style and subject-matter. Gone is the naive and child-like spirit of the ancient chronicles; gone are the creative thoughts of the great prophets. We are not to expect in this atmo¬ sphere a bright illumination, a new revelation, rather the fixing and strengthening and applying of what has been ^ Not, of course, in technique, nor in terminology. PHILOSOPHY OF THE HEBREWS 29 acquired. And in only one case is this expectation at fault, one which I have already indicated—the hypo- statization of Wisdom as apart from and yet entering into man, as semi-independent and yet issuing forth from God, as being with God not only in time but before time, as being the associate, and almost the Agent, of the Divine creative operations.^ Much of this no doubt might be put down to the exuberant fancy of the writers, to Oriental imaginativeness, and not to be taken literally. But there is so much in Hebrew, Hellenistic, and Aramaic litera¬ ture—all controlled by the same religious principles—of a similar kind that the phenomenon cannot be dismissed lightly and treated as of no significance. The main theme of the writers of the school under discussion is Wisdom considered in all its aspects, mundane and practical, moral and spiritual, and then it is considered as to its source, which is found to be God. In fact it is regarded as the chief attribute of God, and more than that, as something proceeding forth from Him and as breathing through all things which He had formed. To the Palestinian inter¬ preters of the Law and the Prophets the emanation of the Divine Being which obtains first regard is Memra, the Word. This conception is treated in much the same way and credited with similar faculties and similar operations as the Wisdom of the Sages.^ When the authors who have come most under the influence of Greek thought begin to appear, of whom 1 Job xxviii. 12-28 ; Prov. viii. 22-31 ; ‘ Wisd. of Sol.’, vii. 25-7, viii. 3-5, ix. 4, 9-11, xviii. 15. This list of references is not exhaustive but representative. 2 The Targums employ the term Memra. See art. ‘ Logos ’, Hastings, Diet, of the Bible ; also Westcott, Comm, on Gospel of St. John, introduction, p. xvi. However, the idea represented by the term Memra is a familiar one in the Old Testament Scriptures —the Targumim established and extended the idea under the new term. See also Part II. 30 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW Philo is the most splendid example, the Logos conception is seen to unite and blend the ideas of Memra and the Divine Wisdom in One Thing or Person (it is not clear which), and this Logos creates and animates a-vfXTras o Koa-jjo^} bridges the chasm between the Transcendent God and His Universe. And though the possibility of Incarna- , tion is not developed, and perhaps would be entirely outside Philo’s range of thought, and that of the early Alexandrian School of Hellenistic philosophy, nevertheless these speculations carried forward the metaphysical grop- ings of the Ancient World to the point where the next step would almost inevitably seem to be, ‘ The Word became Flesh and tabernacled among us.’ ^ Thus it may be said that in spite of a superficial appear¬ ance in some instances of mere worldly prudence and common sense, the Wisdom Literature performed a notable task in at least three ways : (i) by presenting the problem of undeserved pain and affliction frankly and unshrink¬ ingly, though unable to suggest an adequate solution ; (2) by cutting loose at least in part from national exclusive¬ ness and proclaiming the Universal Fatherhood of God ; ^ (3) by contributing to the development of the (Logos) doctrine which later on found its speculative expres¬ sion in Philo and its justification and verification in vSt. John. ^ Philo uses other names for the Universe, e. g. to o \ ov . See Drummond, Philo Judaeus, vol. i, Bk. Ill, cap. ii, pp. 267-313. 2 John i. 14 (R.V. margin). 2 This characteristic appears in other parts of the literature of the Hebrew people, notably in some of the prophets, but is more consistently maintained among ‘ the Wise Men ’. 31 CHAPTER III JEWISH APOCALYPTIC But there were other products of Hebrew thought (whether written in Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic matters not) which helped to make the Jew of the first century of our era what he was. Until the last generation their writings had been either unknown or practically disregarded: now they are appreciated at their true worth, and there may even be danger that they will receive almost more attention than they intrinsically deserve. I refer to the Jewish Apocalyptic writings. Some portions of them are included in the Hebrew Canon, and such have always been accorded reverence as integral parts of God's Word though their characteristics are the same as those which have only deutero-canonical authority, or have none at all. Even in Ezekiel ^ and Isaiah (I) ^ there are pure examples of true apocalyptic, and a large section of the canonical book of Daniel is of the same type.® Indeed its apocalyptic is probably the norm, or model, of much which succeeds it. Moreover the collection of writings known as the Apocrypha contains one fine example of this class of writing—2 (i. e. 4) Ezra. It is, however, among the non-canonical fragments of literature which have come down to us from 200 b. c.- A. D. 100, generally known as Pseudepigrapha, that we find the greatest number of Apocalyptic writings. There is also within the New Testament Canon the magnificent Apocalypse attributed to St. John which is one of the best examples of this kind of literature, and among non- ‘ As typical, see Ezek. x. 2 As typical, see Isa. xxiv-xxvii. (This is now regarded as a late and pseudepigraphic addition to Isa. I.) ® Dan. vii-xii. 32 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW canonical Christian writings there are several which might be classified as apocalyptic. But the pseudepigraphical books contribute most of the material whereby we may - judge of the character, scope, and influence of this type of literature. The cause of the rise of pseudepigraphic methods has been variously explained, but nowhere, so far as I have seen, with complete satisfaction. Certainly there was no literary dishonesty about it. The sense of proprietorship which authors feel in regard to their own writings, and the immorality of abstracting therefrom, or adding thereto, are comparatively late, and typically Western, contribu¬ tions to practical ethics. Rhapsodists and others played pranks with the poems of the Greek Heroic Age. Yet I can well imagine Sappho and Alcaeus, to say nothing of Anacreon,^ having a strong sense of ownership in regard to the jewels of their thought and fancy. In the Periclean Age the highest point of Hellenic culture and literary self- consciousness was reached. Roman letters of the classical period were also strongly infected with the same spirit. But it was certainly very slow in affecting the instincts and habits of Oriental and semi-Oriental peoples, and literary conventions of the Western pattern had no in¬ fluence over the type of mind which was capable of pro¬ ducing the Pseudepigrapha of Judaism. Canon Charles has perhaps accounted for the phenomenon in the best way by the following explanation : ‘ The anonymity or pseudonymity that characterized all the progressive writings in Judaism from the third century b. c. onwards, was . . . due to the absolute position the Law had won through the legislation of Ezra. Owing to his efforts and * Yet Anacreon had many imitators who sailed under his colours, i. e. used his name unblushingly—so the literary conscience of those days could hardly have been Puritanic ! (See Nettleship and Sandys, Diet, of Class. Antiquities, in loc.) JEWISH APOCALYPTIC 33 those of his successors it came to be an accepted dogma in Judaism that the Law was the complete and final Word of God, and so valid for all eternity. Such a con¬ ception of the Law made the renewal of prophecy impos¬ sible. If any real advances were to be made towards a higher theology, they could only be made in works of a pseudonymous character under the aegis of some great name in Israel earlier in time than that of Ezra.' ^ But even this solution does not explain, for instance, the Apocalypses of the Book of Daniel, which are now generally regarded as unauthentic and as belonging to the Maccabean Age. Their place in the Sacred Canon might, however, be accounted for somewhat in this fashion. The legalistic pressure upon the contents of Scripture which Ezra in¬ augurated only gradually made itself felt, and became operative upon certain portions of the Sacred Writings before it became operative upon them all.^ In other words there was a gradual crystallization, beginning with the Law (the Torah), and extending thence to the whole body of writings, which were ultimately declared supremely sacred and canonical at Jabneh (Jamnia) about a. d. ioo. It was perhaps early in this period of gradual crystalliza¬ tion that the Apocalyptic of Daniel and possibly certain portions of the prophets (Isaiah, Zechariah, &c.) won their place and retained it within the sacred limits.^ Other writings which originated later were unsuccessful in forcing an entrance since the process of crystallization was more advanced. Certainly the action of Ezra and those who succeeded him must have had the effect, either of smother¬ ing the prophetic faculties, or else forcing them to present ^ Charles, Between the Old and New Testaments, pp. i6o—i. (See also pp. 36-45.) - Sanday, Inspiration, pp. 71, 96, 123. •' Kirkpatrick, Doctrine of the Prophets, e. g. pp. 203, 491-3 ; Isa. xxiv-xxvii, pp. 442-78 ; Zcch. ix-xiv. D 34 the first measure : THE HEBREW themselves more or less disguised. Our fathers accepted the first alternative, and, for the period between Malachi and the preaching of John the Baptist, would consider the Psalmist's pathetic assertion appropriate : There is no more any prophet : Neither is there among us any that knoweth how long.^ Modern investigation has, however, revealed to us that the prophetic instincts and potentialities were very much alive during this period, though their expression was cramped, impaired, and transformed. From the time of Ezra onward no man could receive credence and have his mission recognized, speaking in his own person and as the mouthpiece of God. He was more likely to be heard (or read) if he delivered his message under the cover of some great name. And so he wrote as Daniel or Moses or Enoch, and proclaimed under their shadow what he conceived to be the Will of God for his own generation.^ It seems to have been during periods of national eclipse, and when the sense of failure was particularly keen, and the dangers of racial disintegration and absorption by Gentile and polytheistic peoples were very threatening that Apocalyptic literature was written and circulated.^ The glory of Israel had departed but the aim of these devout authors was to carry on and repeat the assurances of the prophets in regard to a future beatific state. In doing so they expanded and developed certain ideas, and through their efforts advanced the cause of monotheism and gave a more spiritual as well as a more universal content to religious aspirations.^ Of course there are ^ Ps. Ixxiv. g. For a very interesting discussion of chronology and historical setting, as well as commentary of this Psalm, see Kirkpatrick, The Book of Psalms, pp. 439-48. “ For a suggestive treatment of this subject, see Charles, Between Old and New Testaments, pp. 38-45. “ See quotation from Jewish Encyc., i. 676, p. 44 id. * Although the conception of the Kingdom of God is present JEWISH APOCALYPTIC 35 exceptions to this general trend, but that it was the general trend there can be no doubt. Nevertheless the mode of expression, the recording of m.ental pictures or visions,^ relying as it does upon the richness of imagination with the minimum check of reason, lent itself to all kinds of extravagance and unreality. Moreover, owing to the strictures, or perhaps merely to the passive resistance, of the religious authorities, these earnest men were unable to express themselves with the decision and force of the earlier prophets. They may also from their very circum¬ stances have lost in some m.easure the power and sureness of spiritual perception which their ancestors had possessed, possibly also their sense of responsibility. Accordingly they ‘ half revealed and half concealed ’ their thought in magnificent, sometimes extravagant, pictures. Yet when all is said which can be said in depreciation of this late product of Hebrew genius, we cannot dismiss it lightly, for it was in circles largely controlled by Apocalyptic ideas that the forces which were to regenerate the world had their origin. Jesus of Nazareth denounced the conventional Pharisaism, and ignored Sadduceeism,^ but never assailed or reproached the prevalent Messianic expectations of the in the prophets (Isa. Ixv. 17. Ixvi. 22 ; also Mic. iv. 1-13), to apocalyptic is due its great enrichment, expansion, and spiritualiza¬ tion. Our Blessed Lord used language which the Apocalyptic literature had taught his hearers to appreciate at least to some extent. The terms ‘ Kingdom of God ’ and ‘ Son of Man ’, and the terminology of his doctrine of ‘ the Last Things ’ were by no means novel to His contemporaries. It is possible that this interesting subject will be touched upon again in the course of this investiga¬ tion. The ideas of immortality, resurrection, and final judgement, universal in its scope, are also themes which are strongly developed in Apocalyptic writings. 1 See H. B. Swete, The Apocalypse of St. John, introd. {§ 2). 2 Probably because it was negligible as a spiritual force. The false direction and tone of Pharisaism made it dangerous ; Sad- duceeism was passive—a spent force. D 2 36 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW people (though he did sometimes check their ignorant or premature ebullitions) which were fostered by Apocalyptic writings and teachings. He did indeed make large use of the method Himself. These are significant facts. And the facts are easy enough to understand when it is seen that in Apocalyptic literature the most considerable theological and ethical advance was made during the few centuries preceding Christ. The tendency of the ruling authorities was j ealously to guard and preserve the religious records of the past. Their eyes were fixed .upon the past, and their influence was directed towards suppressing re¬ interpretation, innovation, novel and strange doctrine. But there were elements in the race, remnants of the old prophetic party which could not rest in a conservative attitude, could not believe that God had spoken for the last time, that the future held no hopes, that spiritual aspirations were to remain unsatisfied, that new experiences would not call for new explanations. To a large extent the apocalyptists represent these elements for us. There are also other data which suggest that the Judaism of Jesus’ day was not so simple nor so stereotyped as early nineteenth-century historians were wont to assume. It is, however, the literature of vision and revelation which proves the existence of a large part}^ of devout men who were neither Pharisees, Sadducees, nor Herodians, who were not so eccentric as to be esteemed dangerous by the authorities, nor so ascetic as to withdraw altogether from the social life of the race like the Essenes,^ or the Egyptian Jewish community described by Philo under the title of Therapeutae.^ In fact the writers at the head of this school * See Lightfoot, Epp. of St. Paul—Colossians and Philemon (Dissertation: the Essenes, pp. 3.<|.5-4i7) ; also Jos., Bell. lud., Bk. II. 8. 2 See De Vita Contemplativa, a reputed work of Philo ; also Drummond, Philo Judaeus, i. 24, 178-81. JEWISH APOCALYPTIC 37 evince a culture quite equal to that of their contemporaries, a creative power in advance of them, a depth of spiritual and ethical perception quite foreign to the average Pharisaic scribe or Sadducaic priest, and a catholic-mindedness which is extraordinary when we consider the narrowing influences of the national life. Probably Apocalyptic teachers largely impregnated the mass of the people with their ideas, kept alive the Messianic hope, and were responsible for the many who like Simeon and Anna were waiting for the redemption of Israel. It is easy, therefore, to understand that this move¬ ment was not in favour with the responsible and accredited exponents of Judaism. It was a progressive and spiritually liberalizing movement. Though it was not a conscious and deliberate effort like that of Philo to combine Jewish religion and Greek speculation, and so make monotheism acceptable to a wider public, it certainly tended, among its more contemplative adherents at least, to weaken the sentiment of racial exclusiveness. Though purely Hebraic in origin, method, and spirit, the Apocalyptic writings, intent upon ultimate things, upon sin and righteousness, judgement and blessedness, and upon God, laid small stress upon the minutiae of contem.porary religious life ; and their effect would be to produce in their readers a sense of the comparative unimportance of the traditions of men. Then, those members of the ruling classes who dreaded change, and were politically as well as religiously conservative, looked askance at theories and aspirations which made the masses restless, and which were so often misconstrued by the ignorant, and tended in the direction of riot and revolt. For the spiritual conceptions of the apoca- lyptists, clothed as they were in imaginative language, full of martial and sensuous figures, lent themselves to material interpretations by crude intelligences. The result was a general craving for new things, and occasionally attempts 38 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW were made to hasten the Kingdom of God with violence. Theudasd and ‘ that Egyptian ’ ^ of the Book of the Acts, the revolts narrated by Josephus,^ are a sufficient indication of the general restlessness of those days, and a partial justifica¬ tion of the repressive policy of the Jewish authorities. It were too much to say that these irregular and abortive efforts were the direct outcome of Apocalyptic teaching, or that such teaching was responsible for them, except in the sense that the Apocalypse of St. John was responsible for the extravagances of the Anabaptists of the Reforma¬ tion Period, or those of the Fifth Monarchy men in the days of Cromwell. Nevertheless there was sufficient con¬ nexion between the two to account for the dislike of such teaching which the contemporary authorities exhibited ; while the tone of the teaching itself—its other-worldliness, its indifference to the traditions of the elders, except in the broadest sense, its universalism—made it the object of Rabbinic suspicion and latent hostility. For as soon as Pharisaic Rabbinism had been freed from Sad- ducaic rivalry, it hastened to give the final blow to the Apocalyptic movement. That movement has never re¬ covered, though in mediaeval Judaism there have been recrudescences of Apocalyptic interest. But its literature has been banned and condemned as dangerous and here¬ tical. This, as far as Judaism is concerned, but Christianity in truth became the heir of apocalyptic zeal and spiritual receptiveness, and into this new channel were drained all the progressive, vital, and catholic influences which the religion of revelation had developed. But in pre-Christian days the Apocalyptic movement kept Jewish religion from petrification and maintained the 4 ^ Acts V. 36 : also Judas of Galilee ‘ in the days of the enrol¬ ment V. 37. 2 /^cts xxi. 38. 3 Jos., Antiq., Bk. XVll. 6, 9, XVIII. 3, XX. 5 ; Bell, lud., Bk, 11 . 13, &c. JEWISH APOCALYPTIC 39 masses in a state of expectancy, the spiritual condition of the people being such that, although susceptible of false leading and imposture, it was also ready to respond to the stern ethical teaching of the Baptist, and to appreciate something of the significance of the utterances of the Son of Man. That is, it was sufiiciently responsive to make the mission of John and the Ministry of Jesus mighty spiritual successes, however much they were superficially, and materially, failures. Even so, the constant misinter¬ pretation of the aims and principles of Jesus, not only by His avowed enemies but by His most loyal followers and intimate friends, suggests the weakness of the Apocalyptic cult, its visionary, vague, and impracticable characteristics. And this weakness causes us to believe that, had not a vitalizing and invigorating force been brought into contact with it, ‘ the new prophecy ’ would have lost itself in vapourings, and died of its own ineptitude. CHAPTER IV THE HERODIAN AGE The main features of the leading schools of thought, or parties, among the Jews in the time of Our Lord hardly require exposition. The tenets and sentiments of Pharisees, Sadducees, and Herodians are sufficiently well known in outline from the pages of the New Testament and the statements of Josephus. It would, however, be possible to acquire a partial impression from the New 3'estament and an erroneous one from Josephus.^ To begin with, one important point is apt to escape the careless or un- ^ The New Testament is only concerned with Jewish sectarianism as it touches Our Blessed Lord and His Ministry ; Josephus is striving to create an impression favourable to his race upon Gcnti'es. 40 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW instructed reader ; the denunciations of Jesus are directed against the inconsistency of Pharisaic conduct, the ostenta¬ tion and unreality of Pharisaic professions, the smothering of the Law of God by the traditions of men, rather than against their doctrines. On the other hand, he barely notices the Sadducees, except on the one occasion when He refutes their problem and places the solution of it on a totally different, in fact a supra-mundane, plane.^ There is, however, no doubt (though the certainty is opposed to the commonly received opinion) that the most active agents against Him in the final stage of His Ministry were Sadducees. And in the repressive measures inaugurated against the nascent Church, the Sadducees, as was natural, took a leading part; the Pharisees either appear vaguely and elusively, or, as on one occasion, favourably passive.^ The Herodians were a political party rather than a religious sect, and may be disregarded in the present discussion. To return to the great religious sects, the Sadducees as far as doctrine was concerned were the conservative party, rigid adherents of the Mosaic Law, accepting nothing as of faith but what appeared therein, or could infallibly be proved thereby,^ and hence treating as not of revelation such matters as immortality, the ministry of angels, the resurrection of the body, and the Messianic hopes. The Pharisees were the progressives of the time ^ and their theology was richer by reason of a wider view of revela¬ tion. They recognized practically the contents of the Canon of the Old Testament, later ratified at Jamnia, as of binding authority. They also incorporated in 1 Matt. xxvi. 23 ff. ; Mark xii. 18 ff. ; Luke xx. 27 ff. 2 Acts V. 33 ff. The admonition of the Pharisaic Rabbi produced a laisser-faire policy, which was just what the Apostolic Church needed at the moment. Note also the effect of St. Paul's doctrinal appeal to the Pharisees (Acts xxiii. 6 ff.). 3 \V. O. E. Oesterley, The Books of the Apocrypha, p. 154. THE HERODIAN AGE 41 their teaching and treated with exaggerated respect what Our Lord calls ‘ the traditions of men i. e. the exposition and rulings of succeeding Rabbis upon the text of Scripture. This practice had the effect of bewildering the simple followers of the Law, and of magnifying the letter at the expense of the Spirit. It may be said, there¬ fore, that the Pharisees were doctrinally much nearer to Jesus than the Sadducees in that they accepted so much more than the latter of what Our Lord claimed to be Himself the Fulfilment. On the other hand, the Sadducees, who made no great spiritual claims and were less suscep¬ tible to the sins of spiritual pride and hypocrisy, did not incur to the same degree His righteous indignation. They had not accepted so much and therefore so much could not be expected of them.^ But as I have indicated above, the apocalyptists who held the same doctrinal position as the Pharisees, though in a more spiritual and less legalistic manner, were the party from which Jesus received sym¬ pathy, and it was from the elements in the nation most influenced by them that the bulk of His followers was drawn. It is perhaps natural that we should hastily assume a nation-wide numerical preponderance to the Pharisaic sect. In the Gospel narratives it occupies the foreground in antagonism to the Mission of Jesus. This may easily be accounted for not so much by greatness of number, as by special antipathy of sentiment. The leaven of the Pharisees was diametrically opposed to the leaven of the Gospel of the Kingdom of God. Hence the position of this sect in the evangelic narratives. But as far as we can gather, the number of Pharisees, i. e. the membership in * It is a mistake, however, to regard the Sadducees as irreligious and lax in reference to the Law. Possibly sceptics and careless livers were found in their ranks, but the raison d’etre of the party was the loyal maintenance of the Law. 42 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW the fraternity in relation to the whole population, was insignificant, not more than 7,000 in all. Of course their zeal, their reputation for sanctity and learning, gave the Pharisees an influence far wider than their actual numbers. The Sadducees must almost have equalled them numeri¬ cally, yet in spite of lofty station and high-priestly affilig-tions they did not secure the same popular veneration. Indeed they displayed no eagerness to make proselytes ; they were conservative, cultivated, and spiritually sluggish. These traits would also explain why they were not at first conspicuous in opposition to new opinions. When, however, the instincts of self-preservation were aroused they acted ruthlessly enough, and the history of the Apostolic pro¬ paganda in Jerusalem shows that their alarm was not easily allayed. As to the sect of the Essenes there is very little informa¬ tion available. Most of it has been collected and presented to us by Bishop Lightfoot in his inimitable way.^ Certainly the data supplied by him, and what has been brought to light since his day, represent the Essenes as intrinsically interesting, but as a negligible quantity in the national life. Their withdrawal from the common affairs of the people may have won them a grudging respect but did not gain them influence. The Jew has but little symipathy for the eremite and coenobite, and the source of what was peculiar to Essenism was alien, not Jewish. But the masses of the people were impregnated with Messianic ideas and hopes which originated in their con¬ sciousness of being the children of Promise. The prophets strengthened and developed this consciousness: the apocalyptists kept it alive, indeed quickened the sense of the immediacy of fulfilment in an age when the atmo¬ sphere would appear most depressing, and the circumstances most untoward. If the Holy City and Judea were more ‘ See above, p. 36 (foot-note i). THE HERODIAN AGE 43 influenced by the official parties, it was in Galilee that the Messianic hopes were widely prevalent. But the Hebrew of Palestine at this^era was susceptible of other influences to which he yet offered a stouter resist¬ ance than his brethren of the Diaspora. Nothing, and no one, can remain unaffected by environment. Even the Hebrew with his intense individuality is controlled and in some degree moulded by it. The atmosphere of Jeru¬ salem was Jewish of the purest sort, but the Galilaean was exposed to Gentile influences—Syrian and Hellenic. The population of Galilee was large, and it contained many thriving cities in which the foreign element was con¬ siderable, notably Tiberias.^ And though the Galilaeans were celebrated for their fidelity to Judaism, yet it is possible that the separative tendencies, fostered by ‘ scribes and lawyers ' and exemplified by the Pharisaic sect, carried less weight with them than it did with their co-religionists of the Southern Province. This, not merely because Apocalyptic had fixed their attention upon things beyond and above the normal narrowness of their race, but because close proximity to, and intercourse with, Gentiles had in some respects encouraged feelings of friendliness and sympathy. Such were the surroundings in which Jesus of Nazareth ‘ grew in wisdom and stature and in favour with God and men We have no clear information as to His earthly education, but we may feel certain that it included the best elements within reach. In the narrative of the visit of the Holy Family to Jerusalem when Jesus was twelve years old there is a suggestion that this education had already produced extraordinary results—‘ All that heard Him were astonished at His understanding and answers.’ ^ 1 See art. ‘ Tiberias Alex. Souter, Did. of Chrid and of the Gospels, vol. ii. Luke ii. 52. 3 Luke ii. 47. 44 the first measure : THE HEBREW It is, however, His Public Ministry which furnishes proof that Jesus was not only deeply versed in the Old Testament Scriptures but that He also possessed a wide knowledge of the current interpretation of the same, and that the tradition of the Elders though depreciated was yet in¬ timately understood by Him. The exclamation of the Scribes, ‘ How knoweth this man letters, having never learned ! ’ ^ need not be taken seriously as being based upon known facts of Our Lord’s early years. It is the cry of the self-complacent metropolitan who hastily assumes that there is neither culture nor knowledge outside the circle of his own experience. It does not necessarily imply that the earthly education of Jesus had been neglected, or that the deficiency had been supplied in a supernatural manner. It merely illustrates the narrowness of view which obtained in the official ranks of educated Judaism. That Jesus possessed ‘ letters ’ is no matter for astonish¬ ment. It is the use He made of knowledge ; the pro¬ fundity, vitality, and creativeness of His Thought in regard to it which, in conjunction with other facts, causes us to realize that with Him we are in the presence not of a learned Rabbi but of the Son of God. CHAPTER V HELLENIZING INFLUENCES But among the great moulding influences of Judaism none was greater than those created by the Dispersion. So long as the Hebrew people were confined within their own borders, their action upon other peoples was very much restricted ; in the same way the reaction of other peoples upon them was also limited. But from the date of the downfall of the Northern Kingdom till the present John vii. 15. 1 HELLENIZING INFLUENCES 45 day, action and reaction have been very marked and on the whole beneficial. The deportation of the inhabitants of Judah came at a time when monotheism, with its dependent doctrines, had become tolerably fixed. It is reasonable also to assume that the faithful monotheistic element which was contained in the earlier deportation, that from the Northern Kingdom, united and became ultimately assimilated to the remnant of the House of Judah. Prophetic teaching which persisted, and probably was intensified during the Exile, finally consolidated and established the Hebrew in his true and pure worship. Henceforward it would seem to be impossible to shake the fidelity of the sons of Israel to the worship of their God. If, therefore, monotheism could not be shaken, the raison d’Hre of a separative and exclusive policy was abolished, and the People of God were in a fit condition to confer and receive benefits from the rest of the world. But of course the contemporary Israelite could not see things in a calm and judicial spirit. Perhaps he was right ; perhaps the dangers of intercourse were still existent. At any rate this was the conviction of many devout souls as well as the instinct of the people generally. The Gentile was a cruel taskmaster to be condemned not merely as the agent of national affliction, but on religious grounds, as the enemy of Yahweh. And this survival of an acute stage of the racial spiritual experience persisted, and still persists. The breakwater against the floods of polytheism remained, although the perils of inundation had long passed away. It was natural and perhaps inevit¬ able, but it became the chief obstacle in the way of religious progress and expansion. Occasionally some teacher would break loose from the spirit of excessive nationalism and enunciate doctrines on human, and not solely on Hebraic, grounds, or proclaim an age to be when the Gentiles would sit down in the Kingdom of Heaven. The Exilic and post- 46 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW Exilic prophets are, generally speaking, broader in their outlook than their predecessors. Upon the basis of their elders' monotheism they are reaching out to a fuller com¬ prehension of God’s Universal Fatherhood. Yet it is not a conviction ; it is merely the indulgence of a larger hope. Nevertheless we note the same tone in the writer of the Book of Jonah, in some of the Wisdom Literature, and among apocalyptists. Perhaps it would not be too much to say that there is a current of quasi-Catholic Judaism flowing towards, and later to be absorbed in, the Christian Church. There can be no reasonable doubt that the earlier com¬ pulsory emigrations from Ephraim first, and Judah after¬ wards, the former to Assyria, the latter to Babylon, had a disintegrating effect, and the prophecies of Ezekiel point to a rather widespread apostasy. Nevertheless there was ' a remnant ’ which stood faithful, and in this remnant must be reckoned not merely the few who returned to the waste places of Judah and the battered walls of Zion under Zerubbabel and Nehemiah, but a considerable population which still preferred (yet not in any spirit of disloyalty) to dwell by the waters of Babylon. The Hebrews who continued in exile did so partly from necessity, partly because under the milder rule of Persian monarchs they were allowed the full and free exercise of their religion. These clung to the worship of Yahweh and the traditions of their fathers with the same tenacity as that which marked their repatriated brethren. To provide oppor¬ tunities of congregational instruction and common prayer, meeting-places were erected,^ the Law and other sacred ^ I believe that the worship of the Synagogue a,s seen in the New Testament had its origin in the Babylonian Exile, though the germs of the institution were no doubt much earlier. See art. ‘ Synagogue ’ (Moss), Diet, of Christ and the Gospels ; also Oesterley and Box, The Religion and Worship of the Synagogue, p. 337, for a much later date. HELLENIZING INELUENCES 47 writings were translated and transcribed into the ver¬ nacular of the country. Teachers and interpreters of the Scripture kept the faith pure, and applied it to the needs of the people in their new situation. Connexion with the returned exiles and the holy scenes of their ancestral history was maintained by frequent resort to the services of the rebuilt and restored Temple, especially at the periods of the great Eeasts like those of the Passover, Pentecost, and Purim. Nevertheless they dwelt among a strange people, spoke an alien language, adopted no doubt to a great or less degree the manners and customs of their Gentile neighbours. Hebrew insularity was toned down imperceptibly, and the Hebrew character, strengthened by centuries of discipline to resist polytheistic tendencies and practices, was now fit to receive, and did receive, many new impressions and became the recipients of the culture of the day. Later Hebrew thought received several fresh ideas from Babylonian and Persian sources, not in such a way as to impair the great body of monotheistic doctrine, but merely to give a wider outlook and a gentler spirit to those who professed it. But when the Macedonian conquests unlocked the gates of Hellenic culture and spread the Greek language, arts, and literature over the Eastern world, Hebraism was deeply affected together with other Oriental systems and modes of thought. No doubt the Hebrew was less suscep¬ tible to alien manners and ideals than Mesopotamian, Syrian, and Egyptian. He consciously, and conscientiously, resisted these influences. Nevertheless he could not but flow with the current of the age ; the Jew of the Dispersion found he must learn Greek and use it in daily intercourse with his Gentile neighbours, just as his forbears had used Chaldee. The Jew was encouraged to emigrate, and found scope for his peculiar talents in Antioch, in the cities of Asia Minor, and above all in Egypt. It was in this 48 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW country that Alexander in 331 b. c. had founded the city which has always retained and ever conferred lustre upon his name. Great world-cities are a commonplace of modern life. We have grown accustomed to masses of population like London and New York, places which have to a large extent outgrown national idiosyncracies, and have become more or less reproductions of the world at large upon a smaller scale. And furthermore our present civilization has been productive of artificial capitals, places which have been designed consciously to become what they are. Sites carefully chosen, streets marked out with mathematical precision, a fine square here, a Government house there, a Parade Ground somewhere else. Petrograd, Berlin, Washington have made us familiar with such city-building. Hence we are in a position to understand the existence of centres like Alexandria better than the people of any other period since the final break-up of the Roman Empire. Alexandria was par excellence a city of design, and in its development acquired a cosmopolitan character. Even to-day, when the whole world is open to the rest¬ less, the curious, and the health-seeker, Egypt compels multitudes to its shores. Its bright sunshine, its warm and beautiful climate, its historic associations stretching away into the obscurity of the prehistoric, its almost weird rejuvenation under British auspices, draw the minds of all, and until the present unrest,^ the persons of many. What must have been the fascination when a genial and en¬ lightened monarch ^ advertised its charms and presented in his capital city all that made Hellas home to the culti¬ vated Greek, while around lay the vivid witness of that ^ A. D. I92I-2. 2 Ptolemy Soter (306-285 b. c.) is especially in the writer’s mind, but the epithets would, I fancy, fairly well apply to most of the Ptolemies, despite their many vices. HELLENIZING INELUENCES 49 ancient civilization which even the proud Athenian was content to claim as his original.^ But no metropolis claiming to be cosmopolitan in ancient or modern days has ever failed to attract the Jew, and during the greater part of its illustrious history Alexandria contained an immense Jewish population. It has, indeed, been asserted that one-third of its six or seven hundred thousand inhabitants belonged to this race. Certainly the Jews possessed their Ghetto, Regio Judaeorum. This was one of the three districts of the city, and it is quite possible that, as in modern cities, the Jew was also to be found outside his specially assigned district. We cannot assume that the population of each region was rigidly fixed and its population exclusively Greek, Hebrew, and Egyptian respectively. But it is reasonable to suppose that the Jewish population was not appreciably smaller than that of the other two elements ; the more so as we have evidence not only of its commercial and intellectual activity but of the jealousy which the other races of the city exhibited towards it, occasionally breaking out in rioting and massacre. Though it will be necessary in the course of this treatise to refer constantly to Alexandria, one must do so here simply to give its proper weight to the strongest influence to which the Hebrew was subject, namely, the Hellenic. 1 flerodotus, Hist. ii. ii ; Plato, Timaeus, 21-5. In the latter Critias speaks of the Egyptians and Athenians as of coeval and coequal civilization in prehistoric times, but it is the Egyptians who retain the memory of this hoary past and impart it to Solon. An old priest aptly expresses the point of view : ‘ Oh, Solon, Solon ! You Hellenes are always boys, and there is no aged Hellene.’ Critias and those to whom he tells the story display no wounded racial pride in the face of this declaration, and I think the legend may be accepted as representing the common view held by cultivated Hellenes as to the source of their immediate civilization. The possibility of the Phoenicians being the medium of their inter¬ course still holds good. E 50 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW For it was under this influence chiefly that the Jew developed during the centuries immediately preceding the Advent of Christ. Wherever he found himself outside the narrow borders of Palestine—nor was he altogether immune even there, as we have already seen—he came into touch with the Greek language, customs, and ideas. Hellenic civiliza¬ tion was quite as vigorous and far more permeative than his own. Hellenism was diffusive: Judaism intensive. The trend of Jewish thought was Godward : Hellenic man- ward. The Jew was intuitive : the Greek reflective. The main interest of the Jew was ethical: that of the Greek intellectual. As a matter of fact these two elements were complementary the one to the other, and each needed the other to make its distinctive gifts an effective and per¬ manent contribution to the true advancement of the human race. For the moment it may be enough to say that, humanly speaking, the products of Jewish genius and the noble qualities of the Jewish spirit would never have passed the barriers of Hebrew racialism had not the humanizing influences of the Greek in some measure removed, or at least reduced the height of those barriers. Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian had in the past each left some impress. But it was only the last to which the Hebrew in any way lent himself deliberately, and then he did so with large reservations. A common hatred of idolatry drew the Hebrew and the most humane of Oriental despotisms to a mutual appreciation. The Persian also in his best days possessed a comparatively high standard of morality, and this made its appeal to the clean-living Jew. In regard to other nations it was a true instinct which strengthened the Jew against their influence, recognizing them to be upon a lower moral and spiritual plane. But none of the former races with whom the Hebrews had come in contact had such varied and attractive gifts to offer as the Hellene, who after the Macedonian conquests HELLENIZING INFLUENCES 51 spread his wares before the world, and nowhere was there such‘a display of treasures—philosophic, scientific, and artistic—presented to mankind, and among others to the Jew, as at Alexandria. The Jew, with other Orientals, succumbed at least outwardly, and in some measure indeed inwardly, and became if not a Hellene, at any rate a Hellenist. Apart from atmosphere, and from influences too elusive and subtle to be made objects of profitable investigation, the most important product of Jewish Hellenistic culture was the Septuagint—the earliest version of the Sacred Writings of the Ancient People of God. The mere fact of translation bears witness to the broadening effects of Greek civilization. Here are the holy books of the most exclusive people in the world set forth, not in a mystic tongue unfamiliar to the vulgar, sacred in proportion to its unintelligibility, and only to be expounded by a sacerdotal caste, but in the ' lingua franca ’ of the day, widely circulated, accessible to all. The significance of this initial fact is strengthened by the apparent aims of the translators, which were not merely to edify the faithful, but to commend the worship of the One God to the Gentiles. A careful observer will notice that the cruder anthropomorphisms of the Hebrew original are paraphrased and the barbarities of early national history euphemized.^ The alterations are not in themselves very startling, but when we consider the innate dislike of the Hebrew for tampering even with the letter of Scripture, they witness to the pressure of environ¬ ment upon him and his desire that the religion of his fathers should dress itself therein with appropriate garments. Another indication of a less rigid spirit among the Hellenists than that which possessed the home-dwelling Jews is perhaps recognizable in their enlarged Canon. ^ H. B. Swete, The Old Testament in Greek, vol. i. Introduction, pp. 325 ff. 52 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW The Scribes and Lawyers,^ laudatores temporis acti, drew the line of canonicity in the Age of Artaxerxes. Thus the Book of Esther was included within the sacred limits ; Baruch, Ecclesiasticus, and i Maccabees—to mention some of the finest of later writings—were excluded from the Hebrew Canon. It is difficult to understand with regard to these latter works what principle secured their exclusion except a veneration for the writings of antiquity, a sentiment which vindicated itself by placing a chrono¬ logical barrier between ancient and modern.^ However, there are few who would dispute that the average of inspiration is much lower in the collection known as the Apocrypha than in the Hebrew Canon. It is the method of demarcation through the debatable territory which is questionable. There are writings of the Apocrypha which seem to rise above the level of several of the writings included within the Old Testament proper. That these have been rescued from oblivion, and, possibly indeed, from extinction, is due to their inclusion in the Greek version of the Old Testament. We may also be grateful that the quaint stories of Bel and the Dragon, of Tobit, and others, have been preserved since they supply us with interesting literary material and also incidentally reveal something of the thought, life, and practice of the Hebrew people in post-Canonical days. Certainly those who were responsible for the Septuagint version were no more moved by scientific principles in their selection than their more conservative Palestinian brethren. But the wider scope of ^ In the New Testament practically synonymous ; if there is any distinction it is probably on these lines*—the Scribes preserved, interpreted, and handed on the Law, oral and written, the Lawyers administered it. 2 Though the Hebrew Canon was not stereotyped until {circa) A. D. lOO at Jabneh (Jamnia), Philo’s references show that it was practically settled in his day, and indeed imply settlement reaching back a considerable time. HELLENIZING INFLUENCES 53 « their Canon undoubtedly indicates a wish to include rather than to exclude, and a willingness to see the Divine Purpose at work later than an arbitrary date-line beyond which the Spirit of God can no longer move the spirits of men. CHAPTER VI PHILO One of the most interesting personalities of later Judaism is Philo of Alexandria. He was a contemporary of Jesus of Nazareth, though there is no evidence to show that he came under even the indirect influence of the Founder of Christianity. It is true that Jerome speaks, or seems to speak, of Philo as one of those who built or adorned the Christian Church. St. Jerome’s declaration on this point is somewhat ambiguous, but, however that may be, there is ground for a more respectful and more general recogni¬ tion among Christians of this great Jewish thinker.^ The student of Christianity must go to Philo to appreciate the religion out of which Christianity sprang. In him we see Judaism in its finest aspects and in its most Catholic phase. To some he may appear more as a Greek philosopher than as a Hebrew monotheist. But this is a mistake. He was bent in all his literary efforts to commend monotheism to the Hellenic mind, and in pursuit of this object he often speaks like a Greek. But it will be observed that in his philosophy he is eclectic ; he selects those features of Grecian philosophy which appeal to him as a monotheist. In part of his theology he is a Platonist, though not like ^ The above sentence is a reminiscence of a striking passage con¬ tained in an article by J. H. A. Hart upon Philo, which appeared in the Journal of Theological Studies, 1909 (January ?). If I remember rightly, the article was in the form of a review of a work on Philo by Emile Breliier. 54 the first measure : THE HEBREW the great master dealing with the fluid results of specula¬ tion, but with eternal realities. What Plato calmly and vaguely speculates upon, Philo knows. Here speaks the Hebrew, not the Greek. Plato appeals to the Alexandrian because, with some apparent wavering, he upholds the doctrine of the Transcendence of the Great First Principle. In other connexions Philo betrays Stoic leanings. On the whole. Stoicism makes the strongest appeal to him of aU the philosophical cults of his time. Yet it draws him not as a philosopher but as a Hebrew. It fits in best with all his intuitions, with the faith of his fathers, with the virile morality which he has inherited. This austere code of ethics attracts the Jew as it did the Roman, though on different grounds, which will be discussed later, and Philo was a Jew. Again, the very pantheism of the Stoic is suggestive. It suggests the truth which as a heart-felt, not speculative, monotheist he upholds most firmly—that God has not left himself without witness on the earth. But—how explain these things to a Hellene ! That was the difficulty. So he fastened upon the theory of media¬ tion. The Transcendent God acts upon, or communicates with, the universe through properties, qualities, agencies, /Voyoi, Aoyos. This (or these) emanation(s)—he is suffi¬ ciently vague and uncertain in his terminology and appar¬ ently in his thought—fills' the universe with God and makes it in a sense Divine. Of course man shares in this blessedness of being moved and inspired by the Divine qualities in a pre-eminent degree. It is by this means that God speaks to every child of man, but especially to those of the highest type, leaders of thought and spirit— to Moses and the rest. Here very broadly is the philosophical theology of Philo. It is Hebrew monotheism expressed in terms of Hellenic thought. Philo’s religion supplied the matter; Greek piiilosophy the form. And this mode of thought is cer- PHILO 55 tainly patient of the idea that God might become Incarnate. That the great Alexandrian has been looked at askance by the Rabbis of post-Christian Judaism need cause no surprise. There can, however, be no doubt of his sub¬ stantial orthodoxy. It is not his faith but his tone, his sentiment, which is suspect. He HeUenized overmuch, which does not mean that he sacrificed monotheistic dogma, but that he saw its scope was wider than the racial borders, that he felt something of the conviction which struck Peter with such amazement, ‘ Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons, but in every nation he that feareth Him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted of Him.’ ^ In his own person he represents that of which the Septuagint Version was the written testimony, and the Dispersion the vehicle, namely, a catholic religion which had not yet acquired a vital force, nor a living voice. He saw that monotheism was fitted to be, and ought to be, a universal religion, and he did his part in trying to make it so. He failed to do so because, like most learned men of the ancient world, his appeal was too narrow both socially and intellectually. By itself the work of Philo is barren : as a link in the chain of religious development it is most significant. Chronologically and logically it stands last in the process of preparing the meal for the leaven. The first measure of meal, its strong, hard, original grain, ground fine in the vicissitudes of Hebrew national life, its flour softened and made more palatable by mixture of other types of meal, chiefest of them being that of Hellas, was thus prepared to receive the gift of vitality.^ The acting and reacting influences of Hellenism and Judaism had made their final profitable effort in the evolution of such a man as Philo and in making available the products of his mind and spirit. 1 Acts X. 34-5. 2 See Introduction, general argument, and recurring metaphor of the meal and leaven. 56 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW CHAPTER VII THE FULNESS OF TIME In the preceding pages the Hebraic character and its development have been under hasty review. The spirit and tendencies of Hebraism as they issued forth in Judaism ^ have been examined with sufficient thoroughness for the purpose in hand. That purpose is to account for the Jew as he was in the era of the Appearance of Jesus of Nazareth ; to exhibit his possibilities and limitations ; to endeavour to estimate the quality of his spiritual life, and to appraise its vitality and its capacity for self-development. Let us now briefly examine contemporary conditions. None of the material is exactly new, though some of it has only recently secured the attention its importance has deserved, while it would be no exaggeration to say that the whole perspective of the Herodian Age has been altered for us in this present generation.^ The priestly, aristocratic party, which bore the name of Zadok, and whose adherents were called Sadducees, were conservative and cautious in their policy as they were in matters of faith. And indeed their position was one fraught with great peril. The high-priestly families and their dependants comprised a party which was important not from its numbers but its social prestige. They were the titular guardians of the worship and destinies of Israel. They stood between the covetousness, tyranny, and cruelty of Gentile overlords, and the restless, frequently rebellious,' ^ Here used in its strictest sense ' cf. Fairweather, Background of the Gospels, p. ii. 2 Chiefly in the weight given to Apocalyptic opinions and beliefs both in their literary form and in their oral dissemination among the people. .Schweitzer, Charles, Oesterley, and Box are among the pioneers in this department of research. THE FULNESS OF TIME 57 multitude of their own people. Hence their responsibility was very great. It is unfair to impute to them mere selfishness and pride of station. Since they occupied the ‘ seats of the mighty ’ in perilous times, it was their duty, as well as their interest, to suppress the zeal of mob leaders. The slightest sign of popular rebellion, and the power of Rome might find a pretext for removing the last vestiges of national independence, and the precious symbols of their monotheistic faith. They were religious men after a sort, and held to a form of faith for which they claimed Pentateuchal authority. From this, the fervour and intensity of the prophetic spirit was excluded. It was coldly ethical. There was no enthusiasm about it, very little emotion, and no missionary energy whatever. It was useful as a restraining force, but it had no positive aggressive value. More than any other element in the nation life, Sadduceeism represented the stagnation of Judaism. To show that it is possible to make a far less favourable estimate of the tone and tenets of the ruling class in Judaism than I have done, I quote the following passage from a comparatively recent article in a reputable religious journal; ‘ The Sadducees were as unappreciative of the greatness of their high calling as the Israelites had been in the wilderness. . . . Just as the Israelites were con¬ tent with the immediate satisfaction of their bodily crav¬ ings, so were the Sadducees content with the material advantages of the Theocracy. Having the emoluments of office they were fairly well content.’ ^ The Pharisaic party, though naturally more active and alert, was in no better case. Having its origin in a genuine spiritual movement, it soon became satisfied with externals, the machinery of religion. Of course its noblest exponents were men of true religious zeal and honest intent. The ^ Rev. S. Ribcrty, Review of Political Relations of Christ's Ministry, Expository Times (September 1916, p. 535). 58 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW honoured names of Hillel, Shammai, and Gamaliel so testify. The experiences of St. Paul in his pre-Christian career indicate that there was much religious enthusiasm and moral earnestness in the party. But even at their best these forces were misdirected, and rendered abortive by their false direction, produced religious stagnation rather than progress. The painfully inadequate and depressing effects of legal scrupulousness are nowhere better criticized than by St. Paul, who knew the system inside and out.^ So much for its best; at its worst, Pharisaism was what Jesus of Nazareth declared it to be. Nevertheless, we must place to the credit of Pharisaism several things. First of all, it accepted the full content of the Old Dispensation teaching; secondly, it zealously disseminated the knowledge of the same ; thirdly, as an integral part of this teaching, it included the Messianic element, and gave consistent testimony to the racial expectation. These valuable characteristics were over¬ shadowed and impaired by many accretions. The Pharisees ‘ delivered to the people a great many observances by tradition which are not written in the Law of Moses So long as prophecy was a strong and authoritative force, so long the Law required no other interpreter ; but when prophecy lost its vigour and assurance, the Oral Law of tradition arose, and Rabbinical exegesis almost choked the word of God. Theoretically on a lower level than the Commandments of God, this ‘ ocean of comment as some one calls it, was treated practically as of equal authority. It is this sacrilegious tendency which is one of the chief counts in Our Lord’s terrible indictment of ^ Cf. especially Rom. vii. 5-24. 2 Jos., Ant. xiii. 10, 6 (Whiston’s translation). ® Applied, if I remember rightly, to written exegesis, ‘ an island of text in an ocean of comment but equally appropriate to the hood of words which ‘ darkened counsel ’ in Our Lord’s time. THE FULNESS OF TIME 59 the sect which is given its fullest expression in the passage beginning, ‘ The Scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses' seat,’ and proceeds, ‘ ye shut up the Kingdom of Heaven against men. . . . Woe unto you . . . Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin and have omitted the weightier (matters) of the law, judgement, mercy, and faith. ... Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat and swallow a camel.’ ^ As to the racial expectation, their attitude was incon¬ sistent. They included it in the scope of their teaching, and were even zealous propagators of Messianic ideas. The Law and the Messiah were two centres of Jewish thought when Christ appeared,^ and the Pharisees were exponents of both. But the Law, enlarged by them to the extent which we have seen, fascinated them by its complexity, and practically obscured the Promise. As to this latter, they could not conceive any fulhlment which did not retain themselves in the foreground of the religious stage. They could not believe that the Kingdom of God might possibly imply a revolution ; they rather looked for it to establish their own righteousness. Like most people in positions of influence and authority, the maxim ‘ the first shall be last and the last first ’ had a disagreeable sound. They were unconscious of disloyalty to their trust, and consequently they believed that, when the Messianic hopes were fulfilled, their efforts would be rewarded, their pre¬ judices respected, and their interests safeguarded. They succumbed to the danger, which is present to religious teachers in every age of becoming ‘ blind leaders of the blind ’, to which the only antidote is the daily practice of humility, and of selfless devotion to the service of God. Because of the neglect of these virtues their vision narrowed, their hopes focused on their own well-being, and they » Matt, xxiii. 1-35 ; also Mark vii. 9. Cl. ait. ‘ Messiah’, Diet. Christ and the Gospels, vol. ii, p. 178. 2 6 o THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW could not read the signs of the times. As their daily practice of religion was narrow, exclusive, and self-centred, so there was little that was humane, charitable, and ennobling in their teaching. For our present purpose Essenism may be disregarded. Its peculiarities had certain Gentile affiliations. Indeed, the incipient dualism of their doctrines and the ascetic tendencies of their practice were alien to Judaism.^ Un¬ doubtedly some of the characteristics which were visible among the Essenes powerfully influenced Christianity in dater ages, but it is impossible to trace them to the com¬ munistic monasticism of this Jewish sect. They had a common source, and that source is to be found among Oriental Gentile cults. But what chiefly causes them to be discounted here is that Essenism was separated from the current of national life. It was far otherwise with the apocalyptists. These formed no distinct party in Jewish life. Doctrinally they were one with the Pharisees, as indeed were the masses of the people. But in spirit and point of view the difference was sometimes very marked. The official and professional Pharisee, if one may use the term, regarded revelation as complete and its records closed. The Messianic Kingdom, if it were to come, would come according to the declara¬ tions of the ancient Prophets and within the rigid lines laid down by the elders. In fact the latter condition was made more important than the former. But the apoca¬ lyptists, according to their power, filled the role of the prophets of old time. To the new conditions of the Hebrew people they applied prophetic ideas and extended them. In some respects they made them more definite, in others added new features. Indeed, as the hopes of founding a vigorous and independent Jewish State evaporated, these ^ Lightfoot, Epp. of St. Paul—-Colossians and Philemon —the Essenes, pp. 354, 37 ^ tt-, 384 ft'. THE FULNESS OF TIME 6 i pseudonymous teachers developed the other-worldliness of the prophets and applied much which had hitherto possessed a material connotation to the glory of a spiritual kingdom, to the resurrection of the righteous to eternal bliss, and to eternal communion with the Eternal Godd We must not, however, accuse these exponents of later prophecy of indulging in mere dreamy generalities. The outstanding figure of Apocalyptic literature is the Messiah designated variously as the ‘ Son of Man ’, ' the Just One ‘ the Elect One He is to become manifest in the fulness of time, and the idea of the Daniel Apocalyptic in regard to the Messiah’s pre-existence is reiterated and details added. Of course a considerable portion of Jewish literature of this type is post-Christian and borrows something, possibly, from convictions and theories current in Christian circles. Nevertheless its main lines were laid before the Christian era, and the thought and language of Jesus, of Paul, of the writer of the Apocalypse, had become familiar to their contemporaries, however startling the application may have been. In truth it may be said that the mind and imagination of the masses of the people in Judea, and even more so in Galilee, were steeped in Messianic and eschatological conceptions, stretching back indeed into the Old Testament Canon, but, having been revitalized and given new colour by these strange, unknown writers who issued Tracts for Hard Times, drew the thoughts of the multitude away from present earthly disappointment and distress to a glorious heavenly atmosphere where God and His Messiah reign. These wonderful, and frequently extravagant, pictures are most valuable as indicating the method of preparation for some new departure, and also as accounting for the highly wrought expectancy of those days. * Art. ' Apoc. Literature’, Hastings’s Diet, of Christ and the Gospels, vol. i, p. 93. 2 Cf. Book of Enoch, 39. 7 ; 46. i ; 48, 3 (edit. Charles). 62 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW Then we finally referred to the Hellenization of a large portion of Judaism. This affected the Diaspora directly and pre-eminently, but it cannot have left Palestinian Judaism uninfluenced. Viewed broadly this absorption of Greek culture appears to have been decidedly wholesome. Nowhere were there more loyal and convinced mono¬ theists, no more zealous observers of the Law, than among the Jews of Alexandria, Antioch, and Tarsus. Neverthe¬ less they were insensibly moved to the study and admira¬ tion of the civilization and the literature of the people among whom they dwelt. They became less rigid, more humane.^ While Apocalyptic teaching was from inside the national life spiritualizing and broadening Jewish mentality to an appreciable extent, the Greek environment of hundreds of thousands of the sons of Israel was making them more tolerant of their Gentile neighbours, and impregnating them with its best thought. In passing, it may be said that the licence and depravity of heathenism were never assimilated by the Jew in these last ages of his history ; they filled him with a profound pity and aroused his missionary spirit; they did not contaminate him. No doubt there were renegade Jews, but, proportionately, they were few. The ancient prophets had done their work well; the scribes and elders fortified that work ; the apocal3rptists strengthened the inner antidote to Gentile degeneration. It was among the Jews of the Dispersion that the synagogue chiefly flourished, and where it performed its greatest service. Though the Rabbis tell us that in Jerusalem alone there were four or five hundred synagogues, it seems scarcely credible. Certainly beneath the shadow of the Temple their utility would seem less obvious than in the scattered Jewish settlements of Egypt and Asia ^ Yet the martyrdom of Stephen was the result of Hellenistic antagonism to his preaching (Acts vi. 9). THE FULNESS OF TIME 63 Minor. Nevertheless, they might be helpful to the pilgrim Jew in providing a haven where he could meet fellow pilgrims from his own town or locality, and hear familiar teaching in familiar guise. However that may be, the synagogue in alien lands preserved for scattered Jews the sense of racial and religious unity, and maintained in the midst of polytheistic populations little centres of pure monotheistic worship. Points of vantage were they, whence in the fulness of time the masses of heathenism could be assailed. Their value in this respect cannot be over-estimated. Moreover, I have already pointed out that the Hellenistic phenomenon included that crowning achievement of the rapprochement between Hebrew and Hellene, the great Greek version of the Old Testament known as the Septua- gint, a medium of understanding between the Semitic and Greek cultures. The precious gifts of thought and spirit, of Greek philosophy, and Hebrew religion became familiar, more or less generally, on either side. And it was in this atmosphere of toleration and mutual understanding that the Hellenist, Philo, conceived his great, though abortive, harmonies. Later on Judaism, transformed and energized by a creative contact so that it became a new thing, swept over to absorb into itself the glory of the ancient civiliza¬ tion of Hellas—but I am anticipating. Probably enough has been said to supply a working knowledge of Jewish conditions in the time of Jesus of Nazareth. These conditions developed in the period between the Exile and the Herodian Age, as I have attempted to describe them in the section immediately preceding the present one. Some had reached the height of their utility and significance ; some were nearing their dissolution. Sadduceeism as a distinct element did not survive the Destruction of the Temple.^ With the 1 A. D. 70. 64 THE FIRST MEAvSURE : THE HEBREW extinction of the sacrificial system, disappeared the sacer¬ dotal class. Pharisaism persisted through the period of catastrophe, and remained to organize, upon a synagogic and didactic basis, a Judaism uprooted and cast forth from its ancestral dwelling-place. Apocalyptic optimism and idealism were drained off by degrees from Judaism and went to enrich, and sometimes to hamper, a form of monotheism which sprang from the older faith and, strik¬ ing out a new course, set forth to conquer the world. Thus immediately before the moment of enkindling life and energy, the forces of monotheism were like an army awaiting the word to advance against the entrenchments of the enemy. But the avowed leaders of the army, the high-priestly class, were timid and cautious, more alive to the strengthening of their own interests during the period of inaction than anxious to try conclusions with the common foe. Others, the Pharisaic sect, were narrow and local in their view of the campaign, misconceiving its whole character, not content with following the broad principles of discipline which had come to them with the highest authority, but issuing a complex code of instruc¬ tions bewildering in its ramifications, and irritating in its rigidity to the noblest spirits and to the best minds ; these were satisfied with small efforts, and energy wasted in the attainment of small results. Others again (apocalyptists), not in any position of authority, had finer, broader con¬ ceptions which, however, were often marred by incoher¬ ence and contradiction ; they were visionary and without vigorous personal force to support or to guide—these shrank from conflict with ofiicial leaders, and were content to limit themselves to keeping up the morale of the forces. Finally, there was a strong element in the army coming from remote and widely separated regions, speaking a foreign language, and having new and different thoughts respecting method, though its principles were identical THE FULNESS OF TIME 65 with those whom we might reasonably term the Head- Quarters Staff. These Hellenists, like Philo and others, were more elastic, more adaptable, than the Home Forces, and some of their leaders thought that much might be learned from the tactics of the enemy. Meanwhile, the rank and file, ‘ the People of the Land ’, ‘ the multitude who knew not the Law was impatient, anxiously looking for real leader¬ ship, credulous of every rumour, eagerly in search of one to lead them to victory, but uncertain what sort of victory they desired. They were, therefore, unstable and unreli¬ able ; these either followed Theudas into the wilderness, or cried out, ’ Crucify Him ’, as the spirit of fanaticism, or that of servility and self-interest, momentarily affected them. Throughout the host there was lack of munitions, equipment, and aggressive leadership, but the army was expectant, uneasy under restraint, and eager to advance. When and whence were its needs to be supplied, its eager hopefulness to be gratified by an irresistible sweep forward of the legions of the Lord ? Our survey of the field justifies little optimism. The official leaders are no leaders, or else fail to discern the signs of the times. There is no driving force anywhere. On the other hand, the masses of the army are sensitive, and are ready to respond in sufficient numbers and weight for any heroic enterprise, provided it takes the shape of the general expectancy, and is forwarded by a leader who is strong enough to endure persecution and even death for the cause he has espoused. To revert to the figure which is ever in our minds during the process of this study—the meal had endured an age¬ long preparation for a great transformation, and was now ready, as ready as it ever could be, for contact with some vital force. 66 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW CHAPTER VIII CONTACT WITH VITAL FORCE That something momentous occurred during the Herodian period of Jewish history few will be found to deny. Whether it was natural, or supernatural; the result of evolutionary forces finding their full develop¬ ment, emerging from below after subterranean conflict with hostile tendencies; or a power descending, so to speak, from above, designed to quicken and glorify human life, is a problem upon which scientific investigators may reasonably expend themselves, provided that they are ever mindful of two facts, (i) that this is more than a mere physical inquiry, ( 2 ) that beyond what is called, rather arbitrarily, nature, there are vast fields of speculation where the human intellect may easily go wrong. And the subject with which we are at present dealing is the central problem of the world’s life. For many centuries it has occupied the thoughts of the deepest and most reverent minds, and while much light and assistance may be gained by the application of modern scientific methods to the investigation of that which happened, or began to happen, ‘ when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the King’,^ any merely ‘natural’ explanation of the Great Mystery which has changed human life so pro¬ foundly will fail to convince the heart of mankind. This Something I chose to describe as Vital Force, or ‘ The leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal ’. The first of these three measures I have taken to be Judaism. Its preparation for contact has been described more or less accurately and at some length. It is now necessary to state what is meant by Vital Force in ^ Matt. ii. I. CONTACT WITH VITAL FORCE 67 this connexion. And here there is danger of straying into the field of pure theology, or into that of philosophical speculation. Therefore I content myself with indicating briefly what I mean, which is this : The Vital Force is everything which is involved in the career of Jesus of Nazareth, Who He is and what He did {or is generally supposed to have done), either hy His visible, or invisible Presence. This, I think, is a fair way of putting the case, for it is invariably conceded (i) that the momentous change which took place is bound up with Jesus and His Mission, and (2) that the power which effected this change was not removed with His Corporal removal but rather was opened out and intensified after that removal. This, then, is the Vital Force. But our concern is with effects, not causes ; with the material, not the vital force ; with the measures of meal, not the leaven. In marking the changes brought about, in the material we cannot help acquiring some impression of the characteristics and power of the vital force. This is all to the good, but it is not our main consideration, which is to estimate effects. A priori speculation has a wonderful history, and. is adorned with the names of many of the most illustrious of mankind from Plato onwards. It is invaluable as a means of acquiring some sort of knowledge, or semblance of knowledge, in regard to mysteries and eternal verities quite outside the range of intellect by any other method. Yet from the nature of the case its positive contribution to the sum of human knowledge has been small. Its main service to mankind has been to keep human thought alive, and conscious, to the existence, power, and mystery of the Unseen in circum¬ stances where it would otherwise have sunk into gross materialism. But another method is necessary in the subject of this investigation. Forasmuch as something has happened which has profoundly stirred the world and 68 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW renewed it with fresh life and power, it seems that it might be worth while to observe and test the changes which have taken place. If it be a movement which has spent its force, then it has a mere historical interest, but if from the time of its inception it has had a permanent influence, and a salutary one, upon human society, it is a subject, not of academic interest, but of pressing importance. Of late years much has been heard of the philosophic system—it is rather a method—called Pragmatism.^ Ex¬ travagant have been the claims of many of this school, but as a method it has much to commend it. It is, I take it, an application to metaphysics in particular, and to the whole sphere of human intellectual endeavour in general, of the inductive method. By this canon of research, usually associated with the name of Francis Bacon, science from the Elizabethan Age onward has won her greatest triumphs. Nevertheless its application to pure philosophy is revolutionary and its victories are not likely to be so complete as in the field of physical inquiry. Permit, however, a leading exponent of modern philosophy to describe its nature and its value : ‘ Pragmatism is the doctrine that the whole meaning of a conception expresses itself in practical consequences, consequences either in the shape of conduct to be recommended, or in that of experi¬ ence to be expected, if the conception be true ; which consequences would be different, if it were untrue, and must be different from the consequences by which the meaning of other conceptions is in turn expressed. ... In methodology, it is certain that to trace and compare their respective consequences is an admirable way of establish¬ ing the different meanings of different conceptions.’ ^ Its value as an instrument of investigation in the region of 1 The term itself was first used in a philosophical discussion at Harvard University between C. S. Pierce and William James (1878). ^ W. Caldwell, Pragmatism and Idealism, p. 21. CONTACT WITH VITAL FORCE 69 First Principles and of Ontology is less likely to be so marked as in the study of psychology and of human history. Since this present inquiry is of the latter character, a method which has guided physical research to such mighty discoveries, and has now invaded the area of philo¬ sophical speculation, may reasonably be found helpful. Let us now observe the changes which took place in Judaism during the first century of the present era and try to weigh their importance and determine their significance. We have the best of all authority for testing a tree by its fruits,^ and we can at least attempt to estimate the depth and extent of a transformation by judging the thing transformed with what it was before. Furthermore, if the transformation was effective in only a part of the whole, a useful comparison may be made between the portion which was vitally changed and that which only received an external impression. For this is what took place in Judaism. From our review of Jewish religious life in the Herodian Age we may briefly state its condition in the following terms : it was partly stagnant, partly restless; its vital development arrested, its hopes thrown back upon them¬ selves, its pious opinions unratified, its speculations abortive because illogical; its conjectures, often noble, were but visionary ; harmonies were instinctively felt, but were elusive and fragmentary. There were all these qualities and symptoms, but no life. However, in the fourth decade of the first century a change began to manifest itself. Life revealed itself vigorously in a small but growing society imbedded in Judaism. 'An insignificant company of the seed of Abraham, Galilaeans for the most part, shook off the stagnation, in¬ decision, and petty-mindedness which surrounded them, and by which they had hitherto been infected. Speaking * Matt. viii. 15-20. 70 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW broadly, they were men of obscure station and small learning of the accepted sort. As far as we can gather there was nothing in their antecedents to mark them as possessed of brilliant gifts either of thought or action. ^ Apocalyptic dreams, one might reasonably infer, would unfit men for clear, sane thinking, or for the execution of any rational design. And these men had indulged in Apocal5rptic dreams like their neighbours ; some of them had been fanatics ; all, no matter what their native intel¬ ligence might be, had been the slaves of their environment. John, the son of Zacharias, a man of priestly race, a strange prophet brought up in the desert wastes beyond Jordan, had previously converted some, and probably had influenced all. His message, however, was one merely of repentance and preparation. It proclaimed the Day of the Lord as at hand, His Kingdom nigh. But it gave no indication of the character of the Lord’s Coming, nor the nature of His Kingdom. In the loneliness of his prison- house the forerunner himself seemed to waver as to the identity of the Messiah. ‘ Art thou He that should come, or look we for another ? ’ ^ was the message he sent to Jesus of Nazareth. Uncertainty as to what the future might contain, yet conviction that it contained something wonderful and impressive, and exhortation as to conduct in view of what impended—that is the burden of John’s ministry. There was no invitation to organize, or even to act; simply to purify oneself, and to wait. Unlike the old prophetic preaching, it was apparently without the accessories of description and imagery, but marked by greater intensity, as was fitting, in the very shadow of stupendous happenings. Nevertheless, it was not from this quarter that the impulse came which was to ‘ turn the world upside down ’. But the life of John was contemporaneous with that of ^ Luke vii. 19, 20. CONTACT WITH VITAL FORCE 71 Jesus Whom the son of Zacharias accepted as the Messiah, and Whom he was willing to see wax great at his own expensed Of the life, ministry, and teaching of Jesus we have written records from the hands of disciples which concur in all essential respects with the unbroken tradition of the Christian society.^ That there is so little external evidence is not surprising to those who are more than superficially acquainted with the age and circumstances in which the events occurred. Learning was confined to the few; the events took place in an obscure province ; they were not such as to attract general attention at the outset. But the records written, as it were, from within are full, various, and emphatic as to meaning. They bear upon themselves the stamp of sincerity and singleness of purpose. They reflect the convictions not only of the writers but of the inarticulate mass behind them. They are the literary expression of that which was most surely believed among the Christians of the Apostolic Age.^ And apart from the transparent sincerity of the writers, which ultimately comes from the same source, they gain their freshness, originality, and power from their subject-matter, Jesus, the Son of Man, the Son of God. It is these qualities which cause the Evangelic narratives, in spite of crudeness of language and of form, to stand unique in the world’s literature. ^ John iii. 25-30. 2 Corroborative allusions are to be found in Jos. (Anl.) to the life and work both of John and of Jesus. These are roughly con¬ temporaneous, the Antiquities being completed a. d. 93. Some, however, have looked upon these passages as interpolations by Christian hands, but their genuineness is more widely accepted by scholars than formerly. See articles ‘ J^ws ’, ‘Josephus ’ (J. H. A. H.), Encyc. Brit., nth edition; also Thorburn, Jesus the Christ: His¬ torical or Mythical? Also Burkitt, Gosp. of Transmission, p. 345. From the times of Suetonius and Tacitus references to Jesus, and the religion He founded, become more general among external writers. * Luke i. i. 72 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW CHAPTER IX FORM AND SUBSTANCE And these narratives are the substance of the new teaching reduced to writing. Its earliest exposition was oral—delivered with intense earnestness by men who had been closely associated with Jesus from the beginning of His Ministry. Let us consider this new phenomenon from two aspects, (i) its manner or form, (2) its substance or content. I employ this order because it was the manner and form of the new teaching which attracted those whom its substance finally held. The two things, the mode and the substance, are closely connected and yet are easily distinguishable the one from the other. The greatest orator must remain silent if he have nothing to say, or, if he utter words, must be content to see them produce no effect save the tickling of the ears of those who hear them. On the other hand, the loftiest and most original thought must have an adequate expression and a suitable medium. It is to be feared that from time to time the cause of justice and of truth has suffered from lack of powerful advocacy. Much depends upon the force and skill of those who represent a cause. Its success hangs upon the abilities of those representatives. Socrates died because he refused the support of powerful friends and refrained from pleading in his own defence. His innocence could have been triumphantly vindicated. There was plenty to say. There was lacking only some medium to express it. The thing has happened many times in history, and the mind of the Christian goes back in recollection to that tragic, yet pregnant, miscarriage of justice before Caiaphas, and before Pilate, where there was no human FORM AND SUBSTANCE 73 help, and the hand of God was stayed. ‘ Truly the Son of Man goeth as it was determined.' ^ Then again, Socrates’ point of view, Socrates’ method, would have perished but for the intellectual brilliance and literary grace of his pupil, Plato. And this New Thing which had come into the world would shortly have been trodden under foot had there not been found men equal to the task of planting and cultivating it. It may be ■ argued that this New Thing was supernatural, and there¬ fore required no natural means for its propagation. In answer to this it may be affirmed that nothing has ever come into this world, however mysterious and heavenly its origin, which, once introduced, has failed to conform to the principles of life and growth as they obtain in our present condition. Meanwhile, we are not considering its supernatural character but the natural media employed to express this new thing to the world. As regards (i) the manner and form—we have already noted the ordinary abilities and character of the men who led the movement. The evangelic narratives supply no evidence of moral and spiritual grandeur, except in the case of the Master Himself. There are indications of teachableness, courage, quick spiritual insight, willingness to make the supreme sacrifice, but almost any group of like numbers selected from the masses of any country would probably have contributed the same qualities in much the same proportion. Indeed the choice of the inner circle of disciples would seem to have been regulated on the principle of ‘ averages ’.^ The greatest upheaval of human society was to be directed by those who, left to themselves, were mediocre and commonplace men. Be that as it may, shortly after their Master had been taken from them, we see these mediocre men preaching ^ Luke xxii. 22 ; Mark xiv. 21 ; Matt. xxvi. 24. ^ Cf. A. B. Bruce, The Training of the Twelve pp 37-9. 74 the first measure : THE HEBREW and teaching in such a way that not only were their hearers interested and impressed, but that an increasing multitude of them espoused their cause. Whatever views one may hold as to the Gift of Tongues at Pentecost, there can be no doubt as to the effect of the Apostles’ preaching.^ The manifestations of the Pentecostal Gift were received with amazement, doubt, and some scepticism.^ But there follows a sermon by the leader of the little group, a poor provincial, an erstwhile fisherman, one who some weeks previously had in craven fear denied his Master, yet who now at immense risk and with stirring, possibly rude, eloquence preaches the doctrine and message of the Master. It seems to have been not entirely devoid of the qualities which were highly prized by the most learned Rabbis of the time—a knowledge of the Scriptures and a skill in application.^ But there was a freshness and power about it which we can all, I think, feel as we read the second chapter of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, though in that record we have probably a mere summary of what was said. Certainly if we do not feel it, the hearers of the words did, and that, after all, is the matter we are here concerned with. ‘ Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their hearts, and said unto Peter and the rest of the Apostles, “ Men and brethren, what shall we do ? In response to this pathetic plea there was further exhorta¬ tion, followed by an initiatory rite, ‘ and there were added unto them about three thousand souls However, there was more in it than this. It is com¬ paratively easy to persuade men to accept certain opinions or doctrines which are remote from life and conduct. At one time people firmly held that the sun moved and the ^ Cf. G. B. Cutten, The Psychological Phenomena of Christianity, pp. 49 ff. * Acts ii. 12-13. ® Cf. Oesterley and Box, The Religion and Worship of the Syna¬ gogue, p. 21, n. latter part. ■* Acts ii. 37-41. FORM AND SUBSTANCE 75 earth stood still; people now as firmly believe that the earth revolves round the sun in its yearly course. Neither the one opinion, nor the other, carries with it the necessity of a volte-face, or even a modification of one’s habits, or one’s spiritual outlook. Even so, the scientific fact was stoutly disputed because it was thought to conflict with statements of Holy Writ and implications founded thereon. So soon as the contents of the faith were seen to be un¬ impaired by the acceptance of the physical fact, opposition dwindled. This will serve to indicate where men are most sensitive. It is in the region of religious and ethical ideas. And it was here where the new teaching struck, and struck hard—in the region of religious and ethical ideas. They did not merely strike hard; in spite of most untoward circumstances these teachers struck effectively. Here they were, provincial peasants in the metropolis of their race and their religion, frowned upon by a proud, self-sufficient, and learned hierarchy, bereft of the Master Who alone of the little band had previously displayed gifts of leadership, power, and heroism; this contemptible gathering of ignorant men and women dared to raise the controversy which was thought to be dead, the controversy which in all logic had been extinguished with the death of Jesus. These men dared to raise it all up again with an added strength and fervour, and raised it successfully ! Instead of a forlorn hope conducted by One Heroic Figure while adherents huddled in the background, here was the brave, uncompromising advocacy of men assured of the strength and invincibility of their cause, men who but yesterday, so to speak, had forsaken their Lord and fled. Moreover, behind them was a little society, quivering with life, maintaining the closest bonds of intimacy and fellow¬ ship with its leaders. After the execution of a loved and trusted leader, it is a commonplace of history that the adherents, dispirited 76 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW and disillusioned, should scatter, strive to remain hidden, and eventually seek the obscurity of their ordinary pur¬ suits. Unless a succession of leadership has been provided for, this is the usual phenomenon of miscarried revolu¬ tions. But even a cursory examination of the evangelic narratives will show that up to the Crucifixion of the Prophet of Galilee none of the inner circle of disciples had displayed marked capacity for leadership. They seem to have understood their Lord’s mission very partially, and what was expected of themselves very little indeed. This is not to say that they had received no training, or that their training was ineffective. It means merely that the time for its exercise had not yet come, and it was only in process of assimilation. Nothing had so far happened to give coherence and order to the chaos of their minds. Much of Our Lord’s teaching was too spiritual, too mystical for souls, preoccupied with the earthly vesture of Messianic promises, to understand and appreciate. The tragedy of Calvary over, the Person and Mission of Jesus still fascinated yet baffled them. Among the passages which illustrate the mental attitude of the disciples after their Master’s cruel death, there is none more valuable, more beautiful, than that which describes the two wayfarers proceeding to Emmaus.^ The teaching which he had imparted was overlaid by the sense of personal loss and disappointed hopes ; it had been misconstrued and a great grief flooded over it. It needed the touch of a vanished hand. And the sound of a Voice that is still to bring it to the surface, and guide bewildered minds to its meaning. And besides that they needed power. Read the post- Crucifixion narrative, and note how they needed power— ^ Luke xxiv. 13-35. FORM AND SUBSTANCE 77 Illumination and Power ! The flash of light which would clarify, and so enable them to set in order the tumult of their minds ; the Vital Force to make their knowledge effective and serviceable. Then something happened. The fact that the disciples made any effort at all shows that something happened. In accordance with the psychology of unsuccessful revolu¬ tions the disciples had at first dispersed. The indications are that with saddened hearts many of them were about to resume their interrupted toil—had in fact done so. Yet instead of prosecuting their purpose, we find them' within a short time gathered in force close to the scene of the great tragedy, not as mourners haunting the last resting-place of their Beloved, but as men whose hearts are filled with a great joy, and whose spirits are keyed up to a great expectancy. ‘ They were continually in the Temple blessing and praising God.’ ^ It is difficult to account for this striking change of mood from the ordinary psychological condition of bitter disappointment to that of confident expectancy. To effect this change, the stimulus must have come from outside themselves. We are left in the dark, unless we accept the account of the post-Resurrec- tion appearances which are recorded in the Gospels. Although we confess to being baffled in the attempt to harmonize the accounts in all their details, they yet convey to the writer’s mind an overwhelming impression of truth, and they serve, as nothing else could, to explain the change of mood. It was due to the profound conviction that they, the disciples, had seen their Lord risen from the tomb. But this was not all; within a brief period this confident expectancy was succeeded by one of active, courageous labour—preaching, teaching, organizing, administrating. It is extraordinary and baffling. There is an explanation, the explanation contained in the records ; and, if one can * Luke xxiv. 52-3. 78 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW accept the supernatural, it is a complete and satisfying answer to our questionings. Just as the Evangelists explain the change of mood as due to intercourse with the Risen Master, so the author of the Acts explains the change from weakness to power, from patient, eager expectancy to fruitful, organic labour, as due to the Presence of the Paraclete. This explanation may be unscientific, but it is given in all good faith by a careful and painstaking his¬ torian, St. Luke, who was contemporary with the events he relates, or collates, and was next to being an eyewitness to these happenings. This writer’s identity, capacity, and trustworthiness have been severely tested by modern scholarship, and have been thoroughly vindicated.^ If subsequent events were out of line with St. Luke’s narra¬ tive we should have to cast about for another explanation, but the ensuing history of the Christian religion makes it a most reasonable explanation—indeed the only one which meets the facts. Of late years Psychology has given thinking men a new respect for religious experiences, and has banished the old and easy contempt for their effects. It is less difficult to-day to appreciate the careers and teaching of the ancient prophets of Israel and to understand the power and success of Mohammed than it was in the middle of the last century. It is possible that our present inquiry might be illuminated by a comparison between the religious phenomena cited above and that supplied by the little Apostolic society. The effects of prophetic preaching may be estimated by a study of Old Testament literature where we can trace the gradual development of religious and moral ideas, and their growing hold upon the people. These effects are what might naturally be expected from the earnest preach¬ ing of godly men whose authority was generally recognized, ^ Cf. Plummer, St. Luke, Int. Crit. Comm., especially Intro¬ duction, i-xxix. FORM AND SUBSTANCE 79 and whose precepts, however uncomfortable and incon¬ venient, answered to the highest convictions of the race. The main theme of prophetic preaching was the Righteous God, and the need of righteousness in those who worshipped Him. There was nothing creative, nothing even positively constructive about it. Their exhortations pointed to the right road, but gave no power to follow it beyond the power which is derived from example, encouragement, and from the kindling and fanning of a Great Hope. With the teaching of Islam it was different. On their best side the doctrinal tenets of Mohammed were Hebraic with a slight tincture of Christianity. The system of the Great Prophet was therefore largely derivative. But his appeal, and the appeal of Islam generally, and the grounds of its success, are traceable to the simplicity of the message and to an ethical standard which was not over-exacting. On the other hand, while the ‘ Thus saith the Lord ’ of the Hebrew prophet commanded immediate deference, Mohammed undoubtedly had to impress and mould his own environment. He was the first prophet of his cult, not one in an age-long chain of accredited teachers whose links naturally supported one another. He must needs create his own atmosphere, and force the members of his entourage to inhale it. Where he obtained the power to effect his purpose, it is not our present duty to inquire. For myself, I am willing to admit a certain element of the supernatural and to believe that Mohammed possessed a degree of inspiration, since otherwise I cannot account for the power of the man,^ nor for the fruits of his mission, any more than I can account for the power, and its effects, ^ Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero-Worship, The Hero as Prophet. Margoliouth is very severe : ‘ Muhammad was taken as the type of a heroic prophet, just as Odin was made the type of a heroic divinity, the author’s knowledge of the two personalities being about equal.’ Art. ‘Muhammad’ in Encyc. Pel. Ethics, vol, viii, p. 8y8. 8o THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW of the ancient prophets, except on the assumption that God spake as He was minded through them. Nevertheless, it is possible to view the origin and growth of Islam as a purely natural phenomenon. Monotheism had long flourished in the world, and the Christian form of it had captured the civilization of the Roman Empire. The worship of One God was nothing new, and a strong per¬ sonality was perhaps all that was necessary to turn the wild desert tribes of Arabia from their fetishism to a stern and simple faith with a rigid though easily attainable ethical code. Moreover, the fighting instincts of the people were called in to the support of missionary zeal, and Islam was preached with fire and sword. It is a method of propaganda which is easily understood, and, ruthlessly employed, cannot fail of material success. Does the Apostolic type of power and of result conform to either of these varieties ? Only the beginnings of the Apostolic movement have so far been indicated. Its further progress is of a piece with its first stage. Facing new situations, it developed new powers and personalities adapted to its task. The whole authority of contemporary Judaism, armoured with spiritual pride, conscious that it sat in Moses’ seat, early bent its energies to the suppression of ‘ the new way h Later on, the majesty and power of the Pagan Empire accepted the role of persecutor. The history of Roman Imperialism from the time of Nero onwards to Constantine is intermittently involved with this hopeless struggle (hopeless, that is to say, for the secular authorities), and towards the end of the period it constitutes the main issue. Henceforward, the movements of the finest races of man¬ kind are involved inextricably with the doctrines, the ethics, the customs of the community which commenced its career as a contemptible sect of a despised race. Con¬ sidered merely on the surface these results are as marvellous FORM AND SUBSTANCE 8 i as those secured by Mohammed and his successors ; they are infinitely wider, and at the same time more radical and permanent, than those of an Elijah or an Isaiah. The Hebrew prophet brought a peevish and rebellious king to repentance, or awakened the conscience of a people sunk in idolatry and licentiousness ; Mohammed obtained per¬ manent, but more or less external, success by force of arms. But these disciples of Jesus were not in the line, or succession, of accredited teachers ; the official religious classes were at first passively, then actively, antagonistic to them. They made no appeal to the secular authority, nor did they rely upon the arm of the flesh. Their weapons were purely spiritual; they relied upon the persuasive power of the doctrine which they taught. It is extra¬ ordinary that lacking, on the one hand, the authority of the Hebrew prophet, on the other, the material force which Mohammed employed, such a movement as this should have been inaugurated. It is unique in the history of the world that it should have met with triumphant victory.^ We have noted the inadequacy of the agents of this mission, considered from a secular point of view. Yet we have also observed how they rose to the occasion, and what results flowed from their efforts. It may be assumed then that the Apostolic type of power differed considerably, and differed favourably, from the types with which it has been compared. And the difference may be accounted for, or largely so, by the substance of its message. 1 The success of Buddhism instantly rises to the mind, but the comparison with Christianity is misleading. The attitude of Chris¬ tianity to other religious systems is utterly and uncompromisingly exclusive ; on the other hand, Buddhism is tolerant and indifferent. It absorbs any form of popular religion, and thus creates the mini¬ mum of opposition ; ‘ almost every Chinaman would probably profess himself a believer in the philosophy of Confucius, while he would worship at both Buddhist and Tao temples.’ See Rhys Davids, Buddhism^ p. 4 ; also, as to spread of Buddhism, pp. 212-46. 82 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW First of all this new teaching, to permit oneself a paradox, was not new. It was based upon the venerable faith of the Hebrew fathers. The Apostles appealed to the same God as scribes, elders, and doctors of the Jewish orthodoxy. They used the same Scriptures. With the mass of the Seed of Abraham they worshipped in the same Temple, frequented the same synagogues—as yet. They delivered their message as Jews to Jews. So far they differed not from the prophets of old, though of course they lacked the prestige and authority which a long succession of inspired teachers gives to the members of that succession. Already it has been pointed out how prophecy had for generations hidden its head under the cloak of pseudony- ihity.^ Its inspiration was belittled; its utterances suspected ; its very form and method changed. John of the Desert and the Prophet of Nazareth had revived the office, but the tragic ends of both were fresh in the minds of all. Secular and ecclesiastical authority had apparently proved too strong for vigorous and creative teaching. So it seemed. Yet these men had again opened the gates of the vaults of the dead, and the breezes of heaven were blowing through them. Different as it was from the conventional religion, this new teaching was nevertheless in harmony with the ancient faith. Its exponents appealed to history and to prophecy for the justification and con¬ firmation of what they taught. Nor was the morality of the new teaching different from the old ; different, that is to say, from the best part of it. In some directions the tenets of the Law had been accom¬ modated to the infirmities of the people.^ ‘ The traditions of men ’ had too often given a superficial or external interpretation of the Commandments of God. But the spirit and essence of the Law were of such a kind as to ^ See sections (above) devoted to Apocalyptic and pseudonymous literature. ^ Matt. xix. 3 ; Mark x. 5. FORM AND SUBSTANCE 83 fit the aspirations of the most exalted idealist in the sphere of morality. Everything which was ‘ honest and of good report ’ was in accord with it. The moral enthusiasts of the Old Dispensation felt this instinctively. And the new teachers were not conscious of any deviation from the ancient code, nor could their hearers detect it. The charges levelled against the Galilaeans were never moral. The disciples of Jesus simply applied very thoroughly, and under a new motive, and with fresh intensity, that which they had received from their fathers. But where the Hope of Israel is involved it is quite different. As I have already endeavoured to show, the Hebrew race was upheld by Promise. This is a truth, well known to many, which is yet constantly forgotten. From St. Paul’s eager, fervent words we learn that the Promise is a more precious gift from God, a more fruitful gift, than that of Law. And the Apostles declared that the Promise was fulfilled. This was their distinctive message. Everything new and vital, everything which made their teaching unlike the current teaching, was embraced in the fact that they believed the Promise was fulfilled. To proclaim this, they sacrificed the common interests of their lot, their business, their quiet, peasant¬ like domesticity, the tranquil happiness of home and friends and neighbourhood. They plunged into the unaccustomed atmosphere of Jerusalem, filled as it was with learned theological and ceremonial controversy. Here their native instincts were ill at ease, and their natural gifts all at sea. These rude provincials willingly and gladly exposed them¬ selves to the contumely and ridicule of the great and learned of their nation. More than that—they staked their lives upon the conviction that the Promise made by Jehovah to their race had been fulfilled. The Messiah had come ; Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah. Though in the ignorance of unbelief He had been put to death, 84 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW yet God had raised him up, and he was now ‘ by the right hand of God exalted ’d In this state of glory and exalta¬ tion ‘ [He] received of the Father the Promise of the Holy Ghost and this Spirit He had sent forth into the world, ‘ For the Promise is unto you and to your children and to all that are afar off. . ^ From the tenor of the first Apostolic preaching, and that which succeeded it, we learn that the disciples of Jesus believed that the Gift of the Holy Spirit was embraced in the fulfilment of the Promise, Thus it was, that while the Apostles declared the Promise fulfilled, the scope of the same was found to be enlarged, defined, and much enriched. Some of the lofty but hazy visions of apocalyptists were here made^ definite, tangible, and within the reach of all. The extravagances of the imagination disappeared in the presence of the reality. But the essentials of the pictures were there, spiritualized and yet realized. Blessings and privileges which were embraced in the conception of the Kingdom of Heaven, or Kingdom of God, were declared to be not merely imminent but actually present, capable of being accepted and used. The Messianic Age had come, the Hebrew Golden Age, foretold by so many inspired tongues and pens of Israel. Immortality of a kind richer, yet more definite, more personal, than any seer had dreamed of, was now taught as being the inevitable consequence of a firm and heart-felt acceptance of Jesus as Messiah, and the Lord of Glory. Life Eternal revealed in Christ, this was involved in the earliest preaching of the Apostles, though the fulness of its significance was perhaps not immediately present to men whose minds were filled with the conviction that their Lord was risen, and whose hearts were thrilled by the Presence of the Spirit Whom He had sent. In such circumstances people do not realize the full implication of what they say and do. But the Resurrec- 1 AcU ii. 33. 2 ib ^ 39^ FORM AND SUBSTANCE 85 tion of Jesus of Nazareth involved His faithful followers in a similar destiny. That this doctrine was present in the teaching of the Twelve, at least in germ, seems to be beyond question. Otherwise, the Pauline theology, of which the Resurrection doctrine forms an essential part, and the Johannine theology, wherein the doctrine of Eternal Life in Christ is the dominant feature, remain entirely inexplicable. In itself this doctrine of the Fulfilment of Promise suffices to mark off, and set apart as unique, the new teaching delivered as it was with united enthusiasm and authority. We have only to compare the contemporary exegesis of the Pharisaic cult with this bold and com¬ prehensive declaration of fulfilment to note an immense difference, not merely of manner and method, but of tone and spirit. The Jewish Rabbi multiplies sign-posts and gives directions along a road which is already fairly well indicated, and where additional detail merely tends to confuse and oppress the traveller who requires strength and power rather than advice in order to pursue his way. But these new teachers do not point to guide-posts but to a Guide ; they do not grope, they see ; they do not supply suggestion, or interpret, they inspire ; they transmit to the wayfarers not advice, but power. Their convictions are not merely unshakable but ardent, and they pass like an electric current from those who speak to those who hear. Already we have emphasized the poverty of the Apostles, viewed naturally, for any dynamic purpose. And yet the narrative of the Acts presents them as dynamic per¬ sonalities who are withal conscious of their power. They do not claim to be great in themselves. The spirit of Simon Magus is not theirs.^ All which they have they declare they have received, and this most emphatically. ^ Acts viii. 9-11. 86 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW They know that the faith and ethics of the Old Testament are most infallibly true ; they know that the Promise of the Old Dispensation has been fulfilled; they offer bless¬ ings and new hopes which go immeasurably beyond what conventional interpretation of prophecy assumed that it contained. How do they know ? Whence is their assurance ? Whence is their authority ? Who gave them this authority ? Questions of this sort were asked of their Master. It is right to ask these questions ; it is right to test the truth of novel and crucial doctrines. The fault is not in the questions but in the spiritual dullness which makes them necessary, and in the motive which prompts them. The new teachers were filled with a sense of the supernatural origin of their knowledge, assurance, and authority, and the earliest historian of the Church clearly shares this conviction. Every reader of the Book of the Acts must see, to begin with, that the Twelve felt they were pro¬ mulgating something very real and very vital—not theories but facts, not opinions but truths. They were not philo¬ sophers with novel speculations, but men passing on to their brethren convictions which they believed would change the mind and heart of their hearers, as they had changed their own. These convictions involved not merely the mental faculties, but also spiritual aspirations and intuitions, as well as the affections. The message was for the whole man, offering him redemption and release from the moral and spiritual ills which his religion and his conscience alike had recognized, but which they were equally unable to remove. But now everything con¬ noted by the word salvation was offered by these Galilaeans to any who would genuinely accept their teach¬ ing. This was nothing abstract or speculative, but some¬ thing they themselves understood because they had intimately experienced it, something of most precious and FORM AND SUBSTANCE 87 mysterious import. They were proclaiming what they believed to be true from their love for, and faith in, a Friend and Master Who had given them evidences not only of His Love but of His Power. By this propaganda they were sharing with others what they had seen and heard, and their hands had handled of the Word of Life.^ That was it. These men had passed through a great experience which had its origin in Jesus Christ, Who though lately removed from their carnal sight, still in¬ fluenced them, influenced them more profoundly than before —in fact empowered them. This is the witness of the nar¬ rative of the Acts, and of the speeches recorded therein. Yet, as we have seen, contemporary Judaism was a spent and exhausted force. Furthermore, there is nothing in these provincials, or in their antecedents, to account for the change. Notwithstanding, their teaching is fresh and powerful, authoritative and creative. It is Jesus, absent in the Flesh but present in the Spirit, Who has effected this transformation. CHAPTER X THE FRUITS OF CONTACT How does it work ? That is the question of modern practical philosophy. If its fruits are commensurate with its promise, the thing is good, the thing is true. Now the Vital Force enlivening the material, the leavened meal, the little band of disciples filled with the Holy Spirit— these are synonymous terms—satisfies this test. The insignificant company of some one hundred and twenty souls increased with startling rapidity. The original influx was three thousand and this was constantly augmented. ^ 1 John i. I. 88 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW Many of the priests of the ancient hierarchy became converts to the new teaching. The general populace was greatly attracted. Meanwhile the Jewish authorities dis¬ played a growing nervousness. They possessed a dread, reasonable enough, that the proclamation of the fulfilment of the Promise in the Person of Jesus Christ would act upon the contemporary order like some explosive chemical, and blow everything to pieces. From this point of view there is much to justify the submission of this revolutionary proclamation to a severe test, and its exponents to rigorous restrictions. Nevertheless the authorities hesitated long before taking the stern measures that were felt to be expedient. There were divided counsels among themselves, and all feared the people among whom the little fellowship was strongly favoured. The counsel of one of the wisest and most influential of the members of the Sanhedrin was ‘ masterly inactivity Censure and mild persecution had no deterrent effect, ' the Church grew and multiplied \ But the tide of events and their own smouldering pre¬ judices were finally too strong to maintain a laisser-faire policy, or even one of gentle repression. The antagonism of the rulers stiffened ; passionate resentment broke out over the preaching of a brilliant young Hellenist, Stephen, who was the most gifted of the recent acquisitions of the new propaganda. We are told that he was ‘ a man full of faith and of the Holy Ghost and that ‘ full of faith and power ’ he ‘ did great wonders and miracles among the people ’. Nothing is known of his antecedents, but there is a suggestion of superior culture about him, and being a Greek-speaking Jew, he had facilities for rising out of the racial groove as Philo did. Whether he had liberalizing tendencies before his acceptance of the Gospel message is not known. Certain it is that the new faith created, or gave him, the vehicle for expounding truths ^ Acts iv. 34-9. THE FRUITS OF CONTACT 89 which were alike unanswerable and unpalatable to those who laid undue stress on ‘ the seed of Abraham ' idea. Brief though the association of Stephen with the Apostolic fellowship was, it would be difficult to exaggerate its impor¬ tance. He and his six companions were the first repre¬ sentatives of the Diaspora to receive office in the new society.^ The Apostolic body was purely Palestinian and Galilaean. Therefore the selection and ordination of these men, albeit merely ‘ to serve tables ’, was in itself a step forward, pregnant with possibilities which soon came to the birth. Henceforth the Twelve relieved of eleemosynary cares were to give themselves ‘ continually to prayer and the ministry of the Word Nothing can be clearer, however, than that in Stephen’s case the office furnished opportunity for the employment of powers different in kind from those technically attached to it.^ With the evident approval of the Twelve he taught and argued for the faith either in addition to, or in substitution of, the strict duties of his office. He certainly preached Apostolic doctrine, but with a difference. The tone of it was polemical, while that of his superiors was declaratory. Furthermore, he recognized implications in the Gospel message which were so far obscure to, or seen but dimly by, the original teachers of the faith. The Vital Force had touched and set on fire the heart of a Jew, the product of an environment, more cultured, more impressionable and adaptable than that of Galilee. The leaven had transformed material which would make the succeeding transformations possible. It is impossible to state categorically the full substance and trend of Stephen’s preaching. The sermon of Acts vii ^ That they were Hellenists is to be strongly inferred from the narrative which emphasizes the successive stages of development in a Catholic as opposed to a national direction (Acts iv. 36: viii. 2, 4, 5). “ Acts vi. 4. “ Also Philip, perhaps Nit;olas (cf. Rev. ii. 6, 15). 90 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW is an historical review which was l^rought to an abrupt close by the violence of its auditors. It was broken off before its full aim and purpose could be disclosed—dis¬ closed at least to us remote in time and spirit, as we are, from the atmosphere of Judea in the first decades of the Christian era. But it was clear to those who heard, men familiar with his manner of discourse on previous occasions, some of whom were now implicated in the accusations brought against him. These, strange to say, were fellow Hellenists whose prejudices hardened as they disputed with him. But ‘ they were not able to resist the wisdom and the spirit by which he spake It has been argued that those who had been bred in an environment similar to Stephen ‘ were as a body eager to disprove the feeling of the native “ Hebrews ” that they were only half Jews ; accordingly teaching which minimized the value of the sacred “ customs which Moses had delivered ” ^ . . . would cause deep resentment in such circles, in spite of their more liberal attitude to things non-Jewish This may well be so, and this complex motive would help to explain later antagonisms, notably that which St. Paul encountered among Hellenistic Jews. Let us try briefly to reconstruct the character of Stephen’s teaching. Our evidence is of two kinds. There is first the nature of the charges brought against him ; secondly, the evidence supplied by his own words in the fragment of the sermon reported in the narrative. What do his accusers say ? ‘ This man ceaseth not to speak blasphemous words against this holy place and the law ; for we have heard him say, that this Jesus of Nazareth shall destroy this place, and shall change the customs which Moses delivered to us.’ ^ The charge was in the main a true one. St. Stephen 1 Acts vi. lo. Ib., vi. 14. ^ J. Vernon Bartlet, art. ‘ Stephen ’ in Encyc. Brit, (nth edition). ^ Acts vi. 13-14. THE FRUITS OF CONTACT 91 must have declared the Messianic fulhlment in the Person of Jesus of Nazareth, and have pointed out that this fulhlment involved great changes. His accusers were wrong, however, in regarding such a proclamation with censure ; they should have hailed it with delight. Their resentment and antagonism is symptomatic of the failure of contemporary Judaism as a whole to accept and have faith in the Promise. Unconsciously they were sceptics at heart, and in despair of the coming glory they clung like drowning men to the customs of their race. If Messiah, the Consolation of Israel, the Desire of Nations, had come they should have anticipated change and progress. The allusion to the Destruction of ' this place ' was probably due to a misconstruction of the preacher’s words. Probably he did say that, if they rejected God manifest in Jesus, neither ‘ place ’ nor ‘ customs ’ could save them from the Divine displeasure. No doubt many a Hebrew of that age looked forward apprehensively to a possible destruc¬ tion of the Temple and hnal dispersion of the nation. Foreign oppression and internal dissension made this no remote contingency. Now, if it did occur, Stephen would say, the Messiah is greater than the Temple and union with him more blessed than attachment to any earthly place, however holy. No mere scribe could utter words like these, but a man who had been honestly awaiting the redemption of Israel, having been touched by the Power of God, could, if he spoke at all, speak in no other way, dilating upon the fulhlment of Messianic hopes; being interrupted and questioned in the course of his preaching, he would perforce reply in this general sense, and thus would furnish his adversaries with a plausible form of accusation. ‘ What he actually said we cannot tell with certainty. Doubtless, as in Our Lord’s case, there was distortion of real words. It is prof^able enough that Stephen saw that, sooner or later, the process of fulhlment of the 92 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW Law in the spirit must involve its becoming obsolete in the letter, and that the conception of worship involved in this fulfilment must render unmeaning the exclusive sanctity of the Temple.’^ And this brings us naturally to the fragment of a sermon which constituted the only defence it was permitted to make. Dr. Hort calls it ‘ an indirect answer ’ to his accusers ; it was only indirect because it was incomplete. It is the writer’s opinion that the attitude of the auditors became so tumultuous and threatening at the moment of the quotation beginning ‘ Heaven is my throne . . that the current of the historical survey was broken, and the defendant saw there was no opportunity to be given him for the orderly and logical development of his theme. Consequently, he was hurried, perhaps by natural im¬ petuosity as well as by external pressure, to an improvised conclusion couched in the form of well-merited invective, ‘ Ye stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears . . . ’.^ St. Stephen was in the true prophetical line, but his heart would never have burned, or his lips found utterance, had he not come within the influence of Jesus. We can imagine him, apart from the Vital Force, groping dimly like Aristo- bulus or Philo after a unity of Hebrew religion with Greek thought. Less easily, we can see him narrowing his vision and concentrating his attention upon the minutiae of the Law as a learned scribe prominent among the members of his class. But it was the doctrine of the Risen Nazarene which placed him in the role of prophet, preaching what timid apocalyptists only dreamed of. To the attentive reader the trend of the interrupted discourse is sufficiently plain. Through all the vicissitudes of Israel’s history ‘ the Most High ’ is guiding Israel, though constantly frustrated by the people’s obstinacy, to a conception of spiritual ^ F. J. A. Hort, Judaistic Christianity, p. 51. '•* Acts vii. 49. 3 Ib., 51 ff. THE FRUITS OF CONTACT 93 worship which finds its culmination and explanation in ‘ the coming of the Righteous One ’d But these ‘ living oracles ’ delivered by ' the dispensation of angels ’ have been rejected by a people who in their more primitive state preferred false worship to the true, and always the mechanism, the externals, of religion to its inner spirit. ‘ Ye do always reject the Holy Ghost : as your fathers did, so do ye. Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute ? and they killed them which shewed before the coming of the Righteous One ; of whom ye have become betrayers and murderers.’ ^ If the typical Jew had been faithful to the Law as he professed to be, he would have made some effort to read its inner meaning and have been prepared to welcome the Person and Office of Him in Whom the ancient Dispensation found its fullest explana¬ tion and its crowning glory. Instead of securing acquittal, Stephen’s attempted ex¬ planation of his faith simply precipitated matters. The closing scene of the trial was violent and tumultuous, and did not preserve a judicial character. He was dragged forth from the Council and cast outside the gates of the city, where in accordance with the prescribed forms con¬ cerning punishment for blasphemy, he was stoned to death. His bearing in the hour of agony and dissolution was in harmony with his brief and brilliant career as a follower of the Nazarene, and he sealed his faith with his blood in such a way as to exert a far-reaching influence ^ Stephen’s teaching is a remarkable exposition of what Jesus Himself implied so often, and said so unmistakably in His con¬ versation with the Samaritan woman (John iv. 21-4). But none of these had been recorded at the time. Either the direct or indirect teaching of the Master was vividly and firmly in the minds of the earliest disciples, even to penetrating its deepest significance, or St. Stephen’s spiritual perception saw that which the Fourth Gospel later on so amply justified. Acts vii. 51-2. 94 the first measure : THE HEBREW and produce remarkable results. His words and heroic end must have touched a chord in many hearts. How it moved one person, who at the time took a hostile share in the execution, we all know.^ And though the Pauline teaching is so varied and comprehensive, ranging as it does from deep theological mysteries to dietary regula¬ tions, that it would seem to come from no single source, yet the underlying principle of it, sometimes obscured in Rabbinic digressions, was that ‘ the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life This was the truth for which Stephen died. Nor are the effects exhausted with St. Paul. There are strong affinities between the teaching of St. Stephen, as unfolded in the preceding pages as well as elsewhere, and that of the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Both deal with rites and Temple worship, both view the Old Dispensation idealistically, both find its interpretation and glory in Jesus ‘ the Author of eternal salvation Furthermore, the attitude of both is Hellenistic, not Palestinian, though catholic in the sense that Paul is catholic. Something loftier, more spiritual, more intel¬ lectual than the teaching of the Twelve, or that of the Epistle of St. James. The problem of the Gentiles has not touched either; or as perhaps it would be better stated, has not touched the one, nor fallen within the scope of the other. In fact St. Stephen was the pioneer, as the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews was the consummator, of an intermediate level of development between Christianity as a Jewish sect and Christianity as the world religion. There must be emancipation from the letter before the Spirit can have free action upon the world, and it is in this sense that^St. Paul can be regarded as in the line of the first great Christian Hellenist, while the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews ‘ who is known to God alone ’, develops and expands in richest detail the true Hellenistic line of ^ Acts vii. i;8 ; xxii. 19-21. ® Heb. V. 9. 2 2 Cor. iii. 6. THE FRUITS OF CONTACT 95 thought of the proto-martyr. And all their wealth of power and of germinating thought would have remained barren and unproductive but for the Risen Life of the Son of Man, and the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. CHAPTER XI CO-OPERATION OF PALESTINIAN AND HELLENIST The martyrdom of Stephen was the overture to a general persecution which drove all except the Apostles from the Holy City. No doubt a sense of duty caused them to remain to witness to the faith, but their immunity from injury and slaughter when men of lesser prominence were fleeing for their lives continues to be a matter of surmise. It has already been suggested ^ that the propaganda of the Twelve was declaratory rather than polemical, and hence caused less resentment than the aggressive preaching of Hellenistic converts. Furthermore, it is quite possible, nay, probable, that they had powerful sympathizers among those in authority, who would see that they came to no harm. Meanwhile, the dispersal of the body of believers tended to the wider dissemination of the new doctrines. ‘ They therefore that were scattered abroad went about preaching the word.' ^ To another Hellenist, Philip, a colleague of the martyr Stephen, and one of ‘ the Seven ’ recently ordained, was due the evangelization of Samaria.^ The Master by His preaching and example had prepared the way for this innovation, though he himself had done nothing of an overt kind to remove the barrier which subsisted between the Jew and the hybrid Samaritan. It ^ p. 89. “ Acts viii. 4. * Ib., viii. 5-13. 96 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW was left to a Hellenist to enlarge the scope of the new faith, and to proclaim the good tidings to a people not only- hated but despised by the orthodox Jew. In this action we observe the transmuting effects of the religion of Jesus. An unconverted Hellenist would have been as indifferent to the welfare of the Samaritan as his most rigid blood-brother of Palestine. But in this instance we see the Hellenist initiating, and the Palestinian (Galilaean) crowning, a successful effort to embrace the despised people of Samaria within the new fellowship of Jesus Christ. Philip preached and baptized; the representatives of the Twelve, Peter and John, prayed, and imposed their hands upon those who believed, ' and they received the Holy Ghost Thus we see, under the subtle power of the Vital Force, Palestinian and Hellenist co-operating in an action which was one of a series driving the Church forward to its destined task of making disciples of all nations. The unconverted Jew of the Dispersion would never have contemplated such action ; the unconverted Jew of the Holy Land would never have given his blessing to it if executed by others. As it was, the whole body of believers stood committed to this new departure by the deliberate approval of accre¬ dited members of the Apostolic College. The acceptance and baptism by Philip of the Ethiopian eunuch possess, for our purpose, the same general signifi¬ cance as the Samaritan incident. One who acted so boldly in the case of a whole people was not likely to hesitate about the admittance of a single individual into the Chris¬ tian society. Yet in one respect his action marks an advance. While the attitude of an orthodox Jew towards a ‘ proselyte of the gate ’ was kindly and patronizing, he must perforce be regarded as an uncircumcised Gentile. The Samaritan, though hated and despised, was at least circumcised. It is, therefore, evident that Philip was ^ Acts viii. 17. PALESTINIAN AND HELLENIST 97 irresistibly guided,^ I use the word advisedly, to act upon a catholic principle, which up to this time had not been acted upon, the principle that all men irrespective of their race and antecedents are potential members of Christ’s Church, and are eligible for admission thereto. Whether the matter was reported to the Twelve, or not, we have no information. If it were, it might have become the subject of inquiry and possibly of discipline had not the foremost of the Twelve endured an experience, and under its in¬ fluence conducted himself in a manner analogous to that of Philip. The growth and expansion of the young society is illustrated by the setting of this incident. At Lydda and at Joppa disciples were present in some numbers even before the visit of the Apostle, St. Peter, and his sojourn in the coastal region of Judea increased and strengthened the Church.^ While on this visitation, St. Peter was moved to proceed to Caesarea and there admit a prominent Gentile and his household into the fellowship of the faith. He did this almost against his will; both his prejudices and innate convictions were violated by what he did. The incident is presented with all the supernatural colouring we have grown accustomed to in our perusal of this earliest history of the Christian religion, and it is indeed difficult to imagine how otherwise the Apostle could have been prevailed upon to abandon not merely the habits of a lifetime but the inherited instincts of his race and religion, and place a new and bewildering interpretation upon the duties of his office, and the functions of the Church of Christ. Although Cornelius and his entourage had affiliations with Jewish faith and practice, they were yet at the most ‘ God-fearers ’ or ‘ proselytes of the gate ’, and, therefore, uncircumcized Gentiles. We may take it as incontrovertible that the original Twelve began their propaganda with the idea that 1 Acts viii. 26, 29, 39. ^ Ib., ix, 32-43, n 98 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW their efforts were to be directed towards a revived and spiritualized Judaism under the leadership of the Risen and Exalted Messiah. If they thought of Gentiles at all, they thought of them as entering the faith of Christ through the portals of Judaism. In other words, a man must become a Jew before he becomes a Christian. Peter’s original attitude and the transformation which took place is indicated in the following quotation: 'Ye yourselves know how that it is an unlawful thing for a man that is a Jew to join himself or come unto one of another nation ; and yet unto me hath God shewed that I should not call any man common or unclean ; wherefore I came without gainsaying, when I was sent for.’ ^ A little later on there follows that noble and candid confession : ‘ Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons.’ ^ What is to us a truism came to the foremost Apostle like a flash of dazzling light. He could not immediately orientate himself to this new truth, but a further manifestation of the Divine Purpose ^ brought him to the decision which the more adaptable Hellenist, Philip, had previously reached with greater ease. ‘ And he commanded them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ.’ ^ On the Apostle’s return to Jerusalem he is called in question for his un- Hebraic conduct, but when he explains how he was irresis¬ tibly led forward under supernatural guidance, and how the power of the Holy Ghost displayed indifference to racial barriers, the Palestinian brethren ' held their peace and glorified God, saying. Then to the Gentiles also hath God granted repentance unto life.’ ^ Though in his personal conduct there are signs of vacilla¬ tion,® St. Peter never deliberately receded from this position to which he had been led. Very soon the question of Gentile admission became acute, as needs it must in view ^ Acts X. 28-9. 2 34-5. ® Ib., 44 ff. . ^ Ib., 47-8. 5 Ib., xi. 18. ® Gal. ii. ii. PALESTINIAN AND HELLENIST 99 of the ever-widening development of the Church. Its efforts were no longer confined to Palestine. Already we have followed Philip’s preaching in Samaria and on the confines of the desert south of Judea ; we have witnessed the admission of a prominent Gentile proselyte and his household to the Church without the formality of Jewish initiation. About this time we also hear that there are disciples at Damascus, the ancient capital of Syria, well outside the borders of the Holy Land.^ And it is in con¬ nexion with them that an event occurs which is of such far-reaching importance that it controls the current of the Christian religion for all time. I refer to the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, which will be given consideration as part of the larger subject, Paulinism, at a later stage of this study.^ ' Now they which were scattered abroad upon the persecution that arose about Stephen travelled as far as Phenice and Cyprus and Antioch, preaching the word to none but unto the Jews only. And some of them were men of Cyprus and Cyrene which when they were come to Antioch spake unto the Greeks also,^ preaching the Lord Jesus. And the hand of the Lord was with them ; and a great number that believed turned unto the Lord.’ ^ Although previous liberalizing efforts had been carried out, shared in, or sanctioned by the authorities in Jerusalem, this present action was on such a large scale and involved such tremendous consequences that Barnabas, a Cypriote of high repute for his self-sacrifice and generosity, was commissioned to investigate. The inquiry became a bene- * Acts ix. 2, 10, 19. 2 The Second Measure, Cap. X. ^ In spite of the weighty authority of Dr. Hort, Judaistic Chris¬ tianity, pp. 59-60, I prefer the reading "YA\r]vas, otherwise the point of the narrative seems lost. Hellenists, i. e. Greek-speaking Jews, were already a commonplace in tlie Church. ‘ Acts xi. 19-21. H 2 100 THE FIRST MEASURE: THE HEBREW diction, ‘ and much people was added unto the Lord ’ ^ Barnabas, seeking out the illustrious convert, Saul, re¬ mained at Antioch a whole year. The Church became rooted and established, the disciples proudly bore their new name, ‘ Christian ’, and the secular capital of Syria, one of the metropolitan cities of the Empire, bade fair to usurp the position of Jerusalem as the centre of the new faith. ^ Under what was deemed the direct authority and influence of the Holy Spirit, Barnabas and Saul set forth on a missionary journey which was of deepest significance to the Church and its destiny. It is needless for us to follow its course in detail, but we may with advantage to our purpose emphasize one or two features of it. The scope of the journey covered ground familiar to one or. other of the leaders of the enterprise ; Cyprus to Barnabas ; the Cilician and neighbouring regions to Saul. On the occasion of the conversion of Sergius Paulus ^—we are not told that he was regularly admitted into the Christian society—Saul drops his Hebraic and assumes,^ never to relinquish it, the name that he possessed as a Roman citizen.® It is suggestive of his mission to the world— the Roman Empire was, for all practical purposes, the world of that age—instead of to a single race. So far, however, there was no radical change of procedure but the trend of his policy is clearly seen. The Gospel of Christ is still preached first in the synagogues, a method to which St. Paul adheres more or less consistently through¬ out his ministry.® But he does not consider his mission a failure if it should be rejected by his fellow countrymen. He has a wider public in view, and carries Barnabas with * Acts xi. 24. 2 i]3 ^ 25-30. ® Pro-consul of Cyprus. * Or rather the narrator does so. Acts xiii. q, , ' f ® Even in the last scene of the Apostolic history, St. Paul delivers his message first to his fellow countrymen (Acts xxviii. 17-28). PALESTINIAN AND HELLENIST lOI him. ' And Paul and Barnabas spake out boldly, and said, “ It was necessary that the Word of God should first be spoken to you. Seeing ye thrust it from you, and judge 3^ourselves unworthy of eternal life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles.’’ . . . And the word of the Lord was spread abroad throughout all the region.’ ^ When they reached Lycaonia, a region of rustic heathenism, they preached without scruple to the simple peasantry,^ and on their return journey through Southern Asia Minor they established Christian communities with sufficient organization, com¬ munities which, we have every reason to infer, were compound of Jews (Hellenists) and Gentiles alike, and were independent of, and separate from, the synagogues. Then they laid the matter before the Church in Antioch, rehearsing ‘ all that God had done with them, and how he had opened the door of faith among the Gentiles ’.^ It was a mighty step forward and of tremendous import. How would it be regarded by the conservative elements and by the Mother Church of Jerusalem ? CHAPTER XII THE CONSERVATIVE STANDPOINT These questions are answered in the next great section of the narrative.^ First of all, much uneasiness was dis¬ played ; the conservatives took alarm. It was natural that they should. Principles which have become truisms to us were strikingly new to them. The spirit of Christ’s teaching is being painfully assimilated by us to-day. It need therefore cause no great surprise that certain funda¬ mentals, such as the freedom and universality of the Gospel, should have been seriously questioned by devout ^ lb., xiv. 6-18. * Ib., XV. 1-29. ^ Acts xiii, 46-9. ^ lb., xiv. 22-7. 102 THE FIRST MEASURE: THE HEBREW Christians of the first century, whose atmosphere, breed¬ ing, and education had convinced them that salvation could only be obtained by obedience to the Divine Law given to their nation. If not, they might reasonably ask, ‘ what advantage then hath the Jew ? or what is the profit of circumcision ? ’ ^ In the attempt to visualize the conditions of that early society, the student is less surprised at intermittent displays of narrowness and spiritual pride than he is at the wonderful vision, power, and vitality of the new society which enabled it to break the fetters of Judaism and become capable of its world¬ wide task. It was wellnigh smothered in its Jewish cradle, but the evangelic fervour of St. Paul and St. Barnabas, the noble Christ-like charity of St. Peter and St. James, the intelligent, faithful co-operation of the body of believers in Jerusalem, gave the Church of Christ its catholic direc¬ tion and won for it its first great victory, a victory over the cherished scruples of those who composed it. This was the vital contact of the leaven with the meal. Those men were deeply in earnest who said, ‘ Except ye be circumcised after the custom of Moses, ye cannot be saved and those others also ' of the sect of the Pharisees who believed who rose up in the very council and said, ‘ It is needful to circumcise them (the Gentiles), and to charge them to keep the Law of Moses And there follows much serious discussion, probably heated discussion, to which Peter, with the spiritual acuteness characteristic of him, gives a new turn by recalling his own experience at Caesarea, and establishing a principle thereon.^ This is the moment for Paul and Barnabas to give an account of their missionary journey and its wonderful result in the conversion of so many Gentiles. Then after a silence, probably a period of silent and intense prayer, James, the Lord’s brother, who seems to occupy the office of Bishop * Rom. iii. i, 2 Acts xv. i. ^ ^ 4 j]^ ^ 7-11. THE CONSERVATIVE STANDPOINT 103 of Jerusalem ^ and president of the Council, gives weighty judgement like one in authority, that the Gentiles should be left unmolested in their new monotheism brought about by the preaching of Christ. There is to be no submission to a painful, and to many Gentile minds, degrading mutilation, no keeping of Sabbaths, none of the many prohibitions and abstinences enjoined upon the sons of Israel. None of these burdens which constituted ‘ the Yoke which J Peter frankly confessed, ‘ neither our fathers nor we were able to bear but four simple restric¬ tions, two of which we recognize as being implied in the renunciation made by every disciple of Christ at his baptism ; the other two, probably a concession to the Judaic element in the Church, though not conforming very closely to any known code of prohibitions. However that may be, the latter pair of restrictions, that in regard to ‘ things strangled ’ and to ‘ blood ’, seems never to have been enj oined ^ except upon the communities immediately addressed at Antioch, Syria, and Cilicia,^ and even there these injunctions probably had only temporary recognition, as we never hear of them again. Thus the battle was won for the catholicity of the Church, or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say, the decisive battle of the campaign was won, since there remained much sullen hostility to the principles laid down at the Council of Jerusalem, hostility which ever and anon burst into flame and became the chief obstacle confronting ^ So Lightfoot and Gore. See Christian Ministry, p. 116. 2 Acts XV. 10. 3 Nevertheless, many Christians have exhibited a rooted objection to animal blood as an article of food. This is illustrated by Min. Felix, who says, incidentally, ‘ we do not even touch the blood of eatable animals in (our) food ’, xxx. 6 (quoted by Cadoux, Early Christian attitude to War, p. 128). * But for an interesting and valuable discussion of the subject, see Hort, Judaistic Christianity, pp. OS-'/O. 104 the first measure : THE HEBREW St. Paul in his mission to the Gentiles. Nevertheless the leaders of the Church, with the whole body of believers consenting, had adopted the principle of freedom. The Jewish Law including the initiatory rite of circumcision was not to be imposed upon Gentiles who embraced the faith. And whatever individual members, or even parties, in the Church might say or do, there could be no recanta¬ tion, no withdrawal from a principle, involving a grand policy, to which the Christian Society in the very citadel of conservatism, with its most unbending and orthodox members giving voluntary assent, had deliberately com¬ mitted itself under the most solemn and impressive circum¬ stances. The leaven was leavening the lump very effectively. Of the Palestinian leaders of the Church but little more is definitely known,^ though there is considerable tradition, especially in the case of St. Peter. We are not concerned here with the controversies connected with the latter, but it is probable that he sojourned and taught both at Antioch ^ and Rome. The theory that the substance of his message is contained in the Marcan Gospel seems fairly well estab¬ lished. If we accept the Petrine authorship of the first epistle of that name—and there is as much to be said for as against its authenticity—we find the similarity of language and thought between St. Peter and St. Paul very marked, and the circumstance suggests that the powerful and creative mind of the latter had sub-con- sciously influenced that of his simpler and less learned brother Apostle, without, however, impairing the in¬ dividuality and distinction of his message. Furthermore, if we accept the address of the epistle as metaphorical, ‘ the sojourners of the Dispersion referring to Christians ^ But see Acts xxi. 17 ff., where there is no mention of the Apostles. 2 Certainly at Antioch (Gal. ii. ii ff.). ^ I Pet. i. I (R.V.), viewing them as scattered members of ‘ the spiritual Israel THE CONSERVATIVE STANDPOINT 105 scattered about in heathen neighbourhoods rather than to Jewish Christians exclusively, evidence is immediately to our hand of the thorough-going character of St. Peter’s acceptance of the principle recognized at Jerusalem, and of the results of its application. He writes to these un¬ circumcised Gentiles with a warmth of sympathy and appreciation of their spiritual dignity, which could only come from a heart that had outgrown the narrow instincts, habits, and precepts of race and environment. ‘ Ye are an elect race ’, he says, ' a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for (God’s) own possession . . . who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light : which in time past were no people, but now are the people of God : which had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy.’ ^ Simon Peter has travelled far from the days when he longed to found the Kingdom of his Master with a sword stained with the blood of the enemies of the Israel of God.-^ The Epistle of James presents us with one of the most interesting problems of the New Testament. Who was its author ? to whom was it addressed ? Is it anti-Pauline, or merely ante-Pauline ? Is it very early, or is it very late ? These and other questions are constantly being asked and never receive completely convincing answers. If it be the work of James ‘ the Lord’s brother ’, it sup¬ plies us at once with the preoccupation of one who held a unique and distinguished position in the Christian Church of the earliest age ; if it be not, it still remains the work of one who lived in the circle of the Synoptic tradition, and was chiefly concerned with the ethics of the Gospel, not with its theology. It has the gravity, the aphoristic solemnity, of the old Wisdom Literature, but it has more ; it has imbibed something of the freshness, originality, and ‘ Ib., ii. 9-10 (R. V.). 2 John xviii. 10 ; also Matt, xxvi. 51 ; Mark xiv. 47 ; Luke xxii. 49-50. io6 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW vitality of the maxims of the Son of Man. With humani¬ tarian and social interests uppermost, it shows that the Church of the first century ‘ delivered its soul ’ not only in regard to eternal verities, but also had concern for con¬ duct and for daily life. Personally I should wish to look upon this writing, as a homily rather than a letter, as the product of the mind of James, properly called ‘ the Just who turns away from all the heated controversy of the day concerning the Law and the Gospel, Jew and Gentile, and applies the moral teaching of Jesus to social conditions and to a spiritual temper developing in the Church, which seems to him entirely out of keeping with the mind of Christ. Thus had the Evangel of Jesus, and the spiritual power consequent upon it, transformed a Pharisaic Jew into a moral reformer whose morality is the fruit of his religion, or the necessary application of it. CHAPTER XIII THE MULTITUDE OF THE FAITHFUL Let us now consider the effects of the new movement upon the masses of those who were drawn into it. I use the word, masses, advisedly, for I am convinced that a considerable proportion of the Jewish race, both in Palestine and throughout the Empire, became obedient to the faith.^ Doubtless many individuals lapsed, especially during the Judaistic controversy, but there would be a certain influx into the Church, though probably a decreas¬ ing one, which would serve to make up for such defections. At first there would be no consciousness of a divided allegiance. The Christian society during its first period was a sort of imperium in iniperio. Like their fellow ^ For a rather difierent view, see H. F. Hamilton, 'Fhe People of God, vol. ii, p. 40 ; ‘ The believing Jews are but a small minority.’ THE MULTITUDE OF THE FAITHFUL 107 Jews, the followers of the Nazarene frequented the Temple, observed the Law, participated in the activities of the synagogue. What differentiated the two elements was their attitude towards the age-long Promise. The one still looked forward to fulfilment, or had ceased to care about it; the other joyfully maintained that the fulfil¬ ment had been completely realized in the Person and Mission of Jesus of Nazareth. The small company of one hundred and twenty souls ^ became conscious of a life, an organic life, in which all believers participated, and unbelievers did not share. This realization of a life intense among themselves, as based upon their common union with their Master, has a date assigned to it by the first Christian historian. It is the festival of Pentecost after the Passover during which Jesus had been crucified. The first accession of converts shared this realization ; ‘ And they continued stedfastly in the Apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and the prayers.’ ^ Fresh bodies of converts accepted the same principles and followed the same practices. A sort of non-compulsory communism also seems to have characterized' the new society. And all this served to strengthen the inner spiritual bond, while it tended to distinguish, and finally to separate, the Christian from the unbelieving Jew. Repression developing into persecution, the martyrdom of loved and respected leaders, a gradual awakening to the world-wide mission of the Church under the pressure of disputes about the necessity of circumcision and the relation of the Mosaic Law to the Gospel, the admission of individual Gentiles, and then of bodies of Gentile converts, produced a cumulative effect which finally divorced Christianity > There were, however, other believers, especially in Northern Palestine—i Cor. xv. 6 ; Matt, xxviii. 16-20, may refer to the same event, but identification is doubtful. Acts ii. 42 (R.V.). io8 THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW from Judaism.^ Meanwhile it was into a sacred fellowship the converted were admitted, and the admission was always by one rite, one which the Lord Himself had pro¬ vided as a definite means of incorporation. It was baptism by water, with a prescribed formula.^ Moreover, the data which have come down to us from apostolic times make it clear that Baptism was regarded as a Sacrament, or mystery, admitting the candidate, among other benefits, into a Divine Society.^ Besides the rite of incorporation, there is one of con¬ tinuance which is constantly referred to, but in that casual and incidental way in which mention is generally made of the habitual things of life. This is ‘ the breaking of bread It is not necessary to labour the point of the identification of the institution with the Holy Eucharist, or Mass, or Lord’s Supper of to-day. It is essentially the same rite, and except in the case of Baptism, there is no more unbroken tradition than that which testifies to the nature and importance of this Mystery or Sacrament of communion and fellowship. Nor was this rite evolved by the visible leaders of the new society to meet emergencies, nor was it a device created on the spot to keep the disciples united on an ordinary worldly basis, but it was, so they believed, a solemn and supernatural ordinance, instituted by their Lord,^ Whom they regarded as Divine, to be a means of sustaining and enriching the common life, as well as the personal life of the believer, by the impartation of ^ Lechler, Apostolic and Post-Apostolic Times, vol. i, p. 47. 2 Matt, xxviii. 19, but Philip in baptizing the Ethiopian eunuch was apparently content with less if Acts viii. 37 is accepted; see also Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, vol.i, p. 6; also Acts xix. 5. Cf. art. ‘ Baptism’ in Diet, of Bible (Hastings), vol. i, p. 241. 3 Ib., p. 243. ■* As to the relation of Eucharist and Agape, Lechler is interest¬ ing, Apos. Times, vol. i, p. 46. ® Mark xiv. 22-5 ; Matt. xxvi. 26-9 ; Luke xxii. 14-20 ; i Cor. X. 14-21 ; xi. 17-34. THE MULTITUDE OF THE FAITHFUL 109 Life and Strength from Him. It was also a commemorative sacrifice, by its dramatic action vividly recalling to believers the great Sacrifice on Calvary at the moment when they were receiving the gifts of spiritual sustenance and refresh¬ ment.^ Thus they cemented the union with Christ begun in baptism, and were also drawn closer to their common Head. I have dwelt upon these two features of the Apostolic fellowship because they belong to its very texture, not because there are no others which might be considered. Moreover, Baptism and the Eucharist did more than anything else to cause the members of the Church to realize a life shared with their brethren, and apart from those who did not acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah. A spirit of joy, kindliness, and mutual sacrifice seems to have animated the early disciples. They possessed a new vigour and a new courage. There was a readiness to endure persecution for ‘ the Name ’. There was a glad and willing adherence to leaders and a ready obedience to the same, where obedience was not a burden, but the portion of love. Prayer and praise were the spontaneous outpouring of thankful hearts, the happy exercise of souls conscious of God’s Love and Goodness. Intercession was the con¬ stant occupation of men and women whose blessings made them eager for the blessing of others less fortunate than themselves. Missionary enthusiasm was not confined to the Twelve, but pervaded the whole body. And there was an elasticity and adaptability about it which wel¬ comed proselytes, first Samaritans, then Gentiles, into the Body of Christ. Above all there was a spiritual exaltation, a leaping vitality and power, which had its source in the Ascended Christ Who had poured upon the disciples the Holy Spirit. Under this holy influence they forgot lesser things, or outgrew them—racial pride, racial ^ Gore, Church and the Ministry, p. 207 n. no THE FIRST MEASURE : THE HEBREW prejudice, racial privileges, ‘ the traditions of men ’, and the rite of circumcision. What were all these to the great New Thing which had happened in these latter days ?— a Thing which filled the heart with life and love, which clarified clouded minds with fresh convictions, which obliterated barriers, and removed mountains. Here we have some of the points which differentiated the Jew who accepted Jesus as the Christ, and the Jew who did not. And it was all the difference in the world ; it was the difference between life and death. PART II THE SECOND MEASURE : THE GREEK CHAPTER I THE OLD GODS If the effect of the leaven upon the Hebrew was life from the dead, the effect upon the Hellenized world was equally wonderful. Greek art, language, literature, and thought had become diffused and, being diffused, had lost strength, beauty, and purity. While enriching the world, the Hellene had impoverished himself. This would not have been so if the spring of racial life had remained fresh and vigorous. But for some reason or other it was drying up. The world was busy assimilating Greek ideas and drinking eagerly from the reservoir of Grecian culture, but little was flowing into it. After the Macedonian conquests the pure Hellene contributed a dwindling stream of thought and artistry to the world. Indeed, it would seem that most of his energies were absorbed in the imitation and interpretation of the masterpieces of his race for the benefit of Syrian and Egyptian, Persian and Roman. It was easier to explain than to create, and so he was content for the most part to be the world’s dragoman of the glories of his race. A noble office in itself, for no people has ever made so large and rich a contribution to the intellectual progress of mankind as the little people whom in the beginning of the historic period we find spread thinly round the Aegean Sea, concen¬ trated in the Peloponnesus, and on the shores which face it II2 THE SECOND MEASURE : THE GREEK from the north.^ To make this contribution accessible, to explain it, to popularize it, were, generally speaking, the functions of the later Greeks, and such functions were only second in value and importance to the original creative faculty itself. It would be well for us, perhaps, to pause a moment and make an effort to realize this contribution, not in its fulness —that would be an impossible and presumptuous task, not merely for the present writer but for almost any one—but sufficiently to give some idea of the interaction between it and the Power which had its earthly original in Palestine and was transmitted to it through the medium of the Hellenistic Jew. Of course the Greek of the Heroic Age is childlike, whether as depicted in the Homeric poems from the view¬ point of the ruling classes, or as he is described in the poetry of Hesiod from the view-point of the peasantry. However much these magnificent literary survivals of Hellas in its childhood have been worked up, elaborated, modified, and interpolated by successive Rhapsodists and Gnomic writers, they present to us as true a picture of early days as the books of Judges and Samuel present to us in a somewhat parallel stage of national development among the Hebrews. No one contends that the Homeric and the Hesiodic cycles of poetry were contemporaneous, but they throw light upon what in these remote modern days may be regarded not as two but as a single stage of development.^ And whether we look at this stage from the side of prosperous chief, or suffering churl, we discern the same simplicity, the same fresh, engaging candour, the same quaint, misdirected, unavailing piety. In the Homeric Age the gods are very near to men. They have human sympathies and human antipathies. They quarrel and fight among themselves ; they love in the ^ The Grecian mainland. 2 Mahaffy, Social Life in Greece, pp. 65-76. THE OLD GODS 113 human way, and their love is frequently on the lowest physical plane. They are quite as jealous, intriguing, and scandalous as the humans with whom they interfere and with whom they take sides, for or against. The war around the walls of Ilium originated in the spitefulness of goddesses, and throughout was complicated by divine intervention. The tedious and perilous wanderings of Odysseus were necessitated and extended at the will of divine beings whose motives were human and even puerile. In fact the declara¬ tion put into the mouth of Heraclitus by the satirical Lucian expresses the Homeric view with great appropriate¬ ness and brevity. ‘ What are men ? Mortal gods ? What are gods ? Immortal men ? ’ ^ Pre-eminent ability in some department, or some super-excellent quality—power, wisdom, beauty, eloquence, added to the gift of immor¬ tality—alone distinguished gods and men. There is none of the aloofness, the mystery, and the awe to which we are accustomed in Hebraic conceptions of deity. The Hebrew reverently accepts a revelation; the Hellene joyously sets out upon discovery. The religion of the Greek was his own creation, the product of his restless mental curiosity, his vivid imagina¬ tion, and his artistic faculty. Confronted by the inex¬ plicable, he explained it by a god ; as mysteries multiplied, he solved them with the Pantheon. His innate sense of harmony suggested due gradation, priority, subordination— all the principles of social order which he found essential to human life. And as human life was disturbed by faction and intrigue, so his imagination transferred to Olympus conditions and characteristics which made his own course less tranquil but more interesting. Every element in nature as it presented itself to his consciousness, every human quality and passion, were presided over by some immortal being. Life and light, sun and mountain, river 1 Lucian, Vitarum mictio, § 14. T II4 THE SECOND MEASURE : THE GREEK and plain, were objects of friendly reverence because of the deities who animated or controlled them. The powers of reproduction and of growth, of health and of disease, of death and of the shadowy realms beyond the grave, are in the hands of the gods. And yet through all this multitudinous variety of deification there was a seeking after unity. It was not a search imposed from without by some authoritative oracle, or directed by the sacred pages of some record of revelation, like the Vedas and Upanishads. The Greek found the impulse imposed upon him by his own mental and spiritual constitution. He could never rest satisfied with mental chaos and confusion. Indeed the early poetry, Homeric and Hesiodic alike, is an effort not merely to present current religious beliefs, but to co-ordinate, har¬ monize, and interpret them. If when concerned in human affairs one god thwarts another, appeal is had to ‘ aegis¬ bearing Zeus ’, ‘ the Father of gods and men ’ ; sometimes pictured for us as an easy-going voluptuary ; occasionally as a just and austere dispenser of judgement, remote and majestic. The incongruity of character did not startle or bewilder either the early poets or their audience. Moral problems did not worry them, and when later on they did, it was not the poet pure and simple who originally con¬ tributed moral ideas, though he made use of them when supplied, but the philosophers. Yet it was Zeus in his more inaccessible and austere phases who contributed to spiritual and moral progress, and it was upon these loftier attributes that philosophers fastened when they selected Zeus, the All-Father, as the object of their devout imagination, closely approximating to Monotheism as indicated by the magnificent ‘ Hymn of Cleanthes ’. This, however, was almost at the close not at the commencement of de^ velopment. Now, although the gods were all-powerful, Oeol Si T€ Trdyra THE OLD GODS 115 SvvavraL,^ to the Greeks of the earliest historical period, the idea of power was a lofty generality. In a concrete and practical way they were not completely so. Gods and men alike were hedged about by Necessity and Fate. ‘ Oh, woe is me,’ Zeus laments, ‘ for that it is fated that Sarpedon, the best beloved of men to me, shall be subdued under Patrokles son of Menoitios.’ ^ Among the poets, and these were the early religious teachers of Greece, the conception of 'AvdjKr] developed very rapidly, and served to explain, or at least temporarily account for, the tragedies of human life and those insoluble riddles of existence which the current conceptions of deity did not permit to be attributed to the gods. At a later age the philosophers, seeking for a meta¬ physical unity, gathered up the ideas of Destiny, Fate, and all-pervading Purpose, unknown and unknowable to man, lying loosely about in poetic form, and in the thoughts and convictions of the vulgar, and joined them to the sublimer presentations of Zeus; and made of him something approach¬ ing the One Holy Deity, the Object of the reverence and worship of the monotheist. But as the philosophers elevated Zeus, they depersonalized him. Draining off the anthropomorphic qualities which warmed and enlivened the descriptions of the poets, they reduced the Father of gods and men to a mere abstraction, or, like the Stoics, to a subtle, permeating Essence of theUniverse. And however pos¬ sible it may be for the human mind to conceive an abstrac¬ tion, or an essence, it is impossible for the heart to worship it. So far, however, the poets are the teachers of Greece, and so far we are secure from abstractions. But the poetry of the strictly historical period, which we have now reached, is entirely unlike in form, in subject-matter, and in spirit to the poetry of the Heroic Age. In form it is fragmentary and fugitive. It consists of odes and songs—love-songs and drinking-songs—elegies, political and didactic poems. The ‘ Od. X. 306. Ib., xvi. 438 f. (Lang). Ilf) THE SECOND MEASURE : THE GREEK material at our disposal is tantalizingly meagre in view of the extent of time covered and the importance of the epoch. Because of the dominant type of the survivals this is called the Lyric Age. The subj ect-matter is contemporary social and political life, or else it is purely personal and emotional, like the amatory lays of Sappho and Archilochus. As different as possible is this from the chief concern of Homer, and of Hesiod, which is that of chanting the glories of past times. The poets of the Lyric Age are frankly modern and up to date. And the spirit has changed also with form and subject-matter. It is practical and realistic, occupied with everyday matters—the love, the passions, the intrigues, the civic games, the banquets, the life of the various little commonwealths surrounding the Aegean, or upon the many fertile and thickly populated islands of the brilliant sea. The poets of that time had neither the leisure nor the inclination to describe at Homeric length the factions and the intrigues of the celestial state. They were busied overmuch with the discord and clash of parties in their own little communities. That was exciting enough. It does not, however, follow from what has been said that the Lyric Age was an irreligious, or non-religious, one. Far from it. In most respects it marks a distinct advance upon the age which preceded it. If the gods are not so close to men, they are more entitled to reverence ; if they are not so vivid they are not so conspicuous by human frailty. It is not that the poets of the period were more moral than their predecessors, or depicted a more moral condition of society. There are some who claim that there was a marked declension in morals and in manners during the interval, if there was an interval.^ There was remarkable freedom in the relation between men and women, and the latter occupied a distinguished place in the social life of Lesbos 1 Some maintain that the poems of the Heroic Age received their literary form in the historic period. THE OLD GODS 117 and Mitylene. But freedom does not necessarily connote laxity, else the liberties won by women in England and America would indicate a lower moral condition than that which obtains in southern Europe. Such a thesis could not be seriously defended. However that may be, there appears a growing tendency to remove human vices from Olympus. There was still a hrm belief in the gods ; and the Greek with his quickness to detect ugliness and incon¬ gruity would, as soon as he issued from the stage of intel¬ lectual childhood, at once feel the absurdity of appealing for guidance to beings who, though more powerful, were even more lawless and licentious than himself. The Greek has begun to apply his reason to his religious ideas and fancies, and a growing moral sense creates a demand that the ethics of Olympus should not violate the conscience of weak and imperfect humanity. This revolt from the religious ideas of the earlier generation is not every¬ where evident, and it is less evident in some quarters than in others, and in some writers than in others, yet I think it may safely be regarded as one of the ‘ notes ’ of the age. It is Professor James Adam in his illuminating work. Religious Teachers of Greece} who points out that the surviving ‘ fragments of Greek elegiac poetry seldom or never impute the grosser immoralities to the gods \ There is nevertheless an oft-expressed complaint, a complaint seldom voiced by Homer and Hesiod, that man gets very little practical guidance from the gods. The Greeks have very rapidly approached the parallel pessimism of Job and the Wisdom writers which is so unlike the confident assertion of the earlier psalmist, ‘ Yet saw I never the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging their bread.’ To illustrate this we may cite Solon’s ttIvtu S\iOai'(t.To)y acfiavij^ j/oos avO[}d)7roL