Chapter XII: Progress as an Ideal of Action 295 (4)

I have, I hope, said enough to make it clear that there was a real and living intellectual movement in the Middle Ages, and that even in those days men had resumed the great adventure of the pursuit of truth.

* * * * *

We can only for a moment consider the significance and the character of mediaeval civilization as it expresses itself in Art, and we must begin by noticing a distinction between mediaeval art and mediaeval learning, which is of the first importance.

The intellectual movement of the Middle Ages was related to the ancient world, both in virtue of that continuity which was mediated by the Christian Fathers, whose education was that of the later Empire, and also in virtue of the intense and eager care with which mediaeval scholars studied all that they possessed of ancient literature. The relation of the art of the Middle Ages to the ancient world was quite different. There was no continuity between the vernacular poetry of the Middle Ages and that of the ancient world, and while there was a certain continuity in architecture and in mosaic painting, this amounted to little more than that the mediaeval artists took the formal structure or method as the starting-point of their own independent and original work. For the western art of the third and fourth centuries was conventional and decadent, and had apparently lost its power of recovery, while the art of the centuries which followed was at first rude and imperfect, but was full of new life, determined in its reality and dominated by some intimate sense of beauty; it was in no sense imitative of ancient art, but grew and changed under the terms of its own inherent life and power.

Mediaeval art, whatever else is to be said about it, was new and independent, and it had all the variety, the audacious experiments, characteristic of a living art. Nothing is so foolish as to imagine that it was uniform and unchanging. Indeed, from the historical point of view, the interest of the study of it is curiously contrasted with that of the art of the ancient world. There we have only an imperfect and fragmentary knowledge of the earlier and ruder form; its history, as we know it, might almost be said to begin with the perfection of the sixth and fifth centuries, and what we know after that is the history of a long decadence, not indeed without new developments of importance, as for instance in the architectural structure of Roman building, and perhaps in the sculpture of the Early Empire on one side, and in certain aspects of Latin literature on another. The history of mediaeval art is the history of the long development from what are generally rude forms to the highly developed art of the thirteenth century, a development full of incidents and experiments and variety. I have called the early form rude, but the phrase is not very happy, as those who know either the early mosaic or the early epic will understand.

There are still some people, I suppose, who think that mediaeval poetry was all of one kind, cast in one mould, but the truth is that it is of every form and character. It ranges from the bold imaginative realism of the Epic of England, Iceland, Germany, and France, to the exquisite and gracious but somewhat artificial allegory of the _Romance of the Rose_. It includes the first great emotional poetry of the modern world--the sense of the greatness and tragedy of human passion has perhaps never been expressed in more moving terms than in the _Tristan and Iseult_ of Thomas or Beroul--but it also includes the mordant satire of the Renard poetry and of Jean de Meun, and the gross realistic humour of the Fabliaux. The mediaeval drama, in whose complex development we have to trace many strands, probably represents in its oldest forms the coarse farcical buffoonery which may be related to the last fashions of the ancient world; it received a new impulse from the dramatization of scripture history in the twelfth century; but in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, at least in France, it had already become substantially a drama of romantic or contemporary life, as we can see in Jean Bodel's _Jeu de St. Nicholas_, in Adam de la Halle's _Jeu de la Feuillee_ and _Robin et Marion_, and in dramas like the _Empress of Rome_ or the _Otho_. Whatever criticism we might want to make on mediaeval literature, at least we cannot say that it was of one type and of one mood.

It is hardly necessary to point out the movement and changes in the other forms of art in the Middle Ages; it is only necessary to remind ourselves that, while we can see that the artists were often hampered by inadequate technical knowledge, they were not conventional or merely imitative.

It would be impossible here to consider the history of mosaic painting, and its development from the decadent Graeco-Roman work of Santa Pudenziana in Rome, to the magnificent and living decorations of St. Mark's in Venice, or of the cathedral of Monreale. It is enough to remind ourselves of the immense interval which lies between the rude but living sculpture of the ninth century, and the exquisite grace of Chester or Wells, and of that development of architecture which culminates in the majesty of Durham, and in the beauty of Chartres and Westminster Abbey.

It is doubtful if we have yet at all fully or correctly appreciated the nature of mediaeval art; there has been a good deal of foolish talk about 'primitives', which usually goes with a singular ignorance of mediaeval civilization; the one thing which is already clear, and which grows clearer, is that the men of those ages had an instinct and a passion for beauty which expressed itself in almost every thing that they touched; and, whatever we have gained, we have in a large measure lost this.

* * * * *

The mediaeval world was then a living growing world, neither cut off from the past, nor unrelated to the future. It was a rough and turbulent world, our ancestors were dogged, quarrelsome, and self-assertive, and the first task of civilization was to produce some sort of decent order. The world was a long way off from the firm urbanity of the English policeman. And yet the men of the Middle Ages never fell into that delusion which, as it would seem, has ruined other civilizations; the great effort for order was not in their mind to be fulfilled by any mere mechanical discipline, by any system imposed from outside, the only system of order which they were prepared to accept was one which should express the character, the tradition, and finally the will of the whole community. The great phrase of Edward I's summons to Parliament, 'Quod omnes tangit, ab omnibus approbetur' (That which concerns all, must be approved by all), was not a mere tag, as some foolish people have thought, but expressed the character and the genius of a living political civilization.

And this rough turbulent world was inspired by a great breath of spiritual and intellectual and artistic life and freedom.

It might well seem as though the Church and religion were merely a new bondage, and in part that is true, but it is not the whole truth. With all its mistakes the religion of the Middle Ages meant the growing apprehension of the reality of that 'love which moves the sun and other stars', it meant the growth of reverence for that which is beyond and above humanity and which is also within it. For it is the last truth of the Christian faith that we know God only under the terms of human life and nature. And with all the cruelty and brutality of the Middle Ages they taught men love as well as obedience.

Again, it was in these ages, as soon as the confusion of the outer world was a little reduced, that the passion for knowledge awoke again in men's hearts. It is true that some were afraid lest the eager inquiry of men's minds should destroy the foundations of that order which men were slowly achieving, but still the passionate pursuit of knowledge has rarely been more determined. And once again the world was rough, but these men had an instinct, a passion for beauty which expressed itself in almost everything which they touched. They had not, indeed, the almost miraculous sense and mastery of the great artists of Greece, that did not come again till the time of the great Italian artists of the fifteenth century. But they were free from pedantry, from formalism, they left the dying art of the ancient world and made their own way. Their sense of colour was almost infallible, as those who have seen the mosaics of the older Roman basilicas and of St. Mark's in Venice will know; but, indeed, we have only to look at the illuminated manuscripts which are to be found in all our libraries. And in that great art in which, above all perhaps, they expressed themselves, in their great architecture, we see the growth of a constructive genius which is only overshadowed by the superb beauty of its form.

A rough, disorderly, turbulent, greedy, cruel world, but it knew the human soul, and it knew the human heart. The ancient world had ended in a great destruction, but the sadness and emptiness of its last days compel us to feel that it was well that it should end. And the new world was a world of life, of crude force and restless energy, and from it we have received the principles and the forms of a great civilization, and the temper which is never satisfied, for there is no end to life.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

H. W. C. Davis, _Mediaeval Europe_ (Home University Library).

Lord Bryce, _History of Roman Empire_.

Rashdall, _Universities of Empire in the Middle Ages_.

R. L. Poole, _Illustrations of Mediaeval Thought_.

Gierke, _Political Theories of the Middle Ages_.

W. P. Ker, _Epic and Romance_.

FOOTNOTES:

[23] Cf. Cicero, _De Legibus_, i. 10-12; and Seneca, _De Beneficiis_, iii. 18.

[24] Cf. Decretals, v. 39. 44, 28.

[25] Cf. Carlyle, _Mediaeval Political Theory_, vol. ii. pp. 244-9.

[26] Cf. John of Salisbury, _Policraticus_, iv. 1.

[27] Cf. Bracton, _De Legibus et Consuetudinibus_, i. 8, 5.

[28] Cf. Manegold, _Ad Gebehardum_, c. XXX.

[29] Cf. John of Salisbury, _Policraticus_, iii. 15, viii. 17, 18, 20.

[30] Cf. C. C. J. Webb's edition of John of Salisbury's _Policraticus_, introduction.

[31] Cf. Gratian, _Decretum_, D. iv. c. 3.

V

PROGRESS IN RELIGION

BARON FRIEDRICH VON HUeGEL

The difficulties are deep and delicate which confront any man at all well acquainted with the fuller significance of Religion and of Progress, who attempts clearly and shortly to describe or define the ultimate relations between these two sets of fact and conviction. It is plain that Religion is the deeper and richer of the two terms; and that we have here, above all, to attempt to fathom the chief elements and forces of Religion as such, and then to see whether Progress is really traceable in Religion at all. And again it is clear that strongly religious souls will, as such, hold that Religion answers to, and is occasioned by, the action, within our human life and needs, of great, abiding, living non-human Realities; and yet, if such souls are at all experienced and sincere, they will also admit--as possibly the most baffling of facts--that the human individuals, families, races, are relatively rare in whom this sense and need of Religion is strongly, sensitively active. Thus the religion of most men will either all but completely wither or vanish before the invasion of other great facts and interests of human life--Economics or Politics or Ethics, or again, Science, Art, Philosophy; or it will, more frequently, become largely assimilated, in its conception, valuation, and practice, to the quite distinct, and often subtly different, conceptions, valuations, and practices pertaining to such of these other ranges and levels of human life as happen here to be vigorously active. And such assimilations are, of course, effected with a particular Philosophy or Ethic, mostly some passing fashion of the day, which does not reach the deepest laws and standards even of its own domain, and which, if taken as Religion, will gravely numb and mar the power and character of such religious perception as may still remain in this particular soul.

I will, then, first attempt some discriminations in certain fundamental questions concerning the functioning of our minds, feelings, wills. I will next attempt short, vivid descriptions of the chief stages in the Jewish and Christian Religions, with a view to tracing here what may concern their progress; and will very shortly illustrate the main results attained by the corresponding main peculiarities of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism. And I will finally strive to elucidate and to estimate, as clearly as possible, the main facts in past and present Religion which concern the question of religious 'Progressiveness'.

I

I begin with insisting upon some seven discriminations which, even only forty years ago, would have appeared largely preposterous to the then fashionable philosophy.

First, then, our Knowledge is always wider and deeper than is our Science. I know my mother, I know my dog, I know my favourite rose-tree; and this, although I am quite ignorant of the anatomical differences between woman and man; of the psychological limits between dog and human being; or of the natural or artificial botanical order to which my rose-plant belongs. Any kind or degree of consciousness on my part as to these three realities is a knowledge of their content. 'Knowledge is not simply the reduction of phenomena to law and their resolution into abstract elements; since thus the unknowable would be found well within the facts of experience itself, in so far as these possess a concrete character which refuses translation into abstract relations.' So Professor Aliotta urges with unanswerable truth.[32]

And next, this spontaneous awareness of other realities by myself, the reality Man, contains always, from the first, both matter and form, and sense, reason, feeling, volition, all more or less in action. Sir Henry Jones insists finely: 'The difference between the primary and elementary data of thought on the one hand, and the highest forms of systematized knowledge on the other, is no difference in kind, analogous to a mere particular and a mere universal; but it is a difference of articulation.'[33]

Thirdly, direct, unchallengeable Experience is always only experience of a particular moment; only by means of Thought, and trust in Thought, can such Experience be extended, communicated, utilized. The sceptic, to be at all effective, practises this trust as really as does his opponent. Thought, taken apart from Experience, is indeed artificial and arid; but Experience without Thought, is largely an orderless flux. Philosophers as different as the Neo-Positivist Mach and the Intuitionist Bergson, do indeed attempt to construct systems composed solely of direct Experience and pure Intuition; and, at the same time, almost ceaselessly insist upon the sheer novelty, the utter unexpectedness of all direct Experience, and the entire artificiality of the constructions of Thought--constructions which alone adulterate our perceptions of reality with the non-realities repetition, uniformity, foreseeableness. Yet the amazing success of the application of such constructions to actual Nature stares us all in the face. 'It is, indeed, strange,' if that contention be right, 'that facts behave as if they too had a turn for mathematics.' Assuredly 'if thought, with its durable and coherent structure, were not the reflection of some order of stable relations in the nature of things, it would be worthless as an organ of life'.[34]

Fourthly, both Space and Time are indeed essential constituents of all our perceptions, thoughts, actions, at least in this life. Yet Time is perhaps the more real, and assuredly the richer, constituent of the two. But this rich reality applies only to Concrete or Filled Time, Duration, in which our experiences, although always more or less successive, interpenetrate each other in various degrees and ways, and are thus more or less simultaneous. An absolutely even flow of equal, mutually exclusive moments, on the contrary, exists only for our theoretical thinking, in Abstract, Empty, or Clock time. Already, in 1886, Professor James Ward wrote: 'In time, conceived as physical, there is no trace of intensity; in time, as psychically experienced, duration is primarily an intensive magnitude.'[35] And in 1889 Professor Bergson, in his _Essai sur les Donnees Immediates de la Conscience_, gave us exquisite descriptions of time as we really experience it, of 'duration strictly speaking', which 'does not possess moments that are identical or exterior to each other'.[36] Thus all our real soul life, in proportion to its depth, moves in Partial Simultaneity; and it apprehends, requires and rests, at its deepest, in an overflowingly rich Pure Simultaneity.

Fifthly, Man is Body as well as Soul, and the two are closely interrelated. The sensible perception of objects, however humble, is always necessary for the beginning, and (in the long run) for the persistence and growth, of the more spiritual apprehensions of man. Hence Historical Persons and Happenings, Institutions, affording Sensible Acts and Contacts, and Social Corporations, each different according to the different ranges and levels of life, can hardly fail to be of importance for man's full awakening--even ethical and spiritual. Professor Ernst Troeltsch, so free from natural prejudice in favour of such a Sense-and-Spirit position, has become perhaps the most adequate exponent of this great fact of life, which is ever in such danger of evaporation amidst the intellectual and leading minority of men.

Sixthly, the cultivated modern man is still largely arrested and stunted by the spell of Descartes, with his insistence upon immediate unity of outlook and perfect clearness of idea as the sole, universal tests, indeed constituents, of truth. 'I judged that I could take for my general rule that the things which we conceive very clearly and very distinctly are all true'--these and these alone.[37] Thus thenceforth Mathematics and Mechanics have generally been held to be the only full and typical sciences, and human knowledge to be co-extensive with such sciences alone. Yet Biology and Psychology now rightly claim to be sciences, each with its own special methods and tests distinct from those of Mathematics and Mechanics. Indeed, the wisest and most fruitful philosophy is now coming to see that 'Reality generally eludes our thought, when thought is reduced to mathematical formulas'.[38] Concrete thought, contrariwise, finds full room also for History, Philosophy, Religion, for each as furnishing rich subject-matters for Knowledge or Science, of a special but true kind.

Seventhly. Already Mathematics and Mechanics absolutely depend, for the success of their applications to actual Nature, upon a spontaneous correspondence between the human reason and the Rationality of Nature. The immensity of this success is an unanswerable proof that this rationality is not imposed, but found there, by man. But Thought without a Thinker is an absurd proposition. Thus faith in Science is faith in God. Perhaps the most impressive declaration of this necessary connexion between Knowledge and Theism stands at the end of that great work, Christoph Sigwart's _Logik_. 'As soon as we raise the question as to the real _right_', the adequate reason, 'of our demands for a correspondence, within our several sciences, between the principles and the objects of the researches special to each, there emerges the need for the Last and Unconditional Reason. And the actual situation is not that this Reason appears only on the horizon of our finite knowledge,' as Kant would have it. 'Not in thus merely extending our knowledge lies the significance of the situation, but in the fact that this Unconditional Reason constitutes the presupposition without which no desire for Knowledge (in the proper and strict sense of the word) is truly thinkable.'[39]

And lastly, all this and more points to philosophical Agnosticism as an artificial system, and one hopelessly inadequate to the depths of human experience. Assuredly Bossuet is right: 'man knows not the whole of anything'; and mystery, in this sense, is also of the essence of all higher religion. But what man knows of anything is that thing manifested, not essentially travestied, in that same thing's appearances. We men are most assuredly realities forming part of a real world-whole of various realities; those other realities continuously affect our own reality; we cannot help thinking certain things about these other realities; and these things, when accepted and pressed home by us in action or in science, turn out, by our success in this their utilization, to be rightly apprehended by us, as parts of interconnected, objective Nature. Thus our knowledge of Reality is real as far as it goes, and philosophical Agnosticism is a _doctrinaire_ position. We can say with Herbert Spencer, in spite of his predominant Agnosticism, that 'the error' committed by philosophers intent upon demonstrating the limits and conditions of consciousness 'consists in assuming that consciousness contains _nothing but_ limits and conditions, to the entire neglect of that which is limited and conditioned'. In reality 'there is some thing which alike forms the raw material of definite thought and remains after the definiteness, which thinking gave to it, has been destroyed'.[40]

II

Let us next consider five of the most ancient and extensively developed amongst the still living Religions: the Israelitish-Jewish and the Christian religions shall, as by far the best known to us and as the most fully articulated, form the great bulk of this short account; the Confucian, Buddhist, and Mohammedan religions will be taken quite briefly, only as contrasts to, or elucidations of, the characteristics found in the Jewish and Christian faiths. All this in view of the question concerning the relations between Religion and Progress.

1. We can roughly divide the Israelitish-Jewish religion into three long periods; in each the points that specially concern us will greatly vary in clearness, importance, and richness of content.

The first period, from the time of the founder Moses and the Jewish exodus out of Egypt to the appearance of the first great prophet Elijah (say 1300 B.C. to about 860 B.C.) is indeed but little known to us; yet it gives us the great historical figure of the initial lawgiver, the recipient and transmitter of deep ethical and religious experiences and convictions. True, the code of King Hammurabi of Babylon (in 1958 to 1916 B.C.; or, according to others, in about 1650) anticipates many of the laws of the _Book of the Covenant_ (Exod. xx, 22-xxiii. 33), the oldest amongst the at all lengthy bodies of laws in the Pentateuch; and, again, this covenant appears to presuppose the Jewish settlement in Canaan (say in 1250 B.C.) as an accomplished fact. And, indeed, the Law and the books of Moses generally have undoubtedly passed through a long, deep, wide, and elaborate development, of which three chief stages, all considerably subsequent to the Covenant-Book, have, by now, been established with substantial certainty and precision. The record of directly Mosaic sayings and writings is thus certainly very small. Yet it is assuredly a gross excess to deny the historical reality of Moses, as even distinguished scholars such as Edward Meyer and Bernhard Stade have done. Far wiser here is Wellhausen, who finds, in the very greatness and fixity of orientation of the development in the Law and in the figure of the Lawgiver, a conclusive proof of the rich reality and greatness of the Man of God, Moses. Yet it is Hermann Gunkel, I think, who has reached the best balanced judgement in this matter. With Gunkel we can securely hold that Moses called God Yahweh, and proclaimed Him as the national God of Israel; that Moses invoked Him as 'Yahweh is my banner'--the divine leader of the Israelites in battle (Exod. xvii. 15); and that Yahweh is for Moses a God of righteousness--of the right and the law which he, Moses, brought down from Mount Sinai and published at its foot. Fierce as may now appear to us the figure of Yahweh, thus proclaimed, yet the soul's attitude towards Him is already here, from the first, a religion of the will: an absolute trust in God ('Yahweh shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace,' Exod. xiv. 14), and a terrible relentlessness in the execution of His commands--as when Moses orders the sons of Levi to go to and fro in the camp, slaying all who, as worshippers of the Golden Calf, had not been 'on Yahweh's side' (Exod. xxxii. 25-29); and when the chiefs, who had joined in the worship of Baal-Peor, are 'hung up unto Yahweh before the sun' (Num. xxv. 1-5). Long after Moses the Jews still believed in the real existence of the gods of the heathen; and the religion of Moses was presumably, in the first instance, 'Monolatry' (the adoration of One God among many); but already accompanied by the conviction that Yahweh was mightier than any other god--certainly Micah, 'Who is like Yahweh?,' is a very ancient Israelitish name. And if Yahweh is worshipped by Moses on a mountain (Sinai) and His law is proclaimed at a spring, if Moses perhaps himself really fashioned the brazen serpent as a sensible symbol of Yahweh, Yahweh nevertheless remains without visible representation in or on the Ark; He is never conceived as the sheer equivalent of natural forces; and all mythology is absent here--the vehement rejection of the calf-worship shows this strikingly. Michael Angelo, himself a soul of fire, understood Moses well, Gunkel thinks.[41]

The second period, from Elijah's first public appearance (about 860 B.C.) to the Dedication of the Second Temple (516 B.C.), and on to the public subscription to the Law of Moses, under Ezra (in 444 B.C.), is surpassed, in spiritual richness and importance, only by the classical times of Christianity itself. Its beginning, its middle, and its end each possess distinctive characters.

The whole opens with Elijah, 'the grandest heroic figure in all the Bible,' as it still breathes and burns in the First Book of Kings. 'For Elijah there existed not, in different regions, forces possessed of equal rights and equal claims to adoration, but everywhere only one Holy Power that revealed Itself, not like Baal, in the life of Nature, but like Yahweh, in the moral demands of the Spirit' (Wellhausen).

And then (in about 750 B.C.) appears Amos, the first of the noble 'storm-birds' who herald the coming national destructions and divine survivals. 'Yahweh was for these prophets above all the god of justice, and God of Israel only in so far as Israel satisfied His demands of justice. And yet the special relation of Yahweh to Israel is still recognized as real; the ethical truth, which now stood high above Israel, had, after all, arisen within Israel and could still only be found within it.' The two oldest lengthy narrative documents of the Pentateuch--the Yahwist (J) and the Ephraemite (E)--appear to have been composed, the first in Judah in the time of Elijah, the second in Israel in the time of Amos. J gives us the immortal stories of Paradise and the Fall, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Flood; E, Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac; and the documents conjointly furnish the more naive and picturesque parts of the grand accounts of the Patriarchs generally--the first great narrative stage of the Pentateuch. God here gives us some of His most exquisite self-revelations through the Israelitish peasant-soul. And Isaiah of Jerusalem, successful statesman as well as deep seer, still vividly lives for us in some thirty-six chapters of that great collection the 'Book of Isaiah' (i-xii, xv-xx, xxii-xxxix). There is his majestic vocation in about 740 B.C., described by himself, without ambiguity, as a precise, objective revelation (chap. vi); and there is the divinely impressive close of his long and great activity, when he nerves King Hezekiah to refuse the surrender of the Holy City to the all-powerful Sennacherib, King of Assyria: that Yahweh would not allow a single arrow to be shot against it, and would turn back the Assyrian by the way by which he came--all which actually happens as thus predicted (chap. xxxvii).

The middle of this rich second period is filled by a great prophet-priest's figure, and a great prophetical priestly reform. Jeremiah is called in 628 B.C., and dies obscurely in Egypt in about 585 B.C.; and the Deuteronomic Law and Book is found in the Temple, and is solemnly proclaimed to, and accepted by, the people, under the leadership of the High Priest Hilkiah and King Josiah, 'the Constantine of the Jewish Church,' in 628 B.C. Jeremiah and Deuteronomy (D) are strikingly cognate in style, temper, and injunctions; and especially D contrasts remarkably in all this with the documents J and E. We thus have here the second great development of the Mosaic Law. Both Jeremiah and Deuteronomy possess a deeply interior, tenderly spiritual, kernel and a fiercely polemical husk--they both are full of the contrast between the one All-Holy God to be worshipped in the one Holy Place, Jerusalem, and the many impure heathen gods worshipped in so many places by the Jewish crowd. Thus in Jeremiah Yahweh declares: 'This shall be my covenant that I will make with the house of Israel: I will write my law in their hearts: and they shall all know me, from the least to the greatest: for I will remember their sin no more' (xxxi. 33, 34). And Yahweh exclaims: 'My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and have hewn out cisterns that can hold no water.' 'Lift up thine eyes unto the high places ... thou hast polluted the land with thy wickedness.' 'Wilt thou not from this time cry unto me: My Father, thou art the guide of my youth?' (ii. 13, iii. 2, 4). And Deuteronomy teaches magnificently: 'This commandment which I command you this day, is not too hard for thee, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say: Who shall go up for us to heaven or over the sea, and bring it unto us? But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it' (xxx. 11-14). And there are here exquisite injunctions--to bring back stray cattle to their owners; to spare the sitting bird, where eggs or fledglings are found; to leave over, at the harvest, some of the grain, olives, grapes, for the stranger, the orphan, the widow; and not to muzzle the ox when treading out the corn (xxii. 1, 6, 7; xxiv. 19; xxv. 4). Yet the same Deuteronomy ordains: 'If thine own brother, son, daughter, wife, or bosom friend entice thee secretly, saying, let us go and serve other gods, thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death.' Also 'There shall not be found with thee any consulter with a familiar spirit ... or a necromancer. Yahweh thy God doth drive them out before thee.' And, finally, amongst the laws of war, 'of the cities of these people (Hittite, Amorite, Canaanite, Perizzite, Hivite, Jebusite) thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth, as Yahweh thy God hath commanded thee' (xii. 2-5; xiii. 6, 9; xviii. 10-13; xx. 16, 17). Here we must remember that the immorality of these Canaanitish tribes and cults was of the grossest, indeed largely unnatural, kind; that it had copiously proved its terrible fascination for their kinsmen, the Jews; that these ancient Easterns, e.g. the Assyrians, were ruthlessly cruel at the storming of enemy cities; and especially that the morality and spirituality, thus saved for humanity from out of a putrid flood, was (in very deed) immensely precious. One point here is particularly far-sighted--the severe watchfulness against all animism, spiritualism, worship of the dead, things in which the environing world of the Jews' fellow Semites was steeped. The Israelitish-Jewish prophetic movement did not first attain belief in a Future Life, and then, through this, belief in God; but the belief in God, strongly hostile to all those spiritualisms, only very slowly, and not until the danger of any infusion of those naturalisms had become remote, led on the Jews to a realization of the soul's survival with a consciousness at least equal to its earthly aliveness. The Second Book of Kings (chaps. xxii, xxiii) gives a graphic account of King Josiah's rigorous execution of the Deuteronomic law.

The end of this most full second period is marked by the now rapid predominance of a largely technical priestly legislation and a corresponding conception of past history; by the inception of the Synagogue and the religion of the Book; but also by writings the most profound of any in the Old Testament, all presumably occasioned by the probing experiences of the Exile. In 597 and 586 B.C. Jerusalem is destroyed and the majority of the Jews are taken captives to Babylon; and in between (in 593) occurs the vocation of the prophet-priest Ezekiel, and his book is practically complete by 573 B.C. Here the prophecies as to the restoration are strangely detailed and schematic--already somewhat like the apocalyptic writers. Yet Ezekiel reveals to us deathless truths--the responsibility of the individual soul for its good and its evil, and God Himself as the Good Shepherd of the lost and the sick (xviii. 20-32; xxxiv. 1-6); he gives us the grand pictures of the resurrection unto life of the dead bones of Israel (chap. xxxvii), and of the waters of healing and of life which flow forth, ever deeper and wider, from beneath the Temple, and by their sweetness transform all sour waters and arid lands that they touch (xlvii. 1-12). A spirit and doctrine closely akin to those of Ezekiel produced the third, last, and most extensive development of the Pentateuchal legislation and doctrinal history--in about 560 B.C., the Law of Holiness (Lev., chaps. xvii-xxvi); and in about 500 B.C., the Priestly Code. As with Ezekiel's look forward, so here with these Priests' look backward, we have to recognize much schematic precision of dates, genealogies, and explanations instinct with technical interests. The unity of sanctuary and the removal from the feasts and the worship of all traces of naturalism, which in Jeremiah, Deuteronomy, and the Second Book of Kings appear still as the subject-matters of intensest effort and conflict, are here assumed as operative even back to patriarchal times. Yet it can reasonably be pleaded that the life-work of Moses truly involved all this development; and even that Monotheism (at least, for the times and peoples here concerned) required some such rules as are assumed by P throughout.

And P gives us the great six days' Creation Story with its splendid sense of rational order pervasive of the Universe, the work of the all-reasonable God--its single parts good, its totality very good; and man and woman springing together from the Creator's will. But the writer nowhere indicates that he means long periods by the 'days'; each creation appears as effected in an instant, and these instants as separated from each other by but twenty-four hours.

In between Deuteronomy and the Priestly Code, or a little later still, lies probably the composition of three religious works full, respectively, of exultant thanksgiving, of the noblest insight into the fruitfulness of suffering, and of the deepest questionings issuing in childlike trust in God. For an anonymous writer composes (say, in 550 B.C.) the great bulk of the magnificent chapters forty to fifty-five of our Book of Isaiah--a paean of spiritual exultation over the Jews' proximate deliverance from exile by the Persian King Cyrus. In 538 B.C. Cyrus issues the edict for the restoration to Judaea, and in 516 the Second Temple is dedicated. Within this great Consolation stand (xlii. 1-4; xlix. 1-6; l. 4-9; lii. 13-liii. 12) the four poems on the Suffering Servant of Yahweh--the tenderest revelation of the Old Testament--apparently written previously in the Exile, say in 570-560 B.C. The Old Law here reaches to the very feet of the New Law--to the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world. And the Book of Job, in its chief constituents (chaps. i-xxxi, xxxviii-xlii), was probably composed when Greek influences began--say in about 480 B.C., the year of the battle of Thermopylae. The canonization of this daringly speculative book indicates finely how sensitive even the deepest faith and holiness can remain to the apparently unjust distribution of man's earthly lot.

Our second period ends in 444 B.C., when the priest and scribe Ezra solemnly proclaims, and receives the public subscription to, the Book of the Law of Moses--the Priestly Code, brought by him from Babylon.

The Jewish last period, from Ezra's Proclamation 444 B.C. to the completion of the Fourth Book of Ezra, about A.D. 95, is (upon the whole) derivative. Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah were absorbed in the realities of their own epoch-making times, and of God's universal governance of the world past and future; Daniel now, with practically all the other Apocalyptic writers in his train, is absorbed in those earlier prophecies, and in ingenious speculations and precise computations as to the how and the when of the world's ending. The Exile had given rise to the Synagogue, and had favoured the final development and codifying of the Mosaic law; the seventy years intermission of the Temple sacrifices and symbolic acts had turned the worship, which had been so largely visible, dramatic, social, into the praying, singing, reading, preaching of extant texts, taken as direct and final rules for all thought and action, and as incapable of additions or interpretations equal in value to themselves. Yet thus priceless treasures of spiritual truth and light were handed down to times again aglow with great--the greatest religious gifts and growths; and indeed this literature itself introduced various conceptions or images destined to form a largely fitting, and in the circumstances attractive, garment for the profound further realities brought by Christianity.

In the Book of Daniel (written somewhere between 163 and 165 B.C.) all earthly events appear as already inscribed in the heavenly books (vii. 10), and the events which have still really to come consist in the complete and speedy triumph of the Church-State Israel against King Antiochus Epiphanes. But here we get the earliest clear proclamation of a heightened life beyond death--though not yet for all (xii. 2). The noble vision of the four great beasts that came up from the sea, and of one like unto a Son of Man that came with the clouds of heaven (chap. vii), doubtless here figures the earthly kingdoms, Babel, Media, Persia, Greece (Alexander), and God's kingdom Israel. The Psalter appears to have been closed as late as 140 B.C.; some Psalms doubtless date back to 701--a few perhaps to David himself, about 1000 B.C. The comminatory Psalms, even if spoken as by representatives of God's Church and people, we cannot now echo within our own spiritual life; any heightened consciousness after death is frequently denied (e.g. vi. 5: 'in the grave who shall give thee thanks?' and cxv. 17: 'the dead praise not the Lord')--we have seen the impressive reason of this; and perhaps a quarter of the Psalms are doubles, or pale imitations of others. But, for the rest, the Psalter remains as magnificently fresh and powerful as ever: culminating in the glorious self-commitment (Ps. lxxiii), 'I was as a beast before Thee. Nevertheless I am continually with Thee. Whom have I in heaven but Thee, and there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee.' The keen sense, present throughout this amazingly rich collection, of the reality, prevenience, presence, protection--of the central importance for man, of God, the All-Abiding, finds thus its full, deathless articulation.

Religiously slighter, yet interesting as a preparation for Christian theology, are the writings of Philo, a devout, Greek-trained Jew of Alexandria, who in A.D. 40 appeared before the Emperor Caligula in Rome. Philo does not feel his daringly allegorical sublimations as any departures from the devoutest Biblical faith. Thus 'God never ceases from action; as to burn is special to fire, so is action to God'--this in spite of God's rest on the seventh day (Gen. ii. 2). 'There exist two kinds of men: the heavenly man and the earthly man.'[42] The long Life of Moses[43] represents him as the King, Lawgiver, High Priest, Prophet, Mediator. The Word, the Logos (which here everywhere hovers near, but never reaches, personality) is 'the firstborn son of God', 'the image of God'[44]; its types are 'the Rock', the Manna, the High Priest's Coat; it is 'the Wine Pourer and Master of the Drinking Feast of God'.[45] The majority of the Jews, who did not accept Jesus as the Christ, soon felt they had no need for so much allegory, and dropped it, with advantage upon the whole, to the Jewish faith. But already St. Paul and the Fourth Gospel find here noble mental raiment for the great new facts revealed by Jesus Christ.

2. The Christian Religion we will take, as to our points, at four stages of its development--Synoptic, Johannine, Augustinian, Thomistic.

The Synoptic material here specially concerned we shall find especially in Mark i. 1 to xv. 47; but also in Matt. iii. 1 to xxvii. 56, and in Luke iii. 1 to xxiii. 56. Within the material thus marked off, there is no greater or lesser authenticity conferred by treble, or double, or only single attestation; for this material springs from two original sources--a collection primarily of doings and sufferings, which our Mark incorporates with some expansions; and a collection primarily of discourses, utilized especially by Matthew and Luke in addition to the original Mark. Both these sources contain the records of eyewitnesses, probably Saints Peter and Matthew.

The chronological order and the special occasions of the growths in our Lord's self-manifestation, or in the self-consciousness of His human soul, are most carefully given by Mark and next by Luke. Matthew largely ignores the stages and occasions of both these growths, and assumes, as fully explicit from the beginning of the Ministry, what was manifested only later on or at the last; and he already introduces ecclesiastical and Christological terms and discriminations which, however really implicit as to their substance in Jesus's teaching, or inevitable (as to their particular form) for the maintenance and propagation of Christianity in the near future, are nevertheless still absent from the accounts of Mark and Luke.

The chief rules for the understanding of the specific character of our Lord's revelation appear to be the following. The life and teaching must be taken entire; and, within this entirety, each stage must be apprehended in its own special peculiarities. The thirty years in the home, the school, the synagogue, the workshop at Nazareth, form a profoundly important constituent of His life and teaching--impressively contrasted, as they are, with the probably not full year of the Public Ministry, even though we are almost completely bereft of all details for those years of silent preparation.

The Public Ministry, again, consists of two strongly contrasted stages, divided by the great scene of Jesus with the Apostles alone at Caesarea Philippi (Mark viii. 27-33; Luke ix. 18-22; Matt. xvi. 13-23). The stage before is predominantly expansive, hopeful, peacefully growing; the stage after, is concentrated, sad, in conflict, and in storm. To the first stage belong the plant parables, full of exquisite sympathy with the unfolding of natural beauty and of slow fruitfulness; to the second stage belong the parables of keen watchfulness and of the proximate, sudden second coming. Both movements are essential to the physiognomy of our Lord. And they are not simply differences in self-manifestation; they represent a growth, a relatively new element, in His human soul's experience and outlook.

The central doctrine in the teaching is throughout the Kingdom of God. But in the first stage this central doctrine appears as especially upheld by Jesus's fundamental experience--the Fatherhood of God. In the second stage the central doctrine appears as especially coloured by Jesus's other great experience--of Himself as the Son of Man. In the earlier stage the Kingdom is presented more in the spirit of the ancient prophets, as predominantly ethical, as already come in its beginnings, and as subject to laws analogous to those obtaining in the natural world. In the second stage the coming of the Kingdom is presented more with the form of the apocalyptic writers, in a purely religious, intensely transcendent, and dualistic outlook--especially this also in the Parables of Immediate Expectation--as not present but future (Matt. xix. 28); not distant but imminent (Matt. xvi. 28; xxiv. 33; xxvi. 64); not gradual but sudden (Matt. xxiv. 27, 39, 43); not at all achieved by man but purely given by God (so still in Rev. xxi. 10).

To the earlier stage belongs the great Rejoicing of Jesus (Matt. xi. 25-30; Luke x. 21, 22). The splendid opening, 'I thank Thee, Father--for so it hath seemed good in Thy sight', and the exquisite close, special to Matthew, 'Come unto Me--and my burthen is light', raise no grave difficulty. But the intermediate majestic declaration, 'All things are delivered unto Me by the Father--neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him', causes critical perplexities.

I take this declaration to be modelled upon actual words of Jesus, which genuinely implied rather than clearly proclaimed a unique relation between the Father and Himself. Numerous other words and acts involve such a relation and Jesus's full consciousness of it. His first public act, His baptism, is clearly described by Mark as a personal experience, 'He saw the heavens opened' and heard a heavenly voice 'Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased' (i. 10, 11). Already in the first stage Jesus declares the Baptist to be 'more than a prophet' (Matt. xi. 9), yet claims superiority over him and over Solomon (xi. 11; xii. 42). His doctrine is new wine requiring new bottles (Mark ii. 22); indeed His whole attitude towards the law is that of a superior, who most really exhorts all, 'Learn of Me'. And soon after Caesarea Philippi He insists to the people: 'Whosoever shall be ashamed of Me in this generation, of him also shall the Son of Man be ashamed, when He cometh in the glory of the Father' (Mark viii. 38). The most numerous cures, physical, psychical, moral, certainly performed by Him, appear as the spontaneous effect of a unique degree and kind of spiritual authority; and the sinlessness attributed to Him throughout by the apostolic community (2 Cor. v. 21; Heb. iv. 15; John viii. 46; 1 John ii. 29) entirely corresponds to the absence, in the records of Him, of all traits indicating troubles of conscience and the corresponding fear of God. And this His unique Sonship is conjoined, in the earliest picture of Him, with an endless variety and combination of all the joys, admirations, affections, disappointments, desolations, temptations possible to such a stainless human soul and will. We thus find here a comprehensiveness unlike the attitude of the Baptist or St. Paul, and like, although far exceeding, the joy in nature and the peace in suffering of St. Francis of Assisi.

The Second Stage opens with the great scene at Caesarea Philippi and its sequel (given with specially marked successiveness in Mark viii. 27-x. 45), when, for the first time in a manner beyond all dispute, Mark represents Jesus as adopting the designation 'the Son of Man' in a Messianic and eschatological sense. For our Lord here promptly corrects Peter's conception of 'Messiah' by repeated insistence upon 'the Son of Man'--His glory yet also His sufferings. Thus Jesus adopts the term of Daniel vii. 13 (which already the Apocalypse of Enoch had understood of a personal Messiah) as a succinct description of His specific vocation--its heavenly origin and difference from all earthly Messianism; its combination of the depths of human weakness, dereliction, sufferings with the highest elevation in joy, power and glory; and its connexion of that pain with this triumph as strictly interrelated--only with and through the Cross, was there here the offer and acceptance of the Crown.

As to the Passion and Death, and the Risen Life, four points appear to be central and secured. Neither the Old Testament nor Jewish Theology really knew of a Suffering Messiah. Jesus Himself clearly perceived, accepted, and carried out this profound new revelation. This suffering and death were conceived by Him as the final act and crown of His service--so in Mark x. 44, 45 and Luke xxii. 24-7. (All this remains previous to, and independent of, St. Paul's elaborated doctrine as to the strictly vicarious and juridical character of the whole.) And the Risen Life is an objectively real, profoundly operative life--the visions of the Risen One were effects of the truly living Jesus, the Christ.

The Second Christian Stage, the Johannine writings, are fully understandable only as posterior to St. Paul--the most enthusiastic and influential, indeed, of all our Lord's early disciples, but a convert, from the activity of a strict persecuting Pharisee, not to the earthly Jesus, of soul and body, whom he never knew, but to the heavenly Spirit-Christ, whom he had so suddenly experienced. Saul, the man of violent passions and acute interior conflicts, thus abruptly changed in a substantially _pneumatic_ manner, is henceforth absorbed, not in the past Jewish Messiah, but in the present universal Christ; not in the Kingdom of God, but in Pneuma, the Spirit. Christ, the second Adam, is here a life-giving Spirit, an element that surrounds and penetrates the human spirit; we are baptized, dipped, into Christ, Spirit; we can drink Christ, the Spirit. And this Christ-Spirit effects and maintains the universal brotherhood of mankind, and articulates in particular posts and functions the several human spirits, as variously necessary members of the one Christian society and Church.

Now the Johannine Gospel indeed utilizes considerable Synoptic materials, and does not, as St. Paul, restrict itself to the Passion and Resurrection. Yet it gives us, substantially, the Spirit-Christ, the Heavenly Man; and the growth, prayer, temptation, appeal for sympathy, dereliction, agony, which, in the Synoptists, are still so real for the human soul of Jesus Himself, appear here as sheer condescensions, in time and space, of Him who, as all things good, descends from the Eternal Above, so that we men here below may ascend thither with Him. On the other hand, the Church and the Sacraments, still predominantly implicit in the Synoptists, and the subjects of costly conflict and organization in the Pauline writings, here underlie, as already fully operative facts, practically the entire profound work. The great dialogue with Nicodemus concerns Baptism; the great discourse in the synagogue at Capernaum, the Holy Eucharist--in both cases, the strict need of these Sacraments. And from the side of the dead Jesus flow blood and water, as those two great Sacraments flow from the everliving Christ; whilst at the Cross's foot He leaves His seamless coat, symbol of the Church's indivisible unity. The Universalism of this Gospel is not merely apparent: 'God so loved the world' (iii. 16), 'the Saviour of the world' (iv. 42)--this glorious teaching is traceable in many a passage. Yet Christ here condemns the Jews--in the Synoptists only the Pharisees; He is from above, they are from below; all those that came before Him were thieves and robbers; He will not pray for the world--'ye shall die in your sins' (xvii. 9; viii. 24); and the commandment, designated here by Jesus as His own and as new, to 'love one another', is for and within the community to which He gives His 'example' (xv. 12; xiii. 34)--in contrast with the great double commandment of love proclaimed by Him, in the Synoptists, as already formulated in the Mosaic Law (Mark xii. 28-34), and as directly applicable to every fellow-man--indeed, a schismatic Samaritan is given as the pattern of such perfect love (Luke x. 25-37).

Deuteronomy gained its full articulation in conflict with Canaanite impurity; the Johannine writings take shape during the earlier battles of the long war with Gnosticism--the most terrible foe ever, so far, encountered by the Catholic Church, and conquered by her in open and fair fight. Also these writings lay much stress upon Knowing and the Truth: 'this is life eternal, to know Thee, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent' (xvii. 3); symbolism and mysticism prevail very largely; and, in so far as they are not absorbed in an Eternal Present, the reception of truth and experience is not limited to Christ's earthly sojourn--'the Father will give you another Helper, the spirit of truth who will abide with you forever' (xiv. 16). Yet here the knowing and the truth are also deeply ethical and social: 'he who doeth the truth cometh to the light' (iii. 21); and Christ has a fold, and other sheep not of this fold--them also He must bring, there will be one fold, one Shepherd; indeed, ministerial gradations exist in this one Church (so in xiii. 5-10; xx. 3-8; xxi. 7-19). And the Mysticism here is but an emotional intuitive apprehension of the great historical figure of Jesus, and of the most specifically religious of all facts--of the already overflowing operative existence, previous to all our action, of God, the Prevenient Love. 'Not we loved God (first), but He (first) loved us,' 'let us love Him, because He first loved us,' 'no man can come to Me, unless the Father draw him'--a drawing which awakens a hunger and thirst for Christ and God (1 John iv. 10, 19; John vi. 44; iv. 14; vi. 35).