Chapter IV: Preparation in History for Christ (2)

(1) Many a reader of Mommsen's _History of Rome_ will have been surprised by finding that the ideal political construction which the writer's knowledge and imagination have ascribed to Caesar was to consist of three elements--the Roman, the Hellenic, and the Jewish[170]. Yet striking as the paradox is, it is chiefly in the facts themselves. Whether we look at the ethnological character of the Jews amidst a system whose strength is from the West; or at their historical position, as a nation in some sense in decadence, with a history of independence and glories long lost; or at the minuteness of their original seat, and its insignificance at that time as (ordinarily) a subordinate district under the Roman province of Syria, it is alike surprising that it should be possible to speak of them as the third factor of the Roman Empire. Yet, in the main, the same surprise is created by any acquaintance with the circumstances of the Jewish Dispersion, as it may be learnt from easily accessible books, such as Edersheim's or Schürer's[171]. There is first the ubiquity of the race: testified alike by Josephus, Strabo, and Philo, and by the witness of inscriptions. They are everywhere, and everywhere in force, throughout the Roman world. Outside the Roman world their great colonies in Babylon and Mesopotamia are another headquarters of the race. They are an eighth part (one million) of the population of Egypt: they yield 10,000 at the least to one massacre in Antioch. To numbers and ubiquity they add privilege in the shape of rights and immunities, begun by the policy of the successors of Alexander, but vigorously taken up and pushed by Rome as early as 139 B.C., greatly developed by Caesar round whose pyre at Rome they wept, and maintained by the almost consistent policy of the earlier Empire: rights of equal citizenship in the towns where they lived, and equal enjoyment of the boons granted to citizens: rights of self-government and internal administration: and rights or immunities guarding their distinctive customs, such as their observance of the Sabbath or their transmission of tribute to Jerusalem. The opportunities thus secured from without were vigorously turned to account by their trading instinct, their tenacity, their power of living at a low cost, and above all by their admirable freemasonry among themselves, which bound Jews throughout the world into a society of self-help, and must have greatly assisted the enterprises which depend on facility of information, communication, and movement. So far we merely get an impression of their importance. But there are other points which, while they greatly heighten this impression, add to it that of remarkable peculiarity. To ask what was their influence plunges us into a tumult of paradoxes. They had, for example, everywhere the double character of citizens and strangers, speaking the language of the countries where they dwelt, 'being Antiochenes,' as Josephus says, 'at Antioch, Ephesians at Ephesus,' and so forth: possessing and using the rights and franchises of citizens, and yet every one of them counting the Holy Land his country and Jerusalem his capital: respecting the Sanhedrin of Jerusalem as the supreme authority of the race: sending up their tribute annually, flocking thither themselves in vast numbers to keep the feasts, or again not seldom returning there to die. They possessed in fact the combined advantages of the most elastic diffusion, and the strongest national concentration. Such a position could hardly make their relations to their neighbours entirely simple or harmonious. It 'involved an internal contradiction[172].' It could not but be felt that while enjoying all the advantages of citizenship, their hearts were really elsewhere. From all the religious and social side of the common life, which in the ancient world was far less separable from the political than it is now, they were sensibly aliens. They were visibly making the best of two inconsistent positions. And accordingly the irritation against them in the towns (we have a glimpse of it in Acts xix. 34) and the ensuing encroachments and riots, form as chronic a feature of the position, as does their protection by the Empire. But the causes of irritation went wider and deeper. It has been said that 'the feelings cherished towards the Jews throughout the entire Graeco-Roman world were not so much those of hatred as of pure contempt[173].' Their exterior was doubtless unlovely: a Jewry, as M. Renan reminds us, was perhaps not more attractive in ancient than in modern times. But what was even more offensive, especially to that cosmopolitan age, and what struck it as altogether the dominant characteristic of the Jews, was their stubborn and inhuman perversity. They would be unlike all the rest of the world. Tacitus has even formulated this for them as the principle guiding their whole action, reduced to practice in details which were singularly well fitted to exhibit its offensiveness[174]. His picture should be read by any one who wishes to realize how cultivated opinion thought of them: and, even if evidence were lacking, we can see that this was just the kind of dislike to be shared by all classes, cultivated and uncultivated alike. Yet it is against the background of this intense prejudice, ever more scornful and irritated as it was exasperated by the incidents of daily contact at close quarters, that we have to paint the phenomena, as striking and as abundantly testified, of the vast and penetrating influence of the Jews over their neighbours. These also lie upon the surface. In very various degrees multitudes (of whom women doubtless formed a considerable majority) adopted the customs and brought themselves into connection with the religion of the Jews. The boasts or claims of Josephus, who refers any sceptical contemporary to 'his own country or his own family,' are confirmed by the admissions of classical writers, by the indignant sarcasms directed against the converts, and by the vivid touches in the Acts of the Apostles[175]. 'Victi victoribus leges dederunt' is the strong phrase of Seneca, and it was a very persuasive influence which could cause it to be said that in Damascus 'nearly the whole female population was devoted to Judaism': which could give S. Paul's Jewish opponents in the towns of Greece and Asia Minor the power at one time of raising the mob, at another of working upon the 'chief' and 'honourable women,' the ladies of the upper classes: or which could bring 'almost the whole city' together in a provincial town because a new teacher appears in the Jews' synagogue[176]. This influence had its results in a considerable number of actual proselytes who through circumcision received admission, somewhat grudging indeed and guarded, within the Jewish pale, but still more in a much larger number of adherents (the 'devout persons,' 'devout Greeks,' &c., of the Acts[177]) attracted by the doctrines, and acquainted with the Scriptures of Israel, who formed a fringe of partly leavened Gentile life round every synagogue.

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

Such was the position of Israel at the Christian era. It was one which had been gradually brought about during the last three centuries B.C.; but it only came to its full growth in the last few decades (the Jewish settlement in Rome may date from Pompey's time) under favour of the imperial policy and the peace of the times: and it was soon to change; indeed the fall of Jerusalem A.D. 70 altered it within and without. Thus it stood complete during the half-century in which the work of founding the Christian Church throughout the Empire was accomplished, and then passed away. We remark upon it how admirable an organization it offered for the dissemination of a world-religion, originated upon Jewish soil. The significance of this, occurring at the time when such a religion actually appeared, is heightened when we observe that the position had continued long enough fully to try the experiment of what by its own forces Judaism could accomplish for the world. As S. James argued[178] 'Moses had,' now for a long time, in every city them that preach him, being read in the synagogues every Sabbath day'--and it might have so gone on for ever without any conversion of the Gentile world. That world could never have been drawn within a system, which, however zealous to make proselytes, had nothing better to offer to those whom it made than that they might come in, if they liked, and sit down in the lowest place, tolerated rather than welcomed, dependents rather than members of an intensely national community, leaving father and mother and all that they had, not for a position of spiritual freedom, but for a change of earthly nationality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But why did the Jews so regard their history? For the answer we may revert to the other question, What made them what they were at the Christian era? For they had gone through a crisis calculated to destroy both their existence and their religion. It has been in fashion with some writers to emphasize the resemblances, and minimize the differences, between the religion of Israel and that of its neighbours. In view of this it becomes important to note the specific peril of ancient religions. That peril was that the close association of the nation with its god caused the failure of the one to appear a failure of the other, and to endanger or destroy the respect paid to him. The religion of a subdued or ruined people was, as we may say, a demonstrated failure. Sennacherib's defiance of Hezekiah urges this with a conqueror's irony[179]. The case of the Ten Tribes had, probably, given an illustration of it within the circle of Israel itself. And in Judah, upon any shewing, there was enough of the feeling that Jehovah was responsible for His people, of the conviction that He would certainly protect His own, of the confidence resting on prosperity and liable to be shaken by its loss, to make the downfall of the state, carrying with it that of the Temple and the outer order of religion, an enormous peril to the religion itself and with it to the very existence of Israel. It is not difficult to discern the agency by which the peril was averted. That agency was Prophecy. Modern criticism, though it may quarrel with the inspiration or predictive power of the prophets, has given fresh and unbiassed witness to their importance as an historical phenomenon. Kuenen[180], for example, points out how at every turning-point in Israel's later history there stands a man who claims to bring a word of God to the people. Prof. Huxley[181], in a recent article, has told us that 'a vigorous minority of Babylonian Jews,' that is, the Jews upon whom the full forces of prophecy bore, 'created the first consistent, remorseless, naked Monotheism, which, so far as history records, appeared in the world ... and they inseparably united therewith an ethical code, which, for its purity and its efficiency as a bond of social life, was, and is, unsurpassed.' Of whatever fact may underlie this description, the prophets are at once evidence and authors.

Now prophecy confronted the impending peril in the name of Jehovah: on the one side it displayed the enemy (whether as by Isaiah it prescribed a bound to his advance, or as by Jeremiah announced the catastrophe to be wrought by him) as himself utterly in Jehovah's hands, His axe or saw for discipline upon the trees of the forest; on the other side it shewed that Jehovah's obligation to Israel was conditioned by His essential righteousness; that national disaster might be Jehovah's necessary vengeance, and that His purpose for Israel--which it re-asserted with fullest emphasis--might need to be realized for an Israel purified by such discipline, a shoot from the stock of the felled tree, the remnant of an 'afflicted and poor people[182].' And prophecy was beforehand with all this: it was not an afterthought to explain away a calamity: and so it fashioned in Israel at least a core of spiritual faith, to which outward disaster of polity and religion, however destructive, was not confounding, and which had stamina enough in it to draw wholesome though bitter nourishment from the hard Captivity discipline. This, when the flood came, was an ark for Israel's religion, and, in its religion, for the national life, which re-organized itself under new conditions round the nucleus of the religion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(_c_) The work of prophecy and the work of the law was also (if we can distinguish causes which were so much affected by one another) the work of history. To the work of the prophets, indeed, the history of both the past and the succeeding times was essential, the former to supply their work with a standing ground, the latter to engrain its teaching into the life of the nation. We look back, and we ask, What gave the prophets their advantage, what was the fulcrum of their lever? Trained to observe the processes of religious evolution, we must refuse to believe with Professor Huxley that a lofty monotheism and a noble morality sprang out of the ground among a 'minority of Babylonian Jews.' But we shall be prepared to find that the rudimentary stages differ much from the mature. The beginnings of life, as we know them, are laid in darkness: they emerge crude and childish: the physical and outward almost conceals the germ of spiritual and rational being which nevertheless is the self, and which will increasingly assert itself and rule. It may be so with that organism which God was to make the shrine of His Incarnation. We may have to learn that the beginnings of Israel are more obscure, more elementary, less distinctive from surrounding religions, than we had supposed. We need not fear to be as bold as Amos in recognising that what was in one aspect the unique calling of God's Son out of Egypt[183] was in another but one among the Divinely ruled processes of history, such as brought up the Philistines from Caphtor and the Syrians from Kir[184]. We need not be more afraid than Ezekiel to say that the peculiar people were an offshoot (if so it should be) of natural stocks, with the Amorite for father and the Hittite for mother[185]. But all this will hardly take from us that sense of continuous shaping of a thing towards a Divine event which has always been among the supports of faith. We shall see that the prophetic appeals imply a past, and that their whole force lies in what they assume, and only recal to their hearers; the special possession of Israel by Jehovah, His selection of them for His own, His deliverances of them from Egypt and onwards, giving the earnest of a future purpose for which they were preserved, and for which His definite promises were committed to them, to the seed of Abraham, the house of Israel, the line of David. These things the prophets imply, standing upon these they speak with all the force of those who need only bid the people to realize and to remember, or at most to receive from God some fresh confirmation and enlargement of their hopes[186].

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

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

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

It is in some far less normal cause, in something which seems distinctive of Israel, that we have to find the adequate explanation of the whole result. We have to ask (as Pascal so keenly felt[187]) why a nation records its failures and misfortunes as being chastisements of wilful, repeated, and disgraceful fault, and then jealously guards the record as its most cherished possession. It would be easy to suggest that there is in this an egotism clothing itself in humility: and to point out that this egotism would explain the confidence which still looked forward to the future, which anticipated greatness for an 'afflicted and poor people,' and a blessing to all the nations of the earth from its own history. Only this is just to slur the difficulty, and under the invidious word 'egotism' to disguise that wonderful instinct of a destiny and a mission which is so strangely unlike egotism, and which allowed, or even produced, in so profound a form the self-condemnation which egotism refuses.

Doubtless the effects of these preparing forces were felt, and their meanings discerned, only by a few. Not only were they 'not all Israel that were of Israel,' but the bulk of the nation and its representative and official leaders were blind. They were off the way, down the false tracks of literalist Rabbinism, or of one-sided Essene asceticism, or of earthly visions of a restored kingdom, or (as in Alexandria) of a philosophized Judaism. The issues were the crucifixion of the Lord, and all which Judaism, without and within the Church, did to extinguish the Gospel and persecute its followers in its first age. It is right to refer to this, but there are probably few to whom it would cause any difficulty. To the observer of the world's history it is a common sight that the true issues and the distinctive work of a people is worked out not by the many or by the prominent, but by the few, and often the obscure. To the student of Jewish history that which has made Israel what it is in world-significance appears throughout the course of its history as a gold thread running through a web of very different texture. It can be no surprise that the end should be of a piece with the rest. There, in a climax of sharpest contrast, we see the antithesis which marks the history throughout. The training issues in a S. Mary, a Simeon, in those who 'waited for the consolation of Israel' on the one side, and in the 'Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites,' on the other. The natural issue of Israel's life and tendencies is seen in the cold and sterile impotence which, because it is the 'corruption of the best,' is the most irreversible spiritual ruin; while beside and amidst this there was fashioned by a grace and power above nature, though in a perfectly natural way, the true Israel which realize all that 'Israel according to the flesh' professed yet betrayed, guarded yet obscured. And if we have at all rightly discerned as a principle of Divine preparation that it should be negative as well as positive, and should demonstrate to the world before Christ was given, how little the world's own wisdom or effort could supply His place: we shall not wonder that time was thus given for Israel to try out as it were its second experiment, and to shew that by its selfishness and arrogance, by its 'carnalness,' it could warp and distort its later spiritual constitution, even more than its former temporal one, out of all likeness of what God would have it be. 'The last state of the man' was 'worse than the first[188].'

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