Chapter IV: Preparation in History for Christ (3)

III. In the last words we touch that with which this essay may perhaps fitly end. If its drift has been in any sense true, there stands before us, as perhaps the most striking feature of the whole situation, the co-existence of the two preparations, the one general, indirect, contributory, and consisting only in an impressive convergence and centering of the lines of ordinary historical sequences; the other special, directly introductory, and characterized by the presence of a distinctive power, call it what we may, a genius for religion, or more truly and adequately a special grace of the Spirit of God, which is new and above ordinary experience, even as life is when it enters the rest of nature, and reason is when it appears in the world of life. The two preparations pursue their course unconscious of one another, almost exclusive of one another. Greek wisdom and Roman power have no dream of coming to receive from the narrow national cult of humbled and subject Israel. And Israel, even taught by the great prophets, could hardly find a place in her vision of the future for any destiny of the nations of the world. To this antagonism, or more strictly this ignoring of one another, there are exceptions, exceptions of the kind which emphasize the character of the situation which they hardly modify. Two streams of such force and volume as those of Jewish religion and classical life or culture could not touch and leave one another altogether uninfluenced, though the influence was characteristically different. On the side of the world the spiritual needs of individuals caused numbers, not inconsiderable, to receive influences which made them ready to act as seeding ground and ferment for the Gospel. On the side of Israel, the strong sense of mission and of truth made the contact with Greek culture suggest the ambition to use it as a great instrument, to teach it to acknowledge and witness to the God of Israel, who was God of the whole earth: and the results, in the Greek of the Septuagint and in the Helleno-Judaic writings of Alexandria and elsewhere, were invaluable in fashioning language and thought for Christ's service. But all the more distinctly, in the first case, does the antagonism, the gulf fixed, the mutual aversion, the impossibility humanly speaking of fusion between Jew and Gentile come out before our eyes. And, in the second case, the unreal romancings of the Sibylline works, the apparently isolated work of Philo, and the opportunism of a politician like Josephus, have all the character of hybrids, and shew no sign of the vital fusion by which out of a great wedlock a new thing comes to be.

The two preparations stand apart: they go their own way. There is indeed in them a strange parallelism of common human experience and human need. Both have tried their experiments, made their ventures, won their successes, gone through their disciplines of disenchantment and failure. Both are conscious of the dying of life: in Israel there is 'no prophet more'; outside it philosophy has not the creativeness and energy of youth but the quiet acquiescence and mild prudence of age, and life, public and private, is without adequate scope or aim. In both the 'tendencies towards' a Gospel are as far as possible from making a 'tendency to produce' one. In both there is the same desire for which the Jew alone can find conscious expression: it is 'Quicken me!' Both need life. Both have no help in themselves. But in the lines which they follow and the hopes which they frame there is neither likeness nor compatibility. 'The Greeks seek after wisdom[189].' The intellect, and those who are distinctively men of the intellect, can hardly imagine human advance otherwise than in terms of the intellect. Philosophy conceives of it as a conquest of philosophical result, or even as an increase of philosophical material. It is the pain of an advanced and critical time, like that of which we speak, to feel this, and yet to feel that the experiments of speculation have gone far enough to shew that by none of their alternative ways can there be any way out to the peace of certain truth. And yet it seems that, without abdication of reason, there is no possibility of going any other way: the Greeks (and in this sense all the world was Greek) could only look for what they wanted in the form of a new philosophy.

But 'the Jews require a sign.' Totally different, but equally exclusive, were the conditions under which the Jew could conceive of a new epoch. The dread of exhausted resources did not haunt him, for he looked not to human capacity but to Divine gift and interposition. But he thought that he knew the form in which such interposition would come; it was not to be primarily a teaching, (it is the Samaritan and not the Jew who is recorded as expecting in Messiah one who, 'when He is come, will tell us all things[190]'); it must appear in action, 'with observation[191],' with pomp and scenic display, with signs, and signs which, in a very visible and tangible sense, should seem to be from heaven[192], in particular with circumstances of triumph and conquest, and with an exaltation of Israel to the glories of her monarchy many times enlarged.

Such are the demands; the things sought and needed; the conditions prescribed; definite, severally uncompromising, mutually unlike, and even conflicting. And then from out of Israel, without moral or political earthquake, without overwhelming display of supernatural force, nay even, to a superficial eye, with all the appearance of weakness and failure, without any rescue for Israel, with no attempt to present itself in philosophical form, with none of the strain and elaboration of a conscious effort to combine many in one, but rather with a paradoxical and offending 'simplicity' and 'foolishness' of mere assertion:--there comes forth a Thing in which on the one side Jews--whom we all recognise to be the best Jews, Jews in the truest and deepest sense--find the whole spirit and meaning, even down to its detail, of the life and the hope of Israel summed up and fulfilled; which left them no sense of disappointment, but rather a consciousness of having had hopes only too narrow and low; which gave them the exulting sense of 'reigning as kings,' with a 'King of Israel': while on the other side this same Thing was felt by 'Greeks' as a 'wisdom' flooding their reasons with a light of truth and wisdom (_sophia_), which met the search of philosophy (_philo-sophia_)[193], but also in simple and wise alike drew forth and ministered to needs which philosophy had but half seen and wholly failed to satisfy, enabling conscience to be candid and yet at peace, building up a new cosmopolitan fellowship, and restoring to human life dignity and value, not only in phrase and theory, but in truth. 'There came forth a Thing,' or rather there came forth One, in Whom all this was done. The question rises, 'Whom say we that He is?' And though the answer must be reached in different ways by different men, and the witness to Him in Whom is the sum of all, must needs be of many kinds; yet the convergence of many lines (as we have been permitted to trace it) to One in whom they are all combined and yet transcended, to One whom they can usher in but were powerless to produce, may be no slight corroboration of the answer which was accepted, as we have to remember, by the lowly Jesus with significant solemnity: 'Thou art the Christ,' the Fulfiller of all high and inspired Jewish hope; 'the Son of the Living God[194],' His Son,--as the Son of Man, in whom all that is human reaches fulness; and as the Son of God, who brings down to man what he has been allowed to prove to himself that he cannot discover or create.

[150] S. Matt. xiii. 52; v. 17.

[151] S. Matt. xxi. 33-38.

[152] S. Matt. v. 12; xxiii. 30-37.

[153] S. Mark xiv. 49; S. Luke xxii. 37.

[154] S. Luke xxiv. 25, 26, 44.

[155] Gal. iv. 9.

[156] Rom. xvi. 26. So the pages of the early apologists are to our feeling almost cumbered by the profuseness of their appeal to these Scriptures.

[157] S. John i. 1, 14, 9, 10.

[158] _Ep._ cii. 12.

[159] _De Carne Christi_ vi. Eum Christum qui jam tunc et adloqui ... humanum genus ediscebat in carnis habitu: cp. _adv. Prax._ xvi. ediscebat Deus in terris cum hominibus conversari.

[160] S. Matt. xi. 4, 5; xii. 39; xvi. 3.

[161] Hdt. i. 142.

[162] Clem. Alex. _Protrept._ cx. init.

[163] 1 Cor. i. 21.

[164] Wordsworth, _Excursion_ iv.

[165] Ἀταραξία (Epicurean): αὐτάρκεια.

[166] The words 'era of Christianity' are used intentionally rather than the more precise 'era of Christ,' because anything which (without being influenced unless in the most impalpable way by Christianity) prepared the world through the first and even the second century of the era to receive the Gospel may be fairly included as preparation for the revelation of Christ.

[167] Capes, _Age of Antonines_.

[168] _Philosophy of the Greeks: Eclectics_, p. 20 (tr. Alleyne).

[169] _Gospel of the Resurrection_ (3rd ed.), p. 72. It is interesting to notice that according to so dispassionate an observer as M. Gaston Boissier (_La Religion Romaine d'Auguste aux Antonins_), who has done so much to trace the better tendencies of the Imperial period, the evidence suggests some such distinction, even as regards some of the main practical results of Christianity. For example, there was a tendency to ameliorate slavery on principles of general humanity, but there was no hint of a possibility of an end to slavery. There were some signs of mutual interest between classes, but no progress towards the effective appearance of a true philanthropy such as the Christian. In such cases, however, the validity of the distinctions must be debatable and fluctuating. It is absolute as regards the Incarnation.

[170] Bk. V. c. xi. _The New Monarchy._

[171] Edersheim's _Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah_: Schürer, _History of the Jewish People in the time of Jesus Christ_.

[172] Schürer, II. ii. 273.

[173] Schürer, II. ii. 297.

[174] Tac. _Hist._ v. 4.

[175] Schürer, II. ii. 308.

[176] Acts xvii. 5, xiv. 5, xiii. 50, 44.

[177] Acts xiii. 43, &c.

[178] Acts xv. 21.

[179] Isaiah xxxvi. 18.

[180] _Hibbert Lectures_, 1882, p. 231.

[181] _Nineteenth Century_, April, 1886.

[182] Isaiah x. 15; xi. 1; Zeph. iii. 12.

[183] Hosea xi. 1.

[184] Amos ix. 7.

[185] Ezekiel xvi. 3.

[186] It is interesting to note that, according to the record preserved by Israel of their own history, that which Kuenen says of later time,--that 'at each turning-point of the history stands a man who claims to bring a word from God.'--is exactly true of the older history too; Abraham, Moses, Samuel, David, are all in this sense prophets. Yet there is no appearance of a later age forming a past in its own likeness. The prophets do not imagine an earlier row of prophets like themselves, put in like the portraits of the early Scottish kings at Holyrood, to fill the blanks of history. The early figures are not cut to prophetic pattern; they have each their distinct individuality of character and office, only they have a unity of Divine commission and service.

[187] _Pensées_, ii, 7 § 2.

[188] S. Matt. xii 45. It should be observed that the words were spoken of 'this wicked generation.'

[189] 1 Cor. i. 22.

[190] S. John iv. 25.

[191] S. Luke xvii. 20.

[192] S. Matt. xii. 38; S. John vi. 30, 31, in each case following some of our Lord's own signs.

[193] This comes before us vividly in Justin Martyr's account of his own conversion. _Dial. c. Tryph._ 3 ff. 'Thus and for this reason I am a philosopher.'

[194] S. Matt. xvi. 16.