Chapter IV: Part 4

Comparisons are often instituted between the Mosaic ethical code and that of other religions, with the view of showing that there is nothing peculiar in it, and that instead of being fuller it appears to be even defective when placed side by side with some of them. The peculiarity of the Mosaic code is in its first table, which nearly all the others lack. The Mosaic is an interpretation of the law written in men’s hearts by the light of religion: it is the manifestation of religious truth as the real foundation of ethics. Morality has so long been associated with religion in our thought that we speak at times as if it had been always so; but among no ancient people, save among the Hebrews, did any worshipper expect morality from their deities. On the contrary, they conceived of them as having all their own appetites and passions and vices, so that as civilisation advanced men were often far nobler and purer than the gods which they worshipped. When we remember that physiolatry, from its lowest to its highest form, tolerates and even consecrates the vilest impurities by its worship, we can realise what a new and creative power was communicated when the conviction had laid hold of man that Deity is one who is Himself all that man ought to be, one who can only be propitiated by righteousness and appeased by truth. Human progress became not only possible then, but it was secured. So pure an idea of God meant a loftier idea of man. It involved the poorest and the humblest of men in vast responsibilities, and therefore it implied for them rights and dignities equal to those of the highest of men; for the supreme all-holy Lord God was no respecter of persons, and the beggar on the dunghill was in His eyes as precious as the prince upon the throne.[109]

From the period when Vedic speculation first began its course to that in which it produced its earliest Upanishad, these moral and spiritual truths were not kept secret among the philosophic few, but were prophesied in the gates and streets of every Hebrew city. No one can say that they were thankfully received and loyally obeyed by the people of Israel; on the contrary, their whole history represents the struggle of a stubborn and rebellious race against a revelation too pure and spiritual to be acceptable to them. Their religion was always higher than themselves, but while towering above them, it perpetually hovered round them, contradicting their most cherished inclinations, and condemning their most deeply rooted habits. The invisible God, of whom no likeness was to be tolerated, who was not to be worshipped even in the greatest of His works, was too far removed from their sympathies. It took centuries of severe handling to uproot their strong tendency to Nature-worship; yea, the Divine detestation of it had to be branded in the national conscience by their final overthrow. Eventually, however, the truth got rooted in the mind of a “remnant” of them that God is not to be worshipped under any symbol, and cannot be enshrined in temples made with hands; that the heaven of heavens cannot contain Him; that in gifts and offerings He takes no pleasure, but that He dwells with the meek and lowly, and finds a pleasing sacrifice in the contrite spirit and broken heart. The divinity of the revelation seems attested by the fact that it continued all throughout their history above them, rebuking and condemning, but never suffering them altogether to fall away from it. And this is still its relation to ourselves: it is a creed contradicting our life, a Divine law in direct opposition to all that claims to be popular; for where even yet is the Christian who can be said fully to realise all that is summed up in the truth, “God is not to be worshipped by man as though He needed anything;” “God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth”?

The universality as well as the purity and spirituality of this fundamental article of the Hebrew faith separates it from and elevates it above the Indian beliefs. Nature-worship has always been local and ethnic in its range; the gods of the hills are not the gods of the valleys, and the deities of Assyria command no reverence in Egypt. To the Hebrew was first communicated the catholic faith that the one Lord over all is rich in mercy unto all. The treasure was received, it is true, in an earthen vessel, by a people who could only apprehend as children what we are expected to hold in the comprehensions of men.[110] In patriarchal times by the people generally the One Lord was conceived of too much as just the protector of the family. In Mosaic times the great and terrible God who avenged Himself on Egypt was thought of too much as the champion of the tribes. Under David and the kings He was too much the sovereign of the nation and of the Holy Land; and so it was down to the times of the Captivity. All throughout this period, however, there were perpetual protests against this attempt to ethnicise a faith essentially catholic. They were reminded that the Holy One was Lord over all the earth; that though they were a peculiar people, they were not His only people. The prophets of other nations were brought to testify to them; their own prophets were sent to warn the heathen that they should not die. All through their history they were admonished that their gift was too large for their little nation to contain; that it was theirs only in proportion as it was imparted or shared, and that as a nation they could only exist if all nations were blessed in them.

Alas however for them, all this seemed in vain in its effect upon the nation at large; the treasure was forgotten in their estimate of the vessel; their own destiny loomed largest in their conceptions of Providence. It was not the holy Lord God who was to have universal dominion, but they His favourites, and therefore their king would reign over all lands and keep his feet on the neck of their foes. Out of this fatal error, and out of the childish superstition akin to it, that material prosperity was the sole or chief reward of devotion, came all their unbelief and apostasy, and so when the succession of prophets had in vain testified to them that the Lord alone was to be exalted—that before Him, not before them, must all peoples bow,—the threatenings long uttered were fulfilled: the nation was shattered, its palladium, the temple, was destroyed, and they were driven beyond the Euphrates.

Then however ensued a course of events which must be regarded as among the greatest surprises of history; for just when they and their religion might have been expected to vanish as completely as the ten tribes previously deported had vanished, they are found to be preserved; and the worship of Jehovah, instead of being extinguished by the dominant worship of Babylon, is seen to emerge in the course of two generations more vigorous and considerably purer than ever it had been before. It was during the Exile that the real nature of the religion of Israel, as one adapted and destined to enlighten and sanctify far more than a single people, began to be truly discerned.[111] The Jewish people had a great deal to learn from Babylon and Persia, and they returned to their own land with clearer conceptions of immortality, the resurrection, the spiritual world and judgment to come, than any of their forefathers had gained. Scholars, however, who enlarge upon their indebtedness to their conquerors, seem to forget how much they had to communicate to them. In the psalms of the pre-Exilian period, and in the doctrines of Moses and the prophets, they carried with them a treasure richer than the whole wisdom of the East. So though they learned much from Babylon, they also learned in it to appreciate the gifts which they had previously despised. Sorrow and penitence helped to clear their spiritual vision, and prepared them for the prophecies of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah. They learned that though banished from the Holy Land they were not thereby cast out—as their fathers imagined—from the presence of Jehovah; that, though the temple had been destroyed and sacrifice had been suspended, God could still be worshipped with sincerity and truth. The teachings of their prophets brought home with conviction to them the oracles of their earlier seers, that obedience was better than sacrifice, and contrition than sin-offering,—“that he that doeth repentance, it is imputed to him as if he went to Jerusalem, built a temple and altar, and wrought all the sacrifices of the law.”[112]

With the destruction of the temple there arose the synagogue, which, with its reading of the Law and the Prophets, its chanting of the Psalms, its offering of prayer, and the giving heed to the voices of the elders, represented a far higher and more spiritual service than temple courts reeking with sacrifices and steaming with incense. It is true that they were still fascinated by the material splendours of the former days; for after their return they restored Jerusalem, rebuilt the temple, and re-appointed its services. A revival led to a reformation, which, following the old lines as closely as possible, assumed the form of a retrogression rather than advance. The new energies of the nation were repressed by a Levitical domination as rigid and intolerant as Brahmanism ever was in India. It was not the spirit of the Living God but the hand of the long dead Moses that was to rule their conscience and mould their history. The consequence was just what might have been anticipated. Human nature revolted from subjugation to a system which had served its day. Religion, where it was earnest, stiffened into formalism, and formalism in many cases congealed into hypocrisy, and, as inevitably happens, intellect raised its protest against this irreligious religion in many anti-religious and even atheistic forms. Meanwhile synagogues rose all over the land, promoting doctrine rather than ritual, stimulating rather than repressing discussion, and thus conserving and propagating the truths that prepared the ways of the Lord. Only a handful however, had returned; the majority of the exiles prospered and multiplied, and, unlike the ten tribes, were not absorbed among the Gentiles. At the beginning of the Christian era, for one Jew living in Palestine there would be a hundred living beyond it, not only in Babylonia, but in Greece, and Egypt, and Italy, and all over the Empire. There were many Jews in Spain, in Britain, and in the dark territories beyond the Danube; and though they adapted themselves to foreign ways, and became all things to all men, in regard to their religion and their intimate connection with Jerusalem they still continued to be Jews.[113] As their nationality declined their faith arose. By and by, not content with the heathen toleration for their religion as only one of the many in the world, they began to spread it abroad. Judaism, with the temple and the Levitical law, would in Palestine eventually have petrified, but the Diaspora, with the Synagogue and the Septuagint, enabled Israel to play their proper parts as the religious teachers of mankind. Proselytism gradually became very vigorous and successful; devout men and women everywhere, unable to find peace of conscience in the intoxicating and demoralising rites of Pagan temples, turned from them to take hold of the skirts of the man who was a Jew. In a manner and to an extent which even the youthful Isaiah never could have dreamed, Jerusalem began to attract out of every nation under heaven the kind of people who were found in its streets at Pentecost,—Parthians and Medes, and dwellers in Pontus and Arabia, and the eunuch of far distant Ethiopia.[114]

As we have noticed the highest outcome of Vedic thought in pursuit of Atman, let us also notice the highest development of Hebrew belief in their hope of Messiah, whose germs are traceable in their faith from the first. For example, one of the earliest and most lasting effects of their conception of Deity was the conviction of their own unworthiness and inability to live in the presence of the holy God. Though they were to be a kingdom of priests for other nations, they dared not enter into the relationship which priest implied. They required a mediator like Moses, who could speak to the Holy One for them, and receive for them His message. Their whole worship was based on this feeling, and the purer and higher rose their conceptions of God, the more intense became their self-abasement. Between Him and the noblest of His creatures there was an impassable gulf. Though He was far, far off from them, He was far too near—so near that they could not go anywhither from His presence, and yet in their dread there was a yearning to come near to Him and to see Him face to face. The Brahman aspired to lose himself in the Absolute, in the pure light of characterless knowledge; the Hebrew, mastered by the personality of God, longed to see Him as He is. And never more earnest was this longing in the Hebrew to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to be satisfied with His likeness, than in the times of his deepest self-humiliation and keenest contrition. “I pray Thee, pardon the _iniquity_ of Thy people;” “I beseech Thee, show us Thy _glory_;” “and these two pangs so counter and so keen,” shame and reverence akin to dread, aspiring love, were to prove not only the purification of their own faith, but the birth-throe of a better hope for the world.

For their dread and shame sprang from their consciousness of their own evil, and their aspiration from an instinct which whispered that evil, though deeply ingrained in, was not essential to the being of man. Their sense of sin was very poignant, more so than in the case of any other people. The Hindus had a conception of merit, but a very poor and weak conception of sin. They were more impressed by life’s suffering than by the taint of which it was only the consequence. But the Hebrews felt the shame and the curse of that taint as no people ever felt it. They had quite a vocabulary to express the many shades and degrees of the feeling of it; yet in their speculations they were led to believe that this taint was not inherent in their nature nor ineradicable from it. There was a time when sin was not; there might be a time when it would not be. The dominion of evil was an interlude, and though terribly prolonged in human experience, it might have an end. That was the central ideal of the Fall which they pictured on the first page of their Bible, and conserved in their seventh-day Sabbath.[115] In the fact of man’s creation they felt that his redemption was involved, and so the Hebrew dread of and longing for God were reconciled by a hope that though to man belongeth shame, to God belongeth mercy as the God of salvation. There was another and a better covenant than that which had been concluded with their ancestors at Sinai, or with the first father of their tribes long before. It was made not with Moses or Abraham for Israel, but for all nations with a Divine Mediator, who, behind all that was of man, though yet the seed of the woman, would, in a way that neither Moses nor any of the prophets could understand, eventually make an end of sin.

The history and the literature of the Hebrews would be a perplexing enigma without this hope. Like their faith, it was too pure and spiritual for them to receive, and to the very latest it always appears with something of the defilement of their religious condition clinging to it. During the Exile, however, this hope became purer and stronger, and the imagery in which they embodied it became more evangelical and spiritual than that employed by earlier poets and prophets. The section of the Hebrews that returned to Palestine held it in increased strength, but with the old national taint upon it. Their own restoration and the favour of Persia kindled anew the foolish dreams of their ancestors, and, alas! when Persia disappointed them, and its favour was supplanted by oppression, and the kingdom, instead of rising Phœnix-like out of its ashes, became the battlefield or the gage of foreign nations, there broke out in Palestine the bitterest plague of unbelief and apostasy that had ever assailed the nation. For idolatry, for overlaying or corrupting the worship of Jehovah, their forefathers had often been severely chastised, but no prophet had as yet complained of a temple deserted and an altar defiled by unworthy offerings. And this was because men professed to have discovered in the destruction of their national hopes that after all religion was vain, and there was no profit in serving God.

Any one who has intelligently read Malachi, or the sayings of Agur the proverb-collector,[116] or the Book of Ecclesiastes, will see to what a depth of scepticism, if not indeed of atheism, their perverted Messianic hopes had brought the Jews of Palestine. We appreciate the criticism which regards Coheleth, so alien to the healthy and joyous spirit of the Hebrew religion, as the natural outgrowth of this period.[117] When faith in Israel’s imperishable kingdom seemed to be completely wrecked, when ministers of religion led the revolt from it, and unrighteous rulers and corrupt society made life in Palestine, as in Rome in Nero’s day, not worth the living, it is not to be wondered that this one which has survived, but that “many books”[118] should have been written to echo the cry, “All is vanity.” We may listen to it as a note of despair from a pessimist in whose people religion had died, because disappointed political ambition had shown them that “no earthly good” came of serving God; or we may read it as the protest of some healthy-minded Jew against that orthodox asceticism which after the Captivity invaded religion, and led to the rise of Pharisaism and Essenism. In any case, it seems to mark the proper close in Palestine of an age of national perverted faith and hope. The Essenes like the Indian ascetics had hope neither for the nation’s recovery nor for the establishment anywhere of a kingdom of God. The Pharisees, on the contrary, had hope, but it was the old political hope, and in them, though Egyptian and Syrian and Greek and Roman had trodden the nation under foot, and though the Maccabees had suffered and poured out their blood in vain, it seemed to grow stronger and stronger. Ready to believe any impostor, and to rise at the faintest call, their fanaticism more than once betrayed the people into ineffectual and most sanguinary revolts; but it had one result that was not wholly evil, for they drew after them the multitudes to the desert, when the thunder of the Baptist’s cry reached Jerusalem, “The kingdom of God is at hand.”[119]

So was it in Palestine; but among the Diaspora all over the Empire the hope of Messiah assumed a purer and more catholic form. Everywhere it was strong, but the broader horizons by which they were surrounded saved them from the delusions which intoxicated the Palestinian Jew. In classical literature there are tokens that it had filtered into Gentile minds. It was undoubtedly vague and shadowy even at its brightest, but in the Sibyl and Pollio its fulfilment signified something more important than a successful revolution in Palestine. It meant mighty changes impending that would bring good to all the world, the augury of a star that would soon glimmer in the eastern horizon, and grow and brighten till it would be seen to be not a light for Asia only, but the Sun of Righteousness with healing in His beams for every nation under heaven.

We have thus been following two lines of religious movement, perfectly independent of each other, far apart geographically, still further apart in the beliefs which inspired them. We have seen how the melody of joy and health which the Indians brought with them from our common primeval home ended in a sigh of despair. Individual existence, at first so full of wonder and delight, lost soon its freshness and glory, and came to be felt to be such a burden that emancipation from it by absorption into the Absolute was hailed as a boon. The human mind, leaving its childhood behind it, and advancing to question itself and the universe, after a season of movement and sense of freedom and power, somehow lost or missed the way. Oppressed in the toils of the jungle, and wandering ever further from practical life as it proceeded, it lay down vanquished, longing only to be at rest and in quiet as infants that never saw the light.

The other line of development marks not the course of a speculation, but the growth of a faith laying hold of mankind with creative and transforming power. This faith, never dissociated from, but seeking to dominate and reform actual life, condemned inertion, and fostered hope for a race working out its salvation, because convinced that God is working in them both to will and to do. We see a light streaming from above into the darkness of man, paining and blinding at first the organs which it seeks to purify. We see a struggle on the part of the creatures to bring the Most High down to their level, and make Him their servant, and a striving of the Divine Spirit to train them as children. We see a mighty Hand laid ever on a peculiar people, at times so softly that they hardly felt it, at times with conscious guiding and sustaining power; at times chastising them sorely by the sword of the enemy and the heart-hunger of exile, but never giving them over unto death. Not for forty years, but for twice forty generations we see Him leading and humbling and proving them, till in the souls of the aptest—though only “a remnant” of them—He had rooted ideals of human destiny which never can perish. Then, that all might be ready in the fulness of time, He scattered them among the nations, and lo! when required they are everywhere, crying in the crowded capitals of the East and of the West, in the darkness of the North and the brightness of the South, “Prepare ye in the desert an highway for the Lord.”

Footnote 62:

Introduction to _Le Bouddha et sa Religion_; Paris, 1858.

Footnote 63:

Müller, Introd. to _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. i. p. xxi.

Footnote 64:

A. Burnell, _Indian Antiq._, 1880, p. 223, quoted by Prof. Max Müller
in Introduction to vol. x. of _Sacred Books of the East_, p. xi.

Footnote 65:

Frankfurter, Appendix to Wordsworth’s Bampton Lectures for 1881; _The
One Religion_, p. 340; Eitel _Lectures on Buddhism_, p. 44; Edkins,
_Chinese Buddhism_, p. 232.

Footnote 66:

Prof. Max Müller, Introduction to vol. i. of _Sacred Books of the
East_, p. xxvii.

Footnote 67:

A. E. Gough, _Philosophy of the Upanishads, etc._, p. 5; Trübner’s
Oriental Series.

Footnote 68:

This statement is hazarded, notwithstanding the recent reply of the
author of _Supernatural Religion_ to Bishop Lightfoot’s Essays. It
will be generally conceded that he has adopted an untenable position,
and that, though his rejoinder to the learned Bishop may be a vigorous
assault, it is weak criticism. Sanday’s work on _The Gospels in the
Second Century_ is on the whole a better reply than the Bishop’s to
the allegations of the author of _Supernatural Religion_, whose
extreme scepticism of literary evidence is quite equalled by his
dogmatic extravagance of statement.

Footnote 69:

_Vie de Jésus_, Introd. pp. xv, xvii, 4th ed.; Paris, 1863.

Footnote 70:

_Science de Religions_, pp. 12, 20.

Footnote 71:

Professor Max Müller, Introd. to Dhammapada, _Sacred Books of the
East_, vol. x. p. x.

Footnote 72:

_Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xiii. p. 37; Introd., vol. xi. p. xx.

Footnote 73:

Oldenberg, _Buddha, etc._, p. 27.

Footnote 74:

Mahavansa, by Turnour; Dipavansa, xx. 20, quoted by Professor Max
Müller in _Sacred Books of the East_, vols. x. p. xxiv, and xiii. p.
xxxv.

Footnote 75:

_Buddhist Birth Stories_, vol. i. p. lvii; Trübner’s Oriental Series.

Footnote 76:

Weber, _Indian Literature_, p. 294; _ibid._

Footnote 77:

We may safely assert that in the mass of Buddhist literature already
available nothing has been found, nor is anything at all likely to be
found, corresponding in character and evidential value to the
Christian Scriptures. What would the New Testament have been, asks
Professor Müller, “if the spurious Gospels, the pseudo-apostolic and
post-apostolic productions, the debates of the Councils, the
commentaries of the Fathers, and the lives of the saints, had all been
bound and mixed up with it”? (_Sacred Books of the East_, vol. i.,
Introd., pp. xv, xvi.) And yet this is a parallel to the confusion
represented by the so-called Buddhist Bible. In truth, it is not a
Bible, but a library, containing not only the earliest treatises, but
the commentaries upon them made in later ages, and extracts and
repetitions from itself so extensive and numerous that were they
omitted this portentous collection—four times as voluminous as our
Christian Bible—would be found to be much shorter than it. When the
original Bible of Buddhism has been disinterred from this pile it will
be found to resemble almost in nothing our New Testament, but it may
present many analogies to the Talmud and Targums, and perhaps some
very interesting resemblances to isolated portions of the Old
Testament. As far as it has been translated to us, the Tripitaka
contain neither prophecy nor history; but one division of it presents
suggestive coincidences with portions of the apocryphal Scriptures;
and scholars may find a comparison of some of the texts of Job,
Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes with those of the Dhammapada and some of
the Suttas an agreeable and not unprofitable study, without in the
least being tempted to transfer their allegiance from the Hebrew to
the Indian sages.

Footnote 78:

Eitel, _Lectures on Buddhism_, p. 6; Hunter, “Historical Aspects of
Indian Geography,” _Scot. Geog. Mag._, Dec. 1888.

Footnote 79:

Rogers, _Superhuman Origin of the Bible_, Lecture v.

Footnote 80:

Professor Max Müller, _Introduction to the Science of Religion_, p.
103.

Footnote 81:

Professor Müller, Gifford Lectures, _Natural Religion_, p. 564.

Footnote 82:

_Record of Missionary Conference in London_, 1888, vol. i. p. 39; also
his _Buddhism_, p. 558.

Footnote 83:

_Le Génie des Religions._

Footnote 84:

Sutta Nipata, translated by Fausböll in vol. x. of _Sacred Books of
the East_, Part ii. pp. 23, 76, 109, 113.

Footnote 85:

_Ibid._ vol. x., _ibid._ Part ii. p. 40. We are also reminded that a
man is not a Bikkhu because he puts on yellow robes, unless he has
cleansed himself from evil (Dhammapada, i. 9, 10).

Footnote 86:

T. W. Rhys Davids, _Buddhism_, pp. 5, 145.

Footnote 87:

Sir Monier Williams, _Buddhism_, pp. 162, 163.

Footnote 88:

Émile Burnouf, _Science de Religions_, p. 24.

Footnote 89:

M. Vivien de St. Martin, _Mémoires sur les contrées occidentales_.

Footnote 90:

Oldenberg, _Buddha, etc._, p. 10.

Footnote 91:

_Sacred Books of the East_, vol. i. p. xxii.

Footnote 92:

Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, vol. ii. p. 338; Weber, _Indian
Literature_, p. 38; Sir Monier Williams, _Religious Thought and Life
in India_, p. 18.

Footnote 93:

See Satapatha-Brâhmana, translated by Professor Eggeling in vols. xii.
and xxvi. of _Sacred Books of the East_. Max Müller places the age of
these books within the ninth and seventh centuries B.C.

Footnote 94:

E. Quinet, _Le Génie des Religions_, p. 185; Paris, 1857.

Footnote 95:

Sir Monier Williams, _Religious Thought and Life in India_, p. 24,
referring to the Aitareya-Brahmana, vii. 13.

Footnote 96:

Oldenberg, _Buddha, etc._, p. 15; T. W. Rhys Davids, Hibbert Lectures,
p. 25.

Footnote 97:

Gough, _Philosophy of the Upanishads_, pp. 41, 42.

Footnote 98:

_Sacred Books of the East_, vols. i. and xv. No one has dated any of
the Upanishads earlier than 600 B.C., and some of them are very late.

Footnote 99:

_Sacred Books of the East_, vol. i. p. lxvi.

Footnote 100:

Svetâsvatara-Upanishad, iii. 7, iv. 14, 16, v. 13, vi. 7, 9, _Sacred
Books of the East_, vol. xv.

Footnote 101:

Oldenberg, _Buddha, etc._, pp. 47, 48; Gough, _Phil. Upan._ pp. 61,
67.

Footnote 102:

T. W. Rhys Davids, Hibbert Lectures, p. 28.

Footnote 103:

_History of Israel_, vol. i. pp. 41, 47.

Footnote 104:

Gifford Lectures, _Natural Religion_, p. 563.

Footnote 105:

It is significant that in the beginning of the Bible Nature-worship
seems stamped as accursed in its symbol, the serpent, and that the
whole Bible from beginning to end is a Divine protest against that
worship in all its forms. Mankind in all ages is tempted to become as
the gods, and in a low condition he has almost everywhere succumbed to
the temptation. He feasts his gods, compels them to serve him, is
really higher than they, and thus he degrades himself or falls from
the ideal of one made in the image and after the likeness of God.

Footnote 106:

Ewald, _History of Israel_, vol. i. pp. 320-322.

Footnote 107:

Some ascribe it to the Deuteronomist, ch. vi. 4.

Footnote 108:

Professor Müller finds the first traces of a Maker or Creator in the
Vedic deity Tvashtar, the carpenter—the clever workman, even smith,
forging bolts for Indra therein, Rig-Ved. iii. 55. 19. “Tvashtar, the
enlivener, endowed with many forms, has nourished the creatures and
produced them in many ways; all these worlds are his.” Of another god,
latterly called Pragâpati, he quotes Rig-Ved. x. 81. 2, as one who,
“creating the earth, disclosed the sky by his power.” Very
significantly, however, he reminds us that the same poet loses the
idea, and speaks of the secret of creation as undiscoverable.—Müller’s
_Natural Religion_, p. 245. Also Introd. to Upanishads, _Sacred Books
of the East_, vol. xv. p. xxiv.

Footnote 109:

Fairbairn, _Religion in History and in the Life of To-day_, pp. 39-51.

Footnote 110:

It was only by their very highest and greatest souls that the Godhead
was conceived in anything of its spiritual glory. To Abraham God was
the Creator, distinct from and greater than the earth and heavens
which He had made; to Moses He was a righteous Lawgiver, training upon
eagle-wings a peculiar people; to David He was a tender and wise
Shepherd of a foolish and helpless flock; to Isaiah and the later
prophets a Father dealing with rebellious people, whom He pities,
knowing whereof they were made. These conceptions, however, cannot be
said to have been those of the mass of the people.

Footnote 111:

Kuenen, _National Religions and Universal Religion_, Hibbert Lectures,
1882, p. 187.

Footnote 112:

Edersheim, _Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah_, vol. i. p. 275.

Footnote 113:

Jos. _Contra Ap._ ii. 30. 32; _Antiq._ xviii. 1. 1; _Jewish Wars_, ii.
8.

Footnote 114:

Uhlhorn, _Conflict of Christianity_, chaps. i. ii.; Jos. _Antiq._
xiii. 9. 1, and 11. 3, and _Contra Ap._ ii. 10. 39; Kuenen, _Religion
of Israel_, iii. 273 _seq._; Renan, _Les Apôtres_, pp. 253, 260.

Footnote 115:

The truth on which the Sabbath is founded is the majestic truth of a
completed creation, and one conform to the latest discoveries of
science. During the whole course of human observation no new creative
effort has been displayed in the production of a new type. The animal
and vegetable worlds stand to-day as man first beheld them. The
creative spirit has passed into the soul of man, in whose world is the
progress which nature has long ceased to manifest, and under whose
handling nature itself improves. But God, though resting from His
works of creation, is not in Scripture said to be resting from His
works of mercy: “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.”

Footnote 116:

“The words of Agur the son of Jakeh,” Proverbs xxxi. 1.

Footnote 117:

Hüber, _Der Pessimismus_, 1876, p. 8; Holdheim, Preface to vol. iii.
of _Predigten_, quoted by Cheyne, _Job and Solomon_, pp. 250-253.

Footnote 118:

Eccles. xii. 12.

Footnote 119:

Edersheim, _Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah_, vol. i. p. 276;
Keim, _Jesus of Nazara_, vol. i. pp. 316-325; Kuenen, _Religion of
Israel_, vol. iii. p. 177.

LECTURE III.
THE BUDDHA OF THE PITAKAS: THE CHRIST OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.

The condition of Palestine and the progress of events in it at the beginning of the Christian era, are set in the clear light of history, and defined by an accurate chronology. To the superficial observer it appeared to be a prosperous land, for it was fertile and carefully tilled, populous, and, in the northern regions especially, teeming with the fruits of industry. It had reached the commercial stage of civilisation, and everywhere, in well-built cities adorned with palatial buildings, many of them the abodes of merchants who rivalled the Italian nobles and Herodian princes in the costliness of their manner of living, it yielded indications of the luxury which successful commerce brings in its train. But as always happens when wealth abounds in a land, there was a corresponding amount of poverty. While the rich were lavishing fortunes upon selfish and gigantic follies, an increasing multitude, born and bred in squalor, were struggling for very existence. In the days of the Son of Man their numbers were vastly increased by political troubles which disturbed trade and depressed agriculture. So to an eye that looked beneath the surface this seemingly prosperous Palestine was diseased and in a dangerous condition, for pauperism and discontent were rapidly maturing the seeds of anarchy, and preparing for the successive revolutions in which so many perished before the Roman eagles swept down upon the carcass of a State politically dead, because morally and socially corrupt.

Under the Herodian dominion, secured as it had been by the destruction of an illustrious royal house and the sacrifice of their bravest patriots, the sympathies of the people revolted from the throne to cluster for a time around the temple; but just as the dignity of the office of the high priest was rising in their estimation, successive nominations to it by the king and procurator of men odious to the good turned the tide in a different direction. The hierarchy was represented by the Sadducees, a party small in number and far from popular. Though wearing names of ancient and honoured families, they were obviously careless alike of the sanctuary and of the interests of the nation. Strict observers of the law of their Davidic ancestor, they rejected the prevalent interpretations of it, and all the new-fangled doctrines concerning angels and spirits, and the resurrection of the just, which had been formulated since the Exile. Especially opposed to the belief that the keeping of the law would procure for a man recompence in a future state, they held that the law must be kept to the letter just because it was God’s will, even though the soul died with the body. Their wealth and position as the aristocracy brought them into connection with the representatives of the great foreign powers of the times, whose manners and fashions they copied; but the nearer they drew to the Roman and Asmonean nobility the further they drew apart from the people whom they never pretended to love, and who, equally alienated, regarded them with similar dislike.

Withdrawn from the temple, the affections of people were freely given to the synagogue leaders as the representatives and fosterers of the national ideals and hopes. In these days every small town had its synagogue, while in Jerusalem alone there were said to be four hundred and eighty. These were not only places of worship, but schools in which the Law was made the common possession of all without distinction, and also arenas for exciting discussion, in which was nursed that love of dialectics to which so many striking analogies exist both in India and Greece. They were dominated by the Scribes, the sole copiers for the ever increasing synagogues of the ancient Scriptures, and the true interpreters of the law. Pedantic and self-important though they generally were, they were revered so by the people for their piety and gifts that from them were chiefly selected the members of the court of the Sanhedrim, which represented all that was left to the nation of executive power. Their Cabbala, revealing the secret doctrines to be found in names, of which we have specimens in the writings of St. Paul,[120] and the mystic significance of numbers, of which we have traces in the Apocalypse, may be only interesting now as curiosities, but we must never forget that they rendered undying service to the world in preserving from corruption, by many arts carefully studied and applied, the texts of Holy Scripture.[121]

The Pharisees, the Nazarites of the nation as their name implies, the democratic antagonists of the aristocratic Sadducees, the staunch opponents of the Gentile, the believers in the coming kingdom of the just, were deservedly the most popular of all the religious sects in Palestine. More liberal than the Sadducees in their interpretation of the law in its bearing upon the people, they never thought of exacting for faults or transgressions the ancient penalties; but they were far more severe in their personal observance of it.[122] To the mass of them it was a ladder by which they might climb into the kingdom of heaven; and out of it, to make sure of this end, they evolved a most comprehensive system of bye-laws, as sacred to them as the original precepts by which every action and word and relation of life was regulated. Pharisaism was just Brahmanism, and though more ethically applied it was in its spirit and aim as selfish. Bent only upon accumulating merit, in character it became eventually as morally impure. Forgetting in their attention to petty details the weightier obligations of life, disregarding their neighbours that they might provide for their own recompence, the Pharisees became as a class so corrupt as to draw upon them the most scathing of all the denunciations of our Lord.

More Pharisaic than the Pharisees, said to be an offshoot or secession from them, the Essenes in their desert communities sought by the worship of Jehovah in the spirit of the prophets, and yet apparently by prayers to the sun, and by an ascetic and celibate life, to deliver the immortal soul from material impurity, to educate it to enjoy the beatific vision, and to prophesy the secret things of the future. In these communities of pious people, the very flower of Judaism,[123] the only ray of light in the deepening darkness, some may be pardoned in professing to find the dawn of Christianity—not in its external arrangements, but its inward dispositions and beliefs. In its avowal that morality was superior to legal observance, in its endeavour to prepare the mind by calm to receive the Divine instruction, in its sabbatic sanctification of all days of the week, in its estimate of all work as religious, and of every meal as sacramental, it pre-intimated the teaching of the coming gospel; but while its arrangements may have suggested the monastic institutions of Christendom, we can never regard it as the matrix of Christianity. Its life was just the last flickering ray of Judaism, a bright gleam irradiating the features of a moribund age, but not that of a new birth with promise of a mighty future. It was not the rush of a new force into the battle of the redemption of humanity, but the _sauve qui peut_ of a rout which it believed to be universal. As pessimist as Brahmanism in its views of life, though more Buddhist than Brahman in its methods, its aim was the same—that of rescuing the individual from a world nigh unto perdition and really not worth the saving.[124]

In the virtuous Pharisee and the pious Essene Judaism found its best representatives;[125] but at most there were only six thousand Pharisees[126] and four thousand Essenes[127] in all the nation, and, alas! the majority of the Pharisees were not sincere; and the Essenes, though really in earnest, had abandoned the nation to its fate. Among the religious classes piety and morality had become so dissociated that a man who in the matter of belief or of worship would strain at a gnat, might in practice without condemnation swallow a camel. The result of this fatal divorce between creed and conduct was seen in a social corruption which augured everywhere the gathering of the storm-clouds of retribution. At that time Greece was dead, and what was best in its spirit had passed into Alexandria. There, blending with the more robust spirit of the Hebrew religion, it was forming that Hellenism which, though it never could account for the origin, was yet powerfully to influence the unfolding of our religion. In Hellenism we have the natural resultant of the conflux of Eastern and Western thought, which, according to some, will explain the birth of Christianity. In it certainly the Aryan and the Semite were seen contributing their very best thoughts, and the product was—Philo; but Philo-Judæus is neither St. Paul nor St. John, and the Christ of the Gospels is further beyond him than the heavens are above the earth.

In Alexandria Greece might be said to live, but Rome was hopelessly dying. Drunk with the cup of the sorceries of all nations, embruted with every lust, it was staggering to a doom which neither law, even the best conceived and most thoroughly administered, nor philosophy, even the wisest and most consistently illustrated, could avert. The civilisation of the Western world was marvellous: it was a world not only of poets and artists, of brave soldiers and subtle statesmen, but of sound moralists too; but civilisation, powerless to save, could only cover with broidered robes the leprous body, or adorn with golden trappings its bier, and morality could not restore what was sick unto death. When Rome and Palestine were alike corrupt, there was no hope for the world in man; yet when all help in man faileth, there never lacketh help in God, and so, just when the night was blackest, and despair had seized on all save a few aged people in the courts of Zion, and a few thoughtful Magi in the distant East, lo! over a Babe in the cattle-crib of a leewan in Bethlehem was descried the shining of the Star of Hope.

When we turn from Palestine to the holy land of Magadha, the cradle of Buddhism in the sixth century B.C., we find no light of history streaming upon it. All is dim and shadowy, with no chronology to define events, and no incidents to distinguish personalities. It is like a land of dreams to our modern conception, but it is not a chaos. We can trace to a certain extent movements in it, and as we follow them there emerges in outline sufficiently clear a real civilisation, which, though lacking the stir and endeavour, the commerce and the art of the West, and really inferior to it, is yet most interesting in its pathetic resemblances, and all the more instructive that its beliefs and institutions were formed out of antecedents and predispositions very different from any of which the Western world had experience.

It is evident from the very cursory survey already made that religious belief in India and in the West must have passed through phases significantly similar. In both it proceeded from faith in a revealed system of truth—in India in the inspired Vedas, in Palestine in the inspired oracles. Human speculation in both cases was begotten, and for long it was educated in faith in revelation, then beginning to rationalise; in both cases it unintentionally undermined what at first it only endeavoured to explain. Turning from ancient scrolls to the study of the book of human nature, whose pages, though often tattered and defiled, are always fascinating, it was staggered by the contradiction between man’s ideals of goodness and justice and the realities of human history. Out of this collision arose the Promethean demand that the divine powers that govern life “should either explain or abdicate.” In Palestine this wrestle with the inequalities of providence originated early, and continued all along; but it was confined within limits by faith in the personality of Deity as one so infinitely greater than man that only a part of His ways could be understood. Indian speculation never reached the approaches to this idea of God: it wandered into a Pantheism of a grosser type than ever the West was acquainted with, and once it reached that stage it could not stop. Just as in Greece pantheism ripened into the materialism of the Epicurean and the atheism of the Stoic, so in India, even before the days of Gotama, may have begun that open revolt against Deity, in the perilous attempt of reason to explain by itself the universe, with which his name has since then been most closely associated.

The religious world in India in the times preceding his birth, like the religious world of Palestine, had a hierarchy represented by the Brahmans, the indispensable functionaries in all sacrificial services. Corresponding to the Scribes were the Teviggi, the reciters and expounders of the sacred and still unwritten books. The Rabbin had their analogies in reforming Brahmans, who alone or in communities that had gathered round them professed to teach the higher discipline which could secure deliverance. If a multitude of sects be an indication of intellectual movement, there was as much stir in Brahmanism as in Judaism. In the Pali books there are mentioned as contemporaries of Buddha six noted teachers of great schools, the most formidable of whom, or at least the most hated of his soul, was the head of an ascetic sect which, like the Essenes, had renounced the world to make good their own salvation. This Niggantha sect, still represented in India by close upon half a million of adherents in the district of Rajputana, claims not only to have preceded the founder of Buddhism by two hundred and fifty years, but to have anticipated the essentials of his system.[128] Its philosophical and ethical doctrines are almost in accord with his, while its cosmogony and ritual incline more towards those of Hinduism. Its adherents apply to their founder the titles “Victor” or Jina, and “Enlightened One” or Buddha, which many imagine were ascribed solely to Gotama; but whether Buddhism sprang from it or gave birth to Jainism is a question still undecided. The only solid fact as yet ascertained is that from the earliest traceable period their mutual relations are marked by that pronounced intolerance[129] which prevails when kinsfolk quarrel.

Collision and antagonism between sects in India was neither so sharp nor so fierce as in Palestine, and Buddha ministered in conditions much more favourable to the propagation of his system than did Jesus Christ. The Sadducean opponents of Christ represented a powerful hierarchy, the Pharisees a popular democracy, and the Scribes an influential Sanhedrim, with power of inflicting a sentence of death. The Essenes never mingle in the scenes of the Gospel, and it is questionable if they are ever referred to in them. Over all and dominating all was a most jealous and vigilant Roman despotism, ever ready to turn even a religious quarrel to its own account, so that it was the most natural of things that an opposition thus represented should nip, as it were, Christianity in the very bud by crucifying its Founder. In Magadha, however, it was otherwise. The broad distinction was between Brahmans and Sramans,[130] the latter a general title covering many secessions from Brahmanism, and the popular favour was equally bestowed on both. The Brahmans, though dominant, had not the power, and to their credit do not seem to have had the will, to persecute. It was not from them, but from the scholastic and conceited Teviggi and from the ascetic sects that Buddha encountered most formidable opposition; and yet even in these cases opposition was not rigid. It was a war not of blows, but of words, in which an appeal to the secular arm or to force was out of the question. A new sect, therefore, especially one that had donned the yellow robes and alms-bowl of the mendicant, protesting against the debasing belief in the efficacy of Brahmanic rites, or the virtue gained by extravagant Yogi austerities, would obtain from the people at large more favour than resistance or disdain.

The intellectual movement in India appears thus to have been extensive and many-sided. In the multitude of sects there is a guarantee for freedom,[131] and competition in the proclamation of truth is better than monopoly; but in religion, as in trade, the competition of over-multiplying sects tends to increase adulteration. So in early Buddhist literature, while there is incontestable evidence of the existence of honest instructors, there is also unquestionable evidence of the abundance of quacks, who trifled with truth simply to make a gain of it, and of shallow but clever professionals, who dealt with gravest themes in the spirit of the mere debater.[132] So there, as in Palestine in the days of Coheleth, through over-discussion the old faith was rapidly evaporating. In the Brahmans, religion had degenerated into formalism; in the Teviggi, into traditionalism. In the philosophic Sramans it was in many instances passing into blank atheism; and among the ascetics, into despair. While this was the condition of the learned and of the few, the masses everywhere, like the Ammé Ha-árets in Palestine, were wandering—no man caring for them—further and further into the idolatries and sensualities of Hinduism. Morality was perishing, the writing on the heart was getting more indistinct, and conscience becoming more confused. Then, just as five centuries later, when faith was almost gone, Christ came to restore it by communicating new life, so when divine law was in danger of fading from the consciousness of men, there arose one to assert its eternal supremacy; preaching the creed of Coheleth without his fear of God, and enforcing the keeping of the commandments, not as expressed in Vedas or interpreted in Brahmanas, but as written in every fibre of the body and every faculty of the being, as the only way to safety.

Who was he? Like the Author of Christianity, he has had to contend, as it were, for the recognition of his personal existence. Even to-day it is maintained that neither Christ nor Buddha ever existed, that they were merely incarnations of popular conceptions, and that all the legends concerning them can be reduced to a combination of anterior mythological elements. These mythical theories, however, in regard to the origin of Christianity, may be considered among the curiosities of criticism;[133] and in regard to the origin of Buddhism, though more justified by the confessed uncertainty as to dates, they have been satisfactorily dispelled as another instance of refining overdone.[134] Brahmanism and the successive phases of Hinduism can be traced to no individual founder, but in investigating the origin of Buddhism we breathe a very different atmosphere. There is a human and moral character about it which the other Indian religions lack: something real as in Mosaism, and palpable as in Islam.[135] We may rest assured that Buddhism had for its founder a real person, and though our best authorities have had to search for their facts through a vast amount of fabulous materials, we may accept the dates which they have approximately fixed for his birth and death, and the outlines which they have sketched of his life and ministry.

Gotama, a name still found among the Rajput chiefs of Nagara, was born in the north-eastern region of India, about a hundred miles from Benares, about the year B.C. 557. His father, a Sakya, a name unknown in any native Indian family, and said to indicate descent from a race of northern nomad immigrants, was rajah of Kapila, and his mother was a daughter of the family of Koli.[136] His principalities, of very limited extent, seem to have been eventually swallowed up by the greater Indian monarchies, for when Fa-Hian visited the country Kapila had become a vast solitude, and there for ages its very name has perished from the living speech of men. Even though his royal pedigree be an embellishment of the later legends, there seems no reason to doubt that his father was noble and rich according to the standard of the time, and sufficiently independent of Brahman domination to train his son in his own way. It seems not to have been in their studies, but in the exercises befitting a warrior prince, that Gotama was educated, though a disposition thoughtful and melancholy, and strongly sympathetic, appears to have disinclined him from such a mode of life. Even as a youth the darker sides of existence threw a shadow over him; the sufferings of mankind were among his earliest impressions, and he brooded over them till his mind, poisoned by the contemplation of them, threw its gloom over everything around him, and made the very air hang heavy with the weight of woe.