Chapter XXV (1)

WHY THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES IGNORE THE FUTURE LIFE.

Veritas filia temporis.—BACON.

It is impossible to become familiar with the monumental, and other, evidences of the position, which the idea of a future life held in the religious system, and in the minds and lives of the Egyptians, without finding one’s self again and again occupied with the inquiry—Why the Mosaic Dispensation rejected it?[5] To pass over a matter of this kind is to reject it. If a code makes no reference whatever to the idea of inheritance, but provides for the appropriation and distribution of the property of deceased persons in such a manner that the idea of inheritance does not at all enter into the arrangement, as, for instance, appropriating it all to the State, or distributing it all among the inhabitants of the neighbourhood, it is clear that the author of the code rejected the ordinary, and natural ideas of inheritance. In this way the Mosaic Dispensation rejects the idea of a future life, an idea which was the backbone of organized thought in Egypt, and among all Aryan people. It does not reject it in the sense of saying that it is false, but in the sense of omitting it as unsuitable for the purposes it has in view. It adjourns the consideration of it to another day, and to other conjunctures of circumstances.

But this is only a part of the wonder. Solomon, one of whose wives was an Egyptian princess, and who possessed so inquiring a mind that it is absolutely impossible he could have been unacquainted with the idea, nowhere in what has survived of his ethical, philosophical, religious, poetical, or practical writings, thinks it worth even a passing reference. On the contrary, like his father David, he emphatically speaks of death as the end. The former had asked whether God shows His wonders among the dead? Or whether the dead shall rise up again and praise Him? Shall His loving kindness be showed in the grave, or His righteousness in the land where all things are forgotten? The wisdom of the latter promised length of these subsolar days only.

Our surprise, already great, is carried to a still higher point on discovering that, for the six centuries which followed the time of Solomon, the Hebrew prophets, men of the profoundest moral insight, and whose very business it was to put before their countrymen’s minds every motive which could have power to induce them to eschew evil, and to do good, pass over in their teaching, just as Moses, David, and Solomon had done before them, this paramountly influential, and to us morally vital idea.

If one had been called upon to give an _à priori_ opinion on the subject, it would have seemed, I think, utterly impossible that such an omission could have been made at the beginning, considering the nature of the work that had to be done; or, if for some exceptional, but decisive, reason it had been made at first, that it could have been maintained throughout. We must remember that the word throughout here applies to the whole course of a national literature, embracing history, legislation, philosophy, poetry, morals, and, above all, religion through a range of a thousand years. The idea was all that time all about the people, and those who contributed to their literature, in Persia, in Egypt, and in Asia Minor. In Europe every tribe of barbarians, and of semi-barbarians, and every civilized people, possessed it. It was the source of their respective religions. It made them all what they were. But in this all-embracing, vigorous, and long-sustained literature of the Hebrews it has no place. It might, for some special reason, have been excluded at one epoch, but why through all? It might, for some special reason, have been ill-adapted to some departments of Hebrew thought, but why to all? And the manner is as singular as the fact of the rejection. It is simply passed over in silence. No reference is made to it. It is not discussed. It is not denounced. It is not ridiculed. It is not insisted on: that is all.

Here, then, is an historical problem than which few can be more curious and interesting. We may not yet be in a position to answer it completely, but it is evident that the first step towards doing this is to set down all the reasons that appear to us possible, and to weigh each with reference to the mind, and the circumstances, of the times. We may not be able to divine all the reasons, or, indeed, the right one, but still this is the course that must be pursued.

The right answer will depend to a considerable extent on dates, that is to say, on the preceding and contemporary history; on ethnological facts; and on a right appreciation of the mental condition of the people. We shall have to ascertain the date of the Exodus; who the Hebrews were, or, to be more precise, who the Israelites were; and what were the popular beliefs, and forms of thought, that bore on the question before us. With respect, then, to the date of the Exodus, we shall, if we confine ourselves to the Hebrew accounts, find the inquiry beset with great difficulties. It is evident, from their character, that those accounts were intended primarily for religious, and not for historical, purposes. Had history been their object, we should have had some Egyptian names; the absence of which, however, from the records, alone throws some light on their purpose. The name, for instance, of the Pharaoh under whom the Exodus took place is not given, nor the name of the Pharaoh, whose minister Joseph was, nor that of the Pharaoh, who reigned when Abraham came down into Egypt, nor, indeed, of one of the kings, who reigned during the sojourn of the Israelites in Egypt. Nothing is told us of the internal condition of the country, with the single exception of the success of Joseph’s plan for enabling Pharaoh, in a time of famine, to become the actual proprietor of the whole of the land of Egypt, save what was held by the priests; nor is anything told us of its external history, notwithstanding that that was its most eventful and important period: for Egypt happened, just at that particular time, to be—having recently culminated in the very zenith of its power—the wonder, the terror, and the glory of the Eastern world. It was the period, which had seen the conclusion of the long struggle between the Egyptians and their Semitic invaders; a struggle in which the latter, having at first been victorious, had overthrown the native dynasty, got complete possession of the country, and ruled it for some centuries, but had in the end been expelled. This struggle, which had terminated when the connexion of the Israelites with Egypt commenced, was followed by a period of unexampled greatness and prosperity. To it belong the reigns of Sethos, whose minister Joseph was, and of Rameses II., the son of Sethos, and the oppressor of the children of Israel. These two greatest of Egyptian conquerors, both of them, overran Syria, and the neighbouring countries: the latter carrying his devastations even as far as Persia and Asia Minor. They had permanently occupied positions on the Euphrates; and were keeping open their communications with them through the sea-side plains to the west, and through the countries to the north, of the district the Israelites conquered, and took possession of. Sethos had been a great builder, but Rameses was the greatest builder the world has ever seen. All the chief structures at Karnak, Thebes, Abydos, and in a multitude of other places in the Delta, as well as in Upper Egypt, and even in Nubia, were his work. What he had done in this way was so far in advance of all that had ever been done before, that it must have been the talk of all that part of the world. Of all these great names and great events, no mention whatever is made in the Hebrew Scriptures, although, during the sojourn, Egypt was actually the scene of the sacred history. The omission is very similar to that which is the subject of this chapter, and almost as difficult to explain. If, then, we were confined to the Jewish accounts, it would be impossible for us to assign to the date of the Exodus its place in the history of Egypt. There is, however, one name occurring incidentally in the account of the oppression, which, in conjunction with monumental evidence, enables us to fix precisely this indispensable date—so precisely as that we are sure that it took place in the reign of Menephthah, or Menophres, the son of the great Rameses, and the grandson of Sethos. I shall reserve the demonstration of this till I have occasion to mention the Canal of Rameses.

I said that the date of the Exodus has an important bearing on the inquiry of why the doctrine of a future life was excluded from the Mosaic Dispensation: it has this importance, because it enables us to know what had been going on in that part of the world for some time immediately preceding the promulgation of that Dispensation. Knowing the date, we know that reciprocal barbarities, such as this age can fortunately form but a feeble conception of, had for centuries been the order of the day between the Egyptians and the Semites. At last the Egyptians had got completely the upper hand, and had driven out the main body of the Semites from their country, had devastated in a most sweeping, and ruthless manner neighbouring countries, and most frequently and most completely those parts of Syria which soon afterwards fell into the hands of the Israelites. If we can form but a feeble conception of the barbarities of those times, we can perhaps form only a still less adequate conception of that which prompted them—the gluttonous hatred that animated these two races towards each other. No amount of blood, no form of cruelty on any scale, could satiate it. There is nothing in the practices, the history, the religion, of the modern world which enables us to understand their feelings. We see much evidence of them on the Egyptian monuments, and some indications of them in the Hebrew Scriptures; and these, of course, must be translated, not in accordance with our ideas, but with the ideas of those times. Every shepherd was an abomination to the Egyptians. The Hebrews took the opposite view, and regarded the first tiller of the ground as the first murderer. The Hebrews might not eat with the Egyptians, for that was an abomination to them.

It is the date, which enables us, in some measure, to understand the feelings that underlie these statements.

The next question is, who were the Israelites? We are now regarding the question singly from the historical point of view, just as we should the question of who were the Lydians, the Etruscans, the Dorians, or any other people of antiquity? There is no question but that they were substantially a Semitic people, mainly of the same race, and of the same dispositions and capacities as the other branches of the Semitic stock, as for instance, the Phœnicians, and the Moabites of the old, and the Arabs of the modern world. It is clear, however, and this is a point of some importance, that they were not of unmixed Semitic blood. Abraham came from Ur of the Chaldees, and was therefore a Chaldean, whatever that appellative stood for at that time. The Hebrew Scriptures describe him as a Syrian. He can, therefore hardly be regarded as of pure Semitic descent. Furthermore, when the people left Egypt they must have had in their veins a large infusion of Egyptian, that is old Aryan blood, somewhat mixed with Ethiopian. This must have been the case, because during their sojourn in Egypt there had been no disinclination among them to intermarry with Egyptians. Joseph had had for his wife a high-caste Egyptian woman, Amenath, the daughter of Potipherah, priest of On; and the wife of Moses is called a Cushite, or Ethiopian woman. Besides this, we are told that when the people—their blood being already mixed in this way with that of the semi-Aryan Egyptians—went up out of Egypt, there went out with them a mixed multitude, which can only mean Egyptians, who cast in their lot with them, or a remnant of the Hyksos, who had stayed behind at the time of the expulsion of the main body, or the descendants of the Asiatic captives of Sethos and Rameses, and their predecessors. I need not go to the Egyptian accounts. The above facts will be sufficient for our present purpose. They enable us historically to understand the people. They were of mixed descent, of very composite blood. The preponderant element was Semitic, but that had been enriched by large additions of better blood; still, however, not to such an extent as to efface, or even to any decisive degree alter the Semitic characteristics. The mental capacity and vigour, the apprehensiveness and receptiveness of the people, had been increased, but still they were in the main Semitic; in language, in sentiment, in cast and direction of thought.

At that particular juncture, then, in the history of that part of the world to which our attention has just been recalled, Moses had to deal with the material we are examining. Still limiting our inquiry to historical objects, historically investigated, what he had to do at that time was to make these mixed and unpromising materials into a people—a work that was from first to last entirely a moral one: as hard a task as was ever undertaken, the very idea of which has no place in the minds of us moderns. He was thoroughly aware of the difficulty of his task. Had it ever been heard before, and, after some thousands of years, we may add, has it ever been heard since, of a nation taken out of another nation, and, according even to the Hebrew accounts, the object of which is not historical, taken chiefly from the servile class of another nation, and yet welded into a true people, with the strongest, the most enduring, and the most distinctive characteristics? What material was ever more unlikely? And yet was ever success more complete? A scion, not a vigorous and healthy offset, but a bruised sprout, was so planted, and surrounded with such influences, as that it took good root, grew vigorously, sent forth strong and spreading branches, and bore, and even still bears, its own peculiar fruit. Nowhere in Europe in these days, except it may be to some extent in northern Germany, is any attempt made to fashion in this way the mind, and sentiments, and instincts of a people, which, and not the amount of population, or of wealth, is what truly constitutes a people.

Why, then, did Moses, in this great attempt, omit entirely the one thought we consider the most potent of all? His object was to make a people. It was not primarily to reveal a religion. We come to this conclusion from an observation of the facts, from an analysis of the Dispensation, and from taking into account the principle, that religion is for man, and not man for religion. But a nation, especially such a nation as he contemplated, is made only by moral and intellectual means. The revelation, therefore, of a religion was not at all an accident, or in any sense something which might be, according to circumstances, included in, or excluded from, his plan. It was a necessity—a necessary part of the one means for the one object. These materials could not have been made into a people without a code, nor could there have then been a code without a religion. The question, then, before him was not simply—as is generally supposed—to promulgate a religion, but to make the mass of living integers before him into a nation by a code, sanctioned by a religion. The religious part of the question, therefore, was limited to the consideration of what form of religion would best effect this?

One indispensable requisite was that it must be a religion that would never take them back in thought and heart to Egypt. With Egypt he must break utterly and for ever. This was a most difficult task. The thoughts of the people went back to the flesh-pots of Egypt. They remembered the fish, and the leeks, the onions, the cucumbers, and the melons they had eaten in Egypt; but, more than all this, they remembered the palpable and intelligible religion, the magnificent and touching ceremonies and processions, the awe-inspiring temples—all that had satisfied at once the eye, the heart, and the thought, while they had sojourned in, and served the gods of, Egypt. They even recurred to the worship of the bull Mnevis, the divinity of Heliopolis—Joseph’s On—at the very foot of Sinai. Everything, therefore, that could recall Egypt and its religion, everything that might present a point of contact between the thoughts, the worship, the lives of the new people and of their old masters, was to be studiously avoided. The dividing lines must everywhere be deep and sharp—there must be no bridges from one to the other. So it must be. But the doctrine of the future life was the very kernel—the heart itself—of the religion of Egypt. There was, therefore, no choice; this must be utterly abandoned and excluded: to admit it would be to admit Osiris, the judge of the souls deceased this world, his assessors, and his array of avengers, and the whole apparatus of the lower world. As to Heaven, too, or the place of the blessed, the Egyptians had already appropriated the sun, which, in that material age, must have appeared as the best—indeed, the only suitable—_locus in quo_. That was already peopled with Egyptians; and it could, therefore, be no heaven for the Hebrews—for Semites. Or, if they were, in the end, to inhabit the same heaven, sympathy for the Egyptians, and for their ideas, would be kept alive; and, if so, then the design of forming a peculiar people, separate and distinct from all other people, must be abandoned. It would be impossible to carry it out.

This view of the reason for the omission of the great doctrine has in it, I think, some truth, though it is far from being the whole truth. Moses may have seen clearly that it would have been impossible to carry out his paramount object if this doctrine was allowed a place in his system; but this view falls short of what is required. It does not account for the whole of the fact. It does not account, for instance, for the doctrine not having been admitted into the system in after times—and no explanation can be complete, or satisfactory, which does not include that. We know, also, that Moses did not reject absolutely everything that was Egyptian. He retained, for instance, circumcision, and the Egyptian division of the lunar month into four weeks of seven days each, etc.

Another conceivable supposition is that, if the doctrine of a future life had been admitted, it was foreseen that the priestly caste, instead of remaining the ministers and servants of the congregation, would have become its masters, as in Egypt; and that the law would then have been wrested into an instrument for giving them undue power and domination. It would have given them the lever for moving this world at their pleasure, and for their own behoof; and so its primary object, which was a moral and political one, would have become only secondary to the maintenance of a dominant privileged class. This supposition, when applied to those early times, is not, as the history of Egypt shows, altogether an anachronism; and it is evident that dangers of this kind were foreseen, and, to some extent, provided against. We see an indication of this in the intentional absence, during the earlier periods of the history of the nation, of monarchical institutions, which, in those times, were, externally and politically, almost necessary, and, consequently, almost universal in the outside world. We trace, also, this thought in the comment made on their adoption, when it had become impossible any longer to dispense with them. And, again, in the fact that the Prophets, who were the authorized expositors and maintainers of the law, were not Priests. But of this supposition, also, we must say that it does not explain the whole of the phenomenon—for there were periods when, notwithstanding the amount of truth and force contained in the reason it suggests, the great doctrine might have been, but was not, introduced.

Or was it, and this I propose as a third conjecture, that the Hebrews were too unimaginative a people to realize in thought the conception of a future life? And, therefore, was this one instance, amongst others, of the progressiveness of the Revelation, which had spoken in one mode to the fathers, and which spoke afterwards—of course, within certain intelligible limitations—in a diverse manner to their descendants? This progressiveness every one is aware of; but I do not think that the Hebrew was quite so unimaginative as the supposition implies. The Semitic race is imaginative in its way. It is, and was, a gross race; which, of course, implies grossness of imagination; but we can hardly suppose that the Hebrew of old would have been less capable of imagining a future Paradise than the modern Arab; though, we may be sure, it would have assumed, like his, very much of an earthly character; and that earthly character would not have been of the highest and most refined kind. Feasting, for instance, would have been an ingredient in the future bliss of a healthy and hungry people, who, in this world, had very little to eat. And here it would be interesting to ascertain what, on this subject, was the belief of the Phœnicians, Canaanites, Moabites, and ancient Arabians. It is to the point, also, to remember that the Hebrew system had a Paradise. It was, however, one which came at the beginning, and not at the end, of all things. It was, also, an earthly Paradise. In this I see implied contradictions to the Egyptian doctrine on this subject. And I believe that there are other similarly implied contradictions without direct references; and that there are such points of allusive protest, and of intended contrast, is of importance. For instance, I am disposed to think that the comment on the Ten Commandments—‘these words ... and no more’ is an implied contradiction of the Divine authority of the Forty-two Commandments, with reference to which the Egyptian believed that he should be tried at the Day of Judgment; an article of Egyptian faith, with which Moses, and the people who were listening to him, must have been quite familiar; and which could hardly, at that moment, have been absent from their minds. But as to the supposition before us, I think, to whatever extent we may be able to allow it to be true in itself, we shall still be unable to accept it, just as was the case with the two others we considered before it, as a sufficient cause for the phenomenon we are now investigating.

But I have not yet exhausted all the light that can be brought to bear on this difficulty. I can see a fourth solution. It occurred to me at Jerusalem. I there said to myself, ‘Let us endeavour to look at it in the form in which it appears to have presented itself to the Divine Master. He “brought life and immortality to light” to His countrymen, and, in the highest sense, to us. He must, while engaged in this work, have seen clearly the very difficulty that is now before us. It was, in fact, the difficulty that directly, or in its logical consequences, stood up before Him on all occasions of His teaching. How, then, did He meet it? How did He deal with it?’ I will now proceed to propound the answer, that this way of contemplating the difficulty evolved in my mind.

I assumed that the first step towards finding the way to the true answer to our question was to ascertain what was precisely the work Moses had been called to do, and what were the conditions under which he had to do it. In order to reach a right understanding of these matters, it was necessary to know the date at which his work was done. Without that we should have been quite unable to reconstruct in our minds the conditions under which he had done his work; the very chief of which were the nature and composition of the human materials, out of which he had to form a people, which was his great task. A similar process must here be repeated with respect to the work of Christ: we must now make out distinctly what it was that He had to accomplish, and what were the obstacles in the way of His accomplishing it.

Hitherto we have been endeavouring to make out what had to be done at the first establishment of, and throughout, the old Dispensation; and we have summoned before us, successively, three reasons, which might be imagined, and alleged, for the omission in that Dispensation of one particular doctrine we might have expected to find in it. This we did with a constant reference to the times, circumstances, and conditions of the work. We saw, however, that not one of those reasons is sufficient and admissible. Not one explains all the phenomena. What, therefore, we are endeavouring to get sight of is still in obscurity. The answer sought has not yet been found. What we now propose to do, still for the purpose of obtaining this answer, is to recall what He taught, and what arguments He used, Who ‘brought life and immortality to light;’ and how in doing this He dealt with what Moses had taught, and with what he had not taught; and how He dealt with the thoughts that were in the minds of the people He was addressing. If this inquiry shall enable us to see that it was, precisely, the doctrine of the future life (what Moses had abstained from teaching) which overturned the old Dispensation (what he had taught); and at the same time to see how, and why, it had this effect, then we shall know why Moses, and the Prophets, had not taught it.

Fifteen hundred years had elapsed since Moses’s day. What we have to set before our minds, now, is the conditions under which the new work had to be done. It was new, because it cancelled, or supplemented, what was old. It did both. How did it do it? What were the difficulties it had to contend with? What were the obstacles that stood in its path, and had to be surmounted? Of course, they must have been the creation of the foregoing state of things. Let us, then, be sure that we understand the antecedent times and events.

The object of Moses had been to form a people, in the ordinary sense of these words; a people, that is to say, who would be well-ordered at home, and able to hold their own among their neighbours. For this purpose a code was the first necessity, and, indeed, it might effect all that was required. But even a somewhat superficial acquaintance with the history of those fifteen centuries shows us that this code must come from God. That was a necessity. A law from man would, at that time, have been useless, and even inconceivable. There was, however, no difficulty about a law from God. In the spontaneous apprehensions of the people, at that time, God was the source of all law, directly and immediately, as distinctly as He is to our apprehensions the source of all law, mediately and ultimately. We must make out the effect of this difference. Theirs was the case in which the intervention of God is not confined to principles, it being left to human legislators to apply those principles; but it was the case in which He gives, necessarily, the letter of the statute. Of this it is the natural, and logical, sequence, that He should be the administrator and executor of His own law, even of what we call civil and criminal law. Human agency, when employed, was employed only mechanically, in the same way as a famine, or pestilence. There was nothing in the mind of the people that could dispose them to reject this conclusion, for they had already accepted the premises. They saw God standing behind the law—which is regulative of society; and dictating its letter; and, because they saw this, they could not, also, but see Him standing behind the course of events, and bringing about the rewards and punishments the law required.

But, furthermore, it is evident that law, civil and criminal, must be executed here in this life. This is a concern of existing human societies that must be attended to. The more instantaneously punishment overtakes the offender the better. The more completely, then, will the very object of the law be carried out, that which is the whole of its _raison d’être_. It always has been so all over the world. To be effective, to answer its purpose, to do what it aims at doing, its action must be certain, speedy, visible. Punishment has two political objects, to rid society of those who are disturbing it, and to strike terror into, and so deter, those who might be disposed to disturb it. The object of law, therefore, can not be attained without present, immediate punishment. The more immediate the better. It has been so everywhere, and always. Moses’s law, therefore, required the sanction of direct, immediate, mundane rewards and punishments, just like any other code.

We see, then, at once, that there was no absolute need for future rewards and punishments. We can even already imagine that they would have had a weakening and disturbing effect upon the system: at all events, we shall eventually find that they were, precisely, as a matter of fact and history, the very solvent that was used, designedly, for the very purpose of disintegrating and destroying it. As it was a system of statute law, what was needed was that the offender should be punished here at once. Moses had no concern with the world to come, or with the unseen world at all, excepting so far as it could further his great object. No code of civil and criminal law, that ever was heard of, could be maintained, if it relegated the punishment of the offender to a future life. And, furthermore, as God was the primary giver of the law, and the actual source of it, so must He be the actual executor of it: it was His own law. This was intelligible, and logical. And furthermore, it was in perfect harmony both with the physics and the metaphysics of those ages, among the learned and the unlearned alike. To their apprehension everything good in nature, in society, and the mind of man, came direct from God. God’s arm, therefore, was ever bared, and visible. Every offence had its penalty, whether the offence of an individual, or of the nation; and that penalty was visibly exacted at the time, that is to say, in this life. The idea of future rewards and punishments would have been antagonistic to this. It would have been an element of confusion and weakness. There was no place for it. It was practically and logically and philosophically excluded. The one thing that was paramount, and indispensable, was thoroughly attended to. What would have acted injuriously on that imperious necessity was set aside.

All this is clear abstractedly. And in the concrete history it comes out with perfect distinctness. During the fifteen hundred years the law is in force, we have not one syllable about a doctrine of a future life. It was so, because it was absolutely logical, and quite natural, that it should be so. Nothing else could account for the fact. It was just what ought to have been the case. It was excluded not so much designedly as spontaneously. There was no more place for it in the teaching of the Prophets than there had been, originally, in the code itself, because it would have been destructive of the system they were expounding and enforcing. It could not, therefore, have occurred to them to teach it.

But at last, for certain reasons, the time has come for teaching it. What now, therefore, we have to do is to mark the way in which the law was dealt with in order that it might be taught. The object of the Light of the World was not, as that of the code of Moses had been, to form a people, in the ordinary sense of those words, that is, to make and maintain in the world that political organism we call a nation, but to form a peculiar people, that would belong to all nations. His kingdom was not to be as the separate kingdoms of the world, but an universal kingdom, constructed out of all the kingdoms of the world. It would differ from the ordinary kingdoms of the world in the source, in the purview, and in the object of its law. It would reject everything, however necessary for national purposes, which conflicted with the idea of the universal brotherhood of mankind, the only conceivable principle for an universal voluntary society; and its law, for obvious reasons, would not be a written law. It would not require that its members should pay taxes, though it would require that they should tax themselves to satisfy the claims of fraternity. Nor would it require that they should fight. God would not be to them the Lord of hosts, but the universal Father. The working of the community would give no occasion for the use of arms. It would be composed of Jews, Greeks, and Scythians; of bond and free; of all peoples, kindreds, and languages. Nothing could bind together this unlocalized society but their morality. And the only sanction, looking at mankind generally, for the morality of an unlocalized society, would be the rewards and punishments of a future life. The principles, therefore, of an universally applicable system of morality, binding together a people taken out of all nations, must be made the law of this peculiar people, this unworldly, universally-diffused community; and they must believe in the rewards and punishments of a future life. Their law must find both its source, and its sanction, in themselves, that is to say, in what they felt, and believed: whereas both the source and the sanction of the old law had been _ab extra_.

We can see no way in which this could have been done except by terminating that part of the old system which made the letter of every statute, that is to say, the whole organization of society, and every provision of every kind for the maintenance of that organization, of Divine institution; and which, therefore, required that God should execute His own law Himself, here, in this life. Here were two ideas, distinct, but necessarily connected, and now they must be annulled, both of them. Both the legislation, and the enforcement of it, must be transferred from God to the State. Indeed the State—it had been Greek, and now it was Roman—had already got them absolutely into its own hands. The old law had now no existence, except on sufferance, and that only to a limited extent. Legislation could never again be got out of the hands into which it had fallen; and it was, in itself, far better that it should remain in them. Of course it could not have been so with God’s people of old time: but for the future it ought not to be, and it could not be, otherwise.

Henceforth God would be the source in men’s hearts of the principles only of right. Legislators must, themselves, apply those principles to the varying circumstances and needs of their respective times and countries. They must also themselves provide means for enforcing the observance of their applications of these principles. But, of course, though this might answer roughly the purposes of human societies, it would be altogether imperfect and inadequate as a machinery either for fairly and completely rewarding and punishing individuals, or for making men good, or for keeping the heart pure, and gentle, and loving. All this must still result from the relation in which man feels that he stands towards God. Man could have little to do with these matters in his fellow man. This world, in which ‘some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall,’ was clearly not the place for the perfect adjustment of compensations and retributions. The balance for weighing the things that are seen cannot be exactly trimmed here. How, then, could there be any pretence of weighing the more important things, those that set in motion the whole life, that cannot be seen? This necessitated a future life. The world had passed into a state in which heaven-sent, heaven-administered codes were impossible. But religion itself had not become impossible. It would, however, be obliged henceforth to address itself to what God has willed should be the general conscience of mankind, and to find its sanction in what God has enabled man to anticipate of a life to come. This was a higher form of religion. It belonged to higher conditions of humanity.

What was now required was not that law, or that the principles and foundations of law, should be overthrown; but, on the contrary, that those principles of morality, that are universal, and are commonly recognized among mankind, should be made, with the most searching and binding force, the law of the new society; and that the sanction of this law should be changed from the present to the future life. Much that had necessarily been incorporated in the Mosaic Dispensation, because needed for its limited, national, mundane purpose, must now be held to have answered its purpose, and to be terminated as far as the new, universal, society was concerned. Everything that was special belonged to this head; and, _à fortiori_, everything that was exclusive, and so conflicted with the universal law, which was, above all things, a law of brotherhood. It could be nothing else. In this view, the mother idea of Christianity is the substitution, as the rule of individual life, of the universal natural law for the positive written, municipal law of the Hebrews, and of every other people. It has no written law of its own. It appeals to the unwritten law, which is inscribed not on tables of stone and brass, but on the fleshly tables of the heart; that is to say, to what is in man. And this, we may observe in passing, it is, which enables it to live and grow, and to develop, and accommodate itself to every increase of knowledge, and to the advancing conditions of society.

Still local mundane governments must be maintained; and this also would require a law. Law was, therefore, henceforth divided into two parts: that which is universal, natural, unwritten, which God reveals to men’s hearts, and for the observance of which they will hereafter be accountable to God; and that which is shaped by the wisdom and the folly, the knowledge and the ignorance, the necessities, the circumstances, and the interests of human legislators, and of separate, often hostile, nations. For this latter men would be accountable, primarily, to the State. The State would enact, and must administer and execute it. Only in cases in which the State was Christian (none such then existed, but the time might come when the kingdoms of the world would be the kingdoms of Christ and of God), would the principles of the municipal law not conflict with the principles of the divine, universal law. But even in cases where they were in conflict, the Christian, as human society is ordained of God, would, as a matter of conscience, even when not of right and reason, submit to it. This, however, would be understood as having its limits, for there would be cases in which we must obey God and not man.

(These ideas, by the way, neither condemn nor commend to us the principle of the establishment of national Churches. That is a question of times, of circumstances, and of expediency. We can imagine conditions under which the advantages of such an arrangement, and others, under which the disadvantages would preponderate. Of course, at the time of the promulgation of the religion, the idea of anything of the kind was impossible. What has been before us has, however, obviously a bearing on the questions of what establishments, where they exist, should teach, and of how they should enforce their teaching.)

As to the law, for which a man would be accountable to God, that would be taught him by God. The knowledge of it and the desire to fulfil it would result from the working of a Divine Spirit within his heart. The teaching of that Spirit would be always in harmony with the knowledge to which man had been enabled to attain, and with the social conditions to which he had been raised. That knowledge and these conditions are progressive. So, therefore, would be the teaching of this Spirit. We know in what mode it spoke, in old times, through prophets and holy men; and what it was, at a later period, in the words of Christ, Whom God sent. Under the Mosaic Dispensation it had promulgated municipal law, which requires in all cases, and had required, in an especial degree, in the case of so rude a people as the Hebrews, immediate rewards and punishments; and this, under the circumstances, the most important particular of these being that God was Himself executing the law, here and now, had excluded the doctrine of a future life. Under the Christian Dispensation it promulgated natural, universal, unlocalized law, and so required the doctrine of a future life; and this necessitated the abrogation of the doctrine that God is Himself executing the law, here and now.

The argumentative position and aims of the Divine Master can not be understood, unless these differences are attended to. He taught that His kingdom was not of this world. It could not have been so taught by them of old time. He taught that men must render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s. Formerly it could only be taught that God was all in all. When these, and many other similar statements of Christ and of His Apostles are interpreted in accordance with the then existing condition of the chosen people and of the world, we see that they involve the entire abandonment to the civil power of the whole domain of positive legislation, and of the entire and unqualified right of maintaining such legislation; of course, without at all exempting legislators or magistrates from obedience, in the exercise of their legislative or executive functions, to the principles of right, and from ultimate accountability to God. The authority of the old civil and criminal code having thus been transferred from God to man, that of the ceremonial code followed the same rule: though, indeed, these are distinctions which were hardly recognised in early times. The law was not hereby absolutely and necessarily abrogated, but only the idea that it is imposed, enforced, and maintained by God in this life. That was the idea which had given its form and character to the old Dispensation, and upon which it had been founded, and to which the multitude, learned and unlearned, clung, because they could not understand either how polity, religion, or morality could be maintained without it, or how, in these matters, there could be any advance. What, therefore, the promulgators of the new Dispensation had to show was that the abandonment of these old ideas about law was not tantamount to the abandonment of law itself. Man did not cease to be accountable, and accountable to God. The old form of law, as a heaven-originated code, and for that reason containing religion, was abolished; but a higher and better form of law was substituted for what had been abolished. The thing intended could now be fulfilled more completely than before. An expansion and elasticity were given to it, which might enable it to keep pace with every enlargement of our moral consciousness, and of our purest and loftiest aspirations. It was exalted, perfected, and made of universal application. What, though necessary in its day, had, all along, been crippling, distorting, and obscuring it, was now annulled. What was abolished was the old letter, and its sanction; the old heaven-sent, heaven-administered, heaven-executed code. Life and immortality could not be preached, nor understood if that were maintained. What was not abolished, but to which a freer and more enlarged course was given, was the living and life-giving Spirit: the consciousness of right that is in man. That had been in bondage under the old letter. It must now be emancipated: otherwise it would die altogether. There was now, in the observance of that old letter, a veil over their hearts. That must be torn away, and then life and immortality would become distinctly visible. True, henceforth, man would not have to give an account here, in this life, to God, receiving his punishment or reward in this life very imperfectly: the perception, however, of this would make visible the necessity of his having to give an account in the world to come, in an after life, when not a few overt acts, which are all that can be attended to in this world, and those few only very inadequately either rewarded or punished, but when even every word and every thought, as well as deed, could be called into judgment; when everything could be fully revealed and known; and exact recompense and retribution assigned.

In this way were things revealed, some of which had been kept secret from the chosen people throughout the whole of their national existence, and some of which had been kept secret from all people from the foundation of the world. In this way would every scribe, who was fully instructed unto the kingdom of heaven, bring forth out of his treasures things new as well as old. This was the connexion and the opposition of the two Dispensations. Divine wisdom was justified in both.

We have now before us the very pith and marrow of His teaching. It is not in this world, as it had been taught by them of old time, that God’s assize is held. It was not because those Galilæans, whose blood Herod had mingled with their sacrifices, had been greater sinners than other Galilæans, that they had suffered those things; nor had those eighteen, on whom the Tower of Siloam had fallen, been sinners above other men that dwelt in Jerusalem. Then follows the Parable of the Unfruitful Fig-tree, which, instead of being destroyed, was spared again and again. God’s arm is not now ever bare, and visible, to execute judgment on the evil-doer. The Parable of the Wheat and the Tares is to the same purpose, only more explicitly. What! does not God punish now as of old? Is the Almighty’s arm shortened? Can He allow the wicked to prosper in the earth? The answer is the end, the day of account and settlement, is not now. The meaning of the prosperity of the wicked is not that they are being set in slippery places, in order that they may be suddenly and fearfully cast down. For the present God does allow the tares to grow together with the wheat. There was more in this than met the ear. Let him whose ears have understanding hear it. For them it had an inner, an historical, and in the religious order, both a destructive and a reconstructive meaning: and so we might go on with other forms of the great lesson. The affliction the poor blind man laboured under was not a judgment—neither he nor his parents had sinned. This is not the life for judgment. And so does God make His rain to fall on the land of the just and of the unjust, and His sun to shine on the good and on the bad indifferently. The rich man, though most undeserving, had possessed, and enjoyed, undisturbed, and to the full, all of good that this world can give; while Lazarus, though most deserving, had suffered, without any mitigation, all of evil this world could inflict. The balance of condition and desert had not been adjusted in any sense, or degree, here, but was completely and thoroughly in the after-life. It had not so been taught by them of old time, nor could it have been. Such teaching was directly subversive of—and, as a matter of historical fact, did subvert—the old doctrine, for the indispensable sanction of that law was its immediate execution here in this world. Then God could only make His rain to fall, and His sun to shine, on the land of the just; and must withhold them from the land of the unjust. It could have been maintained by no other teaching. But now that the complete execution of the law was removed from this world, a foundation was thereby laid for the establishment of the great, but omitted, doctrine; and, together with it, of its corollary of time and motive for repentance being in God the reason, and for man the use, of this forbearance and of this even-handed goodness.

The above statements contain, I submit, the fundamental governing ideas of Christ’s teaching, as it is set before us in the Gospels. No surprise need be felt at finding that these ideas are not presented in the sacred documents categorically. The reasons for their not having been so propounded were quite insurmountable. It is enough that they are the substance of them. That we should clearly apprehend that it is so, is necessary to a right understanding of the documents, of the religion they offer to the world, and of the history of the religion. They will, also, often show, by an easy and sure test, what doctrines of particular Churches are excrescences on the religion of Christ, and what are contradictions to it.

So also was it with the teaching of St. Paul. He made the enlightened moral consciousness of man the source of the law of religion, as distinguished from municipal law; and he taught that the sanction for this heart-inscribed law exists in the rewards and punishments of a future life. For this reason the resurrection was his cardinal doctrine; for, if there be no resurrection, he had but little, in what would be the sentiments and opinions of the mass of mankind on these subjects, to support and enforce his teaching. It is evident that he could not have maintained either of these two points, if he had maintained that the old Dispensation was of perpetual obligation. With respect to it, all he could maintain was, that, morally and practically, it had its legitimate issue in what he was teaching. Logically and implicitly, its requirements had necessitated its contradicting both his two above-mentioned great points. At all events, with respect to both, it had taught something very different from what he was teaching. To the conjoint consideration of what it had formerly taught, and what he had to teach now, he addressed himself; and we find that all that he said upon these subjects was in perfect accord with what had been said, and implied, by his Divine Master.

II. And, now that we have collected our facts, let us proceed to combine them into a regular and synoptical argument. If, in my endeavour to establish them, I may have been too concise, I beg the reader to call to mind the title of this work. These are matters which, here, I can neither pass over altogether, nor yet treat as fully as I might think desirable.

For the purpose, then, of his great work—that of forming a people, the municipal law (this we must endeavour to separate in thought from the religion) had occupied in the mind of Moses the first place. The subordination of the religion to the law is evident, because the object and use of the religion were to sanction and enforce the law. Law is nothing, unless there be force to maintain it. In ordinary cases, the requisite force is found in the majority, or in the strongest class, or in an individual stronger than the community. In this case it was sought _ab extra_: the religion was to supply it. In the dispensation that was to be the place, and the use, of the religion. It had no ulterior, nor collateral, objects; because it did not include in its purview the future life. These ideas belong to an early stage of knowledge, and of thought, in which municipal law and religion are inextricably entangled. We, at this time, are able to disentangle them; and, while keeping them in thought distinct from each other, to make out, in any case that may be before us, in what relation they are standing towards each other.