v<'!'i>:v.:';vfA'.'y.Vi-';.';: '.,. ■ ^-:tage of culture comes anywhere within the range of its attrac- tion, that philosophy will, in the absence of countervailing influences., a? those of Physical Science for example, be di'awn to it with the directness with which a stone, or a shot bird, falls to the earth ; while if, as in the case of Greek Philosophy, the Metaphysical system is thrown off the prevailing Keligion in TllK KEY. 25 re-action as it were, and in antagonism to it, it will still fall towards Religion, it is true, but, like a bird wounded but still struggling, it will reach it at some more distant point along the field. This, then, is the key to the dii-ection which any Metaphysical Philosophy will take, Avhen in the presence of a religion springing from the same stage of civilization and culture ; and we now have to see to what extent it is applicable to the details of the evolution of Greek Philosophy. Now in our introductory chapter it will be remembered that we stipulated that two conditions should be supplied us, before the successive stages passed through by Greek Philosophy in its course and evolution could be laid down in advance. The first was, the circumstances of the starting, and the second, the rules and limits of the game, or as we may put it here, the conditions of the starting and the conditions of the running. As for the conditions of the starting, we may say that Greek Philosophy was not imported into an alien religion but was, as we have said, thrown off in re-action, as it were, against the superstitions of the prevailing Polytheism ; while as for the <'onditions of the running, the essential point is that it was free throughout its whole course from the intrusion into it of the disturbing element of Physi(;al Science — no great discovery like that of the Copernican system of Astronomy, the Law of Gravitation, the Correlation of the Physical forces, or the intimate connexion between the Brain and the Mind, havins: as yet a])peared, to modify men's conceptions of the World and of Human Life. The game, accordingly, was a comparatively simple one, between a hand, as it were, of Metaphysical Cards, and a hand of Eeligious ones, or to revert to our other metaphor, the running was between the purely Metapliysical Causes of Greek Pliilosophy, and the Personal Wills of Religion. If, then, we represent the river of Philosophy as flowing between the two shores of Religion, on the one hand, and Physical Science, on the other ; and if, further, we picture the religious bank at the time of which we are writing, as thronged with the 2() THE EVOLUTION OF GIJEEK THOUGHT. miscellaneous multitiKle, while the scientific shore is as yet practically uninhabited and unexplored, it will follow from the principles we have laid down, that if the little boat of Greek Philosophy, in its reaction against the puerilities and absurdities of the prevailing Polytheism, pushes out from the opposite shore of Science, it must take a diagonal course, as it were, across the stream, and finally run into that religious bank from which, at its starting, it had sought to escape — but at a point much lower down the stream ; at that point, in fact, where the shore had already been prepared for its landing, by the passage of Paganism into the new religion of Christianity. And it will follow, further, that as we know the first move on startino-. viz the hypothesis of Thales that the material essence of Water was the essential principle of all things, we should know before- hand that having failed to account by this single essence for all the varied richness, beauty, and complexity of the Woild, it would be logically pushed on to call in one after another all those essences we have described, to its aid, until in the end, having exhausted them all, and being still unsatisfied, it would be bound in its own despite to pass over into the new region of wills and so fall into Rehglon again. In the following chapters I propose to demonstrate this in detail, by following the little boat till it lands on the shores of Christianity. But before doing so a Avord or two may perhaps be necessary, to indicate the nature of the difference between the attempt I am now making, and the parallel attempt of Hegel. In the introductory chapter, I ventured, it will be remembered, to assert that the law laid down by Hegel as that along the line of which not only Greek Philosophy, but all Philosophies and Religions whatever, had been envolved, was unfitted by its very range and generality for the strictly limited and defined problem of the evolution of Greek Philosophy. But after the preceding dissertation on the nature of the difterent kinds of Causes proper to Religion, Philosophy, and Science respectively, we are in a position to go farther, and to assert that the law of ruv: KEY, 27 Hegel Is not only not suitable to the use to uliich he would put it in the problem before us, but is as entirely inapplical)le to it as a door-key is to the purposes of a watch-key. The real problem, it is to be observed, is not so much the mere fact of the evolution and unfolding of Greek Philosophy as such, nor even the law of that evolution, as it is its direction and goal. For all germs whatever, whether of Philosophy or Religion, as we have already said, differentiate and unfold in the same way, and after the same law ; and this law is practically the same whether in the form given it by Hegel, or in that given it by Herbert Spencer ; the only difference being that the law of the movement of ' Spirit,' of Hegel, is the inner or mental side, as it were, of Spencer's Law of Evolution on its outer or physical side. With Spencer the Universe with all it contains is but the progressive unfolding and evolution of a fixed quantity of Force in the antagonistic forms of attrac- tion and repulsion ; with Hegel it is the same progressive unfolding, only of Being or Existence in general, with positive and negative poles ; the only difference being that while with Spencer things unfold themselves on the flat, as it were, as an egg into a chick, with Hegel they unfold in an ascending spiral, step on step, like a staircase. But as for the movement itself, it is the same In both, viz. "a continuous process of differentiation and integration," as Spencer himself defines it. If then the direction and goal of Greek Philosophy, and not its mere evolution, is the main question, the existence of fixed points outside itself, is absolutely necessary. In ancient times, Religion was the fixed point towards which Greek Philosophy was advancing, and Into which, as we shall see. It ultimately fell. In modern times, on the other hand, as we shall see in our next volume. Science is the fixed point towards which Philosophy steadily moves, until It passes over Into and is absorbed by it. Without such fixed points, indeed, from which to take their bearings, neither Ancient nor Modern Philosophy would have any defined goal whatever, but like a ship without '28 THE EVOLUTION OF GKEEK THOUGHT. a rudder, or an engine off tlie rails, would run their course of differentiation or evolution, here, there, or anywhere. In order, therefore, that the law of evolution, as laid down by Hegel, should be of practical and not merely of speculative value for purposes of Philosophy, it ought to include among its repertory of 'causes,' not only the ' essences ' of Philosophy, and the ' antecedents and consequents ' of Physical Science, but the 'Wills' of Religion. But the difference in nature between a will, an essence, and a physical antecedent, is in its way, it is to be observed, as great as the difference between the mind of a man, the perfume of a rose, and the angles of a trianale. If therefore, Hejicl's law of the movement of Thought were capable of grinding out in its evolution the nature, say, of an ' essence,' or of a ' physical antecedent and consequent,' it is evident that it could not by the same act and movement grind out that of a ' will.' Nor indeed, to do him justice, has he anywhere made the attempt. What he did was to put all these causes into the smelting pot together, and because they were all covered by the one term ' cause,' to assume that the same move- ment which had ground out one, had thereby ground out them all — as if he were to assume that the same quality which gave the colour to a rose would also give its perfume or the form of its petals. And, indeed, even had he succeeded, the result would have been of no value for our purpose, for by smelting down all kinds of causes into one kind of cause, he would thereby have left no objective points outside of itself, to indicate the direction in which Philosophy was moving ; and so instead of giving us a solar system, as it were, in which the various planets get their practical significance from their relation to the sun and to each other, he would have given us a Stellar Universe with direction and goal, beginning and end, equally unknown. It would have been like a world in which there was nothing but white light, or, to use a metaphor which he has himself used in another connexion, like night in which all cows THE KEY. 29 arc alike Ijlnck. Dut if further presuniptive evidence were wanted that Hegel's law of intellectual development conld no more grind out in its revolution and ascension a cause of the nature of ' will,' than it could the perfume of the violet, or the colour of the rose, it Avould be found in the fact that Schopen- hauer, following on Hegel, could construct out of his leavino-s^ as it were, a philosophy of the world and of life (and a very- plausible one too), based on this very conception of ' will ' as cause; and further that Von Hartmann could by taking the law of the movement of Thought from Hegel, and the idea of real causation or ' will ' from Schopenhauer, construct a highly developed system of Philosophy, different from both. Now in my work 'Civilization and Progress' I ventured to go still a step further, and to take my stand neither on the Logical Understanding of Hegel, nor on the Will of Schopen- hauer, nor yet on both together with Von Hartmann ; but on the Human Mind itself in its ensemble and as an organized wliole ; and as the human mind contains in itself all kinds of causes, this enabled me to get the three kinds of causes to which 1 have referred, and to point out those fixed relations between them on which I shall now attempt to reconstruct the history of Intellectual Development. Instead of dashing and confounding the three distinct kinds of causes into one, I have kept them apart, and so have been able to use each as a fixed point, as it were, by w:hich to measure the movements of the others, as a surveyor requires to use something outside the field he is sur- veying, say a tree, or a stake, or a house, before he can take its measurements and its relations to surroundinir things. And hence, instead of regarding Philosophy, as Hegel has done, as a swelling torrent which whirls into its own current Religion and Science as its mere tributaries and spoils, like that king who summed up the State in himself ; I have figured it as only one form of thought among several. Religious, Scientific, and Poetic, each of which has its own laws and modes of procedure. Or we may compare it to a thin silver streak meandering betweea 30 THE EVOLUTION OB' GKEEK THOUGHT. the great mountain ranges of Religion on the one side and Science on the other, its little bark, far from being independent of Religion and Science, being on the contrary deflected by them as by great mountains of magnetic ore, now to this side and now to that — to the Religious shore in Ancient Times, and to the Scientific shore in the Modern World. To sum up, then, we may say that by taking his stand on the limited categories of the Logical Understanding alone, Hegel was unable to get more than one kind or category of cause, for use in his history of human development. He has nowhere shown that things so different in nature as a ' will ' an ' essence,' and a ' physical antecedent and consequent,' are either modes of one kind of cause, or modes of universal laws of thought, in the same way as heat, electricity, and light, can be shown to be but modes of universal laws of motion. Nor yet has he shown how an ' essence,' for example, can develop into a ' will,' or a * will ' into an ' antecedent and consequent.' He cannot, therefore, fore-see that a Philosophy of essences will under certain conditions eventuate in a Religion of wills, or a Religion of wills in a Science of antecedents and consequents. Although, therefore, his law may be the true law of thought- in-general, as the Law of Evolution of Spencer may be the true law of the Universe as a whole, it is nevertheless not a law from which we can determine the direction or goal of Greek Philosophy. But if, on the contrary, taking one's stand on the Human Mind in its ensemble, as it were, we begin by frankly accepting these causes as different in essential nature, and not attempting to grind them down into forms of some one universal law, or into modifications of some one kind of cause ; and if further we can discover that although different in nature, like love and jealousy, or religion and morality, they yet stand in certain definite relations to each other, so that when one is known the other may be fore-seen, we ought by using each as a fixed point by which to measure the other — like the surveyor who uses the height of a tree to measure the extent of a field. Tin: KEY. ol and the lengtli of a field tlie height of a tree, or the asti'onomer who uses a planet to measure the distance of the sun, and the distance ot the sun to get the position of the j)lanet ; we ought, I say, by using Religion as a fixed point for Philosophy, Science as a fixed point for Religion, and each in turn as a fixed point for the other two, to be able to trace beforehand with a large measure of scientific precision and detail, the great movements of Intellectual Development, Ijoth in their general unfolding, and in their several stas-es of evolution. With these somewhat abstruse preliminaries then, with Avhich I regret to have been obliged to afflict the reader on the very threshold of our subject, we are now in a position to advance with comparative ease to their detailed application to the course and evolution of Greek Philosophy. CHAPTER II. UP TO PLATO. ^T^O begin with, then, one might anticipate that Greek Philosophy originating as it did in the reaction of men of culture against the absurdities of Polytheism, would, in the violence of this reaction, go to the opposite extreme ; and instead of starting from the multiplicity of wills of the gods of Paganism, start from a single principle, and that this principle, instead of being of the nature of a Fo^ee Will, would be at the farthest remove from it, viz. something definite, concrete, and Material. And we might go farther and anticipate that taking its stand on a Material Principle as cause or essence, Philosophy must inevitably advance to the next higher stage of existence, viz. Vital Principle or Soul ("A^'X*/) then on to the still higher Intelligence, and finally to the highest of all, viz. Morality and Beauty ; and that having in this way gone the whole round of the mind, and exhausted each of its broad categories or divisions separately, there was nothing left for it but to take its stand on them all, combined and knitted into a living concrete whole by the unifying bond of AVill, which degrading them all to instruments of its own design, would use them all freely in its ex})lanations of the world ; — and what is this but to pass over again to Religion ? All this indeed in general outline one might have expected, but we can go still farther and anticipate the details of each of these successive UP TO PLATO. 33 stages with a surprising approach to accuracy. To take the first stage, for example, viz. that in Avhich Philosophy takes its stand on some ^Material Principle as the essential cause and first principle of things, — one would know beforehand that it could not pass into the higher stage of Vital Principle or Soul, until all the potentialities of Matter had been exhausted ; and further that as it would, as we saw, most probably begin at a point the farthest removed from the free Will of the gods, which was the efficient principle in Paganism, viz. at some concrete and palpable form of Material Essence, its next stao-e would be to somethino^ less con- Crete and palpable, as being a more flexible and efficient instrument, until it reached a principle of such a degree of unsubstantiality and tenuity that it coiUd scarcely be distinguished from the Vital Principle or Soul into which it was inevitable that it should next pass. And this, as Ave shall now see, is precisely what historically took place. The first systematic attempt to account for the World by Philosophy rather than by the conflicting Wills of the gods, was made among the Greeks, by Thales of Miletus, who looking into the world around, and observing that the germs of all life came from damp and moisture, boldly pushed his little philosophical bark out into the stream, and announced that Water was the first principle and essential cause of all things. He might have selected Earth as a still more crudely material principle, but it would have required a belief in miracles as great as that of the Paganism he had abandoned, to have imagined a principle so gross and stolid as Earth, capable by its own nature of transforming itself into all the light and airy beauties of the world. He was obliged accordingly to begin with Water, as a material substance of sufficient fluidity and flexibility to be at least conceivably capable of transforming itself, under the influence of Heat and Cold, — those two great del ex machind of all the early Greek philosophers — into the multiplicity of Existence. But as even this failed to satisfy D 34 THE EVOLUTION OF GREEK THOUGHT. the culture of the tune, to Thales, accordingly, quickly- succeeded Anaximenes who from a different set of consider- ations of no importance to us now, — such, for example, as that the world was enbosomed in the atmosj)here as in a matrix, and that the breath of the nostrils was the life of the body, — advanced to a principle less concrete and palpable, and therefore all the more flexible, and announced with equal confidence that Air was the first principle and essential cause of all things. And here, perhaps, it is proper to pause and remark that Water and Air although to the reader they may seem more like Scientific than Philosophic causes, in reality were not so. For although undoubtedly material in their nature, they did not, like scientific causes, i^vicede their effects, and pass entirely over into them to be lost in them, as when wood, for example, passes over into ashes, soot, and gas, in the process of com- bustion, but were conceived by these philosophers to underlie each and every transformation which for the time being they assumed. That is to say they were philosophiccd essences, and not scientific causes in the modern sense of the term. That this is so may be seen in the position assumed by the Thinker who took the next step in the solution of the Problem of the World, viz., Anaximander. This philosopher, feeling doubtless the diflficulty of transforming water or even air into all the infinite variety of the world, thought to avoid the difficulty by goins behind the concreteness of Water and Air, to something more intangible still, to that infinite, indefinite substratum common to them both when stripped of their special and peculiar properties, that indeterminate something which is not Water, or Air, or Fire, but of which these and all other things are but the modifications. Now this intangible, indefinite sub- stratum, the UTreipov as it is called, which is a still more flexible and efficient cause of things than Water or Air, inasmuch as it can pass with equal ease into each and every kind of substance and effect, was regarded by Anaximander as being not like that primitive homogeneous and nebulous Matter of Modern Science, UP TO PLATO. 35 which precedes, passes over into, and is lost in the suns which it throws off from itself, these suns, again, being, as suns, lost in the planets thrown off by them in turn, and the planets again in the moons, etc. ; nor like those anthropomorphic apes, our ancestors, who passed over into primitive men and were lost in them, and these again into civilized men, etc. ; but rather as an invisible essence underlying at each and every point of time, each and every quality of substance or thing, and transformable with equal ease into them all. With this indeterminate Substratum, accordingly, Matter in so far as it has body or substance, exhausts itself, and can go no farther. There remains, therefore, nothing more in Matter for Philosophy to take hold of in its explanation of things, save pure Form alone ; and this step accordingly, which Avas inevit- able before Philosoijhv could advance to the hio-her stage of vital Principle or Soul, was taken by Pythagoras, who, wliile figuring, like Thales and Anaximenes, Water and Air — to which he also added Earth and Fire — as the original essences out of which all visible and sensible existences were composed, and while conceiving these again, like Anaximander, as resting on an infinite substratum common to them all, went a step farther and announced that this again rested upon and was made up of figures or forms — solids, planes, lines — all of which^ again, were but modifications of Number (the odd and the even, the monad and duad, and the like), which, accordingly was the cause not only of all material things, but of mental also ; — the secret not only of the rhythmic movement of the starry spheres, but of virtue, truth, health, happiness, friendship, justice; even God Himself, being but the deep and everlasting harmonies of Form and Number. Philosophy having thus exhausted not only the Substance of Matter but its very Form also, in its attempts to explain the phenomena of the World, there was nothing for it on its way to that principle of Will or Religious Cause to which its little barque was inevitably drifting, but to pass to the next higher stage of 36 THE EVOLUTION OF GREEK THOUGHT. Vital Principle or Soul {^^xv) «is First Cause and primal essence of the World. And so accordingly it did. But before attempting to exhibit the evolution of the successive stages of Soul or Vital Principle when used as explanation of the phenomena of the world, we have to ask, as before, how much of the detail of these stages could be anticipated beforehand from those great general relations between Religion and Philosophy which we have seen to exist. To begin with, then, we may confidently assert that the evolu- tion of Soul or Vital Principle as First Cause of Things will follow an entirely different movement to that of the Material Principle which it superseded ; and that instead of proceeding in its explanation of the World, from the concrete and palpable to the abstract and intangible, as we have seen to be the case with the Material Principle, it will proceed, on the contrary, from the indefinite and abstract to the definite and concrete. And the reason of this is that Matter, being in its nature comparatively stolid, becomes the more flexible, efficient, and capable an instrument, the more ethereal and impalpable it is ; whereas the Vital Principle or Soul, being by its nature ethereal, becomes the more efficient, the greater are the number and variety of the concrete (pialities with which it is endowed. And we may go farther and anticipate that as the very con- ception of a Vital Principle or Soul involves some kind of body or Matter with which it is indissolubly united, all theories of the World in which this Vital Principle or Soul is the active factor, the positive pole, the right hand, must include also some Material Principle which shall be the passive factor, negative pole, and left hand as it Avere. And further still we may anticipate that as Soul advances in the number, dif- ferentiation, and definiteness of its qualities, the better to explain the world, so, too, must the Matter which is bound up with it, and which goes hand in hand with it ; much in the same way as the better to render a piece of comjjlex music, you require not only a greater number of players, but UP TO PLATO. 37 also a greater number of strings ; or the better to explain an obscure case of crime, you require not only a greater number of special motives, but a greater consensus and circumstanti- ality of incident with which to harmonize them. And lastly we may go a step farther and anticipate that as the Soul or Vital Principle is a double-sided essence, having as it were both a material and a spiritual side, the successive philosophers who embraced it, while following the general law of its advance from the vaofuer and more abstract to the more definite and concrete of its forms, must at the same time have laid particular emphasis or stress, some on its material, others on its ideal side, according to their special peculiarities of temperament, disposition, or natural affinity. And all this, as we shall now see, is what historically took place. The first philosophers to take up the problem of the AVorld at the point Avhere Pythagoras had left it, viz., at that most abstract conception of Matter which is involved in Number and Form, and to carry it on to the higher stage of Soul or Vital Principle, were the Eleatics, who, conceiving this principle, it must be remembered, as a something indivisible and incorporeal, indeed, but at the same time as having extension, and pervading the Universe in the same way as we conceive the Vital Principle to pervade and animate the bodies of men and animals, began, accordingly, by representing it, as we should anticipate, in its most crude and abstract form, as pure Being — a principle which under the designation of the One, or the Eternal Unity, was made by Xenophancs the First Cause and animating principle of all thinsrs. To him succeeded Parmenides who so over- weighted this principle, so made it the be-all and end-all of existence, that the opposite pole, viz., the Material World which was indissolubly bound up with it, was degraded to a mere succession of fleeting ephemeral existences, coming into being, and passing away as in a dream, or, like the images in a mirror, shadowy and illusory appearances without reality or independent existence of their own ; his follower, Zeno, 38 THE EVOLUTION OF GEEER THOUGHT. going so far as to maintain that not only the substance ol things but the movement and change, the multiplicity and variety which are characteristic of the Material World, had not and could not have any real existence of their own — as he proceeded to prove by the story of Achilles and the tortoise. B%.t the tough Material World was too real and pressing to be thus lightly disposed of, and the next step, accordingly, in the evolution of Soul as prime cause of things, was taken by Heraclitus, who. instead of conceiving it under the abstract form of blank Being, gave it the more concrete form of a fiery ^ther ; and instead of regarding the Material side of things with which it was bound up, as an illusion or appearance merely, conceived it as a real but opposing force which by diluting the fiery Soul produced what we know as Air, when more strongly diluting it, Water, and when with its full force entirely neutralizing it, Earth ; the everflowing stream of Existence being regarded by him as due to the omnipresent action in every substance of these two powers in varying degrees of strength and activity. And thus the little bark of Philosophy which had been so overweighted on its ideal side by the Eleatics, that its material side was lifted high and dry out of the stream as but illusion or appearance merely, now became so overweighted by Heraclitus on the material side, that the ideal or spiritual side was reduced to a fiery ^ther, that is to say almost to a material substance. With Heraclitus and the Eleatics the way was prepared for Empedocles who took the next step in the evolution of Soul as first principle of things by advancing to a point where both its ideal or spiritual and its material side become more differen- tiated, more concrete, and more definite ; while at the same time the boat is held so level in the stream, that both sides receive from him equal deference and consideration. Instead of a sinsfle hand on the ideal side, viz., fierv TEther, we have a pair of hands. Love and Hate ; instead of a vague antagonistic Force on the material side diluting the fiery soul successively UP TO PLATO. 39 down to Air, Abater, and even Earth itself, we have, for the first time in Pliilosophy, Fire, Air, Earth, and Water erected into separate immutable and eternal existences. His mode of representing the World is, accordingly, to figure these material elements as lying in their globe-shaped sphere in undisturbed repose -from all eternity united by Love, until the Spirit of Hate, entering from without like an evil demon, brought Fire into a position where it could be attacked by Water, Water by Air, and the like, and so broke up their peaceful harmony and rest; giving rise to evil and sin, and dooming all mortal existences to extinction, until the spirit of Love descending into the chaos, brings all into peace and harmony again. Having reached this point, the principle of Soul, which began its career as interpreter of the World, in the form of blank Being, with Matter as non-existent or as illusion ; and from this advanced to the more concrete and definite form of fiery JEther, with Matter as a real Force opposed to it ; and on again to the still more concrete forms of the Spirit of Love and Hate which by their affinity or repulsion dispose the still more concrete elements of Matter — Fire, Air, Earth, Water — into the harmony and discords of the World ; witli this. Soul can go no farther as a first principle of things, and so comes to an end as a stage in Philosophy. To have gone farther, and differentiated the Spirit of Love into the still more concrete forms of human love, benevolence, friendship, and the like, and the Spirit of Hate into its human forms of jealousy, revenge, and the like, would have been to have run the little bark of Philosophy into the Peligious shore, in among tho^e Pagan gods against whom it had already been for more than a hundred years in revolt. For although its prow was moving steadily in the direction of the AVills of Religion, it was not to the eftcte old gods of Paganism that it was tending, but to the God of Chi-istianity. This, however, was still beneath the horizon in the far future, and in the meantime there was nothing for Philosophy but to keep steadily on its way, 40 THE EVOLUTION OF GEEEK THOUGHT, and to take the step next in order towards that idthnate goal. We have now to ask, then, what this next step must be, what is the next stage througli which Philosophy must pass on its way to that Eeligious shore to which, in the absence of Physical Science, it was inevitably bound ? It started out, as we have seen, with a single principle, Matter, as the prime cause and essential principle of things, and advanced from that to the higher and double-sided essence, Vital Principle or Soul, in which were indissolubly bound up both the Vital Principle itself and a Material Principle as its counterpart. The next higher stage, it is evident, can only be that of free Intelligence, conceived of as existing ajjart from Matter, and having an inde- pendent sphere of life and activity of its own. Now the difference between a Vital Principle or Soul as the First Cause of things, and a free Intelligence, is practically the same difference which we conceive to exist between the powers and capabilities of Instinct and the powers and capabilities of Reason. P'or while the Vital Principle is limited in its powers not only by the range of quality of the Matter with which it is bound by, but also by its own nature — the vital principle or instinct for example of an oyster, or a fish, or a reptile, being strictly limited to certain fixed and rigid modes of action within which its powers are confined, and beyond which it can- not go — free Intelligence, on the contrary, being conceived as quite disengaged from Matter, has as many capacities or tools with which to work, as it has range, variety, and combinations of ideas. That is to say that while the Vital Principle or Soul is doubly restricted, firstly by its limited range of function, and secondly by the rigidity and obstinacy of the Matter with which it is bound up — we have just seen that Empedocles had to construct his theory of the World out of the two primitive instincts of Love and Hate, acting on a hard and fast number of materials, Fire, Air, Earth, and Water— Intelligence, on the contrary, like a free untrammeled hand, is capable of the most UP TO PLATO. 41 subtle, varied, and complex movements of its own. And from this follows an important result. It will be remembered that when Soul or Vital Principle was the standpoint of Philosophy, and when in consequence, the material side of the conception could no more cut itself loose from the mental side, than the mental could cut itself free from the material, those thinkers who by natural bias or disposition leaned to a materialistic view of things, were unable to eret out of the boat and start on their own account unhampered by any spiritual principle, but at most could as we saw, only weigh down their own side. But when once a free Intelligence was made the standpoint of Philosophy, and Matter, in consequence, divorced from Spirit, was left as free and untrammeled as Intelligence itself, to account for the World by principles of its own, it was possible and even inevit- able that those thinkers who leaned to a materialistic point of view should sail away in a boat of their own, to explore by methods of their own, the great stream of existence for themselves. To return, then, to the point at which the problem was left by Empedocles, viz., of a Vital Principle or Soul w'hose spiritual side, Love and Hate, and the material side. Fire, Air, Earth, and Water, were inseparably united together, — the next to take up the problem was Anaxagoras, who perceiving that the great principle of Design was so immanent and apparent in Nature that any scheme of things which neglected to find a place for it was doomed to incompleteness, opened a new era by announcing that Intelligence was the first principle and prime cause of all things. This principle, however, was held by him more in the crude form of a disposing and arrangiufi than of a creative Intelligence. And so, like the Vital Principle or Soul which had been the standpoint of preceding thinkers, it required some foundation or ground-work of Matter on which it was to act. Now although an arranging Power is, like a kaleidoscope, capable if it have the full number of pieces to 42 THE EVOLUTION OF GREEK THOUGHT. Avork on, of producing from these pieces the most varied, com- plex, and picturesque effects, it cannot like a chemically com- bining or constructive Power get these effects from a few simple elements. The consequence was that Anaxagoras was obliged to endow beforehand the Matter on which his Supreme Intelligence had to work, with all those qualities which, in the world, were afterwards to be explained ; he had, that is to say, to pack as many qualities into his Matter at first, as he was afterwards to bring out of it. He accordingly figured the World as consisting originally of an infinite number of invisible atoms of as many different qualities and kinds as there were substances in the world to be explained, — flesh, bone, muscle, sinew, blood, brain, wood, sap, bark, gold, iron, copper, stone, and the like. These were all of the same size, and all mixed together, and his theory was that when the whole of this diffused, extended, universe of atoms was made by Mind (in its character of principle of Motion) to revolve, the like parts would by their own affinity separate out from the unlike, and so form those visible masses of flesh, bone, brain, nerve, wood, iron, clay, and the rest, of which the world is composed ; and that then Mind in its character of a Supreme Intelligence over- looking the whole, as it were, would bring the bone and muscles and blood and nerve together, to form the endless species of the animal kingdom, the wood and sap and bark of the vege- table kingdom, and so on. Now, that this Philosophy was an advance on that of his I>redecessors who had made the Vital Principle or Soul the first principle of things, may be seen in this, that it brings to the problem not only a greater number of tools, but a greater variety of material on which to work. To take, for example, Empedocles who was the last of the Thinkers who had made Soul or Vital Principle their standpoint, it will be remembered that his only tools were the blind instincts of Love and Hate, of attraction and repulsion; and his only material, the four gross and tangible elements of Fire, Air, Earth, and Water. UP TO PLATO. 43 But Anaxngorap, on tlie other hand, had in his principle of Intelligence a tool of universal application, and one too of an infinite flexibility, subtlety, and range of movement ; and in his infinite variety of substances, existing not in crude un- manageable masses but in freely moving atoms, a material that could be moulded with ease into every possible shape, size, and combination ; and so, like a painter with a greater variety of pigments, or a musician with a greater number of more finely modulated strinirs, he was the better able to reconstruct in thought from their elements, the vast multiplicity of the worhl which it was his function as a philosopher to explain. That the appearance of Anaxagoras marked a new era in Philosophy no one will deny, but as the great world was not to be cramped within the limits of even this enlarged formula, further advance was inevitable. To him accordingly succeeded no less a personality than Socrates himself, who, pondering deeply the works of Anaxagoras, objected to the small place that was assigned in them to a free creative Intelligence as Supreme Power, compared with the great use made of Intelli- gence as a principle of Motion, i.e., a mere arranging and disposing Power; and complained that it was only when the principle of mechanism or arrangement had failed to account for the phenomena, that recourse was had to creative design at all. Accordingly he was himself forced to take the next step, and to attribute the World to a Supreme Power that Avas not a mere arranging and disposing j^rinciple like that of Anaxagoras, but a free ci'eative and constructive Intelligence. Now this step, apparently so simple and natural, was attended with great and important results, deflecting the little barque of Philosophy for the time being from its steady onward course, and almost running it prematurely into that Religious bank towards which of itself it was slowly but surely tending. For when once the Supreme Power is conceived of, not as a mere Arrano-ino; Intellisfence, but as a Creative and Designing one, it can create the qualities and properties of Matter as it 44 THE EVOLUTION OF GREEK THOUGHT. needs them, just as easily as it can arrange them ; and the precise constitution of Matter, in consequence, which was of so much importance to previous thinkers becomes now, as it is in all religions, a matter of little or no concern. It was natural, therefore, that Socrates when in prison, and when thinking over the probable reasons that Anaxagoras would have given for his remaining there when he could so easily have escaped beyond the territory of Athens to his friends at Megai'a ; it was natural that he complained that Anaxagoras would most probably have attributed his remaining to the particular arrangement of the bones and nerves of his body, which kept him to his seat, instead of to its true cause, viz., the feeling that it was not only the right but the best and wisest thing to do, to remain there and submit himself unreservedly to the recognized tribunal of his country. Besides, for Socrates to have given a definite physical constitution to ISIatter in the face of a Sui^reme Creative Power, would have been to have weakened and hampered the exercise of that Power as much as the giving a free constitution to a conquered people hampers the free activity of a Ruler who has hitherto been not only nominally but absolutely supreme. And further, as Socrates had not only advanced from the Arranging Intelligence of Anaxagoras to a Creative One, but had taken the additional step of making that Intelligence a power that worked for moral ends, it is evident that any con- stitution he could have given to Matter, must have been of that neutral, vague, and indeterminate character which would allow of its being transformed into anything, and so, practically, be as good as no constitution at all ; getting all its distinctive properties and qualities not from the Matter, but from the Creative Power alone. Pex'ceivino- all this, and rememberino; how all those previous theories of the World in which atoms and elements played so conspicuous a part, had swallowed one another up, and all alike become discredited, Socrates felt that a sufficient account of the World would have been given if UP TO PLATO. 45 you could discover in each instance, what good purpoi^e the design everywhere apparent in Nature subserved. He accord- ingly threw to the winds all theories and speculations about Physical Nature, and took his stand boldly on a Creative Intelligence or Providence working for moral ends as the be-all and end-all of existence. Now in this, as we see, he came perilously near running into Religion, the very note of whose theories of the World (if we take the six days Creation of Genesis as a typical example) is that it represents the World as created out of Nothing, or some blank form of Existence which is tantamount to Nothing, by the fiat of Creative Power alone. Indeed one might almost go so far as to say that had there been an accredited Revelation, like that of Christianity, ready at hand and waiting to receive him on the shore, he must have run his little barque into it. But, as it was, naught but the figures of the old Pagan gods stood confronting him there, and his only course was to remain where he was, and try to discover what those moral ends were, which the Creative Intelligence everywhere had at heart ; and having once discovered them, to try and persuade men to conform their lives to them. Now it is open to men to get at these moral ends of the Creator either by direct Revelation, as in Religion, or by the contemplation of Nature and the Human Mind, as in Philosophy ; but Socrates as a philosopher was restricted entirelv to the latter course, viz., of orettinii- at the moral ends of the Creator from the truths of thinos. But how to discover the truths of things? By the method of Dialectics, says Socrates. Now this method consists simply in taking a number of samples of diff"erent kinds of things, of men, of dogs, of trees, of virtuous actions, of just dealiogs, of temperate conduct, and the like, finding out what common quality characterizes each of these kinds, and giving this common quality its abstract shnpe or expression. In this way we get the true definition, or in other words the truth, of man, dog, tree, virtue, justice, temperance and the like; and these 46 THE EVOLUTION OF GEEEK THOUGHT. truths, once discovered, will, in the opinion of Socrates, be the counterparts in Nature and Life of the moral ends which existed in the mind of the Creator in creating them ; so that from the discovery of the former, we may indirectly, but with certainty, know the latter. But he went further and con- tended that when once the truths of things, and by implication their moral ends were discovered in this way, men could no more act in contradiction to them, when brought face to face with them, than they could to the truths of the multiplication table in any business or worldly transaction. Hence his great and only watchword was Knowledge, knowledge, ever more knowledge, as summing up in itself all that was essential to the well-being of Man. Such was the Philosophy of Socrates. And here we may remark that however well these doctrines of his might, under other circumstances, have served as the basis of a Religion, they could not, in the absence of any theory as to the physical con- stitution of things, long maintain themselves as a Philosophy. The consequence was that after lingering for a little while among his immediate followers — notably Euclid and the Megaric School, who went beyond their master in adding Goodness and Wisdom to the other attributes of the Deity, and in making goodness, virtue, justice, wisdom, not only as with Socrates the supreme ends, but the only realities of life (Evil with them being an illusion of our sensuous nature, and having no real existence) — they were lost in the sands, and never reached that religious shore towards which they were bound. And it was not until Plato had given a constitution to the Physical World, and had extricated the Supreme Intelligence from its dangerous resemblance to the old deities of Religion, reducing it to the more abstract form of an Essence or Spirit of the Just, the Beautiful, and the True, that Philoso^jhy entered again on its old course, and continued in the line of its own proper evolution. In the meantime, however, a movement had begun in quite the opposite direction. For, as we saw, when once Intelligence, UP TO PLATO. 47 which differs from Soul or Vital Principle in this, that both it and the Matter on which it has to act, are conceived as existino- independently of each other, — when once Intelligence was made the first principle of things by Anaxagoras, it was open to thinkers to take their stand on the Intelligence exclusively, or on the Matter exclusively. And, accordingly, just as Socrates and his followers had developed a theory of the World on the basis of a pure Creative Intelligence, without regard to the constitution of Matter, so it was open to any thinker who inclined to a materialistic view of things, to start a theory of the World on the basis of pure Matter alone, with- out regard to a Creative Intelligence. And this, as we shall now see, was what really occurred. The first to start the new movement was Democritus, who launched a boat of his own, which put off into mid-stream in the direction of the Scientific shore, where it was lost for awhile from view. Re-appearing some century or two later in almost the same shape in the doctrine of Epicurus and his followers, it thenceforward continued visible down the stream until all systems alike were swallowed up in Christianity ; after which, disappearing entirely from view during the night of the Middle Ages, it again emerged in full sail and in more scientific shape, in the Materialism of Modern Times. Now to understand this theory of Democritus, it is necessary to remark at the outset, that all theories of the World ai'e at bottom but attempts to account for the qualities of things, — the quality of Mind as distinct from Matter, of animal as distinct from vegetable, of vegetable from mineral, and the like — with all their infinite sub-divisions and shades. And, accordingly, just as when a mere ai'ranging Intelligence was made the First Cause of things, as with Anaxagoras, the Matter on which it had to work had to be endowed at the outset with as wide a range of qualities as there were qualities m the world to be explained ; so when Matter is made the First Cause of things, the infinite variety of its qualities and 48 THE EVOLUTION OF GREEK THOUGHT. properties have to be shown to be the effects of the size, shape, weight, and other properties of the atoms, i.e., of relations of quantity. And hence it was, that while Anaxagoras began by- representing the World as made up of an infinite number of atoms of the same size, but of different qualities, Democritus began by representing it as made up of an infinite number of atoms of the same quality but differing in quantity — in size, shape, weight, and tlie like. And having separated these atoms from each other by interspaces of vacuum in which they were free to move, his theory was that if left to themselves, they would by mere chance, as it were, and by the very necessity of their constitution, unite and separate, separate and unite, to form the world of things as we know them ; the light particles separating from the heavy, to unite again with the light, those of this shape with those of that, the heavy particles falling to the bottom, the light rising to the top, and so on ; and that in this way not only the properties of fire, air, earth, and water, were to be accounted for, and the million-fold combinations into which they enter, but mind and soul as well ; the gods, if they exist at all, having no influence either on the course of the world, or of human life. With these two off -shoots, then, the one, of Socrates and his followers who were making towards the Religious shore from the off-side, and the other, of Democritus and his successors who were making towards the Scientific shore from the near side, both of which were lost, the first in the sands, for want of a suitable Religion to welcome it on the shore, the last, in mid- stream, for want of the necessary scientific proof to enable it to land — Philosophy with the advent of Plato re-entered the old boat, and continued on its old path. Now in order fully to appreciate the nature of the great con- tribution made by Plato to Philosophy, it is important to bear in mind that the thinkers who preceded him had already occupied every available standpoint or principle from which the Problem of the World could be approached. Beginning with UP TO PLATO. 49 crude Matter as first principle of things, they had advanced from tluit to Soul or Vital Principle, from that again to Intellisrence as an Arranging Power, and from that to a Desio-ninf Intelliorenoe working under the still higher con- ceptions of ^Eorality, Wisdom, and Virtue. No entirely original standpoint, therefore, was left for Plato to occupy, unless indeed it were to add the conception of the Beautiful to those of Morality and Wisdom already included in the idea of the Supreme Good. lie was obliged, accordingly, to content himself with taking the principles that had been bequeathed to him by his predecessors, and after freeing them from their grosser impurities and adhesions and re-casting them into more classic form, using them as pillars in the magnificent and harmonious structure to be erected by himself. Indeed we may safely say that there was scarcely a principle that had been advanced by previous thinkers, which he did not adopt and find some place for in his scheme, or which he did not make his own by the new form that he gave it, or by the originality, beauty, and brilliancy, with which he set it forth. And it is only when we have traced the history of Philosophy up to his own time, as we have done here, and have seen how poor and primi- tive were the huts which his predecessors had built, that we can fully appreciate the great Temple he has erected out of their prostrate and sunken pillars, the vast and magnificent cathedral-like dome with which he has spanned their ruins. To take, for example, his first great principle, viz., the a-eipov or principle of Change, the material basis and ground- work of things — this Plato got from the atoms of Anaxagoras and Democritus ; perceiving as he did the infinite superiority of these atoms for purjjoses of philosophical manipulation, over the relatively gi'oss and crude masses of fire, air, earth, and water, of Empedocles. But while appropriating these atoms, he arranged that the little invisible triangles of which they were composed should have such shapes given them, that when they were bound together by his second principle of Number £ 50 THE EVOLUTION OF GREEK THOUGHT. into solid figures — Fire, Air, Earth, and Water — these figures would account for the jirojyerties of the fire, air, earth, and water also; the cubes, for example, that constitute what we know as earth, accounting for the stolidity of earth ; the sharp- pointed pyramids that constitute fire, for the piercing nature of fire, and the like. His second great principle, again, or Number, he appropriated from Pythagoras, but he so extended and altered its range and meaning, that while it no longer accounted for moral qualities, justice, beauty, and the rest as with Pythagoras — who by the way had only the one string to his bow, viz.. Number, from which to deduce them — it was made to explain not only the harmonious movements of the spheres, as well as the shape and outward form of all inorganic bodies, but the physical qualities of those bodies as well, as we have just seen ; and was extended farther still, so as to explain and account for those pure ideals of outward form of all objects whatever, on which the Artist loves to dwell. The third great principle with which Plato worked, viz. his chain or system of Ideas, as he called them, which hung suspended from their topmost link, the Supreme Good, like an inverted tree, and which corresponded to the inner nature and soul of things as distinct from their ouhvard visible forms, — this principle, again, he borrowed from those general concepts or definitions which Socrates extracted from things, by his method of Dialectics, as their real viner nature or truth. And as in the opinion of Socrates these logical concepts corresponded to the true nature of things as they existed in the Creator's mind ; all that Plato had to do in order to get the material he wanted with which to explain the inner nature of things, was to transform these general logical concepts into real essences having an actual independent existence of their own. Had he left them, indeed, like Socrates, as ideas merely in the mind of a Creator, he would, like him, have been in danger of running prematurely into that religious bank which he sought to avoid ; but by giving them, from all eternity, a separate and independent existence, UP TO PLATO. 51 he was able to keep his fourth great principle, the Supreme Good, within the bounds of a strictly philosophical conception, that is to say, as an Essence or Spirit of the Right, the Beautiful, and the True, with disposing and arranging, but not, as in Religion, with Creative power. This Supreme Good, too, he borrowed like the rest — this time from Anaxagoras — but as usual gave it an extension and range which completely altered its character, and made it embrace not only an arranging and disposing Intelligence, but one working for the higher ends of the Just, the Beautiful and the True. With these four principles of Plato, viz., the Good, Ideas, Number, and the aTrapov , and the variations that may be rung on each, Greek Philosophy, in the absence of Physical Science, reaches its highest point as an analysis of the existing structure of things. Beginning, with Thales, with a single principle. Matter, it passed in the Eleatic School to Vital Principle or Soul, made up of two elements, a mental and a material, in- separably bound together, and culminating in Empedocles with these elements still further differentiated, — the mental side being divided into the two suboi'dinate elements of Love and Hate, the material into the four elements of Fire, Air, Earth, and Water. It then passed on to the Intelligence of Anaxa- goras which gave the mental element a still greater range of combination, while the material element, being made up of an infinite number of atoms of every quality and kind, is capable of being mixed and compounded in every proportion and degree. And now that it has reached Plato, it is differentiated into four distinct and independent principles instead of two, viz., the Good, Ideas, Number, and the ar-apov each of which is susceptible of as many combinations as there are properties of Matter to be explained, as there are forms and shapes of bodies, varieties of nature and disposition to be accounted for, and as there are possible ways of realizing in Nature the supreme ideas of Beauty, Justice, and Truth. So that whether you take a man, a horse, a dog, a tree, or any other existing thing, each 52 THE EVOLUTION OF GREEK THOUGHT. alike will be found to be made up of a physical basis of n-'upM , on which a particular visible form is impressed by Number, In which, again, a particular nature or Idea is implanted ; the whole fulfilling the function ap[)()inted it in the great scheme of things. The World-fan, which was closed up when Thales re- garded Water alone as the sole principle of things, has been unfolded by Plato until it shows its utmost rib ; and, indeed in the absence of Physical Science I know not what more satis- factory analysis of things could be given. But however admirable this World-scheme of Plato may be as a statical theory, it had this fatal defect, that it contained in itself no dynamic quality, no principle of evolution. The com- ponent principles of things, and the hierarchy of relations in which they stand to each other, are as well marked in his theory as the successive strata of rock in a railway cutting ; but as to how they will evolve as time goes on, it gives us no clue. And the reason for this is that the four original principles out of which things are compounded, viz., the Good, Ideas, Number, and the o.-K€ipr,v, are represented by Plato as having existed quite independently of each other from all eternity, until, persuaded by the Supreme Good, they came together to form the World, There are therefore none of those relations or connexions existing between them, Avhereby from their present state their future state may be anticipated. That is to say, the theory while giving us a solution of the question as to what Is the actual existing structure or constitution of man, or horse, or tree, gives us no hint whatever as to how man, or horse, or tree, avIU evolve either from youth to age, or Into other forms of life as In the Darwinianism of the present day. On the contrary at every stage of Its existence each creature would have to be rebuilt afi-esh, and would require a slightly different amount of the dirapm to what it had in the former stage, to which a slightly different Number would have to be united, on which again a slightly different Idea would have to be Impressed, and so on. I am of course aware that Plato thought he had UP TO PLATO. do provided for the incessant flux and cliange of things, by the invisible little triangles of the aireipov, which, like particles of ice in a bladder, are kept in continual agitation and movement by the pressure from without : bur a« he still left the other dements of Number and Ideas unaltered, the theory was felt by Aristotle and his successors to be crude and inadequate. There was nothing for it, therefore, but for Philosophy to discover such connexions between these four independent principles, that from their particular state at any one time, their future state might be seen to follow ; to advance, in a word, from a statical to a dynamical theory of things. The World-fan having thus unfolded itself in Plato till every rib of its structure was visible, it now remained to show what those connexions were between the ribs, whereby they Avere bound to gradually draw together until they finally coalesced and closed into a single principle again. To exhil)it this srradual closinsr of the fan until it shuts itself ur» in Christianity, and to show the stages through which the little boat of Philosophy, now in mid-stream, must pass before it reaches that Religious- bank to which it is slowly but surely tending, shall be my endeavour in die follov/ing chapters. CHAPTER III. ARISTOTLE. "VT^E have just seen that in Plato, Greek Philosophy has reached its highest point of statical excellence, the highest point, that is to say, in the analysis of the great factors of Nature and Life ; while at the same time preserving unimpaired the relative hierarchy of these factors in the scale of existence; the d-n-apov or groundwork of Matter at the bottom, above that, Number or the outer shape of things, above that again. Ideas, or their inner natures, and at the top the Supreme (rood itself. But as these factors have no natural relations or connexions amono; themselves, and each has a separate and independent existence of its own, it is evident that a change taking place in any one of them would not necessarily be followed by those correlated changes in the others, Avhich are involved in the conception of a sustained and regulated evolution. For such evolution, indeed, two things are necessary. In the first place the factors must be grouped in such a way that a chnnge taking place in any one member of a group, will draw after it corresponding changes in the other members of the same group ; and in the second place, some more steady and equable principle of Motion must be supplied them, than that furnished by the dneipov of Plato, whose movements it will be remembered were entirely deter- mined by the haphazard pressure from without to which from ARISTOTLE. '55 moment to moment its little triangular atoms might chance to be exposed. Now these deficiencies in the theory of Plato it was left for Aristotle to supply, and so to advance the little boat of Philo- sophy another stage in the direction of that Eeligious shore, to which, as we have seen, it was bound. And what he did was this. He took the four separate and independent elements of Plato, viz. the Good, Ideas, Number, and the aireipov^ and dividing them into two groups, placed the Good and Ideas on the one side, and the same Ideas and the a-n-eipov on the other; leaving out Number altogether, for reasons which we shall see farther on. He then took the Ideas of the first group, and instead of leaving them outside of, and independent of, the Supreme Good, as Plato had done, he placed them inside it, that is to say in the mind of the Supreme Good. After which, taking the a-eipov of the second group, and freeino; it from the little triangular atoms of which it is composed, and which would only have stood in his way, he packed and loaded it with the same Ideas with which he had endowed the Good. So that on the one side we have a Supreme Intelligence, Immaterial, Immovable, but full of Ideas, that is to say of the qualities and natures of all substances, of all life, of all intelligence ; and on the other a void and passive background of potential existence, extended, divisible, and material, into which the same Ideas have been packed, but so placed in relation to this material background, that they cannot unite with it to form the world of real existences until Motion has been communicated to it. But Avhence this Motion ? For, as we have seen, Aristotle had already emptied the utthpov or material basis of things, of the little triano-ular atoms which with Plato were the source of all its movements. There was notlilng for it, then, but to discover some independent source of Motion, and a source, too, which could be relied on to supply it with the e({uability and regularity of the water to a mill. This regulated supply, 56 THE EVOLUTIOX OF GKEElv THOUGHT. accordingly, he professed to have found in the great expanse of iEther that fills the vault of Heaven, carrying on its bosom the stars or gods with which it is inlaid, and revolving in an eternal circle round the pole ; from whose perennial spring, indeed, all the movements of this lower world are supplied, and into wliich again they all sooner or later return. With a Supreme Intelligence sitting outside the circum- ference of Heaven, on the one liand, and a void expanse of Matter packed with Ideas at the centre where our Earth now is, on the other, the World-fan which in Plato had imfolded itself until its utmost rib of structure was visible, now shows signs of contracting and infolding itself for a dynamical movement; and instead of tlie four independent pi'inciples of the Good, Ideas, Number, and the UTrapov, we have now, with Aristotle, only two, with an independent reservoir of Motion between them. And liis theory is that when the Supreme Intelligence opens the woi'ld of Time, by attaching the great reservoir of iEther to the extended plane of Matter here at its centre, the Ideas with which tliis Matter is loaded are so arranged on its outer siu'face, as to be taken up by it in its revolutions, one by one in turn : in the first revolution those lowest Ideas which when united with it oive us the elements of fire, air, earth, and water; in the next, the various combinations of these, that go to the formation of the special qualities of animal and ^ egetable tissue ; in the next, again, the Soul or Vital Principle of these material bodies ; then the Intelligence superadded to these Souls ; and finally the consummate flowers of Beauty, of Justice, and of Truth. So that just as when the motion contained in the mainspring of a watch is communicated to the axle, the wheels, motionless before, begin to turn and to mark out the hours in regular sequence on the dial-plate ; or as when the water of the dam is allowed to get at the mill- wheel, the machinery, silent before, begins now with its merry hum to m-'md out the corn ; or as when the electric Avire is attached to the battery, the message which has been transmitted ARISTOTLE. 57 jilonof it, hitherto invisible, now beoins to write itself out in mystic but visible characters on the tape ; so when the great reservoir of TEther in the Heavens is tapped, and the Motion therein contained is allowed to get at the vast expanse of existence here below, void and silent as yet, but loaded with the potentialities of all forms of hfe, this vast expanse begins to turn, and gradually approaching the Ideas, at last unites with and is interpenetrated by them as the warp by the Avoof to form the world of changing reality as we know it ; the world of earth, and sea, and air, of plant and crystal, of animal and man; these mystic pictures in all then- variety, beauty, and harmony, being one after another inwoven into it, as it steadily tm-ns beneath them, like patterns on some swift- revolving loom. In other words, the same Ideas which circle round the mind of the Supreme Intelligence for His eternal ■contemplation and delight, are, Avlien Time begins, inwoven into the texture of the world, and, as Time-pictures, are unrolled before us in what are known as the ])hen()mena of the world and of life ; their sensuous forms being but the visible hieroglyphs of the invisible Ideas corresponding to them in the Creator's mind, and requiring but ]\Iotion to develop them, as a seal on wax, — it is evident tliat virtue which is the Form, the something over, the something superadded, as it were, to the natural inclinations and passions from which however it cannot be separated ; it is evident that virtue is to be reached not by mere knowledge alone, as with Plato, but by the culti- vation of good habits, and the exercise of moral restraint, i.e. not by cutting off the natural desires, and making virtue alone the object of pure contemplation, but by the assiduous care and training of these desires, as one trains the straggling shoots till they grow into the symmetry of the perfect tree. And it further follows that in Politics the best Commonwealth with Aristotle is not the one that is devised off hand and excogitated from the brains of Philosophers, as with Plato, and then realized by political arrangements which shall for ever cut off citizenship from its natural basis in the family and the home, but the one which is best adapted to the circumstances of the time — climate, soil, locality, the moral and intellectual character of the people, and the like — and which is administered neither by Philosophers alone, nor by the Rich alone, nor by the Populace alone, but by those who having competent means, have been trained to habits of virtue and knowledge of the world ; by those, in short, who are most likely to be on a level with the best aspirations of the time, and avIio, in consequence, are best fitted to guide existing conditions into a new and hi2;her form. And from this same fact, viz. that Form and ]\Iattcr, like the poles of a magnet, are indissolubly united, and cannot, except by a merely verbal abstraction, be conceived as having an existence independent of each other, it follows that the Divine Spark in man which is bound up with his animal instincts and intelligence as the Form of which thov are the Matter, although a ray from the Supreme Intelligence itself, cannot be immortal, as it cannot exist apart from and independent of that Matter of which it is the Form. As the animal instincts and intelli- gence die with the body, so too must the Mind and Sou). CO THE EVOLUTION OF GREEK THOUGHT. Again, in the tliree great elements of Aristotle's Philosophy, viz. the Supreme Intelligence, the Reservoir of Motion in the iEther, and the matrix of Matter loaded with Ideas or Form as its positive pole, we have the origin of another favourite position of his, viz. the reduction of all things to either the Actual, or the Potential. Now the Supreme Intelligence being, as it is, an immateri d, immovable, and invisible essence, insusceptible of change, must be an Actuality. So, too, the great globe of il^^thcr which lills the vault of Heaven, and is co-extensive with the bounds of the Universe, must be an Actuality. It is a unity and totality which, moving in a circle, is incapable of change, or of being aught but what it is and has for ever been. But this Earth of ours, on the contrary, with its two poles of Matter and Form, which however can only unite on condition that Motion is supplied to them, must have been a Potentiality. So, too, must have been each and every thing on the Earth. For as all existintr thin2;s are made up of the union of the two opposite essences, Form and Matter, it is evident that, as there is always a chance of these essences missing each other as it were, and not meeting full circle in their revolutions, instead of the existino- thino- Ave mio-ht sret the negation of the thing, its privation; for example, instead of light Ave might get darkness ; instead of heat, cold ; instead of beauty, deformity ; instead of life, death ; and so on. It is the same in the moral region. If the two essences meet, we have good, if not, evil ; if they meet, happiness, if not, misery ; if they meet, love, if not, hate ; if they meet, forgiveness, if not, revenge. And hence Ave have Aristotle saying there is no Evil in the Eternal Actualities, that is to say, in the Supreme Intelligence and the Moving Vault of ^F^thcr, but only on this Earth of oui-s, this Avorld of Potentiality, Avhere by reason of its two poles, two courses are always open, either to hit or to miss, to meet or to pass, to make or to mar. And lastlvit is in these three "'reat factors of the Aristotelian Philosophy that Ave have the source of Aristotle's well-known AUISTOTLE. 61 division of causes into Final, Eflicient, Formal, and Material. The Supreme Intelligence, for example, correspond.s to the Final Cause of thinus, that is to say to their end or aim, as a man's end in building may be said to be the final cause of the house. The Reservoir of Motion in the ^^Ether, aofain, corresponds to the Efficient Cause of things, inasmuch as it is the agenc}' by which the two poles of Matter and Form are brought together; as the bricklayers and hodmen who bring together the materials, may be said to be the Efficient Cause of the house. The Ideas or Forms, again, with which the primordial Matter is packed as its positive pole, correspcmd to the Formal Cause of tilings, to their qualities, properties, function, or vital principle ; as the formal cause of a house is its use or function and not its mere external shape or archi- tecture. And lastly, the primordial Matter of the world corresponds to the Material Cause of things, in the same wa^- as the bricks and mortar are the material causes of the house. And here, perhaps, it may not be out of place, before proceeding on our way, to indicate briefly the relative excellences and defects of the systems of Plato and Aristotle. Indeed these may all be summed up at once by saying that while the system of Aristotle is superior as a dynamiccd theory of the World, that is to say as a theory of the evolution of things, of their movement and procession ; the system of Plato still remains superior as a statical theory, that is to say as an analysis of the great elements of which at any given time the World itself as a whole, with all that it contains, is composed. As a dynamical theory the system of Aristotle has the same superiority over that of Plato, as the doctrine of Evolution of our own day has over the six days creation of Genesis. For while with Plato each new person or thing, animal or man, requires a fresh exercise of the arranging Intelligence, of the Supreme Good to constitute it, a fresh application of Number to the r'.Trapov, of Ideas to Number, and so on, in the same way as in the ^lo.-aic Cosmogony the ^2 THE EVOLUTION OF GlIEEK THOUGHT. creation of each new species requires a fresh act of Creative Power ; in Aristotle, on the other hand, wlien once the two poles of Matter and Form are brought together and kept in revolution by a continuous supply of IMotion, they will of themselves and by their own natures evolve one after another all the phenomena of the world and of life, of earth, and air, and sea, of crystal and plant, of vegetable, and animal, and man. But this superiority of the system of Aristotle over that of Plato as a dynamical theory, Avas compensated by its corres- ponding inferiority as a statical one. For having found an independent source of Motion elsewhere, viz., in the great reservoir of ^'Ether in the Heavens, Aristotle who was anxious to pack his Ideas or Forms into the primordial Matter in such a way that they would be indissolubly united with it, w^as obliged to empty this INIatter of the little triangles with which Plato hnd endowed it; as otherwise he "would have been as much embarrassed by them as a weaver would be who sliould be required to impress a new pattern on a warp still inwoven with an old one. But these little triangles were to Plato not only his source of motion, but, like the triangular wooden bricks which children build into cubes and other toy figures, were the elements with which, by the application of Number, he built up the outward form and configuration of things ; the first application of Number binding them into the sensible forms of fire, air, earth, and water; the next building these again into the infinite variety of animal and vegetable forms ; and the last into the beautiful figures, the ideal shapes, out- lines, and pi'oportions of things on which Art loves to dwell. The consequence was that Aristotle, having got rid of these little triangles from his primordial Matter, in order to make room for the Ideas or Forms which he wished to pack in their l>lace, had left himself no elements with which to construct the outward shape of things as distinct from their inner essence; and no place, thei'cfore, for Number, whose only function with Plato was to bind these triangles into the infinite variety of ARISTOTLE. t)3 forms. He was unable therefore, to find any place in his system for a theory of outer forms, and hence it was that in re-arranging the four great factors of Plato, viz., the Good, Ideas, Number, and the r/'-e/f^ov as groundwork for his own system, he left out Number as we have said altogether. It is quite probable, indeed, that Aristotle would have argued that the Ideas which were answerable for the use, quality, function or vital principle of things, would be answerable also for their external forms ; but this would have been to make one essence accountable for two such naturally antagonistic things as soul and body, mind and matter, which would have been a poor and inadequate explanation. Indeed if further proof be wanted of the superiority of the system of Plato over that of Aristotle as a statical tlieory of things, it will be found in the fact that Avhen a new dynamical princij^le other than that of Motion, viz. the theory of Emanation, was introduced by the Neo-Platonists, it was to the original factors of Plato that they turned for the elements on which this new principle was to act, and not to those of Aristotle. But before closing this cliaptcr it is necessary to remark that although the dynamical theory of Aristotle has a superficial resemblance to the modern theory of Evolution, it really bears only the same relation to it that a phantasm does to the reality. With Aristotle the evolution of things, of earth, and crystal, and plant, and animal, and man, is got by uniting and addhig one shadowy Essence to another as shadowy as itself, and this again to another, and so on ; whereas in Modern Scientific Evolution, real forces that can be weighed and measured are converted into their equivalent of other forces, and these again into their equivalent of others, and so on ; so much vital energy into so much chemical j)roduct, and the rest, — quite a different matter. CHAPTER IV. FROM ARISTOTLE TO CHRISTIANITr. TN the last chapter we saw that Aristotle by grouping the four separate and independent elements of Plato into two compound and connected ones, was enabled to account in a measure for the procession and evolution of things over and above their mere structure and composition ; and so pushed the little barque of Philosophy a stage nearer that Religious shore to which it was inevitably tending. We have now to see that its next stage had to be reached by a continuation of the same process, viz., by the drawing together again of this connected pair of factors into a single concrete unity. Aristotle, we may remember, had reduced the great factors of tlie World-process to a Supreme Power possessed of Ideas, on the one hand, and a basis of Matter packed with the same Ideas, on tlie other ; and had filled the gap between with the great reservoir of iEthcr which by communicating Motion to the wide expanse of Matter, enabled it to incorporate into itself one by one tlie Ideas with which it was surcharged or surrounded, thereby precipitating the order and beauty of the phenomena of this AVorld of Time as we know them. Now in this theory, God, it is to be observed, is separated and kept apart from the Universe, and can comnumlcatc with it only through the intervening medium of the il^]thcr. If, therefore, we were to suppose this intervening medium to be abolished, and the FKOil ARISTOTLE TO CIlKISTIANITr. 65 Supreme Power instead of contemplating in eternal serenity from outside the Universe the Ideas with which He is filled, were to be introduced within the world of Matter, and sj diffused throughout its substance as to act on it directly everywhere and everywhen, would not this be the last step in that unifying process which it is the aim of Philosophy to consummate? For now, instead of two separate and compound existences connected bv a third different from either, v*^e should have only a single concrete existence, the World, but with two sides or faces, as it were, a material or sensible, and a spiritual or invisible ; the latter, as being diffused through the former, being of the nature of a universal Spirit or Soul, and containing within itself all those elements of which it is the representative ; — the Supreme Power, Ideas, and the Motion-giving iEther. Novv this is not only the general but the precise position taken lip by the Stoics whose theory was that the World was a single concrete entity witli two faces or aspects, a material and a spiritual ; the Spiritual, which pervaded the Material, including under the one term of a Universal Soul, conceptions so different in essential nature as the Supreme Good, the Ideas or Reasons of Plato, and the Motion-giving iEther of Aristotle. But although the Stoics in this way were enabled to reduce the World to a single concrete unity with two sides, it is evident that owing to the number of heterogeneous categories which, in this forcing process, they were obliged to dash and confound together — categories so essentially distinct as God, Reason, and the JEther — the unity tliey got was a merely formal vuiity more apparent than real; and that here at least Philosophy could not find its final rest. What form then was Philosophy next to assume? Back it could not so, without the sacrifice of those advantages which had made each si'''.cessive step an advance on the last : and farther forward than this Pantheistic Unity of the Stoics, with its two poles or sides of Matter and Soul, the unifying j)rocess could not go. What then was the next move to be ? F 66 THE EVOLUTION OF GREEK THOUGHT. It will perhaps give us a hint as to the direction in which we are to look, if we consider that a Philosophy, to be entirely satisfactory, must not only account for the movement and evolution of things, but must maintain unimpaired in the process the hierarchy and independence of the ultimate factors of which they are composed ; must have not only dynamical efiBciency, but statical integrity. Now, as we have seen, each step taken by Philosophy after Plato with the view of getting greater dynamical unity and efficiency, was purchased by the loss of the independence, the gradation, or even the very existence of one or other of the factors or elements of which things are composed. Plato, as we have already seen, had reached the highest point of analytic and statical truth in his decomposition of the structure of things into four separate and independent elements ; — the Good, Ideas, Number, and the r/.7r€ipov, elements which accounted in the broadest and simplest way for the composition and hierarchy of the World ; the a-n-apny accounting for their material basis, Number for their external forms. Ideas for their inner natures, and the Supreme Good representing the end to which they all worked. But, as we saw, these factors had no connexion or relation with each other, and could not therefore unite to explain the movement and evolu- tion of things. To remedy this and to get a principle of movement and evolution, Aristotle, accordingly, was obliged to represent these factors as being united in groups wutli an independent principle of Motion between, so that the movement of any one element would draw the others after it, and so account for the movement and evolution of them all. But in thus endeavour- ing to find room in his theory for the movement and evolution of things, he was obliged to sacrifice Plato's j^rinciple of Number, and so to leave unexplained the entire range of that quality of things which is included imder their external form. With the Stoics it was worse, for, as we have just seen, in order to get a still greater unity and dynamical efficiency than Aristotle, they were obliged to confound together under the FROM ARISTOTLE TO CHRISTIANITY. G7 single name of the Si)iritual Principle or Soul of things, categories so separate and eternally distinct in nature, as God, Eeason, and the fire-giving iEther ; so that the image of tlie World Avhich Plato had set up with so much labour and con- scientious care, with all its parts in their relative hierarchy and subordination: — Godlike Reason and Ideas as tlie head: Kumber in the beauty and proportion of its bodily form ; the Kirapov in the material of which it was composed ; and the whole figure pointing upward to the Supreme Good ; this magnificent and perfect creation of Plato was left lying by the Stoics in a prostrate and undistinguished heap, — God, Reason, Form, and ^[atter vaguely showing through the fictitious unity in which they were enclosed as in a sack, and all promiscuously confounded together. The truth is, it is impossible on any ordinary dynamical theory, to get the ultimate elements of which things are composed to unite together to produce tlie movement and evolution of the world, without doino; violence to their real independence and statical integrity. Being ultimate elements they can liave nothing in common into which tliey are further resolvable ; and having nothing in common, it is impossible by any artifice to so unite them as to make them form a coherent unity ; as we have just seen in the case of the Stoics w^ho imagined they had given unity to such different categories as God, Reason, and iEthei', by the simple expedient of putting them into a common receptacle, and labelling them with a common name. On the other hand, even if it were possible to make them unite so as to produce the movement and evolution of the World, they Avould lose in the process all tliat was distinctive in their nature, all their separate and self- bubsistent virtue ; for it is the characteristic of an ordinary dynamical movement, that the cause passes over into and is lost in its eff'ect ; that when two things, for example, unite together to produce a third that is different from either, they cease thenceforth to exist as independent elements with dis- tinguishable qualities, losing their old identity of the new Q8 THE EVOLUTION OF GREEK THOUGHT. creation, as wlien oxvsyen and hvdroo;en unite to form water. It is evident, therefore, that if no philosojihy is complete which does not furnish us with a dynamical as well as a statical theory of things, a theory of their movement and evolution as well as of their composition and structure ; and if this double requisite is impossible on any ordinary dynamical theory ; it is evident that to release Philosophy from the impasse in which it was left by the Stoics, and to give it a fresh start, some new dynamical principle must be found, which shall at once account for the etei'nal procession and evolution of things, and at the same time preserve unimpaired the dignity, independence, and essential integrity of their ultimate elements. AVliat then is this new dynamical principle I Up to this point, indeed, 1 had been enabled by means of the principles which I had laid down at the outset, to antici- ]iate to the extent and in the manner we have seen, the succes- sive steps taken by Greek Philosophy in the course of its evolution and development, with a glance only here and there to make certain on points of detail, and to assure myself that I w^as keeping on the right track. But when I arrived at the point which we have now reached, I confess I was at a loss to know in what direction to turn. On surrendering myself, however, unreservedly to the actual historical facts themselves, I found that the next step taken by Greek Philosophy em- bodied precisely the new dynamical principle which was wanted, and which, indeed, I might with a little more patience have foreseen. This was no other than the great principle of Emana- tion which has played so great a part both in Eeligion and Philosophy, and which, when once it was introduced, continued to be made the basis of both, for over a thousand years. It was drawn from the belief that there were causes in existence which, unlike ordinary dynamical causes, could give rise to effects without themselves passing over into these eftects ; but on the contrary remained where they were, without change of place or loss of substance. This kind of cause was to be seen, for FROM ARISTOTLE TO CHRISTIAXITY. G9 example, in tlie mind, which although the cau<5e of endless thoughts, 5(till remained the same mind; in the sun, which in spite of its infinite radiations into Space, still remained the same sun, without apparent loss of substance ; or in the parent wlio, although the cause of a numerous offspring, still remained the same parent ; all of which apparent instances of emanation or begetting must, in the absence of a knowledge of the Physical Sciences, have seemed just and reasonable. Now when this kind of cause was introduced into Philosophy, it at once solved the dilHcultv in which she had been landed by furnishing a new dynamical principle which should account for the movement and procession of things, Avithout destroying the independence and integrity of the great original elements of which they were composed. And it became evident that if once you could get a true statical theory, that is to say, a true theory of the structure and com- position of things, a true inventory of the original, eternal, an 1 underived elements of all existence, all you would have to do to explain their evolution and movement w^ould be to let them emanate from each other, the lowest from that above it in the scale, that again from the next, and so on until you came to the highest of all from which all had originally proceeded. In this way you would get a series of existences eternally pro- ceeding from each other, without loss of substance, change of place, or confusion of quality. You would get, in a Avord, a theory which was at once dynamical and statical, which would explain the movement and evolution of things consistently with the integrity and independence of the ultimate factors of whicli they were composed. Now of all the Greek Thinkers Plato was the one whose philosophy, as we have seen, had reached the highest point of statical perfection ; succeeding Thinkers, like Aristotle and the Stoics, in their endeavours to account for the movement and evolution of things, being oblio:ed either to sacrifice one or other of the great factors of Plato, or to confound them all together. If Philosophy, therefore, should 70 THE EVOLUTION OF GREEK THOUGHT. return to Plato for its statical basis, and instead of representing his original factors, viz., the Supreme Good, the System of Ideas, Number, and the uTreipov as isolated and independent existences, as Plato himself did, were to represent them as emanating from one another in the way in which thoughts emanate and proceed from the mind, rays of light from the sun, or children from their parents ; the System of Ideas from the Supreme Good, Number or the Ideal forms of things from the Ideas, and last of all the aireipov or Matter from these forms ; would not this by accounting for the flux and evolution of things without endangering the integrity and independence of the original factors, be a Philosophy in advance of all that had preceded it ? Now this was precisely the position taken up by Neo- Platonism, a school of philosophy inaugurated by Philo, a Jew of Alexandria, about the time of Christ, and reaching its culmination in Plotinus some two or tbree centuries later. The Neo-Platonists boldly went back to Plato for the statical elements of their system, ignoring all those Thinkers who had Iain between them, and who had exercised the ingenuity of the Schools during a period of four or five hundred years. Their theory was that the AVorld Avas the emanation of an omni- present activity, an intelligent Vital Principle or World-Soul diffused through the Universe; that this World-Soul again, Avas the emanation in turn of the pure Eeason which united in itself the entire system of Platonic Ideas ; and this Reason, ao'ain, or Locros, as it was called, the emanation of the Eternal One, the Good, the Primitive Unity which was neither Reason nor World-Soul, but included them both, and was itself the Unthinkable, the Unspeakable One. Or to put it another Avay, from the Eternal One proceeded, as first emanation, Reason or the Logos ; and from this again as second, the AYorld-Spirit or Soul whicli was the vital principle of all things ; and these three are on the principle of emanation, one ; in the same way that the rays of light in the sun and the rays FKOM ARISTOTLE TO CHRISTIAXITV. 71 of light on the earth, though different are yet the same ; or that a man's mind, the tliought of his mind, and the expression of that thought, though unHkc are yet the same ; though three, are yet one. And hxstly from this invisible Trinity in Unity wc have as final emanation of all, the world of sensible things, of Material Existence, as we know it and see it around us. This is the first appearance in the Western AVorld, it is interesting to note, of the doctrine of the Trinity, a direct result as we see of the doctrine of Emanation ; and this doctrine, again, not, it is to be observed, a religious conception at all, but a purely philosophical one ; introduced as we have seen, to meet the necessity that had arisen of finding some new •dynamic principle, different from the old, which should explain the movement and procession of things, without endangering the independent existence of the elements out of which they ^vere composed. And here we may pause to observe that as the soul of man, like the World-Soul, is on the theory of Emanation one with the Eternal Unitv, instead of being as in Plato different from it, it is evident that the way in which the soul must reach this Supreme Unity must be different in the two systems. In Plato, where the chain of Ideas that lead up to the Supreme Oood as their topmost link is so arranged that each lower Idea, •while containino: somethino; In common with that above it, Is 3ilso different from it. It Is clear that you can reach the Supreme Oood only by separating at each stage the like from the unlike, and holding fast to the former ; in the same way as you can reach the root of an inverted tree from any particular leaf on its circumference, only by following u[) this leaf to the twig that is common to manv leaves, this again to the branch that is •common to many twigs, this again to the trunk that is common to many branches, until at last you reach the root and source of all. This process of reaching the Eternal Unity of things by the continuous process of separating their differences, and uniting their likenesses is known as the method of Dialectics, 72 THE EVOLUTION OF GREEK THOUGHT. and is the method of all science or knowledsre. The ethical watchword, accordingly, of Plato was knowledge, or intellectual definition. But in Neo-Platonism where the soul of man, like the World-Soul, instead of being different from the Supreme Good, as with Plato, is, on the principle of Emanation, really one with it, and in consequence is only prevented from becoming absorbed into and united with it, by the fleshly body with which in man it is bound up, it is evident that if in life you are to get a glimpse of the Supreme Good at all, it must be not by climbing up the chain of Ideas by the laborious pro- cess of separating the like from the unlike, (for the Ideas of the Reason or Logos, as we have seen, are one with the Supreme Good already,) but by the mortification of the flesh, of the appetites, passions, and natural desires with which on its under side, as it were, the soul is bound up, and to which in this world of Time it is chained, — in a word by Asceticism. With a Trinity in Unity, then, as the Godhead from which the material and sensible world is a remote and inferior emanation ; and with Asceticism or mortification of the flesh as ethical code ; it is evident that the little boat of Philosophy is at last drawing close to that Religious Shore to which from the first it was destined. So close, indeed, has it come, that but a single step more, a single plank as it were, is necessary to enable its occupants to step forth on to the banks of Christianity, where, after burning their boat behind them, they will no longer walk apart as before, but for the next thousand years, mingled and absorbed in the life around them, will be imdistlngulshable in doctrine from the great human throno-. What this single step was will be made more clear, perhaps, by a simple pictorial representation of Neo-Platonism and Christianity respectively. The Trinity of Neo-Platonism con- sisting of the Eternal One, Reason or the Logos, and the World-Spirit, we may figure as a triangle with equal sides, from whose base lines of emanation stream, radiating down- wards and outwards to form the great world of Time, of FROM ARISTOTLE TO CHRISTIANITY. 7S Material and Sensible Existence. As such, tlio theory is a purely philosophical one ; the Eternal One, lleason and the AVorld-Spirit, being purely abstract spirits or essences. But Religion, as we have seen, differs from Philosophy in this, that it deals with Wills and Personalities and not with Essences or abstract Spirits. If therefore Ave are to turn Xeo-Platonism into Christianity, we must manage in some way to change the three philosophic essences of the Neo-Platonic Trinity into the three persons of the Christian Trinity. Now to do this, all that is necessary is to take the lines of emanation that radiate from the base of the triangular Trinity, and bring them to a point or focus somewhere between Heaven and Earth, as it were, before allowing them to radiate downward and out- ward to form the world, in the same way as one might pass the folds of a handkerchief through a Aveddino--rins: ; and then to represent this focus, this wedding-ring of mediation between Heaven and Earth, by the man Christ Jesus. This simple step is all that is necessary ; for if Jesus Christ is the Son of God, it is evident that the first person in the Trinity instead of being an abstract Eternal One, must be God the Father ; and the tliird person instead of being an abstract World-Spirit, must now be God the Holy Ghost. That only this single step of the mediation of Christ Jesus, separated Neo-Platonism from Christianity as a philosophy, is placed beyond doubt by the testimony of St. Augustine. Himself brought up and nurtured in the writings of Neo-Platonism, he admits when summing up the advantages that Christianity had over it, that he found practically the same doctrine of the Godhead in both ; that Neo-Platonism equally with St. John contained such doctrines, for example, as that ' in the beginning was the Word or Logos, and the Word Avas with God, and the Word was God,' etc., that the Son being of the same substance, was in the form of the Father, and 'thought it not robbery to be equal with the Father; ' that God the Word ' was born, not of flesh and blood, but of God ; ' and the like. What he did not find in Neo-Platonism, 74 THE EVOLUTION OF GREEK THOUGHT. he tells us^ Avas the Incarnation, the truth contained in such texts as that ' the Word was made flesh and dwelt anions us ' ; that ' He came unto His own and His own received Him not ' ; that ' to those who believed on His name to them He gave the power to become the sons of God ' ; that ' He took on Himself the form of a servant', and ' in due time died for the ungodly ' ; and the like. Now, that the step from the abstract essences of the Neo- Platonic Trinity to the personal wills of the Christian Trinity, whether through the Incarnation of Chi-ist Jesus or not, had first or last to be taken by Philosophy, a few considerations will make manifest. In the first place, in the absence of Physical Science and of the new conception of the Uniformity of Law which it has since thrown as a necessary element into all speculations on the problem of the World, no mere Philosophy as such, employing abstract Essences as its subject- matter, could go farther tlian Neo-Platonism. It was the first, as we have seen, to introduce a di/namical theory of things, which should be compatible with tiie continued integrity and independence of the original elements of which they were composed. It had besides absorbed the essences and abstract principles of all preceding Thinkers, and had woven them into a scheme more harmonious and complete than any that had gone before. Backward Philosophy could not go, and it is equally evident that forward it must. For, as we saw at the outset of this survey, there are only two kinds of causation that can permanently satisfy the minds of men ; either the Wills of Religion, or the uniform antecedents and consequents of Physical Science. Now the Essences and Abstractions of Philosophy are neither the one nor the other of these, and as in them the mind of man caimot rest, it must, in the absence of Physical Science, make in the direction of the Wills and Personalities of Religion. The law arovernino; the direction and successive stages of this movement, I ventured to lay down at the outset, and, as we have seen, the long train of individual FROM ARISTOTLE TO CHRISTIANITY. 75 Thinkers have walked in the line marked out for them by this law, as if by immutable decree. From the abstract Trinity of the Neo-Platonists to the personal Trinity of Wills, Philosophy was bound to go ; and whether by the dispensation of Providence, or by the accident of Fate, Christianity stood waiting on the sliore with every condition favourable for its reception. Not that Cliristianity was the only religion into which Neo-PIatonism could possibly have passed in its way from a Trinity of Essences to a Trinity of personal Wills ; on the contrary any religion with a like philosophical basis, however different from Christianity in its historical basis, would for philosophical purposes have answered as well. Nor did Neo-Platonism pass into Christianity because the latter was the only religion on the shore ready and waiting to receive it ; on the contrary Paganism too was there ; but althouo-li the later and degenerate Neo-Platonists allied themselves with the Polytheism of Paganism, and became its High Priests (much in the same way as the Patriarchs and Bishops became the priests of the Christian Trinity), it was a disgraceful and unnatural union which could bear no fruit, and was, as a matter of fact, in a few years swept away without a murmur or a sigh. Nor yet again did Neo-Platonism pass into Christianity because, as has been alleged, it had itself already in the early days of Christianity, foi'ged and prepared the doctrines of the Godhead which it was afterwards to appear to accept at the hands of its opponents ; on the contrary Christianity as a philosophy must have assumed a form similar to that which it did assume, had Neo-Platonisni never existed. Growino; out of the historical fact of Christ's being the Son of God, its philosophy must have been the abstract expression of that concrete relation. Now as that relation happened to be practically the same as the relation of the Logos to the Eternal One in Neo-Platonism, this of itself was sufficient to account for the likeness in form at least of the two philosophies. It is true that those early doctors of 76 THE EVOLUTION OF GREEK THOUGHT. the Church who were most instrumental in formulatins; it» philosophical creed, especially the relation of the first to the second Person of the Godhead, were drawn from the schools of Neo-Platonism, and that they gave to the historical fact of Christ's relation to (iod, the tact of son-ship, the philosophical form in wiiich they were accustomed to think. Indeed we may go farther and admit that from the time that the Gospel of St. John, which is closely moulded on Neo-Platonic lines, was received into the canon of Scripture, the philosophies of Neo-Platonism and Christianity became, as we should expect, in form at least practically identical. But no mere formal identity could have been permanently established between the philosophies of Neo-Platonism and Christianity, had there not been a real identity in principle ; that is to say, had not the relation of the Logos to the Eternal One been the same in principle as the relation of the Son to the Father in Christianity. And what Avas that principle 'I It was the principle of Emanation ; the only difference in the form of this principle when applied to Neo-Platonism and Christianity respectively being that in Neo-Platonism the relation of the Eternal One to the Logos was drawn from the analogy of the abstract Intelligence, which in giving off broods of thought, remains itself the same ; whereas in Christianity the relation of God to Christ is drawn from that of parent and offspring, where the total personality or avIII of a man, as it were, passes over Into the offspring, while itself remaining the same as before. If once then the historical facts of Christ's birth, death, and resurrection, could be believed in, it would evidently be not only easy and natural, but inevitable, that Neo-Platonism should fall Into and be absorbed in Christianity. For If It were true that Christ really were the Son of God, and that He had sent the Holy Spirit after He was gone, was this not precisely what the philosophy of Neo-Platonism had taught, viz. that the Logos or Word proceeded from and was the in- carnation of the Eternal One, and the World-Si^irit again, the FROM ARISTOTLE TO CIIUISTIAXITY. 77 emanation of the Logos? — but with this advantage on the side of Christianity, that by turning the abstract Essences of Neo- Platonism into a Trinity of real Persons, it not only gave, in the absence of Physical Science, a more satisfactory Cause of things than any mere abstract essences could supply, but furnished also an object of reverence, sympathy, and love, Avhich should engage equally the imagination and heart — a thino- impossible in any merely abstract philosophy. For in the Ionr>- run the human spirit can find comfort, consolation, and sympathy, only in a spirit like its own; and in Christianity this was supplied by the second person of the Trinity, the man Christ Jesus, a man in all points tempted as we are, yet with- out sin. And here again we may refer to the testimony of St. Augustine, who declares that God of the excellency of His m-ace, in sendino; His Son Christ Jesus to save sinners throu2:h faith and love, gave to the minds and hearts of men a more per- manent and abiding solace and peace than could be got from the transient glimpses of God which were to be caught by Neo-Platonism only after the most vain and laborious Asceti- cism. Instead of having, like the Xeo-Platonists, to gaze from the wooded hill-tops to the land of Peace, without finding any wav to it, the Christian could, he says, by the grace of .Tesus Christ, hold on his way straight through beneath the strong- hold built by the Heavenly Commander ; instead of hearing by the way the dreary whistling of the winds, the jingle of the lifeless abstractions of Philosophy, he heard wafted to him such sweet notes as these, " Learn of me for I am meek and lowly of heart, and you shall find rest for your souls." " Come unto me all ye that are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest." But beside these spiritual consolations which it offered to cultured and uncultured alike, Christianity by its adoption from Genesis of the doctrine of a Tempter, accounted for the ever-present sense of Sin iu our inmost members, in a way impossible to Neo-Platonism, w^hich, regarding the natural world as the last and lowest emanation of the Godhead, could 78 THE EVOLUTION OF GREEK THOUGHT. not endow Sin Avitli that positive and absolute character which it assumed when it was believed to be the fruit of a Spirit not good, like the World-Spirit of Neo-Platonism, but, like Satan, absolutely evil in himself. For these and other reasons Greek Philosophy, encom- passed on all hands by a religion which surpassed it not only in moral purity and elevation, but in the satisfactions of its ])hilosop]iic creed, passed as was inevitable, though not without prolonged struggles of self-interest and pride^ softly and slowly into Christianity ; and with the closing of the Schools of Athens by Justinian, disappeared, save as armoury for the exercitations of the Schoolmen, or models for the pens of the Humanists, for ever from the serious beliefs of men. TART II. TPIE EVOLUTIOiN' OF HINDOO THOUGHT, HISTOEY OF INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT. PART II. LIST or AUTHORITIES FOR THE FOLLOWING CHAPTERS ON THE EVOLUTION OF HINDOO THOUGHT. For Hinduism vedic hymns wilson yoga sutras muir raja-yoga elphinstone sankhya-karika max mullep. VEDANTASaVA MONIER- WILLIAMS SADDARMA-PUNDARIKA For Buddhism DHAMMAPADA KHUDDAKA PATHA UPASAMPADA-KAMMAVACA BURNOUF KOPPEN WASSALIEF SPENCE HARDY OLDENBERG RHYS DAVIDS MAX Mi'LLER BEAL BIGANDET For Theosophy bhagavat glta besant upanishads chatterji blavatsky row sinnett old olcott mead judge fullerton CHAPTER I. HINDOO PHILOSOPHY. "FN" the folloAving chapters I pi^opose to pass briefly In review the great philosophies and religions of India, Avith the view of ascertaining the extent, if any, to which the doctrines of these schools can be said to have entered into the compo- sition and structure of European thought. And with this object I shall make It my aim In the first place to determine, if possible, the general level or plane oftlwught, as it were, on which these religions and philosophies all alike lie ; as. If we shall once succeed In doing this satisfactorily, we shall, like the naturalist who has ascertained the family or order to which some extinct but newly-discovered mammalian skeleton belongs, be able the more readily to estimate the position occupied by these systems in the great chain of World-Philosophy as a whole; and the extent, in consequence, to which they are likely to enter as per- manent elements into the Philosophical Evolution of the future. But more than this, we shall be able to show, as we did In the case of Greek Philosophy, that the evolution of these succes- sive systems follows from, and can be anticipated, as It were, by a law or principle of the human mind, which law we shall at the outset without much difficulty be enabled to lay down. Now It will be remembered that Greek Philosophy began its evolution under Thales and his successors, by making some one or other material principle, such as ^Yater, Air, etc., the 82 THE EVOLUTION OF HINDOO THOUGHT. Prime Cause and main efficient factor in its explanation of the phenomena of the world ; that it then advanced under Xenophanes, Parmenides, and their followers, to the stage in which what is called Soul or Vital Principle was the First Cause; and that from the time of Anaxagoras and Socrates onwards it reached the point where pure Intelligence was believed to be the best explanation of the phenomena of the world and of human life. Like the embryo of man, which passes rapidly through the lower stages of fish, reptile, and mammal, to expend the best part of its life in the exhibition of characteristics that are distinctly human, Greek Philosophy ran rapidly through the lower stages of Matter and of Soul, to expend the opulence and fertility of its genius on the changes that could be rung on the principle of Intelligence as the First Cause of things — and from that time to the present, the Thought of Europe in its evolution and development has but continued the process still farther on the same lines. But that there may be no mistake as to the meaning to be attached here to the terms Soul and Intelligence, respectively, I may as w^ell explain at the outset that by Soul or Vital Principle is always to be understood a double-sided principle, half material, half spiritual — a principle which, when the spiritual side is most in evidence, may be figured as a kind of ghost, as it were, which although spiritual in one aspect has always the material quality of extension on the other ; and when its material side is most obtrusive, may be represented by that Vital Principle of Nature w^hich rolls through things, giving them their life, and of which the visible body of Nature is but the material side or counterpart. Intelligence, on the other hand, is always to be figured as an indivisible, immaterial entity, witJiout parts or extension; and when it is a self-conscious Intelligence, always involves the idea of a Thinker on the one side, and of thoughts, images, and ideas which pass before it on the other, on which its eye is transiently directed, but from any one or all of which it is conceived as capable of detaching itself. niNDoo niiLosoniY. 83 Now, that Greek Philosophy from the time of Socrates, and that European Thought and Religion ever since, have made the principle of Intelligence, in the sense in which it is here used, the Supreme Cause and Prime Operative Factor in things, is scarcely open to dispute. With Plato, for example, the Supreme Cause, which he calls the Supreme Good, is repre- sented as engaged from all eternity before the world began in contemplating that golden chain of Ideas, or Types of Things, on which the world was afterwards to be constructed — a chain of Ideas which ran up to this Supreme Good as its topmost link, but from which the Supreme Good, as a thinker from the object of his thought, is represented as for ever free. This Supreme Good, then, is obviously of the natui*e of an Intelli- gence. With Aristotle, again, the First Cause of things which is represented as letting loose that principle of Motion which gives the world the primitive push needed to start it on the path of evolution, and which carries with it those Types or Ideas — Forms he calls them — which are to be deposited one by one along the track of evolution, and one by one to be built into the structure of the world — this First Cause of thino;s is represented by Aristotle, as it is by Plato, as finding from all eternity in the loving contemplation of these ' forms,' its sole and supreme delight. It, too, therefore, is a principle of In- telligence. And so too with the First Cause of the Stoics, which althouirh workinof through laws of Nature fixed and inexorable as Fate, and sometimes even identified or confounded with these laws, was nevertheless represented as being conscious of them as of so many thoughts and activities of its own mind ; and so was a principle of Intelligence. It was the same when Christianity took up the mantle of Greek Philosophy, for in its speculative doctrine of the Trinity it still endowed the First Cause of things with the attributes of a Supreme Intelligence, to which it further added the concrete attributes of personality and will. And not only did this attribute of Intelligence remain through all the changes of that religion, bat it was 84 THE EVOLUTION OF HINDOO THOUGHT. present also in the Deism of the eighteenth century, and in all those Eeh'gious Philosopliies of more recent times that have endeavoured to found a natural reh'uion on the analooies and processes of Nature. If further proof, indeed, were needed that the Religious Philosophies of Europe are all alike founded and constructed on the principle of Intelligence as their First Cause, as distinct from that of Soul, it Avould be found in this fact, viz., that those systems of Materialism and Atheism which have risen in reaction against the supernaturalisms of prevailing religious philosophies, have always assumed that the First Cause, whose existence they are assailing, is of the nature of an Intelligence, and not of a mere blind Vital Principle or Soul. And having once reached this principle of self-conscious Intelligence as the First Cause of things — a principle drawn from what is highest in the human mind — it may be safely asserted that no system of Philosophy which admits the supernatural clement at all, can ever again return to the merely negative and featureless principle of Soul as its starting principle, — a principle drawn, not like Intelli- gence, from what is highest in ourselves, but from that mere vitality common to all the works of Nature alike, the only dis- tinction of which is that it is tvithout either emotion, self- conscious intelligence, or Avill. It has neither the dignity, elevation, nor realizable efficiency of a self-conscious Intelli- gent Will, on the one hand, nor the reality and demonstrable regularity and uniformity of the ' antecedents and consequents ' of Physical Laws, on the other. And if, as we shall now see, not only Hindoo Philosophy, but its modern counterpart Theosophy also, are constructed on this conception of Soul as their supreme principle, we may safely predict that they wall no more affect the evolution of Philosophy in the future, than those present-day kangaroos and opossums of Australia, whose ancestors were cut off by cataclysmic upheavals from the main current of evolution in the Jurassic Age, will affect the future evolution of the Mammalian Kingdom. HINDOO riiiLCsoPHY. 85 Xow, tliat the stage of Soul is really tlie highest point reached by Hindoo Philosophy and Esoteric Buddhism, that in this principle they have found their last expression, their flower and consummation, and tliere stopped, it must now be my endeavour to prove. It is quite true, indeed, that on this plane they have put forth their fruit with a richness and luxuriance of detail unknown to Greek Philosophy in its corresponding stage^ but this is only what we should expect. For when an embryo stops short at the stage, say, of a dog or pigeon, there to expand and live its natural and normal existence, you may expect it to display there a gi'eater range and variety of aspects than will be displayed at the same stage by the embryo of a creature like man, who only passes through these loAver stages on his way to his own proper life and destination. And so, too, was it with Hindoo Philosophy. As those marsupials of Australia wliich were cut off from the general course of evolution in the Jurassic Age, and imprisoned within a limited area of the globe, unfolded the type on Avhich they were constructed into every variety of form ; so Hindoo Philosophy, imprisoned within its own area and cut off from the higher evolution of Europe has developed its systems with an elaboration and subtlety of detail unknown to the ■corresponding stages of European Thought. But for all that these systems are still only expansions of the principle of Soul, not of Intelligence ; they are marsupials and not higher mammalia; they are dogs and pigeons, and not men. Now, that all systems of Hindoo PIn'Iosophy, including the Esoteric Buddhism and Theosophy of the present day, are but elaborations of the principle of Soul as explanation of the phenomena of the Avorld and of human life; and that this Soul is a purely negative principle, whoso oidy distinction is that its spiritual side is entirely Avithout thought, emotion, or self- ■consciousness of any kind, except mere life, and its material side is divested of every quality except mere extension — all this might be known bcforehruid. and from the most careless 80 TUE EVOLUTION OF HINDOO THOUGHT. glance at the general configuration and structure of these philosophies. The first thing that strikes one in them all, is the curious circumstance that Self-consciousness and Intelligence — Reason, Judgment, Memory, Will, etc. — which are regarded by us Europeans as parts of the Soul, if not indeed its very essence, are in these Hindoo systems put down among the material substances that make up the body ; they are regarded as a very subtle differentiation of Matter it is true, but still Matter, as much so indeed as fire and earth and water are Matter, or the plants and flowers and animals and trees into which they are built up; having as little permanence and stability as these latter, and like them coming into being, blooming their little hour, and then ceasing to be. From this alone it is evident that the principle of Soul in Hindoo Philosophy must be something quite diflTercnt from the Self-conscious Intelligent Principle which it is with Western nations. Indeed we may safely sav that no progress can be made in the pro[)er understanding of Hindoo modes and systems of thought, until it is clearly realized that when we Europeans speak of Soul, and when the Hindoos speak of it, we mean two quite different and indeed opposite things. With us. Soul, as we have said, is a principle of Self- conscious Intelligence and Will ; with the Hindoos it is a mere vague diffused essence pervading Nature, the distinctive quality of which is that it is loitkout thought, emotion, will, self- consciousness, or, indeed, any other quality whatever except that of extension and life. That in these Hindoo Philosophies, Soul must be something of this kind, would on reflection be evident, if from nothing else, from this single fact alone, viz., that all their systems, in which it is the object of the individual to unite with the universal Soul, require for their logicr.l harmony and completeness some scheme of Transmigration and Re-incarnation after death. Now while a scheme of this nature is quite compatible with a principle which, like the Vital Principle of Nature, can, from the absence of any definite qualities of its own, unite with the bodies or minds of each HINDOO riiiLOSoPHY. 87 and every species of animal or plant indifferently, it would be quite out of keeping with a principle of Self-conscious Intclli- o-ence. For a Self-conscious Intelligence, be it observed, is a positive and higldy complex existence; a concrete, differentiated, and composite entity; and can no more be transferred at pleasure from one type of creature to another after death, so as to unite harmoniously Avith it, than a lion's bead can be made to unite harmoniously with an asses body — and in reality is as absurd and impossible as the satyrs, mermaids, and centaurs of fable. Hence it is, that in all European systems of thought or religion. Re-incarnation and Transmigration ai'e unknown, and the soul after death is obliged either to occupy tiie same body that it had during life (or its incorruptible counterpart), as was the view of the Early Christians ; or to exist quite disengaged from any bod}- whatever. But even were a self-conscious intelligence capable of re-incarnating after death in other bodies than its own, it is evident that its aim, which is that of communing for ever with the Infinite Intellio'ence, would be baulked ratlicr than forwarded bv the return again to Earth. For Intelligence and Love can only grow into a greater richness and perfection by commune and contact with Infinite Intelligence and Love, as one torch can be lit only by contact with the fire of another. And hence it is that in the Christian Religion, those believers who have merited the Divine favour are translated after death, and after the probation of but a single life on earth, to a Heaven where they are destined for ever to remain, drinking the waters of knowledge and love from the Infinite Fountain of Knowledge and Love. And this is just what one would expect when both the Supreme Soul and the Individual Soul are conceived to be of the nature of Self-conscious Intelligences. But where both the Universal Soul and the Individual Soul are blank abstractions, essences characterized by the absence of all thought, emotion, and self-consciousness ; and where intellect, emotion, will, and self-consciousness are but differentiations of 88 THE EVOLUTION OF HINDOO THOUGHT. the material world, the material side of Nature as it were ; it is evident that the Individual Soul can only unite v.dth the Universal Soul by cutting itself free not only from the gross body Avithin which it is confined, but also from the intellect, emotions, and will, which, like the body, fetter and confine the soul — as the water in a bottle can only unite with the infinite waters of the sea by which it is surrounded^ by breaking the bottle in which it is confined. To do this only two ways sutra'est themselves, either self-destruction wdiich would be of no avail, for the soul would immediately re-incarnate and you would be no farther forward than before ; or else that the soul should be sent back to earth again and yet again, until the Intelligence Avhich imagines itself in its ignorance to be the Soul (as a man may mistake a ro])e for a snake in the dark), realizes that it is not the soul at all, but is only a mortal instrument as finite, transitory, and limited, as the body ; until it realizes that all the aims and ambitions, the loves and hatreds of the world are but vanities, illusions of its own making, and due to that same ignorance. Until all this is seen and felt, the soul cannot detach itself in a natural way like a ripe fruit from that mind and body, those senses, intellect, and passions, which bind it so strongly to the world, in order to resume its union with the Universal Soul from which during its life in the body it has been separated. And as this is precisely the solution which is given to the prol)lem of existence by one and all of the systems of Hindoo Philosophy, it is itself a proof that what the Hindoos mean by Soul is not the Self-conscious Intelligence of European thought, drawn from what is hisfhest in man : but is a mere vague and indefinite essence, void of all mental attributes except existence, and of all physical ones except mere extension ; and drawn from that lower Vital Principle, that Anima Mundi, which rolls through all things, and is common alike to the vegetables, to brutes, and to men. If then the general principle of Soul as distinguished from that of Intelligence is the basis of the Hindoo Philosophy, the HINDOO nilLOSOPHY. S\) principle on tlic plane or level of which all its evolution has taken place, it ought to be possil)le for us to mark out before- hand the changes that can l^e rung on this principle, as seen in its successive systems and schools of thought, in the same way :as we liave found it possible to do for Greek Philosophy. The principle of Soul, then, being a doublc-sidcd essence, one side spiritual and the other material — a spiritual, vital, entity, that is to say, Iniving the material quality of extension; it is evident that, as was the case in the corresponding stage of Greek Philosophy, three changes only can be rung on it; either the spiritual side is made the efficient and all-important factor, the material side with which it is bound up beino- deo;radcd to a mere appearance or illusion ; or the material side is made the active factor, the spiritual side, or Soul proper, arising from it like an invisible mist, or exhalation ; or finally each side is •equally real, and equally independent in function and activity. No other combinations but these arc possible, and, as Ave t^hall now see, to these great main divisions the three out of the six systems of Hindoo Philosophy that arc chiefly speculative, viz. the Yedanta, the Vaiseshika, and the Sankhya systems, correspond. To begin Avith the Vedanta. In this system the Spiritual side of the Soul is all in all, and the Material side or factor Avith which it is bound up^ is degraded to a mere illusion or appearance. This philosophy, Avhich still remains the doctrine of the most enliohtened Prahmins, o-reAV immediately out of the Upanishads — that portion of the Vedas or Sacred Scriptures of the Hindoos wjiicli deals Avith the more speculative aspects of their religion, and Avhose doctrine can be summed up in one simple proposition, viz. that there is but one real Being in the T'nivcrse, the Universal Spirit or Brahma, Avho is outside Nature and Avithin Nature and one w^ith Nature : of whom all our individual souls are parts ; from whom they have emerged, and into Avhom they Avill return ; .rising from llim as a Aapoui- from the ocean, and returning 90 THE EVOLUTION OF HINDOO THOUGHT. to Him again as waters to tlie sea. Now tliese TJpanlshads are^ as I have said, part of the Religion of the Hindoos; and a& the objects of Religion can only be beings endowed with personality and will, and not mere metaphysical abstractions, this Universal Spirit or Brahma is invested with all the attributes of a personal Supreme Being, and is celebrated in strains characterizing Him by such personal epithets as the Ruler of Rulers, God of Gods, the Omniscient Lord of All Things, with a thousand eyes, hands, and feet, the Immortal One, uncreated, of spotless purity and light, diifused through endless space and yet existing and abiding in the heart, and the like. Now Avhat the Vedanta Philosophy did with this doctrine of the Upanishads on which it was founded, was, to strip it& Universal Spirit, Brahma, of the personal attributes with which,. as the object of Religion He had been endowed, and to reduce Him to a pure Philosophical Essence or Soul again ; and having done this, to attempt to explain from this Universal Soul, the origin and constitution of the AVorld. And as this Supreme Soul was the pure essence of immortal existence, without intenigence, self-consciousness, emotion, or will, it was neces- sary to account for the mortality and evanescence of all created things which in endless succession come into being and pass away — for the evil and misery, the passion and gloom tliat everywhere intermingle with and cloud the purity of all earthly joy, dashing and confounding it ; and for the grossness and Ignorance that everywhere limit and darken the purity of knowledge and truth. And this the Vedanta Philosophy docs by the simple expedient of putting before the Supreme Soul a series of parti-coloured veils, or coloured glasses if you will, in Avhich it looks, to contemplate and enjoy the images and reflections of itself which are seen there. Now these veils, or domes of coloured glass, are Ave in number, and are each made up of three separate qualities or colours, but in different proportions, viz., of Goodness or Purity which may be figured HINDOO riiiLOSornY. 91 as pure white ; of Passion and Activity which may be fignrcd as red ; and of Ignorance and Darkness which may be fignrcd as black. Of these veils the first is so nearly transparent that the Supreme Soul when it looks through it, sees itself almost in its naked purity; and when this veil is put on, the Soul, although free from all emotion, feels itself pervaded by a certain diffused happiness or bliss, as of a person in a light and dreamless sleep. AVhcn the second veil is put on — the veil of pure intelligence and self-consciousness we may call it — in which the pure white of the veil is slightly tinged with the redness of the passion which must inhere in every personality, the Supreme Soul, which is without self-conscious inteUigencc, emotion or will, which is pure and free from all evil and all activity, sees itself as a self-conscious being, fully aware of its own existence, and of its own feelings and activities, whether they be good or bad. AVhon the third veil is put on — the veil of K'orldhj intellect and judgment, the Supreme Soul, Avhich is free from all doubt, hesitation, or passion, finds itself hoping and fearing, wondering and doubting, sorroAving and rejoicing, as the shifting, changing Avorld of objects and attractions pass before its view. When the fourth veil, again, is put on — the veil of vitality — the Supreme Soul, although devoid of all motion, life, or activity, finds itself speaking and acting and moving:, eatino- and drinkino- as in some strenuous dream. And finally when the fifth and last veil — that of the material hody is put on — a veil which is made up almost of pure dark- ness, the Supreme Soul, which is infinite in extension, which is immortal and unchnngeable and free from pain and decay, finds itself cribbed and confined in this mortal cabin of a body, sub- ject to pain, to birth, growth, change, decay and death. Or in a general Avay we may say that when the first veil is put on, the Supreme Soul is conscious only of a vague diftused hapiii- ness, as of a dreamless sleep ; when the second, third, and fourth are put on, it feels or imagines itself acting and suffer- ing, hoping and fearing, doing and daring, as in a vexed and 92 Till': EVOLUTION OF HINDOO THOUGHT. troubled dream ; when the fifth, the material body is put on, it sees and feels itself a thing of flesh and blood, standing there awake and in the open day. .Vgain, when the veil is most largely composed of whiteness or purity, the Soul is conscious only of high aspirations, pure sentiments, and the nobler exercises of the imagination and heart ; when it is mixed more largely with the red and dark shades of passion and ignorance, the Soul is conscious of the conflict of fierce passions, and is filled with the lust of the eye, and the pride of life ; when it is made up mainly of darkness, the Soul is conscious of dulness and stupitlity, of pain, mortality and decay. It is then, from these diiTerent veils that the Vedanta Philo- sophy accounts for Natui-e, and for the great variety of attribute, affection, quality, and condition of body and mind ; it is from the blending of the different colours in these veils that it accounts for the spectacle everywhere seen of joy dashed with sorrow, of aspiration with baseness, of pure sentiment with selfishness, of pure truth with falsehood and ignorance. The pure white of the Universal Soul, which is without conscious- ness, emotion, passion, intelligence, or will, is by the inter- position of these parti-coloured veils or screens, seen as the moving panorama, the brilliant phantasmagory of Nature and life. But it is all an illusion. With the exception of Time and Space, Avhose objective reality has only been denied in the Idealism of Modern Philosophy, there is in reality, no parti- coloured world of good and evil, of beauty and ugliness, of happiness and misery, of light and darkness, such as we imagine we see around us ; there is no "I " as distinct from " You," from other men, and from the world of Nature; there are no separate and self-conscious minds that perceive, and judge, and know, and will, and do ; there is nothing, in truth, but the One Supreme Soul, which is blank as Space itself, which is in all, and through all, and one with all. Such is the great Vedanta system of Philosophy so prevalent among the higher Hindoo minds of the present day. And HINDOO PHILOSOrnY. 93 before passing on, it may 1)C well to pause and to note tliat the Supreme Soul in this philosophy has none of those attributes of self-conscious intelligence and will which the Supreme Cause has in Western Thought, and that these high attributes of the mind are neither part nor product of the Soul, as with us, but are, like the rest of Physical Nature, the offspring entirely of those veils of illusion with which it has surrounded itself. That is to say, Intelligence, Self-consciousness, and Will, instead of being, as with us, parts or attributes of the Sujjreme Spirit, arc in this Vedanta Philosophy, as in all the other Hindoo philosophies, part of Nature, that is to say of the matenal side of things with Avhich as its other side the Soul is bound up. Individual salvation, in consequence, or that union of the individual soul Avith the Supreme Soul Avhich is the end and aim of the Hindoos, can only be attained by the perception of the fact that the world of Nature and of human life and even the world of intelligence itself, strange as it may seem, are but the results of so many veils of illusion by which we are deceived ; and that therefore all the loves and interests which appertain to these things, must be entirely shut out from the mind and heart. Or in other words, the Supreme Soul raises up an intelligence which is no part of itself, in order to enable the Soul to separate itself from what is not itself, and from this veiy intelligence as much as from the rest ; as the seed, in the words of the great Sankaracharya, purifies the water of its mud, and then sinks to the bottom Avith the sediment when the work is done. With this great Vedanta Philosophy as starting point, a philosophy in which tho Supreme Soul plays so important a part as to reduce its material counterpart to a mere veil or illusion, it is evident that Plindoo Philosophy cannot rest, but must continue its evolution throuo-h a staoc In which the o o Material Factor shall have some more real and positive place assio-ned it. And this we have in the next s-i-cat svstem, the Sankhya. In this system the two sides have equal and 94 THE EVOLUTION OF HINDOO THOUGHT. co-ordinate functions. The niateriul side, Instead of being reduced as in tlic Vcdanta to a series of illusory veils, is made up, on the contrary, of a series of real substances corresponding to these veils In number and function, and like them made up of a triple strand of Purity or Goodness, Passion or Activity, and Ignorance or Darkness. And as in the Vcdanta the first veil, the one nearest the Supreme Soul, is represented as the cause of the other veils, so in the Sankhya the first material essence or substance, called Prakriti, with which the Soul is bound up, is the one from which the rest are evolved, — the Higher Intelligence, the Self-conscious Worldly Intellect, the Vital Principle, and last, the Material Body itself — in practically the same order, and with the same functions, as the veils in the Vedanta. The only diff"erence between the two is that Avhilc in the Vedanta it is that portion of the first veil which is made up of Darkness or Ignorance which arouses the Passion that It Is the function of the Purity or Goodness to countervail ; In the Sankhya, Passion is the element In the triple compound Prakriti, which is the primary moving power that sets In motion both Goodness and Darkness, As fort he Supreme Soul itself, Purusha, which is bound up with this Prakriti, this material side of things, instead of being all in all as in the Vedanta, where the material side is an Illusion, it is reduced In the Sankhya to the position of a mere onlooker^ as indeed was almost Inevitable In a system In which the evolu- tion of the material side accounted for everything — for the World, Nature, Life, and the Mind Itself. Nothing was left for the Supreme Soul to do, unless indeed It were by Its mere presence, as of a concealed magnet, to Avake all those elements into activity and life. Hence it is represented as absolutely impassive, and unaffiected by anything occurring either in Nature or in the body, mind, or heart of Man ; over all of which, Indeed, It sits as a brooding spectator merely. It has been compared In its relation to the evolving life of the world, HINDOO niTLOSOrUY. 95 to the lame man who sits on tlie shoulders of the blind man to be carried along with him to contemplate and enjoy the "beauties and glories of the way ; Nature, the World, and the Life of ]\Ian existing, as is said in the original, like the exhihi- tions of a dancing girl, for the delight and contemplation of the Soul. And here, too, as in the Vedanta, it is important to observe that the Supreme Soul is devoid of Intelligence, Self- consciousness, and Will ; and that these qualities instead of being, as with us, parts or attributes of the Supreme Being, are only parts or attributes of Nature, Prakriti, or that material essence with which the Soul is bound up. And hence in this system too, as in the Vedanta, individual salvation is to be attained by a knowledge which shall clearly separate all that is merely a product of Prakriti, from the Soul itself with which it is the fate of untutored ignorance to confound it; and so deliver the Soul from that bondage to sense, and in conse- quence from those weary rounds of incarnation and re-incarna- tion to which it is doomed, so long as by ignorance and passion it is attached to mortal existence. If then in the Vedanta the Supreme Soul is everything, and its material counterpart only an illusion ; and if in the Sankhya both Soul and Matter are alike real, the Soul beino- the onlooker which by its mere presence stimulates into activity and life the material side, Prakriti, which in its evolution gives birth to Mind as well as Matter ; it is evident that the circuit of Hindoo Philosophy cannot be closed until some system shall arise in which the Material side of thino-s shall be made the all- important factor, and the Soul in turn be degraded to an after- product or effect of the Material Atoms to which it is attached. And this system we have, accordini^lv, in the Vaiseshika of Kanada, the " Atom Eater " as he was called, who figured the world as made up of an infinite number of atoms of five different kinds, fire, air, earth, and water — and mind. These atoms are represented as invisible ; and under the wand of an invisible Necessity, named Adrishta (which is itself the result 96 THE EVOLUTION OF IIIxNDOO THOUGHT. of works and actions done in a previous Avorld), are arranged and marshalled into aggregates, first of twos, and then of threes, at Avhich point they form the visible pnrticlcs of fire, air, earth, and water, as well as of what is called mind. Now it is important to observe that this thing called mind, is, like the rest, built up of invisible atoms of mind. It has a definite existence in time and space, and will only allow one tliought at a time to pass through it to the Soul ; and being, besides, only a combination or aggregate of the original and eternal atoms of mind, it is decomposable into its elements again, and so is as transient an existence as any other natural product, coming into being like all things else, and like them passing away. Now it is these visible, tangible, and otherwise sensible masses or afjo-reo-ates of fire, air, earth, w^ater, and mind, that, when still further combined among themselves in different proportions, make up, according to the Vaiseshika system, the infinite variety and complexity of the world and of human life. And just as in the Vedanta System the world of men and things is accounted for as the result of the refractions of a number of parti-coloured veils or glass domes of illusion with Avhich the Soul is sur- rounded, and in the centre of which it sits enshrouded ; and as in the Sankhya System it is these same veils that are transformed into real substances made up of the same three qualities or parts, viz., Purity, Passion, and Ignorance ; so in the Vaiseshika it is again the same, or practically the same, veils or divisions that appear, but in this case they are composed of infinite a(TO'veo;ates of atoms, in difterent forms and staf>;es of combination and complexity. Such is the material side of this system. As for the other side, the Supreme Soul, it is the same as in all the other Hindoo Systems, that is to say it is infinite, eternal, without self-consciousness, intelligence, or will, without pain, or pleasure, or motion, or any other quality wdiatever except mere extension. And as for the individual souls of men, they are represented as each diffused through the infinite space like HINDOO nilLOSOPIIY. h lumian attributes are but us the vapours and exhalations that arise from the particular •combination of bodily and mental atoms to which they are attached ; and that salvation is only to be reached Avhen these individual souls become as neutral in quality, pure in tint, and free from all admixture, as the Supreme Soul itself. These three systems being representative of the only three radical changes that can be rung on the double-sided principle •of Soul as the Supreme Cause of things, Avith them Hindoo l*hilosophy, in so far as it is made up of speculative systems, .practically ends. In the Vedanta system, as we have seen, the Soul side was everything and the Material side nothing, an illusion ; in the Sankhya, both the Soul side and the Material side were real and independent entities, with distinct and reciprocal functions ; and now in the Vaiseshika the Material side is everything, and the Soul side, in its turn, is reduced to H 08 THE EVOLUTION OF HINDOO THOUGHT. a mere after-product or effect. But besides these distinctively speculative systems, there are three otliers, the Nyaya, the Yoga, and Mimansa, which are not World-systems, but which beginning by accepting the current beliefs of the orthodox in reference to the Supreme Soul and the like, or despairing of finding the truth in systems made by human reason, concern themselves rather with the kind of conduct or attitude of soul necessary to obtain salvation, than with the knowledge which in the systems we have just examined is the indispensable means to that end. These more purely ethical systems have existed in all ages, appearing in and among the speculative systems, and keeping a kind of running accompaniment to them Avithout in any way interfering with the natural course of their evolution. Among the Greeks, for example, Socrates was the first who, discarding the physical and metaphysical theories of his time as problematical at best, and of but secondary importance, made it his first concern to Instruct men in conduct and virtue as the great aim of life ; the dialectic method he employed, although afterwards used by Plato to solve the problem of the Universe as a whole, being invented by Socrates in the first instance for the more immediate object of determining what in any given case was justice, and what injustice, what was virtue, and what vice; questions which, the sopliistries of the Sophists had so perplexed as to make it almost impossible to determine. Among his followers, the Cynics who constituted the left wing, made, like him, a virtuous life the end of their philosophy, using the method of dialectic rather to confii-m them in their contempt for the ordinary decencies, the innocent enjoyments of life, than, like Socrates, to find out by means of it what the golden mean was in reference to all these things. The Stoics, again, although they had a distinct speculative system of their own, still made conduct and virtue and the best means of attaining them, the great aim of their speculations ; Avhile in Christianity, while the fathers and the doctors of the Church were engaged in I HINDOO rniLOSOPIlY. 9U constructing its creed and philosophy, the great masses, accepting the doctrines without question at their hands, sought salvation by conduct cliiefly, and by tlie attitude of soul known as faith, or conversion. In Modern Philosophy, too, you have mystical systems like that of Boelnne, or systems founded on faith and belief like that of Jacol)i, interspersed among the purely speculative systems, or running side by side with them. So, too, then with the Hindoo Philosophy. Besides the Vedanta, Sankhya, and A^aiseshika systems which were primarily theories of the World, you have the Nyaya system which dealt chiefly with syllogism and logic ; the Mimansa which made the Veda or Saci'ed Scriptures its only God, representing it as having existed from eternity ; and lastly the Yoga system of Patanjali. This system begins by accepting the belief in the Supreme Being as fundamental, and then goes on to ask by what conduct or mode of life, union with Him is to be attained ? By distracting the mind from worldly things is the obvious solution ; and in devising expedients for doing this the ingenuity of this philosophy exhausts itself. Among other things you are exhorted to constantly repeat to yourself the mystic syllable Om, to practise forbearance and religious observances, to put your body in certain favourable postures, to hold the breath, to restrain the senses, and, steadying the mind by contemplation. to try and get into a trance by fixing the eyes steadily on tin; tip of the nose ! And, indeed, so profound in many cases does the trance become by means of these exercises, that, as Sir Monier-WIlliams relates, men have been known to remain immovably fixed for so long a time that birds have built nests in their hair, and ants have thrown up nio'.nids as high as their waists; they have stared at the sun till their sight was extinguished, kept their fists clenched till the nails have grown through their hands, and have kept their arms in the air until they have become fixed there, and the flesh has witlicrcd to the bone. 100 THE EVOLUTION OF HINDOO THOUGHT. Now the object of nil these systems of conduct, whether Modern, or Greek, or Hindoo, is to get rid of those cravings of the senses and appetites which prevent the union of what is best in us with the Supreme Spirit. Some, like the Stoics, accom- plish this by trampling on the senses ; others, like the monks and ascetics, by mortifying them or starving them ; others again like the Yogis, by putting them to sleep in a trance ; but it is only in Christianity that an attempt is made to accomplish the same object, not by mortifying the senses and appetites, but by drawing them off to a supreme object of love and devotion elsewhere. Such are the six systems of Hindoo Philosophy ; and with them the principle of Soul as prime factor in the explanation of the phenomena of the world and of human life, exhausts itself. To turn these philosophies into the religions of the great Hindoo masses, all you have to do is to give life to these abstract essences by endowing them with personality and will. For the Supreme Soul of the Vedanta, for example, you substitute the god. Brahma; for the Supreme Soul, Purusha, of the Sankhya system, and the material principle or Prakriti with which it is bound up, you substitute the male god Siva, and the goddess Sakti ; while for the multitudinous variety of Nature, good and evil, through which the Supreme Soul is manifested, you have the gods Vishnu the preserver, and Siva the destroyer, with their numberless ears, and eyes, and hands. With these preliminaries we shall now be the better able to understand tlie great system of Buddhism, and to estimate more justly the part that is likely to be played in the future both of Religion and Philosophy, by the system now known as Esoteric Buddhism or Theosophy. But before passing on to this, it is necessary with a view to future developments, to observe that in all these systems of Hindoo Philosophy there is an entire absence of Science in the modern sense of that term. As for Physical Science, there is of course absolutely none ; there is nowhere any physical relation established between one HINDOO PHILOSOPHY. 101 tiling and another, no line of connexion whereby when the first thing or fact is given, the second may be foreseen to follow. And as for Mental Science, instead of a system of relations being established between any one part of the mind and every other and the whole, by which you are able to predict that when the first impulse or emotion arises the second may be expected to follow, you have a mere list, catalogue, or in- ventory of faculties or powers, — attention, memory, judgment, love, hatred, envy, and the rest, — flung dow^n before you as ex- planation of the mind ; much in the same way as the chemical elements might be flung down in a heap as explanation of the constitution of the material world, without any knowledge of the laws of their special combinations and affinities. For beyond the fact that you are told, as in the Vedanta and Sankhya systems, that of the bodily and mental elements which make up the different sheaths or veils that constitute the world, the first ^jro(fuces the second, the second the third, and so on ; or as in the Vaiseshika that from certain original elements of body and mind all the differentiated powers, qualities, and attributes of matter and mind are produced; beyond this, neither the icJiy nor how required by Science in its explanation of things is ever so much as hinted at ; — a fact the supreme importance of which will be abundantly apparent as the course of this evolution proceeds. CHAPTEE II. BUDDHISM. TN the preceding cliapter we have seen that three radical changes only can be rung on the double-sided pantheistic principle of Soul, where that principle is invoked as the Supreme Cause of Things, and that these three changes are in fact repre- sented in the three distinct stages through Avhich Hindoo Pliilo- sophy has passed in its evolution,viz.,in theVedanta, the Sankhya, and the Vaiseshika systems respectively. In the first system, the Vedanta, we saw that the spiritual aspect of the Soul was so aggrandized, that the material side of things was reduced to a mere appearance or illusion ; in the Sankhya that both sides came in for equal, independent, and co-ordinate shares in the common result ; Avhile in the Vaiseshika, the material side was so prominent that the Supreme Soul, although it existed, yet played no active part in the system of things at all, while the Human Soul was reduced to the dependent position of a mere effect of the groupings and combinations of its mind-atoms, which, strange to say, constitute its material side. With these three systems the general principle of Soul exhausts itself as Supreme Cause of things ; and the only position left for Hindoo Philosophy to take up is to deny the existence of Soul altogether, both Divine and human. And this was the step taken by Buddha. Of the details of the Buddhist system, the researches of scholars have furnished us with material in such abundance. BUDDHISM. 103 that probably little more of importance remains to be known ; but oi the successive links in the chain of thought and reflec- tion by which Buddha, brooding and pondering over the various systems of religion and philosophy around him, arrived at his results, no sufficiently consecutive account has yet been given. This deficiency I shall now do my best to su])ply, and shall •endeavour so to re-arrange the great central ideas of his system, that its lesser streams of thought shall be seen to flow from them by a natural and spontaneous sequence. And this can probably be best done by enquiring at the outset, what that aim or end is, which not only the Hindoo Religion but its systems of Philosophy propose as the result of their labour and speculation? The answer in a word is, the attaining of that state of bliss which is believed to follow from the union and absorption of the human Soul in the Divine; and the no less important consequence of this, viz., the escape of the individual from the necessity of re-birth and re-incarnation on earth. And this latter consequence introduces us at once to one of the most curious differences between the Eastern and the Western mind, and to a view of the world and of life which to European nations is scarcely credible. With us, life itself and the con- tinuance of life — and the more and fuller the life the better — is an end in itself, to be bought, if need be, by the sacrifice of iilmost all else besides ; but to those poor Hindoos, what with ages of despotism, and a certain impassivity of nature inherent or acquired, life, which to us is u blessing, is a real curse and sorrow ; and the prospect of birth and re-birth on earth, which would give us no great concern, is as cheerless and hopeless as the rounds of an everlasting treadmill, or an endless iournev to and fro across burning or barren sands. And all the more so, perhaps, because with them the task of shaking off the burden of life on earth is so difficult. To us this seems a simple matter enough, and anyone who is prepared to chance the life to come, jnay at any time get rid of life on earth once and for all, by a bare bodkin. But to the Hindoo, neither death by his own 104 THE EVOLUTION OF HINDOO THOUGHT. hand nor by that of another can avail anything, so long as the merit necessary for union with the Supreme Soul has not been attained. So long as any the smallest trace of selfishness, of love of the world and its vanities, adheres to the soul, it must descend again to the Earth for further rounds of re-incarnation ; and hence the extremes of asceticism and self -mortification to which the Hindoo will cheerfully submit, in order to escape from that dreaded fate. With these preliminary observations, which may serve as- key-note to the Hindoo way of looking at life, we may now remark that that union of the Individual Soul with the Supreme Soul which is to free men from further re-birth on Earth, is represented both in Hindoo religion and philosophy as a state of supreme bliss ; and it was owing to the logical contradictions- which Buddha encountered when pondering on this doctrine of supreme bliss and the means of reaching it, that his own system of doctrine took its rise. For in all these Hindoo systems, it will be remembered, it was a main article of belief that no union of the human soul with the Divine Soul Ava» possible, until the former had purified itself of the last trace of selfishness and worldly desire. Now it is evident that no act done in the present with the object of a future reward, can be altogether free from that secret self-regard which, according to all these systems, must be got rid of before the Human Soul can unite with the Supreme Soul. Buddha had already discovered this in his own experience, for having retired to the forest to put in practice the asceticism of the Brahmin hermits — their penances, and fastings, and bodily and mental mortifications. — he found that he was still as far from the goal as ever. For,, however much these asceticisms may have chastened his bodily desires and appetites, they did not enable him to get rid of that secret pride, self-love, and complacency which such so-called meritorious acts tended to engender — and certainly not at all of that longing for future bliss on which the eye of the devotee was for ever fixed. He saw, in short, that they were merely BUDDI1IS3I. 105 the sacrifices of present bodily and mental pleasure, for the sake of a greater pleasure by and l)ye. lie was accordingly constrained to give them up, much to the disgust of his com- panions. As for the rites and ceremonies, the prayers and sacrifices of the Brahmins, these were still more palpably only sacrifices of present bodily or worldly good for the sake of a greater future good, and were equally of no avail ; while as for the systems of the philosophers, they were still more con- tradictory. For while on the one hand they represented the union of the Individual Soul with the Supreme Soul as a state of perfect bliss, on the other hand, as in the Vedanta, they represented this supreme bliss as due to the first of the veils of illusion which the soul puts on ; and as all these veils must be stripped off the soul before it can unite with the Supreme Soul, it is evident that that union cannot be one of bliss. So that whether we take the religion of the people, or the doctrines of the philosophers, it is evident that the bliss for which they all ahke yearn, and the cessation from earthly existence which was their dream, were on their own logic impossible. And as this was due entirely to the belief in the continued existence of a ])ersonal identity called the Soul, through all the changes both of body and mind, Buddha was impelled to deny the existence of any soul whatever, whether human or Divine. But, as to take this momentous step was to break with the whole tradition of Plindoo Thought which, as w'e have seen, was built from foundation to roof on this double-sided principle of Soul, it was natural that it should give him pause ; and indeed it was not until after prolonged meditation under the Bo-tree, that he saw his way to a scheme of the World superior in harmony to the old Soul-theory, and equal if not superior to it in meeting the intellectual and moral wants of the time : and so Avas finally impelled to break away for ever from the doctrine of Soul, and once and for all to repudiate it. Now as to these wants of the intellect and heart, there were three at least for which any scheme must provide, if it would lOG THE EVOLUTION OF HINDOO THOUGHT. meet with acceptance either from the j)hilosoplicrs or the vulgar. It must provide some plausible theory of the World and of Life, some credible explanation of the origin and significance of this moving panorama of animals and plants and men ; it nmst provide means for the cessation of birth and re- birth on earth ; and it must provide some state of blissful peace and rest, here or hereafter. And all these wants Buddha felt that he could satisfactorily meet without the belief in any Soul whatever, Human or Divine, and without going beyond the circle of the thought and speculation of his time. The first thing, however, was to get rid of the doctrine of the Soul. How was this to be done 1 How explain the world without it f And how make the mind hold together as a possible existence without it ? ...his was Buddha's first concern, and to jiccomplish it he had recourse to arguments drawn from the mouths of the philosophers themselves. For he pointed out that the feeling of continued personal identity and self-con- sciousness from which the belief in a soul was drawn, was, according to all the systems, a part not of the soul, but of the material counterpart that is always bound up with it, coming into being like other material existences, and like them passing away. In the Vedanta System, for example, it will be remem- bered, the feeling of self-consciousness was produced by one of the veils of illusion with Avhich the Soul surrounded itself; in the Sankhya, it was produced by Prakriti, the material counter- part bound up Avith the Soul ; Avhile in the Yaiseshika it was produced by one of those temporary aggregates of mind-atoms which, like the atoms of fire, air, earth, and water, existed independently of the soul. According tlierefore to the philo- sophers themselves, self-consciousness or the feeling of pei'sonal identity was either an illusion, or it was only a temporary aggregate of sensations, tui-ning up in the great flux of things. It was thus but a broken reed on which to rest the belief in a Soul which, instead of a temporary appearance, was an eternal and abiding realltv : which instead of being one in nature with BUDDHISM. 107 self-consciousness, as in our Western thought, was eternally the union of their individual souls with the Supreme Soul, and,. in consequence, a cessation from re-incarnation on earth, Buddha held out to his followers, besides the same freedom from re- incarnation, a blissful existence in tins life, now and here, even if not in another life also. Besides, Avliile what the Hindoo- Religion and Philosophies promised, although beautiful in theory, was impossible of attainment while the existence of a continuous and individual soul was assumed ; what Buddha promised was within the reach of all. And all this he was able to do for them, by a new synthesis, merely, of doctrines already held in one or other of the existing Hindoo Systems, and without violating any of the distinctive features of Hindoo thought, — with the single exception, of course, of the denial of the existence of Souls. But this denial of a continuous ^personality or individuality, however scientifically true, was so opposed to the intuitions of men, that Buddhism, after having over-run the greater part of India, was driven out in turn again by Brahminism ^^■hich, Avith its doctrine of the soul, was more \\\ harmony, at that stage of culture, with the intuitions and consciousness of men. And now perhaps it may be as well to sum up the general significance of these Hindoo systems of Religion and Philosoph\^ BUDDHISM. 115 by contrasting tlicm in tlicir great characteristics with our "Western modes of thought. And this cannot be better done, perhaps, than by comparing them as to the way in \vhich they propose to attain the great end of all religions, in so far, that is, as religions affect the minds and characters of men. Now as the lower faculties of our nature, our self-interest and passions, are stronger than our higher feelings and our regard for the welfare of others, we may say that the main object of all religious and ethical systems has been to devise means whereby these positions shall be reversed, and the higher instincts of our nature be so re-inforced and strengthened, that notwith- standing their relative weakness they may be made practically supreme. And this, it is obvious, can be done either by weakening and depressing our lower nature, or by stimulating and streno-theninsr our hioher, or bv both together. Now the scheme of the Hindoo Religion and Philosophy is one of pure and absolute repression, a dead mechanical round of pure asceticism, self-mortification, and penance, with such bodily or worldly sacrifices as are involved in the offering of w^orldly goods or in the refraining from physical and bodily comforts. In this scheme, the higher nature is kept uppermost, as we see, not by any direct re-info rcement of itself from without, but by the direct weakening and depression of the lower nature. In Buddhism, the whole of these rites, ceremonies, sacrifices, and offerings are swept away, the extremes of asceticism and self- mortification are avoided as useless and unnecessary, and only such repression is put on appetites and desires as shall prevent their intruding on the field of consciousness ; the main reliance being placed on the process of starving them out, by denying the existence of the soul, or continuous identity, in wliose service they are yoked, and thus cutting off the motives that keep up their activity ; trusting that when the motives for selfishness are killed out, there will l)e no more reason for withholding our natural sympathies from others, than thi-ee would be for a condennied man withholding the truth on the 116 THE EVOLUTION OF HINDOO THOUGHT. morning of his execution, or for a balloon not rising in the air when the ropes that keep it to the earth are cut away. With Christianity, on the other hand, all is different ; and the difference is typical of the toto coelo difference between Eastern and Western thought. Christianity differs from both Hindooism and Buddhism in the same way as the principle of love differs from the principle of asceticism, as the solicitude of affection differs from the sordid calculations of hope and fear. It acts, not by repressing the lower, but by stimulating the higher nature ; raising it above itself, as it were, by holding up before it for its contemplation a Divine ideal and object of love, in whose presence the lower desires shrink into the shade. In other words, while Hindooism would keep the higher nature uppermost, by the direct but negative method of killing out the lower, and Buddhism bv the indirect but still neo-ative method of cutting away the motives that feed its root, Christianity would accomplish the same object by the positive method of directly stimulating, strengthening, and aggrandizing the higher nature, by holding up before it a supreme object of devotion and love. Now if these differences correspond to differences in the very genius of Eastern and Western Thought, it is not very likely they will stop here, but will be found to run into every aspect of practical life and conduct. Hindooism, for example, repre- sents the extreme of Individualism. The one object of its votaries is to save their own souls, not by working for the welfare of others but by attending solely to their own salvation, not by following through love the footsteps of a high personal exemplar wherever they may lead, but by practising a low and selfish asceticism, and by keeping a profit and loss account of merit and demerit. It has no regard, therefore, for the welfare of the family, let alone for that of the State, or the world at large ; and to this disregard, the doctrine of re-Incarna- tion, which means the Incarnation in their children not of their own sculs but of the souls of other men, still further lends I BUDDHISM. 117 itself. InJeecl, neither Ilindooism nor Buddhism, being based, the one on the doctrine of Soul as the Supreme Cause of things, and the other on its mere denial, can find support in their systems for any doctrine of love among men ; for that senti- ment can only get inspiration from an intelligent, loving First Cause, and not from a mere blind Vital Principle or Soul. Now Christianity no doubt, too, is primarily individualistic, for the first object of the believer is to save his own soul ; yet owing to its o;ettin2; its constrainino; force from the love of Christ, and the fatherhood of God, it permits and encourages all that can make for the good of the family, the State, and the World : feelino; that in this it is doino; the Avill of God. Asrain the object of Ilindooism being to attain to bliss by the direct suppression of all forms of desire, all the great work of secular life which springs from the stimulus of one or other form of desire — of wealth, of power, of fame, of applause — is directly repressed; and life itself, with nothing on which to exercise itself, must become a weariness, and re-birth therefore a misery and sorrow. It is obvious, then, that Civilization, which is the record of the achievements of man when pushed on by the desire to satisfy his wants, — his want of what is good to eat, good to Mear, good to ease the friction of life and of society, good for peace of mind, good for the satisfaction <»f the eye and heart, and the like, — it is obvious that Civilization, to men who can live on a little rice, and with whom the satisfaction of these desires could only serve to lay up a store of future demerit, must be an anomaly ; and, since for the same reasons, Science, in the modern sense of the term, and in its application to the arts of life, has made no advance ; must remain stagnant and unprogressive. Buddhism, too, has no need of Science ; for although, like Christianity, it makes the good of others one of its means of Salvation, it is not their bodily or mental welfare but only the welfare of their souls that is its object, and not of their souls in the sense of expanding and enlarging them, but only in the sense of the merit or demerit, x\\v profit or loss tliey 118 THE EVOLUTION OF HINDOO THOUGHT. are laying up for themselves aguinst the day of judgment or re-incarnation. It supplies, therefore, no motive to forward Science, or to apply it to the arts of life. And as the object of Buddhism is the suppression of all de'sire, it gives no stimulus to material progress or to Civilization. Indeed one may observe here, that neither liindooism nor Buddhism could be universal religions, were it for nothing more than that they both require that others shall supply their bodily wants while they sit in meditation ; and therefore their success, viz., the getting rid of desire, is only possible on the condition that others shall have enough desire to work to support them. With Christianity, on the other hand, where the desires, instead of being repressed, find their legitimate sphere in working for the good of the family, the State, and the World, Science is directly stimulated and encouraged for the sake of its practical results ; and would be more so, indeed, were it not for fear of its speculative effects on the Mosaic Cosmogony with which Christianity happens to be bound up. Civilization, in con- sequence, is to that extent directly promoted by Christianity. Summing up, then, we may say of Buddhism, that it is the most determined attempt ever made to solve the problem of the world not onlv without God or the Soul, but without either Civilization or the influence of environing conditions. The attempt, however, to make of it a universal religion was hopeless in the face of the higher point at which Western Thouijht had arrived. For althoua-h its beautiful ethical precepts were in many ways identical with those of Christianity, still the difference in the position occupied by these ethics in the systems of Buddha and of Christ respectively is as great as the difference in the position occupied by the Laws of Nature, in Stoicism and in Modern Science. In Stoicism, although the Laws of Nature were held up as inflexible and inviolable, as a Fate to which all must bow, still no attempt was made to discover any of these laws ; and in the absence of the knowledge of the particular laws, no ad\'ance was possible BUDDHISM. 119 citlicr in knowledge of the world, in civilization, or in the arts of life. So, too, with Buddhism. Although its central precept, its in Christianity, is the doing good to others, that good consists in the cutting away of all desire, and therefoi'c no -effective motive is given for improving the material welfare of men. Its power of really helping others, accordingly, could go no farther than sitting idly weeping over them or witli them, or in the barren comfort of wishing them well ; whereas ■Christianity, by encouraging Science in the application of its discoveries to the welfare of the family, the State, and the World, really does the good which Buddhism may desire indeed, but which, from its very genius and spirit, it can take no step to carry into effect. CHAPTER III. MODERN THEOSOPHY TN the present chapter I propose to complete my study of Hindoo Thought by some account of that curious modern mixture of Hindooism and Buddhism which is known as Theosophy. I do this the more readily inasmuch as it will not only give me an opportunity of discussing certain great in- tellectual fallacies by which the human mind has at all times been deceived, but will also help to dissipate the exaggerated pretensions which have been made for this particular system by its modern disciples. For this ancient wisdom of the Eastern Sages, this philosophy of the Mahatmas or Masters, professes^ it is to be remembered, to contain a more comprehensive, harmonious, and sublime scheme of the Universe, than that unfolded in the Modern Philosophy of Evolution ; and to meet and satisfy the higher emotions and needs of the intellect and heart better than the Religion of Christ. I had myself stumbled on the subject during the course of my studies of Hindoo Thought, and imagining that perhaps it would form only a natural sequence or pendant to the other Hindoo Systems, I entered on the perusal of Mr. Sinnett's " Esoteric Buddhism," the work in which the Mahatmas first gave their knowledge to the Western World, with somewhat languid interest. But I had not gone far when I found that it con- tained a system of Cosmogony, Ethics, and Metaphysics, more MODERN THEOSOPIIY. 121 complex, ingenious, and harmoniously adjusted, than any I had yet known; a system elaborated and refined to a point of detail, of which there was no example in orthodox Buddhism or in any of the other Hindoo Systems, and to which the system of Evolution of Mi-. Herbert Spencer with its magnifi- cent and far-related symmetries, alone in Western Thought affords a parallel. I was amazed at the stupendousness and harmony of the scheme, rather than convinced by it, but I nevertheless felt that here was a system of Thought before which one must pause, a system which one could not skip, but Avhich would stand confronting one until it had been reckoned Avith, and in some straightforward and legitimate manner put out of the way. I had at that time been reading a good deal about thought-transference, hypnotism, clair- voyance, and the like, and Avas no doubt carried away into allowing the j^owers of the ^lahatmas a greater range than, as we shall see, can legitimately be claimed for them ;. and it was not until I saw that the !Maliatmas had assumed for these iDOAvers of clairvoyance, etc., an extension into spheres of truth not legitimately open to them, that I perceived that the picturesque symmetries and ingenious harmonies Avhich had at first so much impressed me, were not necessarily the expression of real facts at all — facts, that is to say, which could be seen by us all if our faculties had been sharpened by training and exercise to the due pitch — but, on the contrary, that they need only be mere paper-harmonies ; harmonies, that is, Avhich if one knew the precise difficulties to be overcome could be Avorked out on paper, like prize puzzles, by successive generations of ino-enious monks exercisins; their imairination and Avorking perhaps, on some earlier design or pattern that had come down to them. And then, too, I perceived that however high and noble the aims of the Thcosophists might be, and this I readily admit, if once this illegitimate method of the self-hypnotist and clairvoyant, Avere to supersede the ordinary and legitimate methods of Science, viz., observation, experiment, induction, 122 THE EVOLUTION OF HINDOO THOUGHT. and verification — not only would men be perplexed with the world of ghosts and shades and malignant spirits of the departed which the Thcosophists have conjured up for us, but it would bring back all those superstitions of the Middle Ages which we have at last and with so much labour happily out- grown. The witch and the black magician would again be with us ; the sorcerer would take the place of the Scientific Physician and of the careful observer of Natural Law ; and the more nervous portion of mankind self-hypnotized by their own superstitions, would again be Avhipped into madness by the imaginary presence among them of hosts of malignant but invisible foes. And now I saw why it was that the high priests both of Religion and Science had passed by Theosophy in silence. The truth is, it does not lay itself open to refutation either by Physical Science or by Religion. Not by Science ; for it professes to exhibit its harmonies on a plane to which Science does not pretend to have as yet been able to penetrate, and by means of mental powers to Avhieh Science with its limitation to the five senses and the instruments that aid them, is a stranger. Nor can it be refuted by Religion ; for it simply and frankly opposes the authority and revelation of the Mahatmas to the authority and revelation of Jesus and Mahomet, and nothing more can be said. If refuted at all, it would most easily be done by the method which the Zoologist would use to refute the claims of some strange and newly- discovered mammal that Mas being forced on his notice ; from the ])oint of view, viz., of its philosophical genealogy, or the position it occupies in the evolutionary chain of World- Philosophy as a whole. And one Avould make the same reply to Theosophy that the Scientist would to the stranger who should come from Australia, bringing with him specimens of its flora and fauna, and who should contend that their rich and luxuriant foliage or their particular beauties of structure rendered it probable that they would supersede the flora and fauna of the AYestern "World. The Scientist would reply that MODERN THEOSOPIIY. 12 o this result must be for ever impossible, as the forms in question — kangaroos, ferns, and palm-like trees — were the lineal descendants and existing representatives of tliose earlier and lower forms of life which during the Jurassic period covered the entire globe, but which, owing to geological catachysms, had become imprisoned in Australia and the adjacent islands, Avhile the flora and fauna of the mainland had gone on to the development of higher and higher forms. In the same way one would endeavour to prove that Theosophy, like some opossum among the higher mammalia, is the sole representative in the Western World of a type and mode of thought which attained its culmination in the East some two thousand years ago, but Avhich cut off since then from European influences has remained stagnant, while European Thought has steadily gone on evolving into higher and higher forms. And one might go farther and contend that far from superseding Vv^estern modes of Thought as its followers believe, it will not even be able to unite with them so as to take Its place as an element in the philosophical evolution of the future. But I must limit myself for the present to the direct treatment of Its two great cardinal features, viz., its Method, and Its Doctrine of the Planetary Chain. In doing this, I shall make no apology for treating the matter seriously, ridicule of the system having already had its day ; and the discussion, at any rate, will serve to throw Into clearer relief some of those curious tricks of Intellectual sleight- of-hand by which, in this motley age of Spiritualism, liationalism, Scientific Materialism, and Religious Dogmatism, the beliefs and imaginations of men have been entrapped, fascinated, or subdued. To begin, then, with the Instrument or Method by wliieh the Mahatmas have arrived at their knowledge of the Con- stitution of the World, and of tlie end, aim, and meaning of existence. Now of all the characteristics of a system of Philosophy, this of the ^Method or Instrument by which it arrives at truth is by far the most important. Whether a 124 THE EVOLUTION OF HI>iDOO THOUGHT. system relies mainly on the testimony of the outer physical senses, as in Mr. Spencer's Philosophy of Evolution, or on the testimony of the inner spiritual senses, as in the poetic philo- sophies of Bacon, Goethe, Emerson, and Carlyle ; whether,, with Cardinal Newman, it uses the " Illative Sense," or, like the ^Metaphysicians, the merely logical and formal Under- standincr : Avhether it makes the satisfaction of the heart its main criterion, as in the higher religions, or employs the method of clairvoyance and hypnotism, as is done by the Mahatmas, — on this question of the " instrument " or method, as on the right or wrong focussing of a camera, will depend either the truth and reality of the resulting picture, or its false- ness, exaggeration, and deformity. I shall not, therefore, apologize for asking the reader to observe with me the cunning^ and dexterous manipulation with which the Mahatmas, in pre- senting their system to the World, have substituted for the genuine results of their method, totally different and illegitimate ones, as if they were one and the same thing. Their method, as I have said, is the method of the clairvoyant, the thought- reader, the hypnotist, or the spiritualistic medium — it matters not Avhich, for in essence they are all alike — and the one indispensable condition to success is, that the things they reveal while in the trance-like state shall be previously known to some living mind or minds with whom the medium is able to put himself en rapport. In this state, it is now generally admitted, the medium can do many strange and wonderful things. He can, for example, tell you the number of a bank- note known only to its possessor, he can find his way to the spot where a hidden pin lies, he can read the contents of sealed letters, and can even recall circumstances and events in the life of others which have passed quite out of their consciou;* memory. Or, again, in his capacity of crystal-gazer he can look at a finger-ring and tell you the romance of its history, at the panels of a room and uncover again the deeds and scenes of which they were the witness, at the ruins of a city wall and re- MODERN THEOSOPHY. 125 trace the steps of its prosperity and decay. But all this he can do only on one condition, viz., that the facts in question are known to one or other of the persons present at the seance, or to those -with whose mind he has been able to put himself in communication. Now in all this, it is evident that there is no increase of knowledge either of the facts or of the laws of Nature or of human life, but only its transfer or exchange. The con- tents of one mind are picked and appropriated by another, and the sum-total of knowledge in the world remains the same as before. And hence it is that no clairvoyant, thought-reader, or mesmerist has ever professed to have added anything by his art to the existing knowledge of Nature or of human life. He has never made any discovery by it in mechanics, physics, chemistry, biology, or botany ; has never by invention applied discoveries in these sciences to the arts of life ; and has never thrown any new light on history, or on the causes that regulate the rise and fall of Societies or of States. Indeed, unless someone whose thoughts he can pick has already known these things before him, he can utter no word; and until the astronomer, the zoologist, and the traveller have spoken, he must remain dumb as to the constitution of the ^loon or Mars, as to the life of the deep sea beds, and as to the interior of dark and impenetrable continents. And as for his knowledge of the laws of that human mind whose passing thoughts he can pick so easily, one would as soon expect to get an essay of Bacon or a play of Shakespeare from a schoolboy, as from him. But to do him justice, he has made no pretence to be able by his method to do any of these things. And now observe the difference in the attitude and pose of the Mahatmas. Their object is the same as that of the medium, viz., to pass as quickly and easily as possible into that trance- like state into which a hypnotized or mesmerized person is thrown ; their means, too, are the same, viz., the fixing the attention steadily on some object — in their case, as is recom- mended by the Yoga Philosophy, usually on the tip of the 126 THE EVOLUTION OF HINDOO THOUGHT. nose ! There is no reason, therefore, why then' powers should differ in kind from those of the ordinaiy medium, however much, owing to their greater asceticism and more systematic training, they may differ in degree, as for example in the clearness of their trance-perceptions, the distance to which their mind can be projected, and the like. And yet, with a hardihood ta which I can remember no parallel, they have calmly assumed that because they can read off with facility such facts and events as are known to other minds, they could equally read them were they altogether unknown. And, indeed, at the first blush the two things seem so alike, and it seems to make so little difference whether you can read off the facts from other men's minds or read them off independently, that their disciples have been completely taken in. And yet when you come to consider it, there is as deep a gulf fixed between the two things, as between heaven and earth. Tlie one, as we have seen, gives no increase of knowledge, the other is the virtual assumption of all knowledge ; the one goes no farther than the modest claims of the thought-reader, the other boldly claims the omniscience of a God. Once allow the Mahatmas this omniscience, and it follows that nothing in heaven or earth or sea can be concealed from their gaze. And accordingly we find them claiming, and their disciples admitting, that they could, if they would, settle for us all those disputed questions about the inner constitution of the Sun, the nature of the Ether and other elemental forces, and the like, on which men and Science have been so Ions; eno-ao-ed : while as for what takes place within the mere limits of our Solar System, they are as familiar with it as if it were their own back o-arden. And this claim of omniscience on the part of poor mortals like themselves, their disciples instead of baulking at, have swallowed with as much credulity and easy good faith as yokels at a country fair. Stiffly upheld in their belief by the phenomena of hypnotism and thought-transference which in all simplicity they imagine to be the same sort of thing, but differing only in degree, they have MODERN THEOSOPHY. 127 yielded themselves up to this claim to omniscience on the part of the Mahatmas without a murmur of protest or suspicion, dog- gedly upholding the claim themselves, and indignantly repudiat- ing any doubt cast on it by others. And all because some poor clairvoyant or thought-reader is able to read the passing thouirhts of other minds ! For it must be remembered that the belief in the ^Nlahatmas rests not on any personal experience which the disciple himself has of these powers, but on the false assumption that they are really and logically analagous with those other powers of which he has experience, viz., of the thought-reader and hypnotist. Probably no more successful piece of intellectual legerdemain has ever been played off in the history of human thought, and considering how gross and palpable is the deception, when once pointed out, none more readily or greedily swalloAved. How gross the deception is, and to what ludicrous lengths it will carry the disciple Avheit once firmly entertained, can nowhere be better seen than in the case of the author of " Esoteric Buddhism."* If, like tlio rest, he has been betrayed by a false analogy into believing that the things that are seen by clairvoyants and thought- readers in a trance are the real things themselves, and not the mere thoughts of the things as they exist in other minds, then it follows that these things must have a real objective existence m fact. And hence we have him gravely declaring that the astral plane is croAvded not only Avith all the thoughts, ideas, wishes. and passions of all the human beings who have ever existed, but that every mountain, river, or building has also left its imao-e there, and will continue to leave it for immeasurable periods of time. And not only these, but tlie ghost of every shop window, market cart, and hansom cab, even of every old hat and pair of trousers, is to be found there also I To such a depth of absurdity has he been reduced by not perceiving that to see the thoughts of things as they exist in other minds — and this is all lie had any reason to expect from the method of •Nineteenth Century, August, 1S94. 128 THE EVOLUTIOX OF HINDOO THOUGHT. the Mahatmas — is not quite the same thing as the omniscience involved in their claim to see the thino;s themselves. But if there be still any doubt, and if further proof be wanting that neither clairvoyants, thought-readers, nor Mahatmas can see what to mortal men cannot be known, it will be found in this fact alone, viz., that Avhat these ' Seers ' say they see in the other world for example (and this is a good test case), is in each case as different and contradictory as are the impressions and ideas in which they have been brought up. The French Spiritualists, it is admitted, declare that the departed spirits who revisit the earth, re-incarnate in their own children ; the English Spiritual- ists deny that they do so ; and yet both are reporting not what they imagine, but what they have seen. Again, both the French and Englisli Spiritualists assert that it is the real spirits of the departed that appear in seance rooms. The Mahatmas, on the contrary, are equally sure that these are only their cast-ofF ' shells ' or mortal passions, which have been wandering about and have been caught up and re-animated for the time being by the mind of the medium ; and that their real self-conscious souls are far off in Devachan or Heaven, wrapped in illusory •dreams, and sublimely unconscious of the things of Earth. Even the great recognized seers, in describing Heaven as they have actually seen it, dift'er as widely in their reports as do the mediums, and see only the reflection of that which they have been brought np to ex[)ect. The Mahommedan seers, for example, describe it as a beautiful garden of the blest, where the figures of the Ilouris may be seen rejiosing under the trees in the shade ; the Parsce sees the Chinbat Bridge of Souls guarded by the dread maiden and her dogs. Swedenborg, again, declared that he actually saw in Heaven those conditions and states which correspond to the letter of the Bible in which he had been brought up, and in which he believed ; while the Thibetan Mahatmas see in Devachan only the pure spirit freed from all the passionate parts of the Soul, and dwelling in peaceful reverie on all the higher experiences of what was good MODERN THEOSOPHY. 121) tind beautiful in its last incarnation on earth. Could anything further than this be wantino; to the demonstration tliat what cUiirvoyants, thought-readers, seers, and Mahatmas alike see, is not tlie real existences at all, but only the imaginations or impressions that have been formed of them in their own or other minds ? When, therefore, the disciples of the ^lahatmas in all simplicity, urge as a proof of the truth of their system of Cosmogony, that it is seen precisely alike by all the brother- hood, the humour and absurdity of the position are as great as if the mesmerist should seriously appeal to the unanimity of the mesmerized under his influence, in proof of the assertion that the floor was covered with rats, or that the water they were drinkino; was the most delicious wine ! Having, by this first intellectual illusion, led their disciples to accept their practical omniscience, the Mahatmas, by a second, have induced them to accept their omnipotence also. Now I am quite prepared to admit the possibility that the body of a medium may, owing to some reversal of its polarity or other i> will not stand ; or of a house which, though beautiful as a desiofn, is quite impossible to buUd. It expresses rather what, if true, Avould be harmonious, than what because it is harmonious must be true. Instead of dealing with the real causes of phenomena, it deals only with lines and curves on paper ; instead of genuine explanations of them, it gives u& false and fictitious ones. In the early part of this chapter I pointed out the intellectual deceptions which had been practised by the ]\Iahatmas on their followers, when they led them to believe that the power of reading clairvoyantly what was passing in the minds of others, was in no way different, except in degree, from the power of reading the facts them- selves independently of their being known to any other mind ; thus making it appear [)lausible that they, the Mahatmas, could by clairvoyant vision see the Planetary Chain as an actual fact, when what they really saw was merely the image or plan of the Chain as it existed in the minds of those by whom they had themselves been taught. I have now to point out the still more insidious intellectual illusion by which they have persuaded their followers to accept their pseudo-causes as true causes, and their pseudo-explanations of events as bona fide ones ; and as this particular illusion is one which is easily played off on the unsuspecting when the subject-matter is complicated, I shall offer no apology to the reader for asking him to consider it for a moment with me. What, then, do we mean by a bona fide cause, a bona fide explanation, of any phenomenon or event ? If we take the human body as an example, it is evident, is it not, that neither its functions in health nor its symptoms in disease can be said to be really understood or explaned, until the relations and coiine.vions between its different organs are so well established that on any change taking place in any one of these organs the effect on the others can, as it were, be anticipated or foreseen; or, speaking generally, until from the state of the body as a whole to-day, you can, other things being equal, anticipate or foresee its 144 THE EVOLUTION OF HINDOO THOUGHT. condition to-morrow. It is the same, then, with the Worhl. It can only be said to be explained as a whole, or in any of its special departments, when the lines of relation between the different powers or forces engaged in the production of its phenomena are so well known, that from the present condition of these forces, their future state may be anticipated or inferred. And now in what way does a sham cause, a sham explanation differ from this 1 In this, viz., that instead of giving us the relations between the factors or powers involved in any given phenomenon, it gives us merely a catalogue of these factors or powers. Now although this catalogue may be said to account in a way for the phenomenon as an existing fact, and if complete, to fully account for it, it does so only in the same way as the body may be said to be accounted for by a catalogue of the functions of its separate organs ; or as a piece of music may be said to be accounted for by a catalogue of its notes ; or the sense of a sentence by the words in which it is exjn-essed, and the like. These are what we may call false causes, false explanations, and the main feature about them is that they make no addition to our knowledge, but are the mere echo or duplicate in another form of the effects to be explained ; as if we should say that the cause of the phenomena of life is the vital principle ! Now it is entirely of such causes as these that the Planetary Chain, as we shall now see, is throughout composed ; and it was for this reason that I said at the beginning, that it was quite possible to construct the Chain on a sheet of paper, by the exercise of ingenuity alone, and without any fresh accession of knowledge. Let us now see in a rough way how this may be done. If then we regard the World, as the Theosophists do, as made up of seven independent Planes or Principles of Existence — the material, the astral, the vital, the passional, the intellectual, the spiritual, and last of all the impersonal Universal Spirit itself from which the rest are all emanations — all we have to do to account for men and things generally, is to MODERN THEOSOPIIY. 14.3 connect with the Earth or Material Principle, the other principles as so many globes set round it in a circle ; much in the same way as in making a pudding you would t^et around you on the table the butter, and eggs, and milk, etc., of which it was to be composed. This done, if you should then make the principles represented by these globes pass severally and in turn (as they came around the circle) into the flatter of the Earth to be united with it, you would explain the world in general, in the same way as you would the pudding by bringing all its ingredients one by one into the dish. If you wished to go still further into detail, and to account for the great types or divisions of plant and animal, of fish, of reptile, of bird, of mammal, and of man, all you Avould have to do would be to count the number of the divisions to be explained, and then let the Principles or Life-impulses pass around the Chain a corresponding number of times, each round reprc- senting the evolution of a type more highly develo])cd than the one that went before : Avhile to get the varieties of species into which each of these greater types are divided, you would let the different principles before going round the Chain as a whole, go as often around the separate and particular globe or globes involved as there are numbers of species to be explained. In this way you would get the Planetary Chain in the rough, which you could then work up into finer and finer detail, according to the number and variety of the forms of life you were expected to explain. Xow in all this, one sees at ■Si glance, that the Planetary Chain is so constructed as to be a mere duplicate, as it were, of the varieties of life it is called upon to explain ; although as an explanation it is made to look genuine on the principle that heat, for example, is explained if only you can find a fire anywhere to account for it ! In essence it amounts only to this, that the cause of the fish, or reptile, or monkey, is the ' life-principle ' of the fish or reptile or mcmkey coming round the Chain and taking up its abode in the Matter of om' Earth; and that similarly the cause of the man, is the 14G THE EVOLUTION OF HINDOO THOUGHT. Life-principle of the man. This is what I call a false and not a gennine explanation of the World ; as if one should say that the cause of baldness is the loss of hair ! To make it a genuine one, you would have to show hoio and lohy it was that the Life- principle of the fish on its way round the other globes of the Chain, developed or was evolved before it reached the Earth into the Life-principle of the reptile ; how and why the Life- impulse of the monkey passed into the Life-impulse of the man ; — but this, I need scarcely say, the Mahatmas have not yet attempted to do. And so it has come about that the followers of these Mahatmas, not satisfied with 'natural selection,' the * struggle for existence,' etc., as sole causes of the Evolution of the World, instead of seeking to discover other genuine principles to make up for the deficiency, have thrown them all alike to the winds, and duped by the Mahatmas with their pretences to clairvoyant vision, have with- out pause or hesitation rushed into their arms to be dazzled and deceived by such poor and illusory harmonies as these. But if further evidence were wanted to streng-then our conviction that the Planetary Chain is but a paper-system, a ])roduct of imaginative ingenuity merely, it would be found in the fact that with all the pretensions of the Mahatmas to clair- voyant vision, this of the relations which subsist between these different Planes, Principles, or Forces, and in which alone as we have seen true knowledge consists, is precisely the one point on which they are silent, and which is absent from the system of the Planetary Chain. For if we consider it, both in Nature and the Human Mind, these planes, principles, faculties or powers, or by whatever name we choose to call them, are so reciprocally inter-connected, that each acts on or is affected by every other, as a flower is by its root, or the vintage by the qualities of climate and soil ; and you can no more detach any one of these principles from the rest, and treat it apart from its relations to the others — you can no more for example, detach intellect from passion, passion from sentiment and will. MODEKN THEOSOPHY. 147 and all from the material body In which they inhere — than vou can the heart from the lungs, the lungs from the liver, or any or all of them from the rest of the body. The truth is, these so-called Planes or Principles of Being have no real in- dependent existence in fact, but only in relation to each other, and like algebraical x's and y's, only exist as aids to the processes of thought. But the Mahatmas, instead of binding these abstract principles into a system of true knowledge by living bonds of relation, have merely arranged them into the pretty and harmonious wreaths, rings, and festoons of the Planetary Chain, as so many cut flowers mechanically tied together by invisible threads. And the consequence is, that like butchers who have dealt all their lives with the organs of the animal body, but who from want of knowledge of the physiological relations of these organs leave off with as little knowledge of tlie body as when they began, the ^Mahatmas, although dealing all their lives with the principles and planes of the Planetary Chain, can, from their want of insight into the relations of these planes give us no true knowledge. And now we can understand how it is that Theosophy with all its pretensions has done nothing for the progress or civilization of the world. Ignoring those relations in which true knowledge consists, it has discovered no new relation, or what is the same thing, no new Law of Nature or of Life ; no new law of mechanics, physics, chemistry, biology, or new application of these to the arts and industries of life ; no new principle in mental philosophy, in politics, political economy, or the arts of Government and State. These they have left to Science with its slow but steady and sure march through the ages, with its method of observation, induction, experiment and verification, to which we mainly owe the present high state of European civilization ; while in no land are !Magic and the Black Arts more universally practised than in Thibet the chosen home of the Mahatmas, nor ignorance and superstition more extensively diffused. PART TIL THE EVOLTITION" OF JUDAISAi. HISTORY OF INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT. PART III. LIST or AUTHOEITIES FOR THE FOLLOWING CHAPTERS ON THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. OLD TESTAMENT APOCALYPSE OF ENOCH APOCALYPSE OF MOSES APOCALYPSE OF BARUCH APOCALYPSE OF EZRA JOSEPHUS PHILO TALMUD EWALD DELITZSCH KUENEN WELLHAUSEN HITZIG REUSS SCHURER NOLDEKE KNOBEL HENGSTENBERG JOST GRAETZ STADE NEUBAUER KITTEL RENAN ZELLER HILGENFELD DIESTEL DRIVER CHEYNE ROBERTSON SMITH MONTEFIORE DRUMMOND HATCH CHAPTEE I. PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY. TN the introductory chapter of this vohime, when discussing the feasibility of the attempt to forecast tlie stages of Evohition passed through by Religions as distinct from Philo- sophies, it was pointed out that the problem presented quite a different aspect and required quite a different method for its solution in the one case from what it required in the other. Philosophies being defined to be games of thought played by the abstract or merely logical intelligence under definite con- ditions, it was argued tliat if you could once seize the laws or rules of the particular game that was being played, the course of the Evolution could be anticipated, as we have just seen to be the case with Greek and Hindoo Philosophy respectively, with a large amount of scientific definiteness and precision. But Religions being, on the other hand, games of thought played by the lohole man, as it were, — intellect, conscience and heart — their evolution far from depending like that of Philo- sophies, on laws of pure thouglit, was dependent on other elements as well — on tradition, custom, affection, sentiment, and sensibility. And although, therefore, it w'ould seem that the attempts to forecast the course and evolution of Religions would be a much more difficult task than in the parallel case of Philosophies, it was seen that this was not so. For although it is true that the number and complexity of the elements of a 152 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. man's nature that have to be afFected before a chano-e will occur in his Religion, are much greater than in the case of his Philosophy, still religions have the advantage over philosophies in this, that dealing as they do with the whole nature of man, they can be reduced to some simple expression, to some spirit or soul, as it were, which is their inspiration and life, and which gives unity and harmony to all their parts ; much in the same way as we may say of an individual, that the soul of all his thoughts and actions is love, or ambition, or money-getting, or pride, or what not ; or of a nation, that the soul of its institutions is equality, or liberty, and so on. And from this it was argued that if the Spirit or Soul of the particular religion from which we start, say of Paganism, can be reduced to some simple and expressive moral formula, and the Spirit or Soul of the Ileligion into whicli it is destined to pass in the course of evolution, say of Christianity, can be equally so reduced ; and if further the moral distance, as it were, between the two can be definitely mapped out into stages, each representing a step or stage in evolution, it will be compara- tively easy, with a little help in the way of historical landmark now and then, to forecast the Jdnd of experience through which the tribe or nation in question must pass from stage to stage, until it reaches the end in view. At all events, this is the principle on which I propose to proceed in the sections of this History which are now immediately to follow — with what result the sequel will show. Our present theme, then, being the evolution of the Intellec- tual World from Paganism to Christianity, and our problem how it is to be done, I shall begin at once, in accordance with the principles just laid down, by asking what is the Soul or Essential Spirit of Paganism and Christianity respectively? That of Christianity we already know ; for alike in its creed, its institutions, its precepts and laws, in the nature of God and of Christ, and in the relationship existing between God and Christ, between God and Man, between Christ and Man, the PAGANIS3I AND CHEISTIAXITY. 1j3 spirit which pervades it is that which may be best expressed in the relationship of father and son, of parent and children ; and from this its spirit and life, perennially proceeds a current which flows for ever in the dii-ection of the Good, the Bene- ficent, and the Merciful ; an impulse which tends gradually, as the tyranny of material and social conditions is step by step relaxed and dissolved, to draw mankind t02;ether into one jj-reat family, with God its Father. This spirit it is which has covered the world with institutions of charity and mercy, which in morals broke at once and for ever the bondage to the letter, and when the time was ripe, ojjened up to mankind political liberty, and to the slave, emancipation and life. It is the Soul of Christianity, as distinguished from the bodily accretions which have become embedded in its structure — the Mosaic account of Creation and the like, which have been the fruitful source of all its woes. If now we could digest the soul of Paganism into as brief, simple, and expressive a formula, and one that should hold good throughout the institutions of Paaan life, we should have vastly simplified our problem by the establishment of two fixed and definite points, the point from which we have to start, and the point at which we must arrive in the course of evolution ; and by marking off carefully the separate intervening points between these two extremes, we shall be enabled to lay down approximately beforehand, the kind of steps necessary to enable Humanity to traverse this ground from stage to stage. What I propose then to do now is, to show that the genius and essential spirit of Paganism, the moral relationship or soul that runs alike through its Religion, its Polity, its Jurisprudence, and its Social Life, may be accurately represented and summed up in the relationship of master and servant, master and slave, as that of Christianity can be by the relation of 2^('^'>'^nt and child. But before this can be clearly seen, it is necessary to correct a certain false colourino; that has been mxcn to the nature of the Pagan gods throuo-h our associations with 154 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. Christianity. We are too apt to imagine that, like the God of Christianity, these beings filled the vast expanse of the Universe with their presence, and we can scarcely be made to realize how much they had in common with ordinary humanity. The truth is, they were simply human beings of a superior order, male and female, with greater powers and passions than men, and of superior size, strength, and beauty ; a kind of transfigured race of men, in short, living on a finer kind of food, with bodies less gross, blood more rarified and ethereal, and endowed with immortality. And far from peopling the vast expanse of the Universe like the God of Christianity, they inhabited only the upper regions of the air, that narrow belt between earth and sky level with the summits of the mountains, on which, accordingly, they were believed to have their abode. And indeed in the absence of any scientific pi-esumption to the contrary, it was natural both for the vulgar and for the philosophers to believe that this region, too, had its appropriate inhabitants ; as the sea was peopled with fish, the air with birds, and the earth with animals and men. But the vast expanse of the Uni\erse beyond this region, which to Christianity is the abode of God, was, on the contrary, reserved in Paganism for Fate which was supreme over all the gods ; or, as in Plato, for those fixed stars and planets, immortal spirits set in a galaxy of fire and carried round in the revolutions of the Universe, dwelling for ever . n their own perfections, and contemplating the pure form of Beauty as it is, — while markino- out the years and hours for human souls, and by their periods and conjunctions controlling not only the destiny of mortal men, but of the immortal c:ods themselves. Now these erods. living as they did so near the Earth, had gradually extended their sway over human life, in the same way as man had done over the inferior animals ; and when History opens they had already partitioned out the whole earthly domain between them, like the provinces and estates of a settled kingdom. Besides the greater deities, the Dii Majores who presided over the sky, PAGANISM AND CIimSTIANITY. 155 the sea, war, fire, love, wisdom, letters, the arts and the like, there were deities over every the smallest department of Nature and Life ; deities of Cough, of Fever, of Patrician Modesty, of Plebeian Modesty, deities of the Koman State, of the Revenue, of Child-birth, etc., as well as separate deities to teach the child to cry, to eat, to drink, to speak, and to sleep. Tliese vast swarms of deities formed a hierarchy among themselves with Jupiter as King at their head ; and had their councils and councillors of State, their messengers and cup-bearers, their feasts, their loves and hates, their jealousies and wars, their I'evenges and reconciliations, just like men. Like men, too, they were almost entirely wrapped up in their own affairs, regarding mankind much in the same way as we regard the inferior animals, or as absentee landlords regard their tenants ; as instruments, viz., to minister to their own appetites, pleasures, or designs. If they entered, as they occasionally did, into the wars and quarrels of mortals, it was, as with us, mainly for the interest and excitement of the sport — taking sides, laying the odds, or backing the winners. In fact they regarded men precisely as we regard the inferior animals, neither loving them nor hating them, but simply making use of them ; and were angry or pleased with them, according as they furthered their wishes, disappointed their appetites, or thwarted their designs. If they happened to fall in love with any particular luiman being, it was as purely a matter of personal caprice as if one should love one's dog, and established no bond that could not at a moment's notice be broken or dissolved. Tlie essence of their relation to men was the same, in a word, as the essence of our relation to the inferior animals, viz., that of masters and slaves. They cared as little for the mere love of mortals, provided their dues came punctually in, as a Despot and his Court care for the mere love of the conquered in- habitants of a distant dependency, provided their tribute is punctually paid. The only relation, in conseqjience, in which men could stand to them was one of fear and dependence, 156 THE EVOLUTION OP JUDAIS3I. j)ropitiating them by incense, offerings, libations, sacrifices and the like ; the amount and quality of the food, the time and place of ofFerino- it, the mode of presentation and the form of supplication accompanying it, being all elements of as much importance in securing the good-will of the gods, as they are in the parallel case of exacting and capricious human despots. With this relation of master and slave as the essence of the connexion subsisting between the gods and men, we should expect the relations existing between man and man to be fi-amed in the same spirit. And so indeed they were. It was the old relation of master anil slave, of man and the inferior animals, repeated in all relationships of life — political, moral, legal, and social ; the father or head of the family representing the master, and all the rest of the family being like animals, the mere creatures of his will. It was the pure law of primitive despotism, the law of the stronger, untempered or unsufFused by any higher moral atmosphere ; and controlled only, where it was controlled, by an nuthority equally cold, despotic and unsympathetic, viz. the Laws of the State ; the only effect of which was that, far from softening or modifying the despotic spirit, it made it, like a river confined between its banks, run all the more fiercely. In Greece, the father was restrained by law from putting his son to death, but he could disinherit and banish him. In Rome, on the other hand, his power was absolute, alike over his children, his wife, his property, and his slaves ; the only exception being in the case of any of the sons who should happen to fill the office of flamen or priest. He had, besides, practically unlimited power of divorce, subject only to the merely nominal censure of the Censors, or the fear of his wife's relations. In every relationship of life, political or social, men's relations to each other were purely legal; and one no more expected the Christian law of love and pity to enter into the relations of man and man, than one expects them to enter into a purely legal contract between landlord and tenant in the occupancy of a house or estate. Here again then the genius PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY. 157 and essential spirit of Paganism is seen to be that of master and slave, of man and the lower animals, as distinct from that of Christianity which is that of fatlier and son, of parent and children. And a still more decisive evidence of this, perhaps, is to be seen by a glance at the nature and functions of the Priesthood. In a religion like Christianity, for example, where the relation between God and man is, as we have seen, ex- pressible by that of father and children, the inward state of the heart towards God is as important in the priest who is to make intercession, as in the worshipper for whom intercession is to be made. The training of the moral and spiritual nature, accordingly, is the most important end of the long novitiate preparatory to entering the Church ; and the highest offices were as freely open in the early ages to the sons of the peasant, if they were men of devout and holy lives, as to the sons of the lords of the soil. But in religions, on the other hand, where the cpods are believed to care as little for the moral and spiritual attitude of the priests and suppliants, provided their dues be paid, as tyrants do for the feelings of conquered tributaries, one would know a 2^riori that the spiritual or moral character of the priest was a matter of no concern. And so indeed it was in Paganism. ^len would as little have thought of inquiring into the spiritual condition of those about to enter the Priesthood, as they would of those about to enter the Army. The pi'iests were drawn exclusively from the Patrician families, as the supremacy of these in the State was held to be a mark of their having been specially favoured by the gods ; the sole qualification necessary to the priest, besides that of good family, being that he had rendered good service to the State. Instead, therefore, of depending on tlieir prayers and holy lives for their success in making intercession with the £rods, their sole function and dutv was analagous to that of those Court Chamberlains who regulate the approaches to tlic Throne, viz. to stand by the suppliant and dictate the form of words to be used by him when presentiiig his offering or 158 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. petition, so that no word should be forgotten or used out of its proper place, their sole concern being, lest by some irregularity of form, they should draw down on themselves the wrath and vengeance of the gods. In all other respects they went through their function with as little spiritual or moral feeling as the cicerones of a museum or picture gallery. If, then, we have sufficiently shown that the soul and essential spirit of Paganism may be expressed by the moral relationship of master and slave, as that of Christianity is by parent and children, my next point will be to show that there was no possible way by which the one could pass into the other by direct continuity, as it were, but that if the Grseco- Pasfan World was destined to become Christian, it would have to be impregnated from without^ as animals must be when we wish to change the breed ; and that the spirit of Paganism could no more change itself without outside impregnation, than a negro could become white. For Keligions differ from Philosophies, as we have seen, in this, that they are not merely a set of abstract propositions, but are the expression of a soul,^ a spirit, a life ; and therefore although religions that express the same spirit may become incorporated by force or conquest, relio-ions like Paganism and Christianity which are the expressions of two wholly different spirits — the spirit of force or law on the one hand, and the spirit of love on the other — can no more pass into one another in the course of evolution, without outside mediation, than a cold-blooded animal can pass into a warm-blooded one. Nor can such mediation be effected by any form of Philosophy whatever. Stoicism which arose out of the bosom of Paganism, attempted it ; and with its high doctrine of One God of whom all the merely popular Pagan deities in transfigured human shape were but transitory forms, with its cosmopolitan spirit, its recognition of the natural rights of man and of the inherent equality of master and slave, was as well qualified as another to effect the change. But although, animated by its spirit, high-born dames made PAGANISM AND CHPcISTIANlTY. 151) praiseworthy attempts to establish charities, to reclaim younij: women from vice, and to help the aged and the poor; and Emperors who had been trained in its Schools enacted laws mitigating the lot of the slave ; these were all but as drops in the ocean, and not only did not, but could not, bridge over the gulf that separated Paganism from Christianity. For Philosophies being attempts of the human mind — a part of Nature — to comprehend the whole of that Nature of which it is but the part, the merest passing product and limited palpable effect, men cannot except from vanity or presumption place sufficient reliance on their own theories of the great totality kn6\vn as the Universe to enable them to repose on them with full and entire confidence. It is true that on the verified Laws of Nature, those laws that connect the different parts of Nature together, they can place an implicit reliance, whatever be their theories of the natin-e of the Supreme Power, or of the Universe as a whole ; but in the absence of the discoveries of Physical Science, the Pagan masses, even were they all born philosophers, could neither singly or too-ether have o-enerated sufficient faith and trust in their own reasonings to turn the abstract God of the Stoics into the living God and Father of Christianity. If this were to be done at all it could only be done from the side of God, not from the side of human reason ; from some authority, that is to say, coming in the name of the whole Universe to instruct Man the part as to what his relations to the whole Universe are ; instead of from the side of man, presuming as in philosophy to judge of that Avhole of which he is only a part. It could only come, in a word, from Religion, not Philosophy. But we may go farther and say that not only could Paganism, as we have seen, owing to the nature of its essential spirit, not pass of itself directly into Christianity, but it could not even form the first link in any evolutionary chain that should even- tually end in it. And for this reason — that for a chain that was to end in a moral and spiritual bond so strong as that of parcnf IGO THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. and children, some kind of reciprocal relation however rudi- mentary must be secured as a first link ; and this is for ever impossible in any religion where there are a multiplicity of gods. For, with these gods regarded as but magnified and transfigured beings of the same nature and passions as ourselves, but with absolute power over us ; having besides their own ends and aims among themselves to serve ; and caring nothing for men beyond what in the way of incense and offerings they could get out of them — with gods like these sitting at every corner and turning point along the highway of life, to exact toll from the passers-by from youth to age, from this one a libation, from that one incense, from another prayers, from one a cock, from another an ox. and from a third a whole hecatomb of oxen ; — you could no more get a standing reciprocal relation however crude and rudim'entary, established, than a simple countryman could with the gangs of sharpers to whom on a race course he is in turn delivered ; or than the helpless trader of the Middle Ages, with the robber barons who swooped down on his caravan, one after another, from their mountain fortresses as he passed. For even the beginning of such a bond, you must have only one god to deal Avith. Now this it is evident you were not likely to get in any large Empire like that of Rome, or Persia, or Assyria, where the gods of the conquered peoples out of which the Empire was originally formed were almost sure when the Empire was consolidated to be swept into one great Pantheon — and so we have multij)licity again. To get a starting point, therefore, from which to eflect from loithout the transition between Grreco-Koman Paganism and Christianity, we should be obliged to oo to some small tribe or nation which had a single tutelary god itself — even although it admitted that other tribes had other gods of their own to whom in their perplexities they also could look for assistance or protection. And accordingly, as we know from History, the transition from the Pagan World to Christianity was actually effected by the tribe of Israel. CHAPTER II. JUDAISM. ^Y\7"I'rH the Israelites then as our starting' point, we are now prepared to show that if once we succeed in marking out the different moral stages, as it were, that lie between the religion of tyrant and slave of Paganism, and the religion of father and son of Christianity^ we shall be able, given a minimum of historical fact, to anticipate in a large measure the kind of •experiences that must befall this one small tribe, in order to advance it from stao;e to staoe, until at last, in the fullness of time, it is ready to impregnate the great Pagan World with its own spirit. These stages, then, we may Avith sufficient accuracy for all practical purposes represent as follows : — Beginning with the Pagan relation of desjDOt and slave, in which, between the multiplicity of gods on the one hand and the world of men on the other there can [)e no reciprocal bond whatever, nothing but pure force and caprice, we have as first stage of evolution the relationship between a single god and a single tribe, in which the god, capricious and revengeful, gives aid and protection in return for certain purely material services, — offerings, sacrifices, etc., — a relation similar to that between a feudal lord and his dependents, and one in which the moral relations existing between the different individuals composing the tribe, form no part of the contract, expressed or implied. This is practically the I'elation existing between all small M 1(J2 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. tribes and their single deities. The next stage is where the god, still capricious and immoral himself, grants his aid and protection only on condition that his worshippers do what Is just and rio-ht among themselves, as in the relations existing between a king and his people. The next stage is where the god becomes moral himself, and becomes god also of the rest of the world ; but while regarding his own tribe as the children of his peculiar care, regards the rest of the world as at best but step-children only. And finally we have the last stage which brings us to Christianity, where God is not merely the severe Moral Father, but a God of Love as well ; where not only His own tribe are His full children, but all mankind without prejudice of birth or nationality ; and where the sole qualification for God's favour is the inward disposition of the heart, — love, viz., for both -God and men. Now if one were desirous of demonstrating that the Great Power which makes use of men for its own ends, is not a mere Fate, or abstract Order of the World, but a real and living Providence, one could not find a better historical example than the way in which the Jewish people were gradually prepared and matured for the purpose of introducing a new and higher religion and morality into the world. It was as if a gardener, having some particular flower or fruit in his eye, should be seen standing over his plants, watching the variations as they arose, and picking, culling, rejecting, cross-fertilizing, until he got what he wanted; or like some dog or pigeon-fancier breeding and selecting from among his puppies or birds those most approximating to the type he has in his mind until at last the happy variation for which he has been working, appears. And so it was with the Jews. It matters not how they were brought to these several stages, whether by what we should call chance or happy accident, by illusion, by unconscious imposture, or even, as in one or two instances,, by downright fraud, — all was alike seized on by a Power greater than themselves, and who, through these means, was leadings JUDAISM. 16 •> them on to issues more vast than those they knew or dreamed ot. If now we take the different stages through which the Jewish nation had to pass before its end was reached, we shall see that what actually befell it was precisely the sort of thing necessary to befall it, if its fortunes were guided by a Providential and Intelligent Power. Given, then, a small tribe of Israelites with its tutelary god, among a number like itself each with its o\ati protecting god, we have to ask what kind of experience must befall this tribe, over and above that of the other tribes, in order to enable it to take the first moral step in that series of evolutionary steps which should end in Christianity ? The answer in a word is, just such an experience as we should expect to befall the individual in a like case to produce a like result, viz., that state of physical isolation in which the mind, blown on alternately by deep gusts of hope and fear, looks helplessly around for some object to which to cling ; and having found it, yields to it an implicit reliance and trust. Now this first indispensable condition to a closer relationship with their god than the Pagan relationship of master and slave, was fulfilled in the case of the Israelites by their long sojourn in the Wilderness, — an experience, we may say, which, in spite of the apocryphal matter mixed up Avith the narrative when reduced to writing in succeeding times, must, from the abiding impression left in the memory, have been, in its broad aspects at least, true. A small band of Egyptian slaves who have just narrowly escaped capture by their Egyptian masters, find themselves wandering about, all unaccustomed, among the desert solitudes, encompassed by danger and terror on every hand — teiTor of lightning and tempest, famine and drought, serjient and scorpion — and yet seeming, as their moving train winds along beneath the blaze of their torches by night, and the smoke of their camp fires by day, to be led on by some mysterious and invisible Power, Avbich, now thundering to them from the top ot Iloreb, now whispering in the ear of their 164 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. trusted guide, now nerving them to victory, now punishing their disobedience by defeat, brings them, like some great Captain, after many wanderings, to the Promised Land at last. Such a novitiate in the solitude and desolation of the desert, alone with Nature, and encompassed by terrors on every hand, was calculated to attach them to their invisible Leader with a bond more personal, and to burn the belief in his protecting care into their minds with a brand more deep than was possible to more settled tribes, who, distracted by other cares, Avere only casually and intermittently, under the agitation of hope or fear in war, driven to reliance on their protecting gods. This of the Wandering in the Wilderness was the first great experience in the history of the Israelites, calculated to differentiate them from other and surrounding peoples, and to prepare them for the high -part they were to play in World- history ; and its effect, trivial at first, became as we shall see, more and more powerful as time went on. It gave to their belief in an over-ruling Power who had chosen them as his own, and who had for weal or woe bound himself up with their fortunes, a vitality and tenacity unknown to other peoples, and only paralleled in later times by the belief of the early Mahomedans in the power and omnipresence of God. But when they at last had fought their way into Canaan and settled there, both their religion and morality received a taint from the surrounding idolatry which threatened to obliterate, and indeed for many centuries really succeeded in obscuring, all that the wandering in the Wilderness had done for them. For, in taking over the land from the conquered inhabitants, they took over their places of worship also. These were usually situated on the tops of hills, or under the shade of green trees — ' high places ' they were called — and there, side by side with the pillars and sacred groves of Astarte the Syrian Goddess of Love, and with the images of Baal the Sun-god, they set up altars to their own god, Jehovah. With such proximity of sacred rites and among peoples allied to them- JUDAISM. 105 selves in blood and with whom they had begun to inter-many, it was almost inevitable that the worship of Jehovah, which had burnt ever more bright and pure in the wilderness, should become mingled and polluted with these idolatrous cults ; and that the people should relapse into that polytheism which, as we have seen, so long as it lasts must preclude all hope of relisfious or moral advance. But this was not all. For connected with the worship of these heathen deities, and indissolubly bound up with it, were a number of nameless abominations and immoral practices sanctioned and upheld by the religions of Avhich they formed a part. Now, the private code of morality which the Israelites brought out of Egypt was comparatively pure ; and when on the occasion of joyous thanksgiving in the Spring, at Harvest and at the In-gathering, they met at their altars to ofter sacrifice to Jehovah for the good things he had given them, they ate the firstlings of their flocks and the cakes of bread they brought Avith them (after giving the best parts to Jehovah), and drank their wine, in innocent joy and merrymaking ; returning to their homes unpolluted and unstained by personal immorality or impurity. But now that they had embraced the gods of the people of the land, they adopted from them the practice of sacrificing their children to Moloch by burning them in the fire ; they regularly dedicated their daughters as prostitutes in the groves of Astarte ; they polluted themselves with the nameless abomin- ations which these religions enjoined ; and instead of listening to the pure counsels of Jehovah, gave themselves u[) to necromancers, soothsayers, Avizards and diviners, who, in the delirium of ecstasy, polluted their minds as the others tlid their bodies. But worse than all, once entered on this downward course, there was no power anywliere available to impede or arrest it. For the altars of Jehovah, as we have seen, were not as they afterwards were, concentrated at Jerusalem, but were found on every hill-top and under every green tree ; and the priests, in consequence, who ministered 166 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. at them, scattered, isolated, without unity or organization, were, except in the great sanctuaries like those of Bethel and Shiloh, entirely in the power, as they were often in the pay, of the rich and great. However desirous they may have been, therefore, they were as impotent to put a stop to immoralities which had been embraced alike by the people and by their rulers, as ministers of religion in the slave states in modern times have been to put down the iniquities of the traffic. This, doubtless, could have been remedied, as indeed it after- wards was, by the centralization and supremacy of the Priest- hood, but here they were behind-hand, having been anticipated by the Kings under whose sway the tribes had united when the temporary and casual leadership of the Judges had failed to cope with the continual inroads from all sides, — of Moabltes, Edomites, Philistines, and other surrounding tribes. And as it was the object of these Kings to keep all power, religious a* well as political, in their own hands, their supremacy still further tended to reduce the Priesthood to subservience ; and that, too, at a time when owing to the impetus and encourage- ment given to idolatry by the wives and concubines of these kings (who caused images and altars of their own gods, of Baal, Chemosh, and Astarte, to be set up in the very precincts of the Palace and Temple), the authority of a united and power- ful Priesthood was the more necessary to aid in repressing it. Under circumstances such as these, what with the multiplicity of gods with their attendant moral abominations, what with the supremacy of the kings, and the subservience of the priesthood, it would seem as if no point of support was to be found anywhere ivithin the nation itself on which could be planted a lever that should lift the people from their degradation, — nothing, indeed, unless it were the deep feeling of dependence on Jehovah, and the consequent sense of sin on falling to keep His law, which in the best spirits still survived from the traditions of the wilderness. This feeling found its most burning expression in the great JUDAISM. 107 Prophets who arose In the eighth and ninth centuries before Christ, who thundered their denunciations of the prevailing idolatry, corruption, and immorality into the ears of recreant Kings and an unwilling People — denunciations of the Baal and Astarte worship with their attendant moral abominations ; of the servility, corruption, and even crimes of the priesthood, who pandered to the lusts and caprices of kings, sold justice for bribes, and abetted the great in their extortions and oppressions of the poor; of the luxury, pomp, and frivolity of the Court, which, instead of relying on Jehovah, the God of Hosts, who had brought them out of Egypt and delivered them by a mighty hand, relied on their arms of flesh, on chariots and horsemen, on hollow j^olitical combinations and alliances — now on Egypt, now on Assyria, now on Syria — broken reeds all, that pierced their hands when they tried to lean on them when the hour of trial came. Against all these the Prophets con- tinued to hurl their thunders ; but although ultimately, and when the time was ripe, they became, as we shall see, by the sense of sin which they aroused, the main factor in the estab- lishment of the Israel of God ; in the meantime they were of little avail in the face of material, social, and political con- ditions so hostile to their desiojns. For were not the ' liio-h places,' the Idolatrous shrines, and sacred groves still there ? And these the people had come to love. Were not the priests still scattered. Isolated, and Avithout organization, and dependent on the rich and powerful, Avho had every Incentive to keep them so ? Did not the king and court rely on their chariots and horsemen, and the people at large prefer to have it so ? If then the Jewish people were destined In the order of Nature or Providence of God to be the organ of Introducing a new and higher religion and morality into the world, it would seem that reformation must come from luithout, and jiot from within ; and we have now to ask whether, with a minimum of historical fact to guide us. It were possible, from the Laws of Civilization In general, to indicate beforehand the kind of 1G8 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. experience that must befall them, to enable them to reach their high goal. To begin with, then, it is evident that the objects to be aimed at are two, first, to put down the Idolatry which was the parent of the immorality; and secondly, to secui'C the Supremacy of the Priests over the Secular Power. 1 shall begin with the first, the putting down of Idolatry. Now to secure this end from loithout, only two possibilities were open. The first was the complete conquest and assimilation of the people by some foreign Power having a more exalted idea of religion and morality than the Israelites; but no such nation was, at the time, in existence. The surrounding nations Avere either polytheistic like Egypt and Assyria, or if like Moab and Amnion they had each their single god, it was j)recisely the immoralities connected Avith the worship of these gods which it was the problem to put down. The other alternative was that some foreio-n Power should do with the Israelites as men do Avith those domestic animals whose pure blood has been mixed and polluted by some base and vicious strain, viz., destroy entirely the more corrupt specimens, and breed only from the purer specimens that are left ; destroy the worst of the oft-spring of these again, and again breed from the purest and best ; and if in the end, as is said to be the case with pigeons, it is impossible to keep a breed pure even in the presence of other breeds, there is nothing for it but to remove them from their native haunts, and start afresh on a pure and virgin soil. Now this is precisely Avhat occurred in the case of the Israelites. First, the ten tribes of Northern Israel, who had been the worst ofi"enders, and who, after the revolt of Jeroboam, had set up the golden calves at Bethel and Dan, were carried wholesale into captivity by Sargon, King of Assyria, in the year 722 B.C. ; the land being re-peopled by tribes sent specially for the purpose from the region of Media and tlie Euphrates, How precarious, indeed, had become the hold of Jehovah on the minds of the Northern Israelites, and JUDAISM. 169 how impossible it would have been, with blood so tainted, to have weaned them from their idolatry and immorality, was seen in the fact that in a few years they had quite forgotten the God of their fathers, and had embraced the Assyrian religion, melting into the surrounding population, and soon leaving behind them no trace of their separate existence. Northern Israel with its ten tribes being thus summarily wiped out, the hope of Israel was centred on the smal' Southern kingdom of Judah. But there, too, Baal and Aststrte worship were as rife as they had been in the North ; and although the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah hurled their thunders against the prevailing idolatry with a fierceness unapproached by Hosea and Amos in the North, even their voices would have proved as impotent as those of the Northern prophets, had it not been for two very important facts. In the first place, owing to the presence of the Ark of the Tabernacle in the Temple at Jerusalem, the sense of Jehovah's invisible presence there between the wings of the cherubim, was more indelibly impressed on the minds of the people of Judah, than was possible in the North at so great a distance from the Capital. The sense of Sin, in consequence, was moi-e easily aroused by the consciousness of any breach of Jehovah's law ; and the word of God as announced by His mouthpieces the prophets, fell on minds thus imbued with the sense of sin, with a more profound effect than in the North. In the second place, the remembrance that the captivity and exile of the Northern tribes had been foretold by the Northern prophets, and especially the fulfilment of the prediction of Isaiah as to the destruction of the host of Sennacherib by the power of Jehovah, lent to the prediction that Judah also Avould be swept into captivity, the weight almost of a Divine decree. But still the ' high places,' the pillars, and the groves to which the people had been so long accustomed remained ; and sanctioned as they were by all the force of prescription and time, neither the exile of the Northern tribes for the like sins. 170 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. nor the weight of fulfilled prophecy, nor the keener sense of sin following on any infraction of Jehovah^s law, could avail to abolish them. There was little chance, then, of their being abolished by the people themselves ; yet if a purer and nobler religion and morality were ever destined to come out of Judah, abolished they must be. The King alone had the power, if he had the inclination, and accordingly when Hezekiah came to the throne, and Isaiah succeeded in convincing him that some such policy was necessary, he immediately took steps to carry it into effect ; and without more ado removed the altars of Baal and Astarte with the exception of those that Solomon had set up on the Mount of Olives, broke in pieces the pillars, cut down the sacred groves, and ground to powder the brazen serpent of the Temple. But there he stopped, leaving still standing the altars of Jehovah throughout the length and breadth of the land. And thus the attempt failed, for as long as these altars to Jehovah were allowed to stand on the spots where altars to Baal and Astarte had so long stood beside them, the long association of the worship of Jehovah with that of these abolished deities, was too strong for the people to resist ; and when, in the reaction under Manasseh, not only the Images, pillars, and groves were set up again, but altars to the sun and planets and all the host of Heaven were raised in the very courts of the Temple, and children once more were passed through the fire to Moloch, — it became evident that nothing would exterminate idolatry and Its attendant immoralities, but the wholesale abolition of all altars whatever outside of the Capital, those of Jehovah as well as of the other gods, and the removal of the attendant priests to Jerusalem where all worship should henceforth be concentrated. But to carry out a reform of this magnitude against the interests of the local priests, as Avell as against the inclinations of the people, was an undertaking more difficult than any that had yet been attempted ; and was felt to require for its success a recourse to more than the ordinary means of appeal. And so, when Josiah came to the JUDAISM. 171 throne, and gave evidence of liis good intentions and zeal for the cause, Jeremiah felt that the time was ripe for the supremo effort. And then was put in practise a riise which for boldness and originality, for the profound effect it produced on the minds of men at the time, as well as on the relio-ion of all succeedina- ages, is without a parallel, perhaps, in the history of the world. The authority of both King and Prophet having failed in the case of Hezekiah and Isaiah, it was now resolved to invoke the supreme authority of Moses himself. And accordingly, in the 18th year of Josiah's reign, in the year 621 before Christ, Hilkiah the high priest brought from out of the recesses of the Temple, when it was undergoing repairs, a book which he professed to have found there, and which purported to contain the last instructions given to the children of Israel by iMoses before his death in the land of Moab, and before they crossed over into the land of Canaan. This book was our present Book of Deuteronomy ; and the burden of its injunctions, which were accompanied by cursings and blessings, was to the effect that when the Israelites should come to the place of worship which Jehovah should choose for them, — to Jerusalem to wit, — they should offer sacrifices at no other shrine, but should break down and up-root all altars, pillars, and groves elsewhere throughout the land, all worship of the sun and stars, all practice of sorcery, divination, and witchcraft, in a word should do pre- cisely what the prophets and the priests of the Temple now saw was necessary to be done. Now although it is admitted on all hands, by orthodox as well as heterodox divines, that however much the book containing these injunctions may have embodied tlic spirit of laws as old as the time of Closes, it was actually concocted and written at this very time by the prophets or priests about the Temple ; still, nothing of this was suspected, and its effect on the public mind was immense. The nation, it could no longer be doubted, had all this time been guilty of the most heinous sin, and yet had been almost, if not entirely 172 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. unconscious of it! The King, when he heard of the penalties that were to befall the nation for its sins, rent his clothes and sent to Huldah the prophetess to find out whether they were indeed likely to be inflicted. She replied that they were, but that he himself should be spared on account of his humility and piety. He therefore gathered the priests and prophets and all the people of Judah into Jerusalem, into the Temple, and when the words of the Covenant, as contained in the Book, were read to them, they all there and then with one accord made a vow to stand by them. This done, the king without further delay began his reformation, and carried it out with a thoroughness that left nothing to be desired. He first of all commanded the priests and door-keepers to clear out of the Temple the vessels devoted to the service of Baal, of the grove, and of all the host of heaven, and to burn them in the fields of Kedron. He then destroyed the high places devoted to the worship of Baal and Astarte, not only throughout Judah but througliout Samaria also, as well as those which Solomon had built on the Mount of Olives. As for the priests that ministered at these altars, he slew those of Samaria and put down those of Jndah, while those that ministered at the altars of Jehovah throusrhout Judah, he brought up to Jerusalem, where they afterwards assisted the priests and had charge of the Temple under the name of Levites. He also beat down the altars that Manasseh had raised to the sun and stars in both courts of the Temple ; destroyed the adjoining houses of the Sodomites, and defiled Topheth in the valley of Hinnom, where the children were offered up as sacrifices to Moloch. But not even the destruc- tion of all the idolatrous shrines throughout the kingdom, the slaying or removing of the idolatrous priests, and the removal of the priests of Jehovali to Jerusalem, radical and thorough- going as the reformation was, was sutficient. For the Court was still there — the king, the aristocracy, the governors, and the civil and military functionaries — and so long as it remained men would still continue to rely on the arm of flesh, on their JUDAISM. 173 chariots and horsemen, rather than on the might of Jehovah ; and it only required the accession of a new king with less pious leanings and less under the influence of the prophets and priests than Josiah, to bring back much of the old idolatry. And accordingly we read that his successors did evil in the sight of the Lord, as their predecessors had done ; not all the cleansings and purifyings that the nation had undergone being able to purify the corrupted blood — not the exile of the Northern tribes, the authority of the prophets, the miraculous repulse of Sennacherib by the hand of Jehovah as revealed by Isaiah, the destruction of the high places of Josiah, the words of Moses himself as contained in the book discovered in the Temple, nor lastly the complete destruction of all altars whatever except the one at Jerusalem, and the abolition of all priests except those who ministered at the Temple there. Nothing availed so long as the secular State by the existence of its arm of flesh, shared with Jehovah the allegiance of men, as the old hill-tops still did by their associations with idolatry. If the Jews, therefore, were ever to become pure worshippers of Jehovah, it could only be by removing them bodily and once for all from the polluted soil, and giving them a fresh start elsewhere. And this indeed is just what happened. Nebuchadnezzar invaded Judah, and in 597 B.C. carried off all the leading; inhabitants of Jerusalem to Babylon; and in 586 burnt the Temple, broke down the walls, and left the land a desolation and a waste. And now at last that sense of the personal dependence of Israel on Jehovah v»hich had been burnt into them, as we have seen, by their sojourn in the Wilderness, and which was the first experience needed to ditterentiate them from other peoples and to prepare them for their 2:reat mission, beoan to exert its full eflect. Fanned into a burning flame by the prophets who carried on the tradition of the covenant between Israel and its God, it gradually aroused in the nation a sense of sin so deep at the recollection of the broken Law, that although at first of little 174 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAIS3I. practical avail in the face of the many religious, material, and social conditions hostile to it, it was destined in the end, and when the time was ripe, to become the sole factor in shaping the Israel of the future. So well indeed had the prophets done their work in the century and a quarter that had elapsed between the exile of the Ten Northern tribes and the exile of Judah, that whereas in the North the deported populations in a few years had melted away and were lost amid the foreign populations ; in the South, exile, instead of making the captivea forget their God, or feel as was usual in such cases that He must be inferior to the Babylonian deity who had conquered Him, served only to deepen their conviction that Jehovah was the one and only true God, and that in all their humiliations,^ sufferings, and exiles, He was but using the other nations of the earth as His instruments to chastise them for their sins. And so they sat by the waters of Babylon weeping for their beloved Zion, and in Psalms of immortal beauty wailing forth their laments over their broken Law. There, absolved from all political and material cares, and far from the associations of idolatry that had been so seductive and fatal to their peace, the last obstacles which up to then had prevented them from realizing the prophet's ideal were removed ; and they were now free to look up to Heaven and like Ezekiel to paint on its pure azure the Israel of their dreams. And when at last they returned to Jerusalem, still further purged of the worldly- minded among them who were left behind, and indeed of all except those who lived in these delicious visions of the future, they returned a 'remnant' indeed, but one which cleansed from all taint of idolatry, and purified by suffering as if by fire, only needed to be kept apart from surrounding peoples for a while, to realize the dreams of the prophets, and to form the nucleus of what was afterwards destined to become a pure Theocracy, the true Israel of God. And so, for the first time in recorded history was taken a real step in the advance of the Morality of the World to a higher JUDAISM. 175 plane, and that, too, by a small Semitic tribe. For tlie first time idolatry had been suppressed, and after centuries of effort the belief in One God (without which, as we have seen, no real advance in morality was possible) was firmly rooted in the minds of men. If, then, we now ask what the particulars of thnt moral advance were, we may tabulate them as follows: — The getting adultery, prostitution, and other nameless heathen practices (as well as the taking of human life), recognized by men as sins, and not as mere civil offences in which you could indulge if you were willing or able to pay for them ; the making the parental relation a sacred one, at a time when in all other countries parents were either the tyrants or slaves of their children; the recognition of the human brotherhood of the stranger and alien within their gates and of his claim to kindness and consideration, at a time when elsewhere he was regarded with dislike, or treated as an enemy ; the making of sorcery, witchcraft, and divination, sins and crimes ; the aboli- tion of human sacrifices ; the mitigation of slavery to the point where it almost ceased to be slavery ; and the making of philanthropy a religious duty binding on all, instead of leaving it as a matter of individual caprice. Now these were all real advances in Morality, not attained for centuries afterwards by any other nation, and wrought out by the Jews, and by the Jews alone, through such long ages of national and personal humiliation, punishment, and sorrow, as we have just seen. So that when Christ came there was nothinsr for him tj do but to take peaceful possession of this vast estate which had been already won and prepared for him, viz., the belief in One God, freedom from Idolatry, and a code of Personal Morality which, with the exception perhaps of the marriage laws, was identical with that of the present day. And now observe that these moral advances could only be made permanent by parallel advances in the conception of God; and these advances, again, in the conception of God were necessitated by the same outer and inner experiences as 176 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. had led to the advance in morality and the putting down of idolatry. Beginning, like Baal of the Syrians, and Chemosh of the Moabites, as a cruel, capricious, and tyrannical god, standing like all the Pagan deities, in relation to his people as a master to slaves, Jehovah was believed, after the experiences of the Wilder- ness, to have bound himself up in a more intimate and personal manner in the fortunes of the Israelites, for weal or for woe, than was the case with these deities and their worshippers, and to have assumed a more paternal relation towards them ; and so could be represented by the Prophets as one who would not suffer any one of his children to be oppressed by the rest, but who insisted that justice and mercy should flow equally among all, like a running stream. It was the first step towards a real paternal relation in men's conception of God, and found its expression in the code of the Ten Commandments ; a code in which the higher morality that usually only subsists between family and kindred, was for the first time in history widened so as to embrace a whole nation. Not only did no Pagan nation reach this height, but in States where Society was built on the relation of master and slave, and where fathers could put their sons to death and masters their slaves, it was impossible that they ever should have reached it. But it must be remembered that, like Baal and Chemosh, Jehovah was still the god only of a single tribe ; and to enable Israel to rise to the conception of him as not only the god of their special tribe, but as God of all nations, yet another great experience was needed, and this was vouchsafed when the Northern tribes were, as we have seen, carried off into exile by the Assyrians. For now there was no alternative but to believe either that Jehovah was no God at all, and that Assur the Assyrian god who had conquered him was the only True God, or else that he was merely using the Assyrians to punish his pcO|)]e for their sins, But under the burning preaching of the Prophets it was inevitable that the latter of these beliefs must prevail. And the consequence was that henceforth Jelio\ali, altliough still having his JUDAISM. 177 dwelling-place in Zion, was Ijclieved to be not only the God of the Isriielites, but the Great and Supreme God of all the Earth as well. That is to say, from a Monolatry, the religion of the Jews had passed at a bound, almost to a pure Monotheism. Kot quite to a pure jSIonotheism — for the existence if not the supremacy of the gods of other nations was still recognized. But it only required the Second Exile, with the sight of the Babylonian gods in the old form of dead images — half wood half god as Isaiah contemptuously calls them — to convince them that Jehovah was not only the Supreme but the only God of the Universe ; and with this belief the religion of Israel passed at last into a pure Monotheism. And further, this very belief of the people that Jehovah was only using the Babylonians as instruments to punish them for their sins, itself necessitated a still further advance in the character of Jehovah, turning him from a god wilful and capricious though requiring justice and mercy from his children, into a god himself absolutely just and merciful. And lastly, the fact that he had chosen the Jews as his own children, Avhile all the rest of the nations stood to him as step-children merely, made him all the more sensitive to neglect from his own people, all the more tenacious of his own honour and dignitv, all the more exactinsf of reverence and awe from them. Further than this of a God Just and Kighteous, but with high ideas of his own honour and dignity, the Jews did not go in their conception of the Deity. Nor indeed could they have gone farther without renouncing all that was distinctive of them as a people; all the teachings of their history, all their memories and traditions, all that had made them what they were, nil that had been ingrained in them by centuries of humiliation and sorrow. To have taken the next step, and conceived of .Jehovah as a God of Luve of whom all nations alike were the children without prejudice or favour, Avould have been to have passed over from Judaism to Christianity itself ; and this step, until the millennium dawns, and nations shall without compvdsion submit to sink their pride N 178 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. and to freely admit their former inferiors to a position of equality with themselves, they could not be expecied to take. But neither the purging of the infected blood of Israel by successive Exiles on the one hand, nor the sense of Sin branded into the national mind by the Prophets on the other, would have availed to raise the morality of the nation to the high point it ultimately reached, or to have jjermanently kept it there, had it not been for the parallel and steady advance of another factor of scarcely less importance, viz., the unity and supremacy of the Priesthood. For it is evident that had the successive exiles purged and reduced the population of the kingdom to its last two inhabitants, still nothing would have been gained had there not been some provision by which these two should be compelled to start afresh with a unanimity of practice and belief. Nor would it have availed anything that the Prophets should have aroused the conscience of the nation to its highest pitch, had they left it without definite knowledge of precisely wdiat men were to think and to do in the various circumstances of life as they arose. Now if it was the function of the Prophets to declare in general terms what the Law of Jehovah was, viz., to do justice and hate iniquity, it was the function of the Priesthood to frame rules for its application in detail, — to mature, consolidate, codify and conserve it, — and this could only be done by their gradual advance to unity and supremacy. For it is clear that with a multiplicity of scattered priests, un- organized, dependent, isolated, and without the guidance of a written code, decisions as to what the Law of their one God, Jehovah, specially was in any given case, were likely to be almost as various and conflicting as if they had been the decisions of the priests of different gods ; and a steady advance towards any common goal of morality or conduct would have been impossible. It will now be interesting to ask what those chance conditions or circumstances in the life of the nation were, which were seized upon and utilized by the Presiding Genius of the World for the purpose of gradually raising the Priesthood JUDAISM. 17S from its isolated, unorganized and dependent position in the time of the Judges, to its final unification and supremacy over all powers in th3 State, under a single High Priest, after the Babylonian Exile. The first condition, and the one without which no start could have been made and no foundation laid, was the fact that the Ark or seat of Jehovah's presence, where his will was declared, his judgments given, and his oracles delivered, w^as a single structure that could neither be multiplied nor divided; and that his presence between the cherubim was an invisible presence. The consequence was that images of Jehovah could not be multiplied at different shrines, nor various readings of his Law given by the priests in charge of such shrines, as Avas the case with the gods of the other tribes. It is true that images of Jehovah, as of the other gods, had been multiplied throughout the land, but these had always been regarded by the prophets from the very first as idolatrous, and responses in consequence given at their shrines must always have lacked the weight and authority of those delivered before the Ark. And accordingly when the Northern tribes, who after their revolt had erected images to Jehovah at Dan and Bethel in the shape of two golden calves, had been swept into exile, and with them the little tera[)him or household images of Jehovah which xvere also in common use in private families, the Ark which had l>een removed by David to Jerusalem, and over which Solomon had built his Temple, gave to the priests connected with that central sanctuary, an authority and supremacy over the priests of all other shrines which they had not before possessed. But although after the building of the Temple the teraphlni v.ere removed from the private families of Judah as well, and placed Avithin it, still the altars to Jehovah remained on the ' high places' throughout Judah; and the priests who ministered at them, infected as they were with idolatrous practices, must have given responses and decisions as impure a8 were their idolatrous rites. And hence it was that when Hezekiah broke 180 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. the images of Baal^ destroyed the groves of Astarte, and pulled down the ' high places ' devoted to the worship of these deities, but left the altars to Jehovah still standing in the places where the Idolatrous altars had been, nothing was gained. It was only when Joslah had abolished the altars to Jehovah as well as those to Baal throughout Judah, and had brought the priests who ministered at them to Jerusalem to act as inferior clergy or Levites about the Temple and in the service of the priests there ; and especially when the whole Law of God, moral, ceremonial, and civil, was reduced to writing, as it stands in our present Book of Deuteronomy ; — it was only then that the authority of the priests at Jerusalem abolished the last traces of the authority of all the other priests. And yet, so long as the Monarchy lasted it was impossible that the pure Law of Jehovah should have free play, or that the Priesthood should have the supremacy over all other powers in the State. It was not until the Second Exile had destroyed the Monarchy and the last vestige of Judah's existence as a secvdar State, that the priests were able to return to Jerusalem with a High Priest as a centre of unity at their head, and with full power to administer a single code of law^s — moral, civil, and ceremonial — for all Israel. This Code, still further elaborated in its ceremonial part by inclusion in it of the Priestly Code found scattered through the other books of the Pentateuch and brought by Ezra from Babylon B.C. 444 (about 100 years after the return of the exiles^, became and remained the sole code of the Jews ; while the Priests who administered it, now at last organized, unified, and centralized, remained henceforth In all matters, religious, political, and ceremonial, the Supreme Power throughout Israel. With idolatry at last abolished after centuries of eftbrt by the combined action of repeated purglngs by Exile, of the sense of Sin awakened and kept alive by the Pro^ihets, and of the steady advance of the Priesthood to ascendancy ; with a new and Iiigher Code of Morality inaugurated than any the world had yet known; we are now prepared, before completing our study JUDAISM. 181 of Judaism, to face the problem which has so long puzzled the critics and commentators, viz., as to why it was that the great cry kept up by successive generations of prophets from age to age, the cry, viz., tliat what Jehovah wanted was not so much .sacrifices and burnt ofTerings as the doing justice, loving mercy, hating iniquity, and walking humbly with their God — that this, which was quite on a level with the best Christianity of our own age, should have ended after the Exile not in the Christian doctrine which would seem to have been its natural outcome, but in a devotion to outer observances and ceremonial forms of the most puerile character, — in a state of opinion in which the picking up of sticks on the Sabbath, or the touching of a dead mouse, was considered as great a sin as adultery ; circumcision as important as uprightness of character ; and ])urity of skin or of dishes as purity of heart? Now it must be admitted that the absui'dity of such an ending after so glorious a beginning is indeed glaring, but a few preliminary consider- ations may perhaps explain the apparent inconsistency and serve to put the matter in a new light. To begin with, it is necessary to correct the false assumption that confronts us on the threshold, and which, as I believe, is the root of all the fallacies into Avhich the commentators have fallen, the assumption, viz., that what the prophets of the 7th and 8th centuries before Christ meant by the phrases to do justice, love mercy, hate iniquity, etc., was much the same as what we should mean by these phrases at the present day. With us the words have a wide, universal, and cosmopolitan sense, embracing the entire world, and one Avhich it would take ages and centuries to realize. But with the Prophets they had no reference to the -world at large at all, but were aimed at certain definite moral and social grievances and injustices existing among the Jewish people themselves. These may be practically summed up as follows : — The extortions of the rich and their oppression of the poor ; bribery and the sale of justice by judges and priests ; the corruptions of the court ; falte 182 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. prophecy ; idolatiy and the moral abominations with which, as we have seen, it Avas associated. Now my contention is that the reform of each and all of these abuses was carried out long; before the excessive devotion to ceremonial came into vogue, and further that had the reform of the abuses not been followed by this excessive devotion to outside ceremonial and obserrances, idolatry would have crept iu again, bringing back all the old immoralities in its train ; and so the Mission of Israel, which was to prove so im])ortant for the whole after history of the world, would have failed. Or to put it more plainly, 1 should contend that the ceremonialism of the Scribe and Pharisee was as necessary to the great part that Israel had to play in the world, as either the preaching of the Prophets, the successive Exiles, or the work of the Priests ; and that without it neither the conception of One God, nor the high code of Morality which the Jews had realized, could have been maintained. But I must first prove my point, viz., that the prophets in their great cry of 'doing justice and loving mercy,' had in their minds only certain definite moral abuses and grievances existing among their oion people, and that these abuses had all been met bv leo;islation before the excessive devotion to ceremonialism set in. Indeed one may say in general terms that the fact that with the prophets Jehovah was the god of a small tribe ot chosen people with whom all his interests were boimd up, ought of itself to be sufficient to prove that the words of this same Jehovah through the prophets to do justice and love mercy, could not have had an extension beyond the limits of their own tribe, no more so indeed than if they had been the words of Chemosh or of Baal. But, if wanted, a more direct proof is to be found In the Book of Deuteronomy which was the work of the Prophets themselves. Here you have it laid down as Jehovah's command that the Jews, although they may exact usury and the payment of debts from the foreigner, are not to do so from their own people; and that they are to utterly destroy without mercy the people of the land, the Canaanites, JUDAISM. 183 the Ilivites, the .Tcbusites, etc., leaving nothing alive that breathes ; all of which surely shows that the command to do justice and love mercy was not intended to have a universal extension to all peoples, but was to be strictly limited to the affairs of the Jews alone. It is true that the second Isaiah, sitting in exile long after the reform of all the moral abuses by the Code of Deuteronomy, could indulge the dream that tlie day would come when all nations should come to Jerusalem for their Law, and when justice and mercy should radiate from thence to all parts of the earth ; but this was only a dream of the far future, a purely personal ideal which would no more be permitted to force itself on an unwilling people until the time for it was ripe, or to interfere with the orderly evolution of the steps necessary to consolidate what had been already won than in our own time the Christian ideal of universal peace is permitted to interfere with the steady evolution, often through conflict and strife, of communities and States. That the words of the Prophets had but a limited application was further seen in this, that when Josiah came to the throne, and the prophetic party for the first time had full freedom given them to legislate agains-t all abuses either in Church or State, the actual abuses for which remedies were found and embodied in the Deuter- onomic Code, were precisely those abuses against which the prophets had so long inveighed — and no others. One of the most pressing was that the rich had gradually added field to field until the land of the country having passed into fewer and fewer hands ; its produce instead of being distributed among the people was exported for foreign luxuries ; the con- sequence being that the people had fallen hopelessly into debt from which they could only redeem themselves by borrowing at usurious rates of interest, or delivering up their own persons to their creditors as slaves. This abuse was one against which the Prophets had inveighed from the first, and it was now met in the New Code by the institution of the Sabbatical Year and the Year of Jubilee, in which all d('l)ts were to be 184 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. cancelled, all slaves set at liberty, and the produce of the land given to the poor ; as well as by the promulgation of laws forbidding the taking of usury by one Jew from another, while the gleanings of the fields at harvest were to be left for the widow, the fatherless, and the stranger living among them. Otliei- laws were enacted against the taking of bribes by Judges and Priests, and the use of false weights and measures by the Merchants and Dealers. The corruptions of the Court, again, with its luxury and its dependence on the arm of flesh instead of on Jehovah, were provided against by the law prohibiting the King from accumulating much silver and gold, from marrying many wives, and from keeping many horses and chariots ; Idolatry and Witchcraft were put down by the enactment of laws prohibiting the setting up of images and of groves, and 'the practice of religious prostitution and unnatural vices. !Now these were the particular abuses which the prophets had in their minds when they spoke in general 1 erms of doing justice, loving mercy, and hating iniquity — these and no other ; and they were all reformed or in the way of reformation, by the laws enacted against them before the Exile. If further proof of this were needed it would be found in the fact that when, about a hundred years after the return from exile, the new Code of the Pentateuch was brought by Ezra from Babylon, there were no laws in it against usury, bribery, idolatry, cruelty, adultery, religious prostitution, incest or sodomy ; no provisions with regard to slavery, poverty, debt, etc. ; showing that the old Law of Deuteronomy had done its work, and that all the moral abuses against which the prophets had so long railed had at last been reformed — so far, that is to say, as it was possible for legislation to reform them. And hence it was that after the Exile, the Age of Prophecy ceased, until the new conception of God inaugurated by Jesus demanded a new moral propaganda in accordance with it. Having cleared the way of these preliminary misconceptions, it will now be comparatively easy to show that instead of the JUDAISM. 185 prophetic cry to ' do justice, love mercy, and hate iniquity,' findini^ its natural sequel in the Christian doctrine, as indeed it ou citlicr of the soul or of the body ; and the blessings promised for obedience to the covenant -svere in consequence of a ])urely material kind — the national possession of the promised land, rich crops, smiling fields, rivers of -vvine and oil, long life, old age, and a numerous and happy progeny ; while the punishments -were national disaster and disgrace, desohite fields, pestilence, famine and captivity. This conception of the nature of Jehovah and of his relation to his people, is the one reflected in the period of the Judges; and it lasted far down into the period of the Kings. But when the Northern part of the kingdom had seceded imder Jeroboam and the rival courts of Israel and Judah with their princes and nobility began to grind the faces of the poor by usury and taxation, until burdened with dcl)t they were forced either to sell their lands or give their own bodies up to slavery ; when in consequence of this land- monopoly the rich were able to buy up all the corn and to hold it until it reached famine prices, and so still further to oppress the poor ; when, further, these kings and courts began to rely on their chariots and horsemen rather than on Jehovah, and to ffo a-whorino- after other Gods, the Baals and Astartes of the time, and to forget the God who had brought them up out of Egypt and had delivered them by a mighty hand ; when, in a word, the measure of their iniquity was full, and the great pre- exilian Prophets arose to denounce them, Jehovah was the only i)Ower to whom the Prophets could appeal. The consequence was that they were obliged to represent Plim not only as a jealous, capricious God, thinking mainly of His own worship and honour, but as a God who loved mercy and hated iniquity, and who was as much offended by tyranny and injustice as by idolatry. From being a jealous, cruel and capricious god, he had thus advanced in the conceptions of men to being a God of Justice and Truth also ; and as we shoidd expect, this change in the conception of God soon made itself felt in the penal code and in the system of rewards and punishments. 200 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. Those were indeed still purely material and worldly in their character (although the threatened loss of the Law of God is made a great hardship by the Northern prophets), and included national disaster, famine, desolation and exile; but from this time onwards the people are no longer all lumped too-ether in one condemnation, as was the case in the time of the Judges, but a distinction is made between the good and the bad, between the righteous and the wicked. It is only the wicked now who will be cut off; the good and those who repent will be saved and will return from the exile to which the prophets had fore-doomed them, either as a holy ' remnant ' or as a purified and renovated Israel. But all this while, Jehovah, although the only God of the Israelites, is still only one among the many other gods of neighbouring nations and tribes. The Jehovah of the Prophets up to the time of the Exile, then, is a God of great power and majesty, loving justice and hating iniquity, but of much loving-kindness and tender mercy ; and at first sight this may appear not unlike the God of Jesus and the Early Church. Nothing, however, can be farther from the fact, as will appear if we turn to the Book of Deuteronomy which was compiled and written shortly before the Exile — a book in which the conceptions both of the prophetic and of the priestly party are fuUy embodied. There we shall find that the loving and fatherly character of God is purely in relation to His own chosen people, and by no means extends to all man- kind. For although the stranger in their midst is set down equally with the widow, the orphan, and the slave, for gentle and compassionate treatment and consideration, you will find set down beside this the equally authoritative command of Jehovah, to smite down and utterly exterminate all the original inhabitants of the land, without pity or mercy. Jehovah, it is evident here, is not yet regarded as the loving Father of all mankind, but of his own people merely. And yet that there had been a great advance over the old conception of Him is seen if we compare the morality of Deuteronomy with the THE EVOLUTION OF JEHOVAH. 201 morality sanctioned by Him in the Book of the Covenant In Exodus, written some centuries before. This old code bears all the marks of an early and barbarous Civilization, and of an early and barbarous God — private revenge, cruelty to slaves, incest, the destruction of crops and fruit trees, family feuds, the ofFerlng up of the first-born as sacrifice, etc. Now in the Book of Deuteronomy all these have been done away with, owlno; to the advance made in the interval in jxeneral civilization, and in the higher conce})tlon of God. The law of retaliation, for example, is entirely done away with except in the single case of false witnesses. Sons, again, are forbidden to take their father's wives and concubines as part of their inheritance, as had been done in the old times — as we see in the case of David and Absalom. Itcligious prostitution, too, in connexion with the Temple-service was forbidden ; and women- slaves were ordered to be manumitted, as men were, after seven years service. The crops and fruit trees of the enemy were to be spared ; and parents were forbidden to ofter up their first- born children to Jehovah in sacrifice, as had been the practice in the earlier times. And instead of God belno- Himself the Judge of causes, judges were now appointed to dispense justice in His name, xlll these, it is plain, were immense advances in Morality — the products of a higher civilization, and reflecting In their provisions the progress men had made in their conception of the nature of God. During the Babylonian Exile the con- ception of Jehovah underwent, as we saw in a former chapter, a still further change. Up to this time He had still remained, in the popular mind, only one God among a number of others ; but when confronted with the terrible disaster of exile and captivity, the Jews had to face the alternative of whether this great afiliction meant the victory of the Babylonian deities over Jehovah (the most natural explanation according to the ideas of the time), or whether Jehovah was using these other nations as instruments in His own hands, to chasten His people for their sins. Under the influence of the Prophets, and backed 202 THE i'.VOLLTION OF JUDAISM. by the long record of pro})liecy fulfilled, the latter view pre- vailed ; and when the exiles had made near accjuaintance with the Babylonian gods, and found them to be only made of wood and stone, they were still the more confirmed in their belief that Jehovah was not only a God above all other gods, but that He was the only real and true God — all the rest being but dead idols or malicious demons. But this sudden advance to a pure Monotheism was not attended as might have been expected by any further advance in morality ; for although the second Isaiah proclaimed that the elect of the Gentiles as avcU as the Jews would be brought to the knowledge of the one true God, and would come from every quarter of the earth to pay Him homage on His Holy Hill of Zion; still the fact that the Jews alone were believed to be His own children, while all other nations continued to be at best but step-children who in the ideal kingdom of the future were to be but servants of the chosen race, prevented any further advance towards equality in the relations between man and man — prevented in other words any further advance towards justice and morality. After the Exile, the captives who had returned to their native land were free to carry out on virgin soil the high morality of the Prophets which had already been definitely formulated in the Deuteronomic Code, but which, owing tO' the presence of unfavourable conditions, had only been partially realized. With the Exile, however, all these imfavourable conditions had completely passed aw^ay — the High-places, the Land-Monopoly, the Court, the Army, the Monarchy, and all the other instruments of iniquity and idolatry against which the Prophets had thundered — and with them disappeared the debt, the usury, the grinding poverty, the slavery, which had grown directly out of them. In the re-constituted Israel, which was constructed after the Exile according to the ideal of their dreams — what with the equality of conditions involved in its peasant-proprietary, what with its Theocracy, its Temple- tax, and its fixed and onerous but cheerfully paid dues for the THE EVOLUTION OF JEHOVAH. 20S support of the priesthood — neither grinding poverty nor licentious hixury had any place. The first result of this condition of Society was that the conception of Jehovah as a God of Justice and Mercy, a God of the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, now that it had no longer its appropriate grievances to keep it alive, was, altliough never entirely to be lost to Israel, allowed gradually to fall into the background ; and was indeed practically forgotten for centuries until revived by Jesus and widened so as to embrace all mankind. That these cfrievances which had called forth the denunciations of the prophets, and had given rise to this new conception of Jehovah as a God of justice, love, and mercy, had really been swept away by the Exile, will be seen at once^ as has already been shown, if we compare the provisions of the Priestly Code of the Pentateuch which Ezra brought with him from Babylon about a century after the Exile, with those of the Deuteronomif Code about a quarter of a century before. In the Priestly Code no mention is made of kings, or courts, or of military service ; of ' high places ;' of pillars, asheras, or the worship of other gods ; matters all of which are of constant recurrence in Deuteronomy. And why? Clearly because, as we know from history, neither king, nor court, nor army, neither ' high places,' idolatry, nor ' other gods ' had any existence in Israel after the Exile. In the same way no mention is made of Sabbath Observance, of the Decalogue, of Jerusalem as the only place of sacrifice, of the absence of blemish in the animals oifercd — and that because all this had long been taken for granted and acted on as a matter of course. In like manner no mention is made of usury, of the opjiression of the poor, the slaves, the widow and orphan or the stranger — and that because the social conditions which had given rise to these grievances had been completely swept away, and the grievances themselves had no longer any existence or were of such exceptional occurrence that they could be easily dealt with by laws known and recognized by all. Another consequence of 204 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. the new state In Avhicli the Jews found themselves after the Exile was that the great race of Prophets, being no longer wanted now that the grievances which had given them their raison d\'ti-e were removed, disappeared from Jewish history and were no more seen. The Prophets gone, the Priests, who had shared with them the authority and homage of the people, stepped into the vacant place. Now the characteristic of the priest as distinguished from the prophet is this, that, like a lawyer, he is not expected to originate any new ideas or to initiate any new line of policy or reform, but only to administer and carry into ever finer subtleties the existing law — extending its range it may be, but not altering its genius or essential spirit. And, accordingly, the consequence of this decay of the Prophet and rise of the Priest was that the prophetic conception of Jehovah — tlie conception of Him as the righteous, loving, and merciful Father of Ilis own people — fell into the back- ground ; and the priestly conception of Him as the jealous, exacting God, full of punctilio and tenacious of His own dignity, came almost exclusively to the front. And this con- ception of God, once ingrained in the mind, was supplemented by another which grew out of the new political situation in which the nation found itself. Protected from all danoer of foreign aggression by the Persian suzerainty, and allowed to freely develop its own Theocracy without interference and indeed with the direct encouragement of the Persian Kins:, the God who had walked in the garden with Adam, who had been heard thunilering from the top of Sinai and through the mouths of his chosen servants the Prophets, was now no longer needed ; and this, togetlier with the exertions of the priesthood to remove Him from contact with all that was earthlv, defilino- or unclean, had the effect of raislncj Him to such a transcend- ental height of holiness, aloofness, and unajjproachable dignity that He was in danger of dissolving into space and dis- appearing altogether from the lives and interests of men. And this indeed would \\n\e been the result had it not been for two THE EVOLUTION OF JEHOVAH. 205 very important considerations. The first was that the very difficulty, in fact impossibility, of keeping the whole of the ritual and ceremonial law without falling into sin on this side or on that, was of itself sufficient to keep Jehovah ever present to the mind; the second was the introduction into the vast inter-space left between Heaven and Earth of a number of subsidiary beings, neither gods nor men, as media of com- munication between God and Man, and as messengers and interpreters of the Divine Will. It was inevitable, indeed, that some such beings should arise from the time when the gods of the nations Avere seen to be nothing but blocks of wood or stone, and Jehovah was left supreme in the Universe, alone in his solitary isolation — it was inevitable, I say, that some such beings should arise to carry out his behests and to watch over the destinies of individuals and of nations, though stiU strictly subordinate to His Supreme dominion and control. And the particular order of beings most suitable for this purpose, as being neither gods nor men, and so neither encroaching on the dignity of Jehovah nor endangering his monotheism, were the Angels adopted by the priests from the Persian religion and brought back with them from Babylon. Now the Persian religion was in so many points akin to that of the Jews both in form and in spirit that one is not surprised that even a people as stiff-necked as the Jews should have found many things in it which they could utilize and embody in their own. The Ormuzd of the Persians, for example, was, like Jehovah, the Supreme God of all the World. Like him, too, he was worshipped without images, and Avas to be approached only after a course of purification identical almost with that of Judaism. The Jews had already taken their stories of the Creation and the Deluge from ancient Babylonian myths — with the single exception that to keep up their monotheism they were obliged to replace the hosts of Pagan deities who played their respective parts in these dramas by a single Divine Will, that of Jehovah, and a single Angelic Will, that of Satan. 206 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. They were also soon to adopt as a model for their synao-ogiies the Persian meeting-houses where the sacred books were retid, and hymns and prayers were recited and offered up to Ormuzd. And now, at the period of wliich we are treating, tlie period following the Exile, they had l)orrowed from the religion of Zoroaster the seven heavenly spirits or angels who surrounded the throne of Ormuzd and carried out his commands — the ' nou- slumberers,' as they were called, who, according to some, make their appearance in Zechariah as the seven eyes and seven arms of the golden candlestick. They had each received special names, Gabriel, Raphael, Michael, Uriel, and the like, and formed a hierarchy among themselves with Gabriel at their head ; each nation having its own special angel to Avatch over it — that of the Jews being Michael, as we read in Daniel. These seven angels surrounded, as I have said, the throne of God, and were in the form of winged men. They were the helpers of men in their perplexities, and became later the guardian angels of Christianity. In the Persian religion there were bad angels as well as good — ' devas ' they Avere called — who were the special servants of Ahriman, the god of Darkness. But here, again, the Jews had to draw a firm line to protect their Monotheism. It was impossible for them to admit the existence of a separate and independent God of Darkness ; nor could they admit the existence of spirits, evil or otherwise, who were other than the servants of Jehovah. And accordingly with the Jews, Satan is only one among the seven angels or spirits who surround the throne of God; his special function being that of the 'accuser' of men. In Zechariah, for example, we find him reproved by God for unjustly accusing Joshua the High Priest. In Chronicles, again, he has advanced a steji farther, and is now seen provoking David to number the people. In Job, he has become an active mischief-maker who puts pit-falls in men's paths to trip them up ; but it is not until the time of Christianity that he has escaped entirely from the control of God, and become a THE EVOLUTION OF JEHOVAH. 207 Tempter on his own account. At no period of his history, however, does he become a separate and independent God like Ahriman ; Ijiit ever remains, although a fallen spirit and rebel angel, the offspring and creation of God, With the gods of the Nations thus su])planted in the Jewish raind by angels, who were neither gods nor yet properly men, but a higher order of being created by Jehovah for the carrying out of His designs, and for acting as His inter- mediaries in dispensing blessings and punishments to individuals and nations, the Jews had at last attained to a completed system of Absolute Monotheism in which one Supreme God, Jehovah, was the God of all the AVorld, with themselves as His chosen people — a God who, although occupying the vast stretches of immensity, had still in some mysterious way his dwelling in their midst on the Holy Hill of Zion. In thus con- ceivins: of Jehovah as speciallv their God, and of themselves as in a special sense his children, while all other peoples were at best his step-children merely, the Jews had reached a point beyond which their national pride would not pcn-mit them to advance ; for however it might be with individuals, it is certain that the nation at large \\ould never take the next stej) needed to bring them to the conception of God as a God of Love, the common Father of all mankind. Higher, indeed, than a God of holiness, justice, and unapproachable majesty, of high dignity, sensitiveness, and honour, who was to be approached only with the most scrupulous attention to personal purity, and with feelings of the most devout reverence and awe, the Jewish conception of Jehovah, as we said in a former chapter, could not rise. And corresponding with this con- ception of God, as we should expect, was their Moral Code. Not that the conception of Jehovah as a God of Justice and Mercy which had been so dearly won by the J'lDphets, with the code of morality founded on it, was ever again lost. Although falling into the background, it was always there and ready to spring up as we see in the Psalms in times of national 208 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. or personal perplexity and adversity. But it was practically overshadowed for centuries by the other conception of Him ; and the Code of Morality became almost entirely a ritual and ceremonial one, in whicli all was done for the honour, dignity, and glory of God, rather than for the essential well-being of men. The consequence was that the better to secure the blessings promised to obedience and to avert the penalties threatened for disobedience to Jehovah's statutes, the Jews had only to carry out the provisions of their Law with greater and greater scrupulosity, and into finer and finer detail. And as these provisions were mainly external and ceremonial, and concerned such matters as sabbath observance, circumcision. Temple-service, sacrifices, feasts, fasts, ablutions, and the like, it is clear that in the end the Jewish life must have reached in ritual and ceremonial a point of scrupulosity transcendental in dearree — as indeed we know it did under the reo-ime of the Scribes and Pharisees. Now this degeneration of morality into ritual and ceremonial observances had already taken place at the time of which we are speaking, that is, shortly after the Exile, and was only less in degree than under the Scribes and Pharisees. The rewards and punishments, too, for obedience and disobedience were still national in their scope, and took the form of material well-being in the present life ; while on the other hand the rewards and punishments of Christianity con- cerned the individual himself, and took the form of spiritual blessings in another world. It is evident, therefore, that although the post-exilic conception of God required only a single step to bring it to the conception of the God of Jesus, that step could not be taken until the gap between a system of national rewards and punishments, and of individual and personal rewards and punishments, between a national immor- tality and a personal immortality, was bridged over. This process, as we know, took fully four hundred years to accomplish ; and to trace its successive stages shall be my aim in the next chapter. CHAPTER V. EVOLUTION OF JEHOVAH AND OP JEWISH MORALITY. (continued). XN the last chapter Ave saw that at the period at which we have arrived, viz., after the return of the Captives from Babylon, the blessings and penalties which attended on obedience to or infraction of the Divine Commands, were conceived as relating to the Jewish people as a xoliole\ the individual participating in them rather as a member of the community at large, than on his own account. It is true that men were beginning to feel, as did Ezekiel, that rewards or punishments were or ought to be personal to the individual as such, but as yet the thought existed only in germ in the foremost minds and had not descended to the body of the people. The conception of the rewards and punishments themselves, on the other hand, remained as it had always been, purely material and worldly in character, — riches, happiness, long life, prosperity, and a numerous progeny, or their opposites. But the gap between a stern and jealous God who regarded only the nation as a whole, and who visited the iniquities of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation, and the God of Love of Christianity who looks into the hearts and minds of each of his children, was too great to be bridged over by a singU step of evolution. It had P 210 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. to be led up to by a stage in which blessings and penalties, while still purely material, and disjiensed mainly in considera- tion of outward and ceremonial acts (on the simjile business basis of a quid pro quo, in opposition to the free grace and love of Christianity), were nevertheless, as in Christianity, conceived to be personal to the individual, and not, as in the earlier Judaism, general to the nation at large. Now the agencies which were chicHy instrumental in inaugurating and consolidatinoj this intermediate stage in the relations between God and Man, between the older Judaism and Christianity, may be formulated as follows ; — the Long Peace, the Written Law, the rise of the Scribes, the admission of the Prophets and Psalms into the Canon of Scripture, and the institution of the Synagogue. The most important of these agencies, perhaps, as being tho indispensable basis of all the rest, was the long peace which the nation enjoyed under the Persian Suzerainty for two centuries after the return from the Exile, — a peace which was continued practically for another century and a half under the Greek Protectorate up to the time of Antiochus Epiphanes. Now it is evident that so long as the nation was surrounded by foes on every hand and was engaged in a ceaseless struggle to maintain its independence, the greatest blessings which Jehovah could bestow for obedience to his commands, must have been national existence, the secure possession of the land, success in war, and the rest ; and that He Himself would be regarded as the God of the nation as a whole, rather than as the God of the individual. But in the long peace of three centuries and a half which followed the Exile, during which the Jews were permitted under Persian and Greek protection to manage their own affairs in their own way, and to organize their Theocracy on the pure ideal of their minds Avithout the fear of foreio^n aaro-ression or interference, — it Avas almost inevitable that their thoughts should turn imoards on themselves, and should centre each on his own individual hopes and fears ; and that God, in conse- THE EVOLUTION OF JEHOVAU. 211 qiience, should gradually come to be conceived of as interestino- Himself in the affairs of individuals, Avatching their actions, and keeping a strict audit of what each had done and left undone. And this, which as a general tendency was almost inevitable, was converted into certainty and actuality by the other causes we have mentioned, viz., by the institution of the Synagogue, the rise of the Scribes, and the admission into the Canon of Scripture of the books of the Prophets and the Psalms. Before the Exile, the worship of God had consisted, as Ave have seen, chiefly in the sacrifices which were offered up at the ' high places ' to be found everywhere throughout the land, on every hill-top and under ever}^ green tree, and within easy access of all. But these ' high places ' had all been abolished by Josiah shortly before the Exile ; and from that time onwards sacrifice Avas permitted only in one place, the Temple at Jerusalem. Noav this centralization of Avorsliip at the Capital, far from bringing God's presence nearer to the heart and conscience of each individual, Avould of itself have had precisely the opposite effect ; — the three great yearly feasts of the Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles, Avhich brought the Jews in croAvds up to Jerusalem from all parts of the Avorld, tending rather to keep up the conception of Jehovah as the God of the JcAvish nation, than as the God of the individual. But as these feasts and sacrifices occupied only a few Aveeks in the year, the people from the country round, noAV that the ' high places' Avere abolished, AA'cre left for the greater part of the time to those ceremonial observances and laAvs relating to the keeping of the Sabbath, personal purity, etc., Avhich could be practised aAvay from the Temple, and Avhich from their narroAvness and strictness kept the fear if not the love of Jehovah for ever present in their minds. Now the agency for the inculcation and enforcement of these private exercises Avas the institution of the Synagogue, — an institution AA'hich the exiles brought back Avith them from Jjabylon. During the Exile, Avhen far away from their beloved Zion and 212 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. with their Temple in ruins, their only form of worship was prayer, praise, and the reading and exposition of the Law ; and this worship they practised in the little meeting- places which they had constructed for themselves on the model of those Persian houses of worship where were recited and sung the holy songs and ancient prayers of the Zoroastrian faith. After the Exile it was but natural that they should bring back with them to Judasa an institution to which they had grown so accustomed in Babylon ; and, accordingly, these Synagogues, as they were called, were soon to be found in every village in the land, and in the intervals of the great Feasts at Jerusalem were the only places of worship. They had taken the place of the ancient 'high places,' but differed from them in this important particular, that while the ' high places ' were the scenes of sacrifices as gross almost and purely external as those of Paganism, the Synagogues were places of meeting for prayer, praise, and the reading and exposition of the Law, — that is to say of a worship purely inward in character. These meetings, which were held twice a week, were opened with prayer and with the reading of the Sliema, ' Hear, O Israel,' etc., after which a portion of the Law was read, interpreted, and ex- ])Ounded by anyone present who felt he had something to say. In this way the word of God was brought consciously home to the heart and mind of each, — and it is interesting to remember that these Synagogues were afterwards felt by Jesus to be appropriate places for the exposition and propagation of his own doctrines. But the reading and exposition of the Written Law, the Pentateuch, although it kept the fear of God before the indi- vidual mind, would have had but little influence in making religion a personal concern between each man and his Maker had it not been for the addition to the Canon of Scripture of the Books of the Prophets, and especially of the Book of Psalms, — with their glorification of the loving-kindness of Jehovah, and His forgiveness to all those who kept His THE EVOLUTION OF JEHOVAH. 213 commands and put their trust in Him. Then, and then only, did the full influence of the Synagogue in transformino- the conception of Jehovah from a national God to a God of love and mercy, a God who listens to the cries of the least of His children^ begin to be felt. The Pentateuch itself, or Book of the Law, the Thora as it was called, was a composite work, made up of old and new portions, edited and in part fabricated in Babylon by the Scribes, and brought to Jerusalem by Ezra in the year 444 B.C., about a hundred years after the return from the Exile. These Scribes were the descendants of the priestly class who had gone into captivity, but who, owing to the impossibility of sacrificing at any other place than the Temple at Jerusalem, had been forced to turn their attention to the study and exposition of the Law. They were, in a word, a kind of transformed Priests. Now when the Temple worship was re-established at Jerusalem after the return of the exiles, those Scribes or religious lawyers who remained behind in Babylon, set themselves to work to bring tlie great mass of Sacred Literature that had for centuries been accumulating, into one compact and as far as possible harmonious whole. The materials they had at hand were many and various, and consisted of old historical tales of the Patriarchs and Heroes of the early world ; narratives of the nation's wanderings and exploits in peace and Avar, taken from the history of the Wars of Jehovah ; the old Covenant of Jehovah with His people known as the Book of the Covenant, which had come down from a remote past, and is now found in certain chapters of the Book of Exodus ; the new Covenant or Book of the Law found in the Temple by Hilkiah the High-priest in the time of Josiah shortly before the Exile, and now known to us as the Book of Deuteronomy ; and the elaborate Temple ceremonial and ritual of feasts, fasts, sacrifices, music, etc., which we see beginning to be planned during the Exile, and taking shape in the ideal dreams of Ezekicl, and which, during the hundred years that followed, hud been elaborated to the point of 214 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. minuteness that we find in the Priestly Code, especially In the Books of Leviticus and Numbers. Now these separate portions of the Pentateuch which had up till then existed only in scattered copies, had been collected and worked over by the Scribes in Babylon ; but as owing to their antiquity and the reverence in which they were held, no one dared take the liberty of altering them sufficiently to bring them into a compact, harmonious whole, the only plan was to bring the separate portions together side by side, and, after rubbing off the rougher angles of dis- cordance, to fuse them into a solid mass, — filling in the interspaces with a priestly and ceremonial medium which gave character and colour to the whole and like the hardened sand between the larger stones in a conglomerate mass, held it firmly together. The effect of this was that when vinited into a single book, — the Book of the Law, — an additional sanctity and reverence was given to the whole, over and above that which had formerly attached to the separate parts. But as the Book was given out to be the full and complete revelation of God to Moses, it became all the more necessary to harmonize the various discordances that were to be found in it. as well as to bring all its provisions up to date, so as to meet the needs and necessities of the times. And as it was impossible to alter, add to, or take from the Written Word, the difficulty of stretching, bending, or otherwise twisting its provisions so as to harmonize them with each other and to adapt them to changing circumstances, was surmounted by what was called the Oral Law, — the Law of Tradition, — whose collected utterances were afterwards to form the greater part of the Talmud. But it was necessary, besides, that this Oral, this Unwritten Law, should have equal authority with the Written Law. The Scribes, therefore, were obliged to resort to the same expedient Avhich had proved so successful when Hilkiah brought the Book of Deutei-onomy from the recesses of the Temple, and when Ezra brought the Pentateuch itself from Babylon ; — the expedient, viz., of THE EVOLUTION OF JEHOVAH. 215 referrin"- It back to Moses. It was allejjed that !Moses had received the Oral Law aloni>- with the Written one from Jehovah on Sinai. And just as with us, Case-made Law, as it is called, has existed from time immemorial alongside of the Statute Law and on an equal footing with it, so this Oral Law of the Jews from the time of Ezra onwards existed side by side with the Pentateuch and enjoyed equal authority with it — each generation of Scribes, like each generation of our own lawyers, being bound by these oral decisions of their pre- decessors as by so many sacred and authoritative precedents. Now the Supreme Tribunal to which all disputes in reference to the meaning, interpretation, or legal application of both the Oral and Written Law were referred, was a body of the most eminent of these Scribes sitting at Jerusalem, and known as the Sopherim, or Men of the Great Synagogue. A commission of this body shortly after the bringing of the Law fi-om Babylon by Ezra, went about the country taking it with them and explaining it to the people ; and afterwards when tlie Synagogues were fully established, those who conducted the services as well as those who acted as judges in administering the Law, were in the habit of appealing to this body at Jerusalem in all cases of doubt, difficulty, or dispute. But it was only natural that the first generation of Scribes, the men who had themselves taken part in adding the ceremonial and ritual parts of the Pentateuch to the old original Book of tlie Law, — the Book of Deuteronomy, — should not show the same reverence for the letter of a Law which themselves had made, as their descendants of later centuries. And accordingly we find that not only did they overlay the Written Law with the traditional Oral Law, but they did not scruple to lay sacrilegious hands on the written text itself. Amono^ other things, for example, they altered, as Kuenen has pointed out. the third of a shekel which was the amount of the Temple-tax in Nehemiah (x., 32), to the half a shekel which was the amount in Exodus (xxx., 13). From the beginning, and indeed for 216 THE EVOLUTIOX OF JUDAISM. many ages, tlie Pentateuch was regarded as the complete Law of God, containing provisions, it was believed, which when properly interpreted by the Oral traditions of the Scribes, were svifficient for the regulation of every act in life. But finding that the old Historical Books were capable, when properly redacted, of yielding much matter serviceable for doctrine and instruction, the Scribes added them one by one to the Canon ; until as time went on they came to be regarded as having the same kind of authority, although somewhat less in degree, as tlie Pentateuch itself. Among others, the Book of the Judges, for example, was redacted from the priestly point of view from sources now lost, while the Books of the Chronicles were simply a redaction from the same point of view, of the Books of Kings. Fortunately, the reverence for the Books of Kings was so great that they still form part of the Canon ; and in minutely com2)aring the historical accounts with the parallel ones in Chronicles, as has been so ably done by Wellhausen, the fact that the one is but a priestly redaction of the other, is put beyond all doubt. In the same way, the noble record of fulfilled prophecies had made it evident to all that the Prophets had been inspired by God ; and the Books of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and the rest, Avere added to the Canon. Now it was only when these Prophets and the Psalms were added to the Canon of Scripture, that the full power of the Synagogue in bringing Jehovah home to the hearts and con- sciences of each individual Jew, began to make itself felt. For the Pentateuch, the Book of the Law proper, deals, it is to be observed, mainly with matters affecting the well-being of Israel as a nation, and only secondarily with those peculiar to each individual. It deals, for example, with historical characters like the Patriarchs and holy men of old, whose lives, though full of idyllic beauty and charm, have still a historical and national, rather than an individual significance ; or Vv'ith rites like Cir- cumcision, and the observance of the Sabbath, whose main object was to keep up a distinction between the Jews and other THE EVOLUTION OF JEHOVAH. 217 peoples; or Avith the great festivals — Passover, Pentecost, Tabernacles, — which drew the Jews up to Jerusalem from all parts of the world, and made those who took part in them feel rather their national relationship to Jehovah, than t\\e\Y personal relationship to Him ; the individual being as it were for the time lost in the crowd. So, too, the great Day of Atonement was instituted for the cleansing away of the sins of the lohole people ; while the continual burnt-offering was the expression of the continued gratitude of the nation as a whole to their God. It was only the sin and trespass offerings, the laws relating to purity, etc., which primarily concerned the individual as such ; but they were purely formal and outward acts, calculated, it is to be observed, rather to appease the wrath of God than to promote the personal communion of the individual with Him. So far, therefore, as the mere reading and exposition of the Pentateuch was concerned, the Synagogue, except that it kept the fear of God before the mind of the individual Jew, w^ould have been as far almost from brlns^ino; him into intimate personal relationship with Him, as the old ' high places ' with their merely outward, and in essence and effect Pagan, sacrifices. It was only when the Prophets and Psalms, as I have said, with that sweet resignation and trust in the loving-kindness and tender mercies of God Avhich have made them so dear to the afflicted, the sorrowing, and the wretched, in every age — it was only when these were added to the Canon of Scripture, to be read in the Synagogue and applied by each to the needs of his own individual heart, that Jehovah became transfigured from the Great and Supreme God of the nation as a whole, to an intimate and personal God, near to the heart of each one of His people, to comfort and bless them and to do them good. But although at last through these various agencies Jehovah had been transformed from a national or tribal cod to a God near to the heart of each individual Jew, still the svstem of rew^ards and punishments continued, as ever, purely material and worldly in character —riches, happiness, health, prosperity, 218 TnE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. long life, old age, and numerous progeny, and their opposites ; the consequence being that each man as reward for obedience to the Divine Commands, looked to the promises of God for the enjoyment of these blessings in himself and in his own lifetime. Of the strange impasse to which this brought the Jews, and of how, coming on it suddenly and quite unwittingly, as on an cpen precipice, Judaism was brought by it to the very verge of disaster and ruin — this, together with the consequences that flowed from it, shall be our theme in the next chapter. CHAPTER VI. THE EVOLUTION OF THE RESURRECTION AND OF A FUTURE LIFE. TN the last chapter we arrived at that point in the Evolution -^ of Judaism where but a single step intervenes to separate the Jewish Conception of God and the Jewish Code of Morality from those of Christianity ; and yet that single step cannot be taken for some three hundred years to come. In the present chapter, accordingly, I propose to institute an inquiry into the causes that have interposed this delay ; and the narrative will fomi one of the most interesting and instructive chapters in the whole history of Judaism. To beo-in with, it will be remembered that we found in a former chapter that the active centres, the evolving nmld of all religions might be reduced to three, viz. a Conception of God, a Code of Morality, and a Supernatural Ideal. It would seem probable, therefore, that if the conception of God and the code of Morality of the Jews were, during the period of Greek domination, or say about 300 B.C., separated by but a single step from Christianity, the delay in passing over into it was due to some incompleteness in the evolution of the third factor, the Supernatural Ideal. And this a priori probability will be found in actual fact to be true. That both the Jewish conception of God and the Jewish code of Morality were at this 220 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. time Avithin a single step of Christianity, and that they still remained practically where they were without any real organic advance until the time of Christ, cannot, I think, be disputed. The conception of God was of One Holy and Just Being, of great majesty, aloofness, sanctity, and purity, resent- ing any want of reverence or approach to familiarity as a stain, but of great loving-kindness and tender mercy to His own chosen j)eople. His ear ever open to the cries of His children. Now a single step forward will take us to the conception of a God full of grace, loving-kindness, and mercy, not only to His own people, but to all mankind — and what is that but Christianity? The moral relation, again, existing between God and man, which in early Judaism had been a relation between Jehovah and the Jewish nation as a lohole, had at the time of which we are speaking become, as we have seen, a personal relation between Him and each individual Jcav. But the terms of that relation were still those that we should expect from a just and jealous but loving God, who kept a strict audit and balance- sheet of all the actions of His people, and who demanded, in consequence, for each transgression a legal equivalent in offering or sacrifice. Now if we take a step forward, you have a God near not only to the heart of each Jew but to the heart of all men, a God who pardons the sinner, not by ticking off each offence as its legal equivalent is paid, but by freely and of His OAvn grace wiping the slate clean from the outset — and this is the God of Christianity. And now, again, Ave have to ask what prevented this single necessary step being taken at once, instead of requiring three hundred years of varying fortune for its realization ? Tliat the delay was due to some arrest in the evolution of that side or element in religion which we have called the Supernatural Ideal — an element which in the case of the Jews took the form of the rewards and promises held out by Jehovah to His people — we have, as we have said, every reason on d priori grounds for believing ; and that it was so in actual fact we are now to see. THE EVOLUTION OF THE RESURRECTION. 221 We have already pointed out that throughout the whole period of Jewish History from the earliest times to the latest, the promises and blessings held out by Jehovah to His children for obedience to His commands were of a purely material and worldly nature — the secure possession of the land, rich fields, bounteous harvests, national freedom and independence, success in war, etc. ; the penalties incurred by disobedience being also of a worldly character, — defeat, exile, slavery, pestilence, famine, and death. There was no immortality either of the soul or of the body, no resurrection, no after-life of rewards and punish- ments — nothing but national and worldly prosperity, or the reverse. Now as the life of a nation, unlike that of an individual, has no definite limit or end, the earthly felicity promised as reward of obedience to God's Law, can, if not accomplished in the existing generation of men, be postponed to a future generation, without serious detriment to the religion which announces it, or suspicion of bad faith on the part of the God who has promised it. But from the time that the rewards and penalties attaching to good and bad conduct were no longer believed to be lumped together in the form of national pros- perity or the reverse, but were believed to be strictly personal to each individual Jew and accurately apportioned to each according to his deserts ; and when in consequence of there being no future life or immortality, these rewards and punishments if made good at all must be made good within the compass of a single human life; then, Judaism all unconsciously to itself, had, by the strain it put on Providence to realize its promises, brought itself to the very verge of ruin — to the point, indeed, at which no philosophy or mere external logic could save it, but where, if saved at all it must be by the Providence or Fate which is concealed in the secret and invisible logic of events. For although it is true that at any age of the world the individual could always appeal, even in his own single life, to a sjnritual compensation, an expansion of heart and soul, an elevation of 222 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. rank in the scale of being, following with mathematical certainty and as by inevitable decree on all devotion to the good and the true — still up to this hour it has never been found to be true that material prosperity will in like manner follow the track of the virtuous and the o-ood. To believe otherwise and to teach it as an article of faith, was to put a greater strain on Providence than it could weU bear ; and as a matter of fact, from the time that these two streams of thought, viz, — the worldly prosperity and the limits of a single life — were seen like railway trains converging and approaching each other, disaster and ruin were imminent, and had it not been for what we have called the unforeseen logic of events, the collision must have resulted in the complete break-down of Judaism. For from the position thus taken up a logical retreat was impossible. This dependence of each man's fortunes on his own good or bad conduct had not been reached in a night, but by gradual stages and slow evolution through many centuries, and could not be revoked. Backward, therefore, it was impossible to go, and to press forward was but to break and shatter oneself against the hard rock of facts ; and falling, to drag down again that belief in One God which had taken long centuries of persecution and exile to laboriously and pain- fully build up — together with all that it implied for the future of the world. It is true that this inevitable consummation towards which Judaism was steadily moving was delayed for a time by the interposition of one or another of those pleasing illusions, those consoling fictions which the mind makes for itself when threatened with the approaching ruin of its ideals or hopes. Among other things, for example, it was said that the bad fortune which had attended the good man up to the last hours of his life, would be succeeded by a moment of supreme bliss which in itself was sufficient compensation for all the sorrows and afflictions of a life-time. Or, again, that if we could only see everything in its true light and perspective as God sees it, we should find THE EVOLUTION OF THE RESURRECTION. 223 much evil in the lives of those men who had been so afflicted, but whom we had been in the habit of regarding as models of all the virtues. These were, of course, pure fictions without foundation in reality, but they served to postpone for a while the inevitable doom that must sooner or later overtake any religion which has had the imprudence to link its fate with a hypothesis so viewy and unsubstantial as the reward of goodness and virtue by material and worldly prosperity in the present life. Now the most complete and elaborate statement in Jewish literature of these fictions, especially of the one last cited, is contained in the Book of Job — which could only have been written at this period, that is to say at some point between the return of the Exiles and the rise of the Maccabees. In this book you have the problem stated in all its pregnancy, and the question discussed in all its fulness — Why a good and virtuous man like Job should be so afflicted by God ? There, too, you see the sophistical fictions by which his friends try to convince him that he must, in spite of his unconscious- ness of all evil, have been guilty, even if unwittingly, of some sin that has brought on him the displeasure of God. But it is all in vain. No one is convinced by them ; and Job himself is only saved from absolute scepticism by the reflection that God's ways are not as our ways, nor His thoughts as our thoughts ; that is to say by giving up the problem as from the Jewish point of view insoluble. But it could not end there. By the time Ecclesiastes was written, all these hollow sophistries had been thrown aside as worthless, and the finer spirits had resigned themselves to an absolute pessimism and scepticism. With neither a resurrection, a future life, nor a reward in this life for their virtues, what could men do but exclaim with the Preacher, ' Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity ' i One event happens alike to all, Avhether they be virtuous or wicked, therefore let us eat our bread with joy, anoint our- selves with oil, put on white garments and enjoy the passing hour. ' Let us eat and drink for to-morrow we die,' for there 224 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. is no wisdom or consciousness in the grave to which we are fast hastening. So far indeed had it gone with the Preacher, that in Ecclesiastes the Jews are no longer the peculiar people, nor is God known as Jehovah, but only as Eloliim. It only required a little time for this pessimism and despair of the Preacher to reach the hearts of the many, and to end in the open and avowed scepticism of all and the bankruptcy of the Jewish religion. But this goal to which it all logically led, and which it was impossible to avoid by any inner process of reason (for it was the strict and logical outcome of all that had gone before), was evaded, as we shall now see, by the help of Providence or Fate in the shape of events from loitliout. The manner in which this came about Ave have noAv to see. Up to the time of Antiochus Epiphanes King of Syria, or say to the year 170 B.C., the Jews, sheltered first under the political wing of Persia and then under that of the Greek Kings of Egypt and Syria respectively, had been permitted to enjoy all the privileges and immunities of their religion, undisturbed either by persecution within or interference from without. They enjoyed, too, all the political privileges of the Greeks who were the dominant caste both in Egypt and in Syria, and were favoured by kings in many instances with high offices and dignities. The consequence of this was that their harsh and sordid lives began gradually to be softened, inter-penetrated, and suffused with the genial radiance, the warm pulsating sunshine of the Greek life which surrounded them like an atmosphere on every side. More especially was this the case with the Jewish Ai'istocracy — the Priestly Party — who in the long peace and in the absence of persecution had, as the governing body of the nation, been gradually transformed from servants of Jehovah into men of the world and politicians, refined and worldly aristocrats and courtiers. So far, indeed, had this inter- penetration of Jewish customs and modes of life by Greek influences gone, that many of the leading Jewish families were willing and even anxious to introduce among their countrymen THE EVOLUTION OF THE RESURRECTION. 225 the more brilliant and refined culture of the Greeks ; and difficult as it must have been to all Jews after the persecutions of Antiochus to realize it, there can be no doubt that the more intimate the association of the upper class of Jews with the Greeks became, the more ashamed did they become of their own peculiar customs and modes of life. They tried to introduce into their towns the baths, theatres, and gymnasia, of the Greeks; and to avoid the ridicule of the heathen populace, they even went so far as to submit to a painful operation in order to conceal their nationality. All this, it is needless to say, was viewed with deep disgust and a growing sense of irritation by the great masses of the Jewish people, w^ho were passionately attached to the ordinances of the Law and to their own cramped and sordid modes of life, and who abominated as much the social customs of the Greeks — their games, gymnasia, baths, etc. — as they did their idolatry. Such was the state of Jewish feeling up to the time of Antiochus Epiphanes. But during the reign of that monarch, matters were brought to a crisis. It so happened that the office of High Priest, which was held by one Jesus, or Jason as he was called in Greek, was taken away from him by the king, and given to his brother Onias or Menelaus. The people took the part of the deposed priest, and in a riot which ensued, Menelaus was obliged to fly from Jerusalem, and seek the protection of the king. He then assured Antiochus that both he himself and the priestly party at Jerusalem, were anxious to give up the Jewish laws and customs, and to adopt those of the Greeks ; going so far even as to ask the king's permission to build a Greek gymnasium at Jerusalem. Now whether it were that the passion of Antiochus for hellenizing the peoples of his dominions led him, when he learnt how far the process had already gone among the upper classes of the Jews, readily to believe that the rest of the people could be weaned from their religion by a sufficiently vigorous application of force — the more so, indeed, as the Scribes, who were the leaders and Q 22Q THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. teacliers of the people, had as yet no voice in the governino- body or Sanhedrim, but were confined to their purely academic functions of expositors and interpreters of the Law — or Avhether it were the fear lest if he delayed too long, the discontented party in Jerusalem would call in the assistance of the rapidly growing Eoman power ; or whether it was owing to pecuniary embarrassments ; or mere greed ; or to disgust with the internal tumults of the Jews and their attitude towards himself, cannot perhaps be known ; but whatever may have been the reason, certain it is that he seized the opportunity afforded him by the riots in the city to march an army into Judaea with the object of rooting out once for all the Jewish religion and nationality. ' Thorough ' was to be the policy, and in carrying it into execution ' terror ' the order of the day. He burnt the finest buildings, razed the walls of ihe city to the ground, and to overawe the population built a fortress at .Vera on a hill close by, overlooking the Temple, and in it put a colony of Greeks. He then rifled the Temple, carrying away the golden candlesticks, the altar of incense, the table of shewbrcad, and the curtains of scarlet and linen ; and giving orders that no child should be circumcised, and that all copies of tlie Law should be secured and burnt. But worse than all, and horror of horrors to the Jews, he caused a statue of Jupiter Olympus to be erected on the altar of burnt offering in the very Temple itself ; and to this, the ' abomination of desolation ' of Daniel, sacrifices of swine were offered daily. The citizens were slain or sold into captivity, the women strangled, and those who were caught endeavouring to make their escape were whipped Avith rods, torn to pieces, or crucified. This was in the year 167 B.C., and ought, one would imagine, to have resulted in the complete bankruptcy of a religion which, while promising worldly prosperity, happiness, old age, and respect, to those Avho kept its precepts, could give even its martyrs no better reward than the whip, the rack, the cross, ignominy, infamy, execration, and death. But it had in fact pre- THE EVOLUTION OF THE RESURRECTION. 227 cisely the opposite effect, and, indeed, was indirectly the means of restoring to something like its pristine vigour that Jewish religion whose heart, as we have seen, was being slowly eaten out by scepticism. This it did by sweeping away once and for all those puerile fictions, those hollow fatuities and sophisms, with which in times of peace men may amuse themselves and a religion hide for a while its bankruptcy, or postpone its downfall, but which in the hour of trial and in the face of calamities like these of the Jews under Antiochus, were felt to be unendurable mockeries. Those dreams of a happiness in this life to be the attendant of virtue ; those accusations of guilt, as in Job, where there had been affliction ; those promises of a happiness in the last moments of life which should more than make up for a life's misery ; — all these fictions it swept away for ever as convicted impostures ; and in despair of finding justice in this life men boldly set sail for another, preferring rather to cherish a pleasing dream of a future which could not be disproved, than a lying unreality in the present. And so we have the first entrance into Jewish religion of that doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body and of a Future Life on Earth, which when transformed and modified by Greek speculation, was afterwards to play so important a vole in Christianity. It first makes its appearance in the Book of Daniel, which all scholars are now agreed in believing to have been written shortly after the Greeks and Syrians were driven out of Jerusalem by the Maccabees. It was just three years to the day from the date of the ' abomination of desolation ' being set up in the Temple, that Judas Maccabeus who had fought his way up to supreme command with the obstinate valour of an old Roman, entered the city, broke in pieces the statue of Ju[)iter Olympus, and destroyed the polluted altar of burnt offering on Avhich it stood ; restoring the altar of incense, the golden candlesticks, the table of shewbread, and all the other appurtenances of the Temple, to their former position. Now it was to comfort and console the 228 THE EVOLUTION' OF JUDAISM. Jews in their desolation after the persecutions, and to resuscitate the faith which had been so rudely shaken by the death of the martyrs, that the Book of Daniel was written. The writer pictures in apocalyptic visions the triumph of the Jewish nation. "I saw," he says, "in the night vision, and behold one like a Son of Man came with the clouds of Heaven and came to the Ancient of Days, and they brought him near Him. And there was given him dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him ; his dominion is an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed." Here, the ' one like a Son of Man ' is used, as is afterwards explained, in contrast to the four figures of beasts, who represent the Assyrian, Median, Persian, and Greek Empires respectively ; and is meant to represent the Jewish nation, the ideal people of Israel, the lambs of the Most High, — those who had fought and died for the faith during the recent persecutions under Antiochus, as distinct from the renegade Jews who had adopted the Greek customs, denied their faith, betrayed their nation, and been ashamed of their religion. But this kingdom of the Jews which God Himself was to set up through the instrumentality not of the Messiah but of the angel Michael, was an earthly kingdom not a heavenly one. And it was into this earthly kingdom that the martyrs who had died for their God and His Holy Temple were to awake, — as well as their teachers, the Scribes, who were to shine like stars. It was into this earthly kingdom, too, that the renegades were to awake to shame and everlasting contempt. But what it concerns us esjiecially to note here is, that this resurrection to an earthly and worldly kingdom of the future is only a pai'tial resurrection, being limited strictly on the one hand to those who had died for their religion and on the other to those who had betrayed it. And being a resurrection into an earthly kingdom, it was a resurrection of the body as well as of the soul ; differing in this from the resurrection of the THE EVOLUTION OF THE RESURRECTION. 229 Greeks, which, being to a place in the pure ether beyond the stars, was a resurrection of the soul only. And when Christianity took over the Jewish code of the resurrection of the body as well as of the soul, but at the same time transformed their earthly resurrection into a heavenly one, the difficulty of determining what kind of body it would be which should thus ascend to Heaven became a source of great perplexity to the Early Church, as we see from the Epistles of Paul, — and indeed has remained more or less a mystery and perplexity to the present time. Now this belief in a Bodily Resurrection to a Future Life on Earth, as compensation for unrewarded virtue in the present one, saved from extinction that Jewish religion on whose existence so much still hung for the future of the world ; and no sooner had it been announced by the writer of Daniel, than it spread over the whole Jewish world like a breath of spring, rescuing: them from the dilemma in which their doctrine of an earthly felicity following on obedience to the Law had placed them, and becoming for the Jews everywhere, with the single exception of the Sadducees, a most sweet and precious posses- sion. And here, perhaps, it may be as well in passing to observe that the reason why the Sadducees could still continue calmly and with the utmost sang-froid to stake the good faith and honour of Jehovah on the prosperity and worldly felicity which were to attend the virtuous in the present life (and that, too, in the face of all observation and experience, and even of the most damning evidence to the contrary), was, that belonging as they did to those priestly families who were endowed with all the authority, prestige, and power of a governing caste, — a hereditary nobility, the special favourites of Heaven, and supported at the public expense, — they could fearlessly appeal to this very fact of their earthly felicity and prosperity as evidence of the truth of their doctrine. For were they not the virtuous and the good, they seemed to ask, and had they not been rewarded in this j>30 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. present life? What need, then, for a resurrection and another life, if men get their deserts In this ? It was a pleasure to them to maintain a doctrine which so flattered their self-love, and could be applied, besides, with so much self-complacency to the worldly misfortunes of their less favoured fellow- countrymen ; — the fact of their scepticism as to the doctrine of the resurrection, only going to prove that although individuals may be found in every age and clime, who, surrounded with luxury and power, will still give up all for the hope of an ideal world beyond the grave, closes of men who are securely entrenched in the privileges of wealth and power, whether kings, or priests, or aristocracies, will always manage to get through the world with much satisfaction to themselves, with- out either the hope of a resurrection or of a future life. The reason that the writer of Daniel represents the earthly kingdom of God as inaugurated by the angel Michael rather than by the Messiah, was because the Messiah had always been represented by the older prophets as belonging to the lineage of David, whereas the Maccabees, who were the leading spirits in the revolt against Antiochus, were not of the Davidic line at all. They were the sons of an obscure priest named Mattathias, living at Modin ; and he in turn was descended from one Asmonjeus, a priest of the order of Joarib, and living at Jerusalem. And hence the dynasty to which he gave his name was called the Asmonasan Dynasty. With the introduction into the Jewish religion of a future life on earth and a resurrection of the body, it would seem as if the time were ripe for taking the last step which separated Judaism from Christianity. Not so, however; for the doctrine of the resurrection as contained in Daniel is not that of a general resurrection, but of one strictly limited, as we have seen, to a very small number of people — to the martyrs, viz., on the one hand, and the renegade hellenizing Jews on the other. Time accordingly must elapse before this limited resurrection can develop into a general resurrection for all ; THE EVOLUTIOX OF THE TiESURRECTION. 2ol and until tlien the frontier of Judaism cannot strictly be said to be separated from Christianity along its entire line by but a sinn-lc step or stage of evolution. For this evolution of a resurrection and a future life of reward and punishment, of a kingdom of God, etc., belongs naturally to that third main element in all religions which is here called the Supernatural or Ideal element; — the element which deals with that vast complex of hopes, fears, imaginations, desires, consolations, dreams, etc., which, like the honey in the flower, lead men on to realize in action those successively higher and higher Moral Codes which, as we have seen, it is the final end and aim of all religions to achieve. And with this evolution of the Resurrection and Future Life, this evolution of the Kingdom of God, wes the evolution of the person who Avas to mediate it, the Messiah, viz. ; — and to this, which will complete our study of the History and Evolution of Judaism, and bring it all along the whole extent of its line up to the frontiers of Christianity, I propose to call the attention of the reader in the next chapter. CHAPTER VI I. EVOLUTION OF THE MESSIAH AND OF THE MESSIANIC KINGDOM. FN a former chapter I pointed out that what I have called the Ideal or Supernatural element in all religions, the element to which in Judaism all that pertains to a Resurrection and a Future life, to a Messiah and a Kingdom of God belongs, is never a pale, cold, philosophical abstraction, but is always a warm concrete reality, palpitating with life, instinct with hope, fear, aspiration, and passion, and suited to every variety and grade of temperament and genius, of taste, culture, and refinement. And we may go farther and say that in no part of Religion is the correspondence between the Supernatural and the Natural, the things of Heaven and the things of Earth, more intimate and exact than it is between our longings, hopes, ambitions, and aspirations in the present world, and the nature of the Heaven we shall construct for ourselves in the next. So close indeed is it, that from a knowledge of the former the latter can with a very great degree of certainty be forecast. And as it is with other religions so it is with Judaism. Not the Valhalla of the Norsemen with its heroes drinking mead out of the skulls of the enemy they have slain in battle, not the Paradise of the Mahommedan Arab with its beautiful houris, its smiling oases, its luxurious couches, and its gleaming THE EVOLUTION OF THE MESSIAH. 233 waters, were more exact counterparts of the earthly ideals of these peoples than was the nature of the Messiah and of the Messianic Kingdom of the earthly ideals of the Jews. This I now propose to demonstrate in detail at the different stages through which in their evolution and development the nature of the Messiah and the Messianic Kingdom have passed, — and mainly with the idea of throwing light on those disputed passages in the gospel narratives which bear on the conception which Jesus had formed for Himself of the nature of the Messiah and of the Kingdom of God. To begin with, one may affirm that before the Exile, the ideal of the imagination in which the Jews lived, and on which in all their calamities they loved to dwell, was not, as we saw in the last chapter, a Heavenly Kingdom beyond the clouds like that of Mahomet and the Early Christians, but was purely an Earthly Paradise, variously figured by the Prophets in detail, but always consisting of certain fixed and definite elements — national independence, material prosperity, abundance of corn, wine, and oil, long life and an abundant progeny. It was on the one hand a purely material and worldly prosperity, and on the other a purely national one, in which the individual Jew was to share, and in the contemplation of w^hich he was to find the ideal of his dreams. But these pre-exilian times were, it is to be remembered, times of oppression — oppression of the poor, of the stranger, of the widow, the orphan, and the slave, by a luxurious and licentious court and a grasping and tyrannous plutocracy. They were times, too, in which the nation now enjoyed profound peace, and now was threatened from without by cruel and relentless foes — Assyrian, Egyptian, Edomite, Moabite, or Philistine. In the picture of their ideal future the Jews, accordingly, would not look for a Messiah sent from God for the conversion of their souls, as in Christian times ; for as yet there was no doctrine of a resurrection or a future life of reward and punishment for the individual Jew. The utmost compass of their hopes Avent no farther than the dream ( 234 THE EVOLUTION^ OF JUDAISM. of an Ideal King, and most naturally a king of the line con- secrated by God, the line of David, a king who should put down the corruptions and extortions of the great and powerful, who should judge righteous judgment, and protect from oppression the widow, the orphan, and the slave. How entirely tliis was the case may be seen in the writings of the great pre-exilian Prophets, where the Messiah is always represented as a King of the line of David, with justice, wisdom, and righteousness as the characteristics of his reign, and reliance on Jehovah rather than on horses and chariots, his policy. Whether he is to be warlike or peaceful (warlike until his enemies are subdued, and peaceful afterwards), whether he shall admit the Gentiles or not to the blessings of the Messianic Kingdom, depends on the circumstances of the time, the temper of the prophet, or the state of national feeling at the time at which he wrote, and of which for the time being he is the m^outhpiece. Listen to the war-like note of Amos, who, with the Northern kingdom threatened by the Assyrian, in his longing for the good old times of David when Israel ruled over Edom, Syria, and Moab, writes (chapter ix., 11) : " In that day will I raise up the tabernacle of David that is fallen, and close up the breaches thereof ; and I will raise up his ruins, and I will build it as in the days of old ; that they may possess the remnant of Edom, and of all the heathen which are called by my name, salth the Lord that doeth this." On the other hand, hear the halcyon note of Isaiah after the first struggles with the enemy are over, and the oppressors are put down. In chapter xl., 1, he says : "And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him. . . . With righteousness shall he judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth ; and he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked. . . The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall THE EVOLUTIOX OF THE MESSIAH. 235 lie down with the kid . , . and a little child shall lead them." Or the note of Justice and Righteousness in Jeremiah, who in chapter xxiii. 5, says: "Behold the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth." Or the adumbration of a peaceful, gentle Messiah, with the nation's trust placed in Jehovah, and not in the strength of its armies, in Zechariah (ix., 9 and 10), which Jesus in after times will interpret in reference to himself. "Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem : behold, thy king cometh unto thee ; he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass. And I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim, and the horse from Jerusalem, and the battle- bow shall be cut off": and he shall speak peace unto the heathen, and his dominion shall be from sea even to sea, and from the river even to the ends of tlie earth." This peaceful note is continued in Micah, who makes Jerusalem the centre to which all the nations shall come for worship and law. In chapter iv. 2 and 3, he says : " And many nations shall come, and say, Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, and to the house of the God of Jacob, and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths; for the law shall go forth of Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And he shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations afar off; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks ; nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." As to whether the Gentiles will be allowed to participate in the blessings of the Messianic reign, that depends much on the individual temper of the Prophet and the state of public feeling at the time of which he is writing. In Amos and Hosea, with the Assyrians closing in around the Northern kingdom, the blessings of the Messianic times are strictly limited to 236 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. Israel ; in Micah, Isaiah and Zechariah, in the pauses of conflict, they are extended to the Gentile nations as well. As to the time of the coming of the Messianic King in these early prophets, it is vaguely foretold by them as ' in the last days,' but was generally believed to be close at hand. In chapter xxix., 17, seq. Isaiah says : "Is it not yet a very little while, and Lebanon shall be turned into a fruitful field, and the fruitful field shall be esteemed as a forest ? And in that dav shall the deaf hear the words of the book, and the eyes of the blind shall see out of obscurity, and out of darkness. The meek also shall increase their joy in the Lord, and the poor amono- men shall rejoice." Zephaniah, too, writing it is believed in the time of Josiah, considers it to be close at hand. " It is near, it is near," he says, " and hasteth greatly." And now observe the change that came over the dreams of the Jews during the Babylonian Exile. With Jerusalem in ruins, the leading families in captivity, and no possibility of the Assyrians allowing the exiles to return, all hope of a restoration of the Davidic line had to be resigned. And accordingly the prophets who wrote during that period could see no possibility of the realization of the national hopes except by the direct interposition of God Himself. The problem was primarily how to get the people back again to Jerusalem, and this it seemed to Ezekiel and to the author of Isaiah (xxiv.-xxvii.) could only be done by the resurrection of those who had died in Babylon. And, accordingly, we have a doctrine of the resurrection specially devised to meet this particular diflSculty, — a doctrine good only for the particular occasion, and which, when it had served its purpose, was not heard of again for four hundred years. If we turn to Isaiah (xxvi., 19) we shall find him writing, " Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust, for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead." Again, in xxv., 8, he says : " He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord shall wipe away tears from off all THE EVOLUTION OF THE MESSIAH. 237 faces; and the rebuke of His people shall He take away fi'om off all the earth ; for the Lord hath spoken it." As for the Assyrians, on the contrary, their enemies and oppressors, they shall die without hope of resurrection. In chapter xxvi., 14, it is said, " They are dead, they shall not live ; they are deceased, they shall not rise, therefore hast thou visited and destroyed them, and made all their memory to perish." Again in chapter xxvii., 13 we read : " It shall come to pass in that day, that the great trumpet shall be blown, and they shall come which were ready to perish in the land of Assyria, and the outcasts in the land of Egypt, and shall worship the Lord in the Holy Mount at Jerusalem." The inauguration of the new Israel being celebrated (chapter xxv., 6) by a feast made by God Himself to all peoples, " a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the lees well refined." So, too, Ezekiel sees no other way of establishing the Ideal Kingdom of the future but by a resurrection. In chapter xxxvii., 12, he says : '• Behold, O my people, I will open your graves and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel." As with Isaiah, it is God Himself who is to do it. " And ye shall know that I am the I^ord, when I have opened your graves, O my people, and brought you up out of your graves. And shall put my spirit in you and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land ; then shall ye know that I the Lord have spoken it and performed it, saith the Lord." Deutero-Isaiah, again, at the close of the Exile, also feels how hopeless it is to expect deliverance from the Chosen People themselves. God alone can do it through the in- strumentality of Cyrus, whom He has anointed and specially raised up for the purpose. And in passing it is interesting to note that with Deutero-Isaiah as with Amos, it is God Himself who does everything, evil as well as good. Amos, it will be remembered, asks in chapter iii., 6, " Shall a trumpet be blown in the city and the people not be afraid ? shall there be evil in i 238 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. a city, and the Lord hath not done it ? " So, too, Deutero- Isaiah, in opposition to the Persians who believed that a special god Ahrinian was the creator of Darkness, declares in chapter xlv,, " I form the light, and create darkness ; I make peace, and create evil : I the Lord do all these things." As for the " servant of God " mentioned in Deutero-Isaiah, it is now generally agreed that this has no reference to an expected Messiah, but is a collective name merely for those Jews who f had remained faithful to their country and their God. When we come to the Persian period, or say broadly between the years 530 and 330 B.C., we shall find the close correspondence between the political and social condition of the Jews and the Ideal Future of their dreams still further exemjjlified. For here, too, as during the Exile, the conception of a Messianic King of the line of David is entirely absent — but for a different reason. The conception of a Messianic King disappeared during the Exile because of the apparent hopelessness of its realization ; it disappeared during the Persian period from want of sufficiently crying grievances on Avhich to feed. With the restoration of the Jews to their native land by Cyrus, Avith full liberty given them of worshipping God in their own way, and with the absence of all political or social oppression, there was no need of a Messiah. The very idea, in consequence, fell into abeyance. And accordingly in propliets like Haggai and Malachi we hear no more of a Davidic King, or indeed of any future King at all. Haggai concerns himself mainly with the rebuilding of the Temple and the encouragement of Zerubbabel ; while with Malachi it is the corruption of the priests and the luxury and licentiousness of the surrounding peoples, that is the subject of his invectives. And instead of a Messianic King, you have Elias the prophet, the great destroyer of idolatrous priests, coming to prepare the way for God Himself who in that great and terrible day will destroy the wicked. But as the Priests and Scribes are all-powerful in the Persian period, the ideal THE EVOLUTION OF THE MESSIAH. 239 future Kino-dom is figured as the carrying out more rigorously the observances of the Mosaic Law. And as that can now be safely entrusted to the all-powerful organization of the priests and scribes, Prophecy, having exhausted its function, becomes extinct in Israel. With the Greek period, beginning with the Macedonian conquests about 330 B.C., the Prophets have given place to the Apocryphal Writers, as they are called, who were in the habit of assuming the names of one or other of the older prophets with the view of giving greater weight to their own reflections on current events; and in them, too, we find the nature of the ideal kingdom accurately reflecting the political and social outlook of the nation at the time in which they are writing. The dates of the works of many of these Apocryphal writers are very uncertain, but enough is known for our purpose here. And accordingly we find that in the absence of all political and religious persecution up to the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, and with no greater anxiety than the occasional passage through Jewish territory of hostile armies who sometimes fought their battles on Jewish soil, no allusion is made by these writers to any Messianic King. The Son of Sirach, in his Book of Wisdom, looks to God Himself to ofather all the tribes of Israel together at Jerusalem, and there to bless them ; but instead of being heralded by a Kingly Messiah, He is to be heralded, as in jSIalachi, by the prophet Elias — the Messianic hope resolving itself into a vague general anticipation of a happy future for Israel, with abundant manifestations of the presence and goodness of God. But with the persecutions of Antiochus Epiphanes, and the rise of the Maccabees, the Ideal Kingdom took quite a different shape in the imagination of men, and one still quite in accord with the new evils under which the nation was suffering. For the doctrine of a Resurrection and a Future Life, had, as we saw in the last chapter, now come in as compensation for the ills, injustices, and oppressions, wliich the 240 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. virtuous had to suffer in the present life. The consequence of this was, that to the function of King which had hitherto been the office of the Messiah, was now added the function of Judge also. But Judas Maccabeus had already realized in his own person all the heroic glories of a Davidic King. There was therefore no room for a Messianic King of the house of David ; and accordingly, as we sliould expect to find, none of the apocalyptic works Avrittea about this period, with the exception of the Sibylline Oracles, make mention of a Messiah at all. In Daniel (xii., 1) it is the angel Michael, as we have seen, to whom the Jews were to look for deliverance, and in chapter ii., 44, it is God Himself who shall set up the Jewish Kingdom which shall not be destroyed; while it is to the Saints of the Most High, that is to say to the faithful Jews, that the judgment of the wicked is committed — the resurrection being restricted as we saw, to the Saints and Martyrs who were to enter into life everlasting, and to the renegade and apostate Jews who were to suffer shame and everlasting contempt. If we turn to the Book of Wisdom, also written about this period, we find again no mention made of a Messiah. It is God Himself who will reign for ever, and it is the Saints, and not the Messiah, who are to judge the nations. Nor in the first Book of the Maccabees is mention made of a Messiah, but only of a prophet, Elijah or Jeremiah, who was popularly expected to come and tell the people what they were to do. And although in the Sibylline Oracles it is said that God will send a King who shall confirm the faithful, and stay the whole earth from war, it is now generally agreed that the allusion is not to a Messianic King, but to the Maccabean High Priest Simon who crushed the remnant of the Syrian party in Palestine, confirmed treaties with Sparta and Rome, and gave to the people a season of profound peace. In these Oracles, too, it is not the Messiah but the Prophets who are to be judges and just leaders of men. And so we see that in the Maccabean period, as well as in the Pre-exilic, the Exilic, the THE EVOLUTION OF THE MESSIAH. 241 Persian, and the Grecian, the nature of the Ideal Kingdom of the Jews reflects the fortunes of the nation like a mirror, or attends them like a shadow. Dui'ing the next period, that is to say during the hundred years or more that elapsed between the struggles of the Maccabees and the accession of Herod, nothing had appeared on the political horizon to alter in any way the conception of the Ideal Kingdom, unless, indeed, it were the rise into greater influence and authority of the Scribes and Pharisees. The Scribes now had seats along with the Priests and Elders in the governing body of the Sanhedrim, and so had become all- powerful ; while the Pharisees were beloved by the people, like the early mendicant Friars of the Middle Ages, as Holy !Men of God. Now it was by the influence of the Scribes and the Pharisees mainly that the Prophets and Psalms had been added to the Canon of Scripture and were accorded the same kind of authority and respect as the Books of the Law themselves. And the effect of this admission of the Prophets into the Sacred Book was to throw back the minds of the Jews to the contemplation of the conception of the Messiah as a King of the line of David as set forth by the Prophets, — an idea which had fallen into abeyance for the last four hundred years. So that although the political outlook had not materially changed, and the Jews were still a nation free from political or religious oppression, we find in writers like Enoch a recru- descence of the old idea of the Messiah, althou2:h in a different form and one more suited to the character of the times. For we always have to boar in mind that since the time of the older prophets the doctrine of the resurrection and of a future life had been introduced into the Jewish religion by the writer of the Book of Daniel. The consequence of this was, that the function of judging as to who were to be considered worthy of reward in a future life, had been added to the original and natural function of the Messiah, which was that of establishing the earthly Kingdom of God. In Daniel, while God Himself R I) 242 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. was to be King, to the Saints of the Most liigh was committed the office of deciding- what Avas to be the future destiny of those who were to arise from the dead. Since then, however, the doctrine had advanced several stages. In Daniel the resurrection is a partial one, being confined to the martyrs and the renegade Jews ; in the Second Book of the Maccabees it is confined to the Chosen People as a whole. But by the time that Enoch wrote, the resurrection had become almost general, including, besides the Jews, the Heathen powers also ; and instead of being a resurrection of the material body was a resurrection of the spiritual body or soul. These souls are confined in four separate compartments, occupied respectively by the souls of the martyrs, of the good, of the ordinary sinners, and of the reprobates. God Himself sits as judge on a high mountain and sends the wicked to the Valley of Hinnom, or Gehenna, where the sight of their torments forms no small part of the pleasure of the righteous in the Paradise close by. In Enoch, then, although the ideal Kingdom of the Future is to be established by a Messiah, God Himself is to carry on the work of judgment and salvation. But when the Romans were at last called on to interfere in the struggles between the rival brothers Hyrcanus and Aristobulus, and Pompey after taking Jerusalem had desecrated the Temple by entering the Holy of Holies, the Messianic conception of the Old Prophets, which had slept for 400 years, revived in all its force. In the Psalter of Solomon, written about this time, the blessings of the future were to be brought in by a Davidic King, who was to carry out the judgments of God by destroying the Heathen who had desecrated the Holy City, and by driving sinners out of the Jewish inheritance. Like the Messiah of the old prophets, he was to rule the people in righteousness and spread the knowledge of God among the nations. Here w^e have the revival of the old prophetic idea of the Messiah in all its fulness — a Davidic King anointed by God and filled with His HI THE EVOLUTION OF THE MESSIAH. 243 Holy Spirit, who shall destroy his enemies, and cause the Lord to be honoured at Jerusalem by all nations ; his own people not only being righteous, but, now that the Scribes and Pharisees are all-powerful, devoted as well to the observance of the ceremonial law. As the strain between the Jews and Romans became the more intense, the more intensely burned the desire for vengeance, and the more did the coming of the Messiah who was to deliver Israel and to restore the Earthly Kingdom announced by the Prophets, become the desire of every heart. This was especially the case after the deposition of Archelaus the son of Herod by the Romans, when Judasa was made a part of the Roman province of Syria under the rule of a procurator; and still more so when the Jewish religion was outraged by the putting up of the golden sliields dedicated to Tiberius in the palace of Herod close to the Temple, and the bringing of the Roman standards bearins; the imaffe of Cassar, into the city. And the conception of the Messianic Kingdom to which these outrages gave rise, was the conception cun*ent among the Jews at the time of Christ, as we have it reflected in the Gospel narratives, — viz., a King of the line of David, born at Bethlehem and anointed by God and filled with His Spirit, who should be heralded either by Elias, as we have it in Malachi and the Son of Sirach, or by the Prophet spoken of in the First Book of the Maccabees : a Kino* who should deliver the Jews from the yoke of the heathen, and should reign a thousand years, during Avhich time the old Jerusalem was to pass away and be replaced by a New Jerusalem, to be followed by a resurrection and judgment of all who had lived. So deeply, indeed, had the Messianic kingdom of the Prophets entered into the Jewish consciousness, that the authors of the early Gospels felt it necessary, if their message was to be received by the Jews, to represent Jesus as having been born at Bethlehem, and to construct long genealogies for him, demonstrating his descent from David. 244 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. Further than this, the Evohition of the Messiah and the Messianic kingdom could not go. The National Hopes were satisfied by the Messiah's coining as an earthly King of the line of David, subduing the nations, and bringing back glory and material prosperity to Israel. The hopes of the individual .Jew were satisfied by a judgment and resurrection in which the good should be rewarded with the good things of this world, while the wicked should burn in their sight in the valley of Hinnom. The religious ideal of the Prophets was satisfied by the righteousness and justice which the Messiah was to bring with him ; while that of the Scribes and Pharisees was satisfied by the holy ordinances of their religion — Sabbaths, feasts, purifications, etc. — being embraced by all nations. And this view of the Messianic kingdom, varying in detail according to the temper of the writer, remains almost constant up to the break-up of the Jewish State and the final dispersion of its people. In Fourth Ezra and Baruch the Messianic kingdom lasts through a world-period and then comes to an end, — to be followed by the consummation of the hopes of individuals in an eternal life, in which the paradise of delights lies always in sight of the fires of Gehenna. So that the Messianic kingdom, which at first was all that the Jews looked forward to, became at last but a prelude and pre- liminary to a future Immortality of reward and punishment to the individual Jew. In the same way, too, this resurrection to a future of reward and punishment, which began by being a limited resurrection in Daniel, goes on in Enoch to embrace the heathen, until by the time of Christ it has become a general one of all those who have lived. To sum up then we may say that the Ideal Element in the Jewish religion, that on which the imagination dwelt and which was the heaven of all their dreams, — the Kingdom of the Messiah, — varied at the different periods of their history with the conditions under which the people found themselves. Beginning with a glorious future of a purely earthly and matarial prosperity THE EVOLLTION^ OF THE MESSIAH. 245 Avhicli under a King of the House of David was to be enjoyed, if not by the existing generation, then by their posterity, it ended by becoming, about the time of Christ, an earthly kingdom of the Messiah for the nation, with a resurrection and future kingdom of Heaven for the individuals who had kept the commandments of God — these command- ments being resolvable mainly into the more strict observance of the ceremonial law. In the Sibyl, too, this future kingdom is a moral kingdom, consisting mainly of sacrifices and ritual observances ; while in the Book of Jubilees and the Targums it is also to consist in the stricter observance of the ceremonial law. As regards the admission of the Gentiles into this future kingdom of God — in the Sibyl and Enoch they are allowed, in the Psalter of Solomon thev are excluded, while in Ezra and Baruch nothing but hatred and vengeance is to be shown them. In the Talmud, again, all Gentile proselytes may come in of their own accord; in the Targums all peoples whatsoever. And in all, the agency, it is to be observed, is the Holy Spirit, or Spirit of God, as it was in the old prophets, — in Isaiah, Zechariah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Deutero-Isaiah, and Joel. But it is in the opinions of the Rabbis that we get the best conception of the differences that existed between the Jews and Jesus in reference to the nature of the Messiah, and of the Kingdom of God. With the Jews as with the Christians there was to be an universal resurrection of the righteous and the wicked, but with the Jews they were to be raised clothed, and to be judged by the Messiah in Jerusalem, the wicked being sent to the fires of Gehenna close by in the Valley of Hinnom, while the faces of the righteous were to shine, and they themselves, with crowns on their heads, were to enjoy the light of the Shekinah. There were to be only a few exceptions to the absolute universality of this resurrection, and these were as follows : — Those who denied the resurrection ; those who said the Law was not from Heaven : 246 THE EVOLUTION OF JUDAISM. the Epicureans ; the readers of books outside the Canon of Scripture ; the makers of incantations ; the generation that died in the wilderness : tlie Assembly of Korah ; the men of a city destroyed for idolatry ; and those who had kept themselves away from the Law. As for the Messiah himself, he was to be mortal like other men, but filled with the spirit of God, and was to die at the end of a triumphant reign. The Rabbis admitted that the Messiah might have to suffer, but never that he should be crucified, as that was a mode of death accursed by God Himself. That the celebrated Rabbi Aquiba should have believed that Bar Cocheba who led the insurrection in the time of Hadrian, was the Messiah, proves that the Messiah was believed by the Jewish Rabbis to be only a man among men, although a man more than usually endowed with the Spirit of God. And finally we have to remark that in all the Apocalypses, Jewish and Christian, the coming of the Messiah is heralded in much the same way, viz. by portents, such as swords in the sky, blood trickling from rocks, the desecration of the Temple, sun and moon, day and night, and the seasons, changing their courses and functions, the nations drunk with idolatry and wickedness till the cup of their iniquity was full. PART IV. THE EVOLUTIOIsr OF CHRISTIANITY. HISTOEY OF INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT. PART IV. LIST OF AUTHORITIES FOR THE FOLLOWING CHAPTERS ON THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. Original Authorities NEW testament ACTS OF THECLA 1st AND 2nd EPIS- JUSTIN MARTYR TLBS OF CLEMENT PISTIS SOPHIA BARNABAS SHEPHERD OF HERMAS PAPIAS IGNATIUS POLYCARP TEACHING OF THE TWELVE APOSTLES BAUR BEYSCHLAG BIGG BOISSIER BRIGHT BRUCE CARPENTER DALE DAVIDSON DIDON DORNER FAIRBAIRN GIBBON HARDY HARNACK EPISTLE OF PTOLEMY ATHENAGORAS TATIAN THEOPHILUS CLEMENTINES CYPRIAN CLEMENT Modern Guides: — HATCH HAUSRATH HAVET HOLTZMANN HORT KEIM LIGHTFOOT MAHCUS DODS MARTINEAU MOMMSEN MOSHEIM NEANDER NEWSMAN NITZSCH PFLEIDERER ORIGEN IRENAEUS TERTULLIAN HIPPOLYTUS TACITUS LETTERS OF PLINY EUSEBIUS SOCRATES SOZOMEN EPIPHANIUS PRESSENSE RAMSAY RENAN REVILLE RITSCHL SCHMIEDEL SCHURER SEELEY STRAUSS VOLKMAR WEISS WEIZSACEER WENDT WESTCOTT CHAPTER I. THE TWO METHODS 12^^ CIVILIZATION. STANDING as we here do at the parting of the Avays between the Ancient and the Modern World, it is necessary if we wonld understand aright the part played in Civilization by Christianity, that we should at the outset endeavour to distinguish with something like precision between the parts played in the complex result by the Spirit of Christ on the one hand, and by the Doctrines and Institutions of the Church on the other. To begin with, then, we may remark that just as at the end of all investigations into life-processes generally, however profound and exhaustive these investigations may be, a mysterious something has to be assumed to account for that residuum of unexplained phenomena Avhich neither physical, mechanical, nor chemical principles will fully explain; so in all enquiries into the history of civilization we are bound to assume, if only for purposes of distinction and clearness, some great Power, — call it Providence, Fate, the Order of Nature, or what you will, — which has brought the world from its rude unconscious forms up to man, from man savage and uncivilized up to man cultured and refined, and which is working steadily and unweariedly upwards to its end of a perfected humanity athwart all the to-and-fro confusion and conflict of individuals and of races which would seem as if thev must baulk and 250 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. defeat it — we are bound, I say, to distinguish between this great Disposing Power which co-ordinates the works of individuals and of races and subdues them to its own ends, knittins: together into one single evolution the work of successive ages and generations, and these same ephemeral individuals and races themselves, who are the means and instruments used by the World-Spirit to work out its own ends step by step and stage by stage without a link intermitted in the long chain, but who, far from having any conception that they are working for these ends, are conscious only of working for their own individual and personal ends, good or bad — the wars, the conquests, the patriotisms, the self-interests, the personal ambitions, or what not, of the age or hour. Or, to put it in another way, we may say that while men and races con- sidered as individual units are engaged in working out their own private and particular ends, the Presiding Genius of the World has so arranged it that by these self-same actions they shall, quite unconsciously to themselves, work out its ends also — ends more vast and sublime than those they know. With this difFerence then between the work of the World- Spirit in civilization, and the work of the individual units, kept well in mind if only for the sake of clearness, we shall now be enabled to advance to the first of the main propositions which it is the object of this chapter to illustrate and uphold, the position, viz., that just as Nature though steady to her own aim of fertilizing the plants and flowers at any cost, still uses different means for that end according to the requirements of the different species ; — now using the bees, now the wind, now birds, and so on;— so the Genius of the World moves to its steady end of a perfected civilization, not by one stereotyped and invariable method, but by quite different and even antago- nistic methods, according to the necessities of the time, the age of the world, and the stage of culture and progress reached. These methods, however they may vary in their minutiae, may for practical purposes all be reduced to two, the direct and the THE TWO METHODS IN CIVILIZATION. 251 indirect method, — the method of the Ancient, and the method of the ^lodern World. Christianity, which is the most important product of the Ancient World, naturally did the work appointed it in civilization on the indirect or ancient method, but as this method is toto coelo different from the method by which civil- ization is advanced in Modern Times, it is evident that no account of the rise and triumph of Christianity can be regarded as true or final in which these methods are confounded. And as this is precisely what has been done in a greater or less degree by many who have hitherto written on the rise of Christianity, I shall make no apology to the reader for asking him to accompany me in the attempt to understand precisely what these two different methods of Civilization are, and how they work. I shall take what I have called the direct method first, — the method used by the Genius of the World in ^lodern Times. It will be noticed that at the present day when good men and women become fired with a noble enthusiasm to leave the world better than they found it, they set to work to accomplish their object by the dii^ect propaganda of the reforms they wish to see established ; advocating them and urging their acceptance on men, not because they are prescribed by any religious code, but for their power to lead naturally and inevitably to the higher life they have in view. Hence we find them proclaiming abroad without further recommendation than the good results on civilization and morality which they believe must flow from them, such reforms as the abolition of slavery, the extension of the suffrage, socialism, the closing of public-houses, the eight-hours day, and the ' living wage.' That is to say they aim directly at the mark they wish to hit, and not indirectly through the medium of something else, — as through lleligion. If they want democracy, they preach democracy ; if they want socialism, they preach socialism ; if they want the abolition of slavery, or the 'living wage,' they preach the abolition of slavery or the ' living wage.' This course seems, indeed, so natural to us at the present day that we can 252 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. scarcely realize that it could ever have been otherwise. And yet, strange as it may seem, it is nevertheless true, that in ancient times no one would have dreamt of trying to carry any serious social, moral, or political reform by the mere demonstration of its power to correct some abuse, or to promote human welfare generally. For Morality in ancient times was as intimately bound up with Religion as an infant with its mother, and you could no more reach Morality without first striking at Religion than you could reach an infant without first strikino; at the mother at whose breast it huno^. To inculcate a higher morality, therefore, you must begin by destroying the old religion which safe-guarded and sanctioned the inferior morality and customs you wished to reform, and putting a new religion in its place ; making the practice of the new morality which it w^as your object to introduce, the indispensable condition to the entrance on the supernatural joys which the new religion held out to its votaries ; — much in the same way as Nature by its cunning expedients makes the cross-fertilization of the flowers the condition obligatory on the bee before it can enjoy the honey they conceal. To extirpate, for example, the type of civilization which grew up under and was sanctioned and upheld by the Brahmins in India, — with its degrading superstitions, its human sacrifices, its widow-burnings, its idolatries, its sensual orgies, and its iron system of caste within which the human spirit was confined as in a prison — and to replace it by a regime of celibacy, temperance, gentleness, and equality, it was necessary for a new religion like Buddhism to arise, which should abolish the gods in whose honour and by whose authority these degrading immoralities were instituted, and should deny the very existence of souls in men to be dis- tributed into a hierarchy of caste-inequality according as they were believed to spring from the head, the limbs, the body, or the feet of Brahm. Buddhism, it is true, failed in the end, but in so far as it succeeded, it changed the primitive type of THE TWO METHODS m CIVILIZATION. 253 Hindoo custom, morality, and life. Again, to break up the Arab civilization before Mahomet, — with its superstitions, its idolatries, its licentiousness, and its internecine feuds, — and to allow civilization to advance another stage, a new religion had to arise which in place of the Black Stone and the painted idols, substituted One God terrible and sublime as Fate ; and in place of an uncertain future, opened up a new and assured Heaven of smiling oases and dark-eyed houris for the delect- ation of those who were prepared to follow out the precepts of its more simple and pure, though still far from ideal morality. Even the corruptions of society under the Medieval Church, where payment in money was sufficient to cover and condone the most scarlet sins, could only be removed and a new and hio-her morality introduced, by what was practically the new relio-ion of Calvinism and the Reformation, — where the sinner having at last obtained personal access to the Scripture, found himself confronted, not with a Church which in ceasing to be independent of Emperors and Kings and Nobles, had become too often, it is to be feared, the mere echo of their vices, but with the terribly real and immediate judgments of God. So difficult is it for mankind to make even the simplest advance in Morality and Civilization ! To get the Ten Commandments respected and observed as they are by the majority of respectable people to-day, hundreds of generations of men and women had to be whipped and scourged and stoned ; and to be tortured by supernal and infernal terrors through long ages. A new and higher code of morality differing in any degree from that to which men have been accustomed, is a pure burden laid on the neck of the unregenerate spirit ; and the masses of men will no more embrace it for its own sake, or for the sake of its effects on civilization, or indeed for any stimulus less potent than some personal hope or fear, than they will clear forests or drain morasses for their own sake. If then in Ancient Times the great moral and social reforms of advancing civilization could only be carried out indirectly 254 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. under cover of Religion, Avhile at the present time they can be carried out directly by the simj^le demonstration of their power to effect the end in view, — we have now to ask what those great s-eneral causes are which made so great a transformation of method inevitable. To begin with, in Ancient Times none of those great laws of Nature which have so profoundly revolutionized our views of the Universe and Man, had as yet been discovered, no laws by which the course of Nature and of Human Society could be satisfactorily explained, — no law of gravitation, no Copernican Astronomy, no law of the connexion between thought and the state of the brain and nervous system, no law of Evolution, of the correlation of forces, and the like. Stoicism and Epicureanism, it is true, as well as Buddhism, taught the inviolability and constancy of the laws of Nature, but only in general terms ; and in the absence of knowledge of the particular laws by which things were to be explained, men were forced to refer what they did not understand to the agency of the only other kind of cause of which they had immediate evidence, viz., to wills, o-ood or bad,' — and so to the agency of gods^ demons, and the like. Not only were all unexplained natural phenomena such as thunder, lightning, earthquakes, comets, etc., referred to the ao-ency of the gods, but in the absence of any knowledge beyond that of dim and uncertain tradition, the origins of States also, and their continued existence and preservation, were necessarily referred to the special care and protection of tutelary deities who were believed to watch over them. These deities were not only believed to have founded these Cities and States, but to have settled their institutions, their orders and hierarchies of men, their morals and customs, the laws they were to obey, the relations of the different classes to each other, what the citizens were to do and avoid, the number of wives they were allowed to marry, and so on ; so that when national calamities and misfortunes threatened or overtook the State, — famine, pesti- lence, earthquake, defeats in war, etc., — they were believed to THE TWO METHODS IN CIVILIZATION. 255 be due to the answer of the offended deltv at the interference with these institutions which he had established. It is evident, therefore, that you could no more alter or destroy these institu- tions (in which, be it remembered, the stage of civilization reached by a people at any given time consists), by the mere demonstration of their effect in retarding development, without first of all destroying or discrediting the Religion and the gods which were believed to have instituted them and still continued to countenance and support them, than you could destroy or alter the institutions of a Russian village or province, without first of all discrediting the authority or discarding the allegiance of the Czar. How true this is will be apparent if we consider those Eastern countries in which Religion continues at the present day to preserve the same relation to the institutions of society as it did in Ancient Times, and reflect how hopeless it would be to attempt to reform theii* moral and social institutions, without first of all destroying or reforming the religion which gave rise to and sanctioned them, and on which they depend. How hopeless, for example, to dream of abolishing (unless by physical force) the Caste system of India with its widow- burning, child marriages, Siva orgies. Juggernaut immolations, Thuo-gee and the rest, without first abolishing the Religion of Hindooism which originated and perpetuated them? How vain to dream of convincing the Mahommedan of the evil of his concubinage and polygamy, his belief in the sword, and his contempt for Science and the Arts, without first convincing him of the falsehood of the Koran and its Prophet ! How convince the Jew that his tribal exclusiveness, his circumcision, his abstinence from meats, his Sabbaths, and the rest, are not the goal of civilization and culture, without first of all destroying the letter of the Law, with its Messianic hopes and the promises given to the Fathers ? It was a true thouirh unconscious instinct that led the missionaries of the Gospel in foreign lands, to begin their propaganda by trying to change the religion of the heathen before attempting to change his civilization or morality. 256 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. And thus we see that the method by which the Genius of the Woi'ld got its work of civilization done in Ancient Times corresponds, as we have said, to the method by which Nature gets the work of fertilization done by the bees. The super- natural Ideals of the various religions — the Paradise of Mahomet, the second coming of Christ in his Kingdom on Earth, and the like — all of which were calculated to dazzle the minds and draw on the hearts and imaginations of men, correspond in our analogy to the honey by which the bees are attracted, and of which alone they are in quest. The new Codes of Morality again Mdiich these religions prescribed — • the Sermon on the Mount, of Jesus ; the alms, prayers, ablutions, limitations of polygamy, etc., of Mahomet, and the like — and which men must obey if they would enter these delightful realms, correspond to the seed which the bees must scatter if they would enjoy the honey which the flowers conceal. They are the real ends, these Codes of Morality, which the Genius of the World has at heart, and for which all this apparatus of supernatural machinery is but the means ; in the same way as the scattering of the seed and the fertilizing of the flowers are, in their purely physical aspect at least, the real ends for which all this beauty and sweetness of honey and flower exist. And thus we see how profound is the error of those Theologians and religious teachers of the present day, who taking for granted that the method by which civilization is advanced must be the same in all ages (instead of being as we have seen, exnctly opposite in Ancient and Modern times), naturally enough iinngine that a superior Code of Morality like the Sermon on the Mount must have been as €fl"ective in drawing on the hearts and imaginations of men in the time of Christ, as a like propaganda would be To-day. In consequence of this error they represent the sublime ethics of the Sermon on the Mount as the chief cause of the rise and triumph of Christianity, — whereas in reality the chief cause of that rise was the belief that Jesus was the Messiah, and that His follo'w ers THE TWO METHODS IN CIVILIZATION^. 257 would sit with Him, in their own life-time perhaps, in His earthly Kingdom of God. Tlie effort to live up to his high moral ideal (which was the real end the World-Spirit had at heart) was merely the price they were willing to pay for this glorious privilege of sitting with the Messiah in his Kingdom, which had so filled and fascinated their imaginations and hearts. To imagine otherwise, and to believe that a number of peasants, publicans, and fishermen, would leave their work, throw down their nets, and rise as by a common impulse to establish a few very high but also very abstract moral principles and precepts about the blessedness of the poor and the meek, and the duty of forgiveness, charity, and love — for their own sake alone, — is a dream of the pulpit and the closet merely. And now we come to the problem so important to Humanity from its bearing on the part played in Civilization by Keligion, the problem, viz., as to the causes which have made it possible in Modern Times for the great ends of civilization and progress to be advanced by the direct method of attacking abuses or advocating reforms on the around of their natural results alone, instead of, as in Ancient Times, indirectbj through the medium of Religion. These causes then may be reduced to two. The first, the active and positive cause, is the prevalence in Modern Times of what is called the Scientific Spint. This spirit is now so extensively diffused, the uniformity and constancy of the Laws of Nature are so recognized and taken for granted by the most active and influential minds, that when once men have decided that any particular material, moral, or social condition — as for example slavery, despotism, polygamy, intem])erance, or poverty — is by its very nature an obstacle to a higher state of civilization and culture, they no longer allow former religions or theological rulings on the point to stand in their way, but unhampered and undeterred by ancient dogma, go straight to their mark and attack the enemy openly and in full face, and for its own evil cftects alone. This first cause, viz., the Scientific Spirit, is already a potent one, and is daily S 258 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. exercising more and more influence over the most intelligent and cultured minds. But the second cause is more important still, for without it the Scientific Spirit would have been strangled at its birth, or if allowed to live at all would have met with little or no sympathy from the great mass of the people, and would have exercised as little authority over the affairs of life as it does to-day among a population of Turks and Hindoos. This second cause is the spirit of the Religion of Jesus ^ as distinguished from the dogmas of the Christian Church . Now Christianity, so far as its supernatural organization and structure are concerned, is a religion of Ancient Times, and had it followed the example of the other religions of antiquity, we should expect to find it laying down a number of fixed, definite, and inelastic rules of conduct and behaviour for all the relationships of life. But in reality it did quite the opposite, and set itself from the outset to emancipate men from existing forms and ceremonies rather than to impose on them new ones. Fully one half of Christ's teaching consists in inculcating a morality not of the letter but of the spirit, not of outward mechanical observances but of the inward condition of the heart. It did not, that is to say, profess to lay down a fixed and written code of moral and social relations, of what men were to do or avoid in all the relationships of life, as Judaism had done before it, and as Mahommedanism was to do after it ; nor did it fix once for all the hierarchy of personal and social relations in which men were to stand to each other, as in the Caste-system of Hindooism. On the contrary its deliberate purpose was to counteract all this, and once for all to put an end to it by leaving Morality so freely and flexibly moveable that it would offer no obstruction to any course of action or conduct which could be shown to be for the spiritual well-being of man. Now this morality of the spirit, if we may call it so, is connected as we shall see by an inner and necessary logic with the very soul and core of Christ's teaching ; but as THE TWO METHODS IN CIVILIZATION. 250 this connexion has not. in my judgment, been sufficiently dwelt upon, and as on it will depend the view we are to take of the part played in Civilization by Christianity, 1 may ask the reader to pause with nie here for a while to consider it. Taking the Ten Commandments and the other precepts of the Mosaic Law as his pomt of departure, Jesus began his propaganda by shifting the emphasis of his teaching from the sophy 2()G THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. and cosmogony wliicli would be chosen there could be little doubt. Most of the early converts to the new religion were either Jews or Greek proselytes to Judaism — and indeed but for the influence of St. Paul who threw open Christianity to all the world, the broad emancipating S[)lrit of the Gospel would have been crnslied under the weight of Jewish tradition. It was inevitable, therefore, that when a cosmogony was wanted for the infant Church, none but the Mosaic one in which they all already believed, could have been for a moment entertained. Besides, what other cosmogony was there in the field, that on its own merits was qualified to compete with it? If they turned to the cosmogony of the Greek Philosophers,, of Plato, for example, or Aristotle, or the Stoics, they found there the Supreme Cause of the World, although represented as spiritual and intelligent, yet too much of the nature of a philosophic abstraction to be suitable for the purposes of Religion — which always requires in the Supreme Being a will and personality like that of man. The Greek and Roman and Egyptian mythologies on the other hand Avhich furnished the religion of the masses of the Roman World, Avere polytheisms, and therefore altogether impossible. Buddhism, again, had no cosmogony at all, having swept the Heavens of all the gods as it had swept away the souls of men, and was, as we have seen, more a system of atheistic philosophy than a religion ; while the Persian religion, with its good and evil Principles, its God of Light and God of Darkness, Avas already represented in the Mosaic Cosmogony (derived like it from a common Chaldean source) by the parallel though no longer co-equal powers of God and the Devil. There Avas practically, therefore, no cosmogony in the field that could seriously compete Avith the cosmogony of Genesis in the minds of tlie early con\erts, and it was inevitable that it should become bound up and incorpo- rated under one Divine Revelation in the structure of the rising creed. Once so incorporated, it thenceforth assumed for all time the character of an absolute truth — fixed, unchanging, and TUE TWO METHODS IN CIVILIZATIOX. 207 beyond the reach of human doubt as part of a written reve- lation from God. And so it came to pass that instead of man's beliefs as to the origin, nature, and constitution of the world being left freely open to his intellectual integrity and to the progress of Physical Science (as we have just seen, his moral, social, and s))irltual welfare were left freely open by Jesus to his moral Integrity and the progress of Moral Science), they were kept tightly in the hands of Eellglon , and were thence- forth imjiosed on man as fixed, absolute, and eternal truths, from which there was no appeal. What a curse this became when Physical Science many centuries afterwards began to make inroads into this cosmogony, and when in consequence it could no longer be genuinely believed as it had been in the earlier time, the long history of religious persecution from the days of Bruno and Galileo onwards almost to our own times, only too sorrowfully bears witness. But this adoption of the Mosaic Cosmogony into the Christian Religion, and the imposing of it on the minds of men by binding it up under one cover with the rest of the Scriptures as a single Divine Revelation, had effects of a different but no less momentous kind. St. Paul made its doctrine of the Fall of Man one of the pillars of his great "Scheme of Redemption" ("As in Adam all die," etc.), and on it founded that doctrine of the Atonement Avhich, the same in substance although slightly dltl'crent in form, was passed on from himself to St. Augustine, from St. Augustine to Calvin, and from Calvin again down to the orthodox believer of our own time; and it is onlv within recent vears that this harsh and gloomy doctrine which overshadowed the Christian conscience for centuries, has been discarded by the best minds in the Church and allowed quietly to drop into oblivion. The next series of errors committed by the Early Church arose from the giving Supernatural Authority to replies made by the Disciples and Apostles to personal questions on social or 2(38 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. political matters — replies which, however just and expedient under the circumstances of tlie age and time, became false and pernicious when bound up afterwards as part of the Word of God, and so made sacred and binding* on all men, under all circumstances, and for all time. Fortunately, however, as these replies were comparatively few in number and only in answer to questions of the most urgent and personal concern, and as they often ran in the Ijne of advancing civilization, the harm they did under the changed conditions of later times was not as great as it might have been. But unfortunately the results Avere most disastrous precisely where the replies were most simple and ingenuous, and most in harmony with the Spirit of Jesus — as in reference to Slavery for example — and the reason of this unlikely phenomenon it will not be wholly irrelevant or uninteresting^ to discover. The teaching of Jesus, although as applicable in the long run, as we have seen, to society as to the individual, was in the first instance a gospel of personal and not of social or national salvation or regeneration. It was intended not so much to put national society right (for this was believed to have but few years to last) as to give to individuals on certain conditions, pass- ports which would admit them, perhaps in their own life-time, into the Kingdom of God. Hence it was that Jesus preached a communism which could only have been possible among little bands of men wandering about and preaching from place to place during the comparatively short interval that must elapse before the second coming of Christ in His Kingdom. Indeed were there nothing else to prove that the Gospel was not intended by Jesus either for society as a whole or for after ages of the world, these communistic views of his would of themselves be sufficient. For when once Jesus had gone from among them, and the time of his coming began to loom vague and uncertain in the minds of the early converts — many of whom, indeed, had already died Avithout seeing that glorious day of the Lord — St. Paul, setting aside the question of the THE TWO METHODS IN CIVILIZATION. 269 second coming, although not doubting its reality, conceived the great design of meantime making the Spirit of Christ a Gospel of Salvation for the Avhole Roman world ; and from that time forward we hear no more of Communism. Conversions were now to be made on the great scale ; and with this object in view the labours of the Church were to be restricted entirely to the work of securing personal salvation to the individual, politics being left entirely alone ; all the more so indeed as the high ideal morality of Jesus in which you were to turn the other cheek also, could be obtained with as much ease under one form of political or social institutions as under another — as easily under the lash of the slave-driver as under the full liberty of Roman citizenship. The consequence was that when asked by the faithful as to what they were to do under this or that political or social regime, as, for example, under Slavery, the reply of the teacher or apostle was quite straightforward and unembarrassed. They were to accept the existing social and political situation in all humility and without murmuring or com- plaint, their sole concern being to do their duty in it in the Spirit of Christ. In a word, they were in all ways, except in matters of faith and belief, to endeavom* not to overturn institutions, but to moralize them. And it was not until the State united itself with the Church under Constantine, that the Church, except in the di-eams of some of the Apologists, so much as dreamt of interfering with the institutions of the State. And now what was the eiFect of this tolerance of the Apostles for the political institutions of the time, this non-interference of the Church with the affairs of State, when once the letters or speeches of the Apostles were bound up as parts of the Word of God ? This, viz., that political or social institutions which had hitherto been tolerated because of the inexpediency of trying to remove them, were now legitimized for all countries and all times. AVhen St. Paul, for example, who had grasped the spirit of Jesus more fully than any of the other a^jostles, gave his countenance to the Slave System which lay at the base of 270 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRTSTIANITY. the Roman State, and ■which could not have been abolished without shaking society to its foundation ; — when St. Paul insisted only that the relation of master and slave should be moralized on both sides in the Spirit of Christ, his words, from the time that they were made part of the Divine Revelation, gave the world liberty and authority to perpetuate slavery to all time. What a curse this became in other times and under other social conditions, the great war of liberation in America when slavery was defended by the ministers of the South from the mouth of St. Paul himself, will be our witness. It was the same, too, with the prohibition of the practice of Usury which Christianity had accepted from the Old Testament, and which, if it could have been enforced, would have destroyed the nascent industries of the world and put back the progress of Civilization for a thousand years. It was the same even in personal matters. When St. Paul from his own personal predilection enjoined a state of celibacy as preferable to that of marriage, he little thought of the consequences to civilization that hung on his words. And yet what great results for good and evil came out of them ! What retreats on the one hand for the pious and contemplative, what asylums for the oppressed in ages of violence ; and on the other, what haunts of vice, gluttony, corruption, and all uncleanness ! We might go on multiplying instances of the same kind, but the above perhaps are sufficient to show what a dangerous experiment it is to fasten on the neck of Civilization obiter dicta like these, which vmder the wing of Religion are made authoritative and final as Divine Revelations, and which thenceforth are stereotyped and made sacred for all time. With the exception of instances like the above, created as I have said by the necessities of the Early Church, Christianity was in its essence a religion of the Spirit and not of the Letter ; and it was because it was so, and because the masses have always assimilated the spirit of a religion more than its •dogmas, that (to revert to the problem with which we set out) THE TWO iMETIIODS IN CIVILIZATION. 271 it has offered no obstacle to the open and direct preaching of social and moral reforms for themselves alone, and by direct appeal to experience, knowledge^ and Science — instead of, as in Ancient Times, by the appeal to fixed dogmas made sacred and binding by the supernatural authority of Religion. It is true, of course, that an ideal spirituality like that of Jesus, ^vith its morality of the spirit and not of the letter, if it is to unite men into a lasting Church must, as Cardinal Newman says, have some authority to interpret and apply it to the varying circumstances and conditions of life ; the only dispute is, who is to be the interpreter ? On the one hand to truly apply the spirit of Jesus to the varying circumstancas and conditions of differing times and places, would require a complete and perfect knowledge of physical, mental, moral, and social laws — that is to say a complete and perfected Science. On the other to have waited until such perfected knowledge appeared, would have been to have dissipated and destroyed the nascent religious community altogether. There was nothing for it, therefore, but for the Church itself to assume the authority ; and in order that its decisions might be placed beyond the reach of cavil or dispute, tlicy must be represented not as temporary expedients to be altered as circumstances altered, but as eternal verities true for all time. The first act of the Church accordingly was, as we have seen, to bind the sayings and doings of the apostles and disciples into a book, and to make that book sacred. Then when the Church became too extended, and discipline too elaborate for the Bible to cover and meet all the complications that arose, difficult questions were handed over to Synods and Councils to decide — and these decisions in turn became sacred. And when at last these Councils and Synods themselves became so distracted by divisions of opinion as to threaten the unity of Christendom, the final authority in all debated questions of faith and morals was handed over to the Pope when sitting in his chair of St. Peter. But it was inevitable that with such poor 272 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. and imperfect knowledge as this?, masquerading as complete knowledge by the simple expedient of fathering it at each stage on the Divine Spirit, these doctrines and practices built up around the simple faith of Jesus Avould at some point of time be found to be incompatible with the scientific knowledge which had been slowly accumulating during the centuries. The Mosaic Cosmogony which had satisfied the early disciples was felt to be untrue to fact ; such laws as those against Usury which were well enough among the little community of Judea, were seen to be entirely unsuited to the industrial necessities of the world. And finally that great body of doctrine and practice which had been added by the Papacy, and which was conceived as but the logical extension and development of the doctrine of the Incarnation — all those doctrines and practices, viz. which were believed capable of communicating Divine Grace by reason of their participating like Christ himself in the Divine Spirit, as, for example, the authority of the Pope, of the Church, of the Sacraments, of Purgatory, of Baptism ; the worship of the Holy Mother, of the Saints and Angels, of the blessed Martyrs, of images, of relics, and the like — all these were beginning to be denied when it was felt that " the Spirit bloAveth where it listeth," and that if there be any depositary of the Divine Spirit among men, it must be in the men of genius in the intellectual world, and in the men of uprightness and purity of heart in the moral world, and not in the bread and wine, the relics, the Holy Water, etc., which have been touched by priest or Pope, or in priest or Pope who have been touched by those who in turn have been touched by him to whom Jesus himself gave the keys.- But as these decisions of disciples and apostles, of synods and popes, once given, were inflexible and could never again be revoked, CiviHzation itself and the progress of knowledge would have been strangled by them had they not at last been rudely set aside. And then began the slow dismantling of the grand and imposing edifice THE TWO METHODS IN CIVILIZATION. 273 which MedioBval Catholicism had erected above the simple shrine of Jesus. The first to fall was the great superstructure of dogma, ritual, and practice, which, as we have seen, had grown out of the doctrine of the Incarnation and the efficacy of Sacramental Grace, viz. — the authority of the Pope, the doctrine of transubstantiation, of purgatory, the worship of images, of the Virgin, of Saints and Angels, of relics and the rest. These the Reformation and Calvinism rudely destroyed, but left still standing for some centuries yet the old Mosaic Cosmogony, with the doctrine of the Atonement resting on it ; the verbal inspiration ; and the belief in a material Heaven and Hell. And now that these too, within living memory, have begun to crumble and are slowly dropping from the beliefs and imaginations of men, is it too much to hope that the universal cry of the new century will be ' Back to Jesus ' — back to his pure and sublime spirituality, and to that morality of the spirit which, although it has to be interpreted by the growing and ever widening Science and experience of the woi'ld, is itself applicable to all places and true for all time. CHAPTER II. JESUS CHRIST. XN the following chapters I j^ropose to make use of the results we have just gained from our study of the history and evolution of Judaism, to throw light on those points in the doctrine and development of Jesus which are still unre- solved, as well as on the general evolution of that Christianity to which the history of Judaism is prolegomena and preparation. And if in our study we have been successful in seizing the state of religious thought and feeling among the Jews at the time of the birth of Jesus, in the three primary essentials — viz., its Conception of God, its Code of Morality, and its Super- natural Ideal — we ought to be able to bring the reader by a single step forward, to those essential elements of Christianity which are destined to carry the future with them. To begin with then, the reader will remember that in a former chapter we tried to show that the vital and seminal element in all religions, the element which for ever fixes and defines their essential character, is the conception Avhich they present to us of the nature of God or the gods. We also saw that it was not necessary to determine in any particular case whether this conception had arisen in the mind of the Founder as a re-action against the conception of God set forth in the prevailing- religion, or whether it had arisen from disgust with the code of morality bound up with that religion — and for this reason, JESUS CHRIST. 275 that give it but a little time, and a new and higher conception of God must inevitably draw after it a new and higher morality, as, on the other hand, a new and higher conception of morality must inevitably act and re-act on the conception of God, until it has moulded it into conformity with itself. But we went farther, and showed that in whatever Avay a religion may take its rise, it cannot be said to be fully equipped for entering on its conquering career, until it has formed for itself a fixed and definite conception of the nature of God. As an instance of this we saw that before the Unity of God could be sufficiently iirndy established for there to be no danger of its being eaten iiway by the surrounding Paganism, before it could be so firmly held that on it as on an axiom of thought new and higher conceptions of the nature of God could afterwards be built, the Jewish Religion had for four hundred years to stoop from the sublime conceptions of God and Morality of the Prophets, to the ceremonial puerilities and absurdities of the Scribes and Pharisees. Now the conception of God that corresjjonded to these puerilities and absurdities was that of a stern and inflexible Censor and Judge, of such majesty, aloofness, and purity, that offences against his dignity or honour could only be atoned for by appropriate acts of purification and propitiation. It is true he was believed to love his own people, but this love Avas so bound down by the multiplied restrictions, exactions, and ceremonial rites with Avhich the Scribes had surrounded it, that instead of turning towards the sinner on the sliirhtest show of contrition or repentance, as was the case Avith the God of the Prophets and Psalms, He presented the fixed and stony gaze of the exacting Tyrant and Judge, who ^-ields nothing of grace but all in consideration of compensation given; and Ilis love was of that cast-iron quality that for the goodness and mercy it dispensed, an exact legal equivalent in the shape of sacrifices, fasts, devotions, etc., had to be supplied it. Now it was this Pharisaic conception of God that enveloped the youth and 276 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. early manhood of Jesus like an atmosphere ; it was an echo of this that he heard from the official expositors of religion on every hand, as, in youthful meditation, he wandered pensive and serene amono* the flower-strewn fields of Galilee — and his gentle heart would not believe it. For there was another God of whom he had also heard, a God of kingly majesty, too, it is true, but one Avhose love for His children was so full and free that it flowed out to them as from a living stream. It was the God of the Prophets and the Psalms. This was no stern and inflexible tyrant, demanding for his satisfaction hecatombs of sacrifices and burnt offerings, but a God of Love and Mercy, whose ear was ever ready. His heart ever open to the cries of those who put their trust in Him. And yet had Jesus gone no farther than this God of the Prophets and the Psalms, Christianity would have remained unborn. But in reality he had shot beyond this, and had got a vision of a Father under the robes of the King ; of One whose loving care for all His creatures was so all-pervasive and all-embracing that without His will not even a sparrow could fall. And this loving- Father it was that he found everywhere reflected to him from the peaceful face of earth and sky, from the sunshine and refreshing rain dispensed alike to the evil and the good, from the up-springing lilies in their chaste and modest beauty, from the gentle cooing doves, and from the religion of simple faith and pious hearts in the humble folk about him. The difl'erence between this God of Jesus and the God of Prophets and Psalmist, although apparently slight is yet real, and in its eff'ects far-reaching. With the Prophets and Psalmist, God is primarily the King, whose honour demands that the first advance towards reconciliation shall be on the side of the sinner; with Jesus, God is primarily the Father whose dignity and honour are lost in His joy at the return of the prodigal. With the Prophets and Psalmist alike, God's love is always conditional ; with Jesus, it is practically uncon- ditional and a matter of free grace and favour originating in JESUS CHUIST. 277 His own heart. That with the Prophets and Psahiiist God's love is always conditional on obedience and on their attitude towards Himself, a few texts will show. Among the Pre-exilian Prophets this love, as we saw in the last chapter, is, like all other relations between Jehovah and Israel, a relation between Him and the nation as a whole. In Amos iii. 2, for example, Jehovah is made to say, "You only have I known of all the families of the earth: therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities." Repentance and return to Him are the conditions of His mercy and pardon. Hosea says, chap. xiv. 1, " O Israel, return unto the Lord thy God, for thou hast fallen by thine iniquity." In chap. vi. 1, " Come and let us return unto the Lord, for He hath torn, and He will heal us ; He hath smitten, and He will bind us up." So, too, in Joel ii. 12, we read " There- fore also now, saith the Lord, turn ye even to Me with all your heart, and with fasting and Avith weeping and with mourning ; and rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the Lord your God, for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness." And lastly, Micah vil. 18, asks " Who is a God like unto Thee that pardoneth iniquity, and passeth by the transgression of the remnant of His heritaije. . . . 1'hou wilt perform the truth to Jacob, and the mercy to Abraham, which Thou hast sworn unto our fathers from the days of old." If we turn now to the Prophets who wrote during the Exile, we shall find that a new note is beginning to be heard, and that the promises of Jehovah begin to be addressed to each individual Jew. But the mercy and pardon though leal, are, it is to be observed, still conditional. Deutero-Isalah says, in chap. Iv., 7, " Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and let him return unto the Lord and He will have mercy upon him, and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon him." But this personal note of the love of .lehuvah for each individual Jew is most distinctly heard in the post-exilian Psalms, which, though Christian in spirit in many passages, always make it conditional on the attitude 278 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. Avlilcli the individual assumes towards God. Take Psalm ciii.. 11 as example, "For as the Heaven is high above the Earthy so great is His mercy towards them that fear Him;" verse 13, " Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him;" verse 17, " But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear Him, and His righteousness luito children's children to such as keep His covenant, and to those that remember His commandments to do them." Now in all these texts we see that while the concep- tion of God is of a God of love and mercy to His own chosen people, that love is still conditional on repentance and sub- mission. In a certain sense, of course, it may be said to be the same Avith Jesus — but there is this difference, that wdiile with the Prophets and Psalmist, Jeho\ah, like a King, Avears his front of Justice and Majesty towards the world, while His TiOve is always ready to swing round to the front on the least show of repentance ; with Jesus, on the contrary, God, like a Father, wears His front of Love towards the world, while His Justice, turned inwards as It were, Is but the means by which He would ])ersuade His errant children to return to Him. This new conception of God as Father came over Jesus as an Inspiration, an illumination, a revelation ; and boi'ne along witk It and the inner joy and ecstasy It caused, He moved over the dewy morning grass with such light and airy step, that the flowers sprang up again behind Him as if but bent by the wandering breeze. And then it was that He saw that the old Mosaic Law, with its Sabbaths and fasts, its feasts and sacrifices (to all of which He seems to have had an instinctive aversion, especially when put forward as the true worship of God), was given the Jews, as he said later of the Mosaic Law of Divorce, on account of the hardness of their hearts — given, as Paul afterwards saw, because of their proneness to idolatry, and not because God Himself wished these outward observances for His own honour and glory. And accordingly he felt himself free henceforth tO' re-construct those older ordinances contained in the Mosaic Law JESUS CHRIST. 279 according to the new conception of God that had been revealed to him ; and was ready when the time came, not only to clear away by a stroke all the multiplied oral traditions with which the Scribes had overlaid the Mosaic Law, but to lay hands, as ■we shall see in his treatment of Sabbath and divorce, on the Sacred Law itself ; so that although the " men of olden time," as he called them, may have said this or that, he, seeing that their words were only of temporary validity and not final and full expressions of the truth, could boldly brush them aside, and with equal authority substitute his " But I say unto you." It was when his heart and imagination were filled with this new life-ffivino; vision of God and human dutv, that he first heard of the preaching of John the Baptist ; and he Avas immediately drawn to him. For the first time in his life he heard his own thoughts in a measure reverberated back to him from this fiery preacher of the Wilderness ; and his meeting Avith the young prophet marked the opening of a new epoch in his life. As to the mental history of .John, one must in the scantiness of the records be content to remain In doubt. Many authorities have considered him to have been connected with the sect of the Essenes, but in the way of this theory there are many and serious difficulties. The Essenes Avere a simple, harmless, Quaker-like kind of folk, plain in dress, lovers of peace, averse to oaths, speaking the simple truth, and given to long periods of silence ; John, on the other hand, Avas a fiery orator full of fierce invective, and abounding in denunciations of the evils of the time. They lived in a community together and had all things in common ; John Avas a hermit. They believed, like the Greeks and Pllndoos, In the Immortality of the soul, and its separate existence from the body after death ; John Avas thoroughly JcAvIsh in his psychology — to him men were total entities either good or bad, and Avould after death be rcAA-arded or punished for their actions in both soul and body, Avithout too curiously Inquiring as to Avhich Avas the guilty member of the partnership. The Essenes, again, lived in a community 280 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. together, and were remarkable for their personal purity and Sabbath observances; John was an ascetic, livinsf in caves and feeding on locusts and wild honey — and in all probability cared as little for Sabbath observance as Jesus himself. They were sticklers for the Mosaic Law ; John preached baptism and repentance only. Nor did he belono- to the sect of the Pharisees ; for these Pharisees were not ascetics, and they spent most of their time in the contemplation of the deliverance of Israel from a foreign yoke. John, on the contrary, abstained entirely from Politics, urging men to repentance as a condition of entrance into the Messianic Kingdom. It is probable that he was of priestly origin ; and what with his sincerity, inflexibility, and general elevation of aim, it is not unlikely that he had of his own initiative taken to this kind of life in order to play the role of prophet in imitation of Elijah ; and, like the mendicants of the Middle Ages, retained in his retreat the spirit of his religion without its organized ritual. That the conception John had formed of God was not essentially different from that of Jesus is proved first of all by the fact that Jesus consented to be baptized by him, and secondly from the similarity in their views of morality. They both preached repentance for the remission of sins, and not ceremonial purity and observances ; a change of heart, and not of mere outward action and behaviour. They both had collected the same sort of people around them — the poor, the outcast, the despised, puljlicans, soldiers, tax- gatherers, etc. — and both heartily hated the Pharisees, whom they characterized as a generation of vipers. But when the people asked them what they were to do after repentance, a difference for the first time makes itself visible. John told those who had tv/o coats to give one to him who had none, and to do the same with food. He told the publicans not to exact more than was their due ; the soldiers not to do violence to any man, or to bear false witness against any man, and, moreover, to be content with their condition. Now tliis itself is good JESUS CHRIST. 281 Christian morality — as good indeed as you can expect to find in a world which has to go on existing from age to age and from century to century — but Jesus raised this morality, for reasons which we shall see presently, to a higher power if I may say so, to a transcendental or ideal lieight. Kot only were you to give one of your coats to him who had none, but you were to give both your cloak and your coat also. But what we have to point out here is that both these codes of morality resulted, and could only result, from the idea of a God of Love — the only difference between them being that while with John, God was rather the God of the old Prophets, that is to say a God with a stern face of Justice towards the world ; witli Jesus, God carried His face of love towards the world, the Justice being but means and instrument of it. The consequence was that while John came mortifying himself with every form of austerity and asceticism, as a propitiation of God's justice preliminary to the out-pouring of God's love ; Jesus came, as his enemies said, eating and drinking — and that because in all the creations of a God of Love he found beauty, harmony^ and joy, but no asceticism. And now occurred the incident whicli of all others had in the view I am presenting the most momentous effects on the future of Jesus, He had gone to John to be baptized, and on coming out of the water he saw in vision the heavens open, and heard the voice of God himself saying, 'Thou art my beloved Son in Avhom I am well pleased.' Now in those pre-scicntlfic days the one thing of all others wliich liad the power of crystallizing a vague uncertainty of opinion or belief into a perfect assurance, or what Cardinal Newman would have called a real 'assent,' was the vision. Nearly all the ijreat and fiery propagandists of the early ages of Christianity were converted by visions ; St. Paul, for example, by the vision of the risen Christ on his way to Damascus ; Augustine, who had wandeied for years in the perplexing mazes of Nco-Platonism and Manicheeism, ever drawn to Christianity and yet never quite 282 THE EVOLUTION OF CHKISTIANITY. able to accept it, by a voice he heard from a neighbouring garden saying and oft repeating the woi'ds, ' Take, read.' Tertullian indeed declares that nearly all the conversions of his time from Paganism to Christianity, were brought about by visions, sleeping or waking. Now Jesus must long have felt that, in the language of the time, the Spirit of God was ujjon him to reveal to others the good tidings that had been vouchsafed to himself, viz., that God was a God of Love, and not merely of stern and inflexible justice ; a God of the poor, and not of the proud, sanctimonious Pharisee. But it is probable, from the circumstance of his going to John the Baptist to be baptized, that it had not yet occurred to him that he was himself the Messiah. It is more probable that, like John, he had only felt himself called upon to preach the good news that had been revealed to him of the nature of God. But when he heard John with all the authority of a prophet, announcing that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand, and perhaps that the Messiah was even now in their midst, it is pro- bable that he felt within himself that if tlie Messiah were, as was believed, a man more endowed with the spirit of God than were other men, and if the Kingdom of God as a God of Love were coming, who so likely to inaugurate that kingdom as the man to whom the true nature of (xod had been revealed. That Jesus was recognized by John as the Messiah is im- probable, and is perhaps one of those pious legends that arose after the fact ; for when John afterwards sent his disciples to ask him plainly whether he Avere indeed the Messiah or no, it is evident he must still have been in doubt. It is more than likely that John still held to the old conception of the Messiah of the Prophets, as one who was to come in earthly power and glory, a king of the line of Da^id ; and it is not at all improbable that tlesus, in spite of His new-born conception of (jod as a God of Love, a conception Avhicli demanded a different kind of Messiah from the popular one, should nevertheless have still been deeply imbued with that idea of the Messiah which he had drunk in JESUS CIIIJIST. 28.3 with Ills mother's milk. So that the vision in Avliich he saw the Heavens opened and heard the voice of God Himself proclaim- inn- him to be the Messiah, must have been to him at first the source of no little perplexity. The liabbis, it will be remem- bered, taught that the Messiah would lie perdu in some out of the way place, until suddenly emerging fi-om his hiding-place, he would be clothed with majesty and power, and coming on the clouds of Heaven wovdd destroy his enemies by the breath of his nostrils. Could it really be possible then, that he, the carpenter's son, avIio had grown up among the people from his infancy, and \\\h) had followed his father's trade openly and in the sight of all from his youth upwards, could be the Messiah? It seemed unlikely from the point of view of the current con- ception of the ^lessiah. But besides the lordly conquering Messiah of Scripture, was there not another ; the lowly, loving Messiah, that lay concealed in Isaiah, Zechariah, and the Psalms — the Messiah of the poor, of the humble, of the wretched? This latter view, ^vhich was first announced by Jesus himself, was the only view of the ^Messiah, it is to be observed, which was consistent with his new-boi"n conception of God as a God of pure Love. Or might it not be still possible that God should intend him to enact the ivlc of both these Messiahs — to inaugurate the Kingdom of God, as the first, the lordly and conquering Messiah, and to continue it as the second, the peaceful, the loving Messiah, the Messiah of Zechariah, who should enter Jerusalem on an ass, bringing peace and salvation with him? He Avas perplexed, and, like Mahomet, retired to the Wilderness to consider himself, and by fasting, prayer, and pondering the Avords of Scripture to wait and learn what God should be pleased to vouchsafe to him. The result was decisive. AVith the passages and texts of Scripture bearing on both types of Messiah filling his mind and heart, it first seemed to him in his fastino- .^tate that if God intended him for the roh- of a Conquering Messiah He would command the stones to be made bread for him. But no miracle 284 THE EVOLUTION OF CnillSTIAXlTY. being performed, he remembered the words of Deuteronomy that man " should not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." He next imagined himself taken up into a high mountain, and being shown all the kingdoms of the World which the Conquering Messiah was to make his own ; and the thought, perhaps the wish, crossed his mind of how glorious it would be to possess them. It may have been but for a moment ; but if the real Messiah were to come to exhibit not God's Power, but rather His conquering Love, this was clearly a temptation of his lower nature, a temptation of the Devil as it was called, and must not for a moment be entertained. For he immediately remembered the words of Deuteronomy, " Thou shalt worship the Lord Thy God" — the God of Love — "and Him only shalt thou serve," that is to say, he realized that the Kingdom of God, as he had newly conceived it, must be his aim — and not a material and earthly, conquering kingdom, the kingdom of the Devil. Again, in his trance or ecstasy he remembered the passage in Psalm xci. 11, 12, where it is said of the Messiah, " He shall give His Angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up lest thou dash thy foot against a stone," and immediately imagined himself on the pinnacle of the Temple, only to wake up to i-ccoil at Avhat seemed like an attempt to force the hand of God in his doubts as to whether His word could be relied on. He remembered how the children of Israel at Massah, when they were disappointed at finding no food, began to question whether the Lord Avere really with them or not, and the words of Deuteronomy referring to that event came to his mind (chap. vi. IG) ; "Ye shall not tempt the Lord your God." Once and for all he put behind him the base thought and the struggle Avas over. It was clear that the ^Messianic role he had to play was that of the gentle, lowly Messiah, come to reveal the nature and heart of God, and not the kingly Conquering Messiah of the great mass of his countrymen — and from that hour he never wavered in his JESUS CHRIST. 285 belief, or, except perhaps at the very last, shrank from the sacrifices it demanded of liini. Accordingly, in his first act on his return to Galilee after his baptism by John, he struck the keynote of his whole future mission. Entering the synagogue at Nazareth (Luke iv. 18), and taking up the Old Testament roll, he opened at Isaiah (chap. Ixi. 1) and read, ' The Spirit of the Lord is upon me ; because He hath anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor : He hath sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord,' and closing the book returned it to the attendant, remarking as he sat down, ' This day Is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears.' In these few words we have his view of what the Messiah should be ; this was the kind of Messiah he himself professed to be ; and from this conception he never again swerved. For when John, as we have seen, afterwards sent his disciples to ask him whether he really were the Messiah or no, he simply said, ' Go and show John those things which ye do hear and see, the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk^ the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.' Indeed, the more he pondered, the more he was convinced that the only kind of Messiah that could possibly be sent from a God of Love must be a comforter of the poor, the weak, the lowly, the broken-hearted ; a healer of the deaf, the lame, the blind ; a teacher and preacher of the good news of the coming of a kingdom of the people of God, the organizer of that kingdom and judge of the fitness or unfitness of those who sought to enter It. To him the old conception of the Messiah as a Conquering King was now an anachronism, an absurdity, a contradiction in terms. So deeply, Indeed, was he convinced, not only that the Old Testament would bear him out In his new view of the Messiah, but also (especially after his marvellous miracles of healing) that it would bear him out in 286 THE EVOLUTION OF CHIUSTIANITY. his assertion tliat lie himself was the Messiah, that he could refer the Jews who rejected him, with the utmost confidence, to the Scriptures for confirmation. Now of all the Scriptures, the passages relating to the Messiah that harmonized most with his conception of a God of Universal Love, and seemed as time went on more peculiarly to refer to himself, and had the deepest influence in shaping his course, were those we have quoted from Isaiah — as well as the whole of chapter liii. beginning with the third verse, " He is despised and rejected of men ;" and those, again, which jSIatthew quotes, chapter xii., 18, as having guided the conduct of Jesus at a certain juncture, *' Behold my servant, whom I have chosen; my beloved in whom my soul is well pleased ; I will put my spirit upon him, and he shall show judgment to the Gentiles. He shall not strive nor cry ; neither shall any man hear his voice in the streets. A bruised reed shall he not break, and smoking flax shall he not quench, till he send forth judgment unto victory. And in his name shall the Gentiles trust." Here it were well to pause for a moment to consider the deep significance the words of the Old Testament had, not only for the Jews, but for Jesus himself. To begin with then, we may say that from the time the Canon of Scripture was closed, the words of the Old Testament were believed by all the Jews to contain the complete will of God in regard to every thought and action of their lives. So much indeed was this the case that when the plain obvious sense of a passage was exhausted, secondary meanings of all kinds which could be construed into figures and types, hints and forecasts of things to come, were supposed to lurk behind the superficial sense, ready to be extracted from it by the skilled interpreter. Now to this purpose certain parts of Scripture lent themselves more readily than others, either because they were couched in language more mystic and unintelligible, or because the meaning they had had for the people to whom they were originally addressed was now JESUS ciiiasT. 287 from lapse of time quite irrecoverable. Such, more especially, were the Prophets and Psalms, which accordingly, when interpreted in a mystic, allegorical sense, could be shown by the ingenious interpreter to yield solutions to all the perplexing problems of the time. Of these problems none were more interestino; than the nature of the Messiah, the time of his coming, and the vole he was to play ; and on them all the Rabbis were full of the most ingenious subtleties. With Jesus, too, the Old Testament, especially in its prophetic portions, was of unimpeachable authority, and especially on the question of the nature and functions of the Messiah. Accordingly, when it had been revealed to him that God was a God of Love, and in general terms that he himself was the Messiah, there was no way by which he could learn what specially he ought to do at critical junctures of his life, but by searching the Scriptures for passages that seemed to bear on these situations. And hence the meaning of the constantly repeated assertions of the Evangelists that Jesus did this or that "in order that the Scriptures miglit be fulfilled" is that he did it in obedience to the will of God as laid down beforehand for his guidance in the Scriptures. But to return. If any further test were required to convince Jesus that he was indeed the ^Messiah of God, it could only be the degree to which he Avas supported in his action as the Messiah of the poor and the wretched, by God Himself. And here the result ao;ain was decisive. For if God would not interfere to justify his claim to the Messiahshlp after the old type, that is to say as a Conquering King of the line of David, Jesus yet found himself supported in his true role of the teach- ing and healing Messiah by the whole power of the Almighty. If his Heavenly Father had failed to turn stones into bread for him, to bear him up if he threw himself into space, or to give him all the kingdoms of tlie world ; on the other hand, as the Messiah of the poor, of the afflicted, of the oppressed, he found himself backed by invincible power. Simple hearts 288 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. flocked to him in crowds to hear the blessed words that he spoke ; at his lightest word the lame walked, the blind saw, the dumb spoke, the dead rose, the demons were cast out ; and amid all the dangers which surrounded him from the populace, the priests, the Scribes and Pharisees, he walked in and out unharmed. With this confirmation in the external world of that of which he was already convinced in his own mind, his belief in himself and his mission was now complete ; and justly so, for all the tests which in a pre-scientific age could be appealed to as witnesses to truth had held good in his own case. First and most important was the vision itself after his baptism, in which he saw the heavens open and heard the voice of God Himself proclaiming him as the Messiah. This direct declaration and testimony of God Himself to his Messiahship would naturally have been the strongest evidence, the most unimpeachable certificate of truth; but falling on a mind imbued with the traditional idea of the Messiah as a king, coming in earthly power and glory, it produced only bewilderment and perplexity, and o-ave rise to a world of doubts, hesitations and uncertain- ties which it needed the experiences of the Wilderness to resolve. These doubts as to which kind of Messiah God intended him to be having been resolved in the Wilderness in the way we have seen, he again emerged clearly convinced — first that he was the Messiah of God, and secondly that he was not the kingly Messiah of the Pharisees, in whose kingdom the Priests and Scribes should have the first place, but the lowly Messiah of the prophets, with whom the poor, the outcast, the simple-minded should occupy the chief seats, together with all those still capable of that child-like love of God which with the Pharisees had been eaten out by f oi'malism and spiritual pride. And this conviction was still further deepened, as we have seen, not only by the testimony of Scripture itself, but by the marvellous success that attended his labours, and the train of miracles and wonders that accompanied him. With the Word JESUS CHRIST. 289 of God Himself out of Heaven, with the Word of God in Scripture, and with the Word of God fulfilled in works of mercy and power — with all these uniting their assurance that he was the Messiah of God, the faith of Jesus in himself was henceforth unclouded, and his confidence in his own power of imparting his spirit to those whom he should choose, unbounded. So entirely indeed had the event justified his own faith that he expected like results to follow when it was communicated to others. He told his disciples that if their faith was but as a grain of mustard-seed they should be able to remove moun- tains ; and he straightway, and without the least hesitation, proceeded to confer on them the power of handling deadly serpents, of treading on scorpions, of drinking poison without beins: harmed, as well as of healino; the sick, castino- out devils and the like — and all without betravinn; the least doubt of the efficacy of his gift or of his power to communicate it to others. With this deep and well-founded belief in his own jMessiah- ship went an equally clear conception of the functions of the Messiah and of the nature of the ^lessianic Kingdom ; and as his belief in the one strengthened, so his conception of the others cleared — all thought of the one involving: some corre- spending thought of the other. And here again his beliefs were the outcome at once of historical evolution and of his new conception of the nature of God. But to see this distinctly we must again refer to our studies of Judaism in the preceding chapters. To begin with then, it will be remembered that up to the time of the Maccabees the ^Messianic Kinodom was to be a period of peace and worldly prosperity for the Jews as a nation, and was to be inaugurated either by God Himself or by a. Messiah of the line of David. But either way it was an Earthly Kingdom under a sovereign exercising earthly sway. After the time of the Maccabean revolt, when the doctrine of the resurrection had come in with the prophet Daniel, the Messianic kingdom, while still an earthly one, was to be inaugurated by a Messiah who should play the double role, first V 290 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. of King, to put down the heathen powers around, and then of Judge, to sit in judgment on those who had died before the Messianic Age, and who were to rise again in their bodies to receive punishment or reward for the deeds done in their former earthly existence. In both the old and the new conception the Paradise was an Earthly one and situated in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, w^hile the Hell was in the Valley of Hinnom or Gehenna, close by the western valley of the city. The next stage of evolution we should expect then would be that of a purely Judicial Messiah, as the first had been a purely kingly and the second a kingly and judicial combined. Still there was the work of organizing the kingdom to be done before the world could be judged ; and without a temporal king it was most natural that the judicial Messiah should him- self do the work of organizing and directing. And for a merely judicial and organizing Messiah to be believed in at that time when all hearts were waiting for a kingly and conquering one, the nature of God must change, so that His kingdom, to be one with that nature, should be one not of secular power but of mercy and love. And this, which was the next step in evolution, is precisely the position into which Jesus was forced by his new conception of God as a God of Love. And as in the kingdom of the proud Jewish Jehovah the Chief Priests, Elders, Scribes and Pharisees would naturally have the supreme place, as they had already as members of the Sanhedrim in the existing Jewish State ; so the Messiah of a God of Love would so organize his kingdom that the weak, the lowly, the wretched and all who were still capable of reciprocating that love should have the supreme seats. Both the function, there- fore, of the Messiah and the nature of the Messianic Kingdom had been marked out for Jesus beforehand, as it were, by the course of evolution, which demanded as its next step a total change in the conception men had of the nature of God. The Kingdom of God, then, as we shall see more clearly in the next chapter, was a kingdom that was to be established on JESUS CHRIST. 291 earth by God Himself in the near future, and was to consist of all those who were capable of reciprocating the Father's love, whether Jew or Gentile — the poor, the humble, the down- trodden, the outcast, the broken-hearted, and the slave. Jesus himself as the Messiah, was to be the organizer of this kinjrdom, and his function was to teach men what were the characteristics of mind and heart necessary to enter it — he himself being their exemplar, as well as being the judge as to who should be considered worthy of a place in it. This Kingdom of God was not only at hand, as it was with John, but from the moment that Jesus himself set out to organize it, it could be said in a sense to be already here; and when it should have been preached to all nations, and those who were worthy had been got together, it would then be ushered in in its visible aspect by God Himself, to the sound of trumpets and with every demonstration of majesty and power. Jesus would then take his place on the throne, and on his right and left would sit his disciples as judges of the twelve tribes of Israel ; the good being rewarded by the society of angels and saints, the bad being punished in their sight in the fires eternally smouldering in the Valley of Gehenna. To go about among men preaching the reality of this kingdom, which it is probable Jesus believed would come in his own life-time, and, like a schoolmaster, to prepare men to pass into it by his own example, was henceforth his one all-absorbing function in his capacity of Messiah of a God of Love. And now we have to ask what the Code of ^lorality was that was necessary to all those who should strive to enter this kingdom of God? To begin with, we may remark that as we saw in a former chapter, it must have been a deduction from the conception which Jesus had formed to himself of the nature of God. And as for the first time in the history of the world, God had proclaimed Himself by Jesus to be a God of Love, so for the first time, love to God and to all God's people, Gentile and Samai'itan as well as Jew, became the supreme duty of 292 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. man. But John the Baptist, it will be remembered, had already l^reached the practical doctrine of loving your neighbour ; for when asked by his followers what they were to do, he replied (Luke iii. 11) that those who had two coats were to give one to him who had none, and the same in regard to food. Now not only is this good, sound morality, but, as we have said, good Christian morality as well ; and indeed it is probably as high a code as can ever practically be realized in the existing state of human nature, and in a world that is expected to continue. But Jesus had heard from John the Baptist that the Kingdom of God was at hantl, even at the door ; and believing that he him- self was the Messiah, and that it should be brought in during his own life-time, he was compelled to go a step farther and to preach a morality adapted not to a world that might continue indefinitely, but to a kingdom of God — a world unhampered by earthly restrictions, where the heart was free to follow its own better nature, free from all the temptations and necessities which in this life for ever pull it down. It was a transcendental morality in a word, a morality too high for the present world, and fitted only, as indeed it was intended, for a world where there was, as Jesus said, neither marrying nor giving in marriage, but where men should be as the angels in Heaven. This code of morality Jesus illustrated by every variety of concrete image. Instead of giving one of your coats to the man who had none, as John had enjoined, you were to give both cloak and coat. With him who compelled you to go a mile you should go twain. You were not only not to kill, but not even to be angry with your fellow-man, not even to call him a good- for-nothing, much less a fool. Not only must you not commit adultery, but you must not even be tempted to it. You must not only not forswear yourself, but you must not swear at all ; not only not resist evil, but turn the other cheek also. You must not only love your friends, you must love your enemies. And why? That you may be perfect like your Father in Heaven. So, too, all exhibitions of vanity, JESUS CHRIST. 2y o self-love, ambition, were to be repressed as inconsistent with the conception of the kingdom of God. You were not to give alms in the sight of men and to the sound of trumpets as the Pharisees were wont to do, but in secret; not to pray standing in the market-place or synagogue to be seen of men, but in your closet ; not to make long prayers nor put on a long face when you fasted, but to wash the face and anoint the head as if going to a festival. And with the Kingdom of God even at the door, yon were not to lay up money, nor take thought for your life, your food, or your raiment, but to leave all, like the birds and beasts, to your heavenly Father. Such, in brief, was the Code of ^Morality that Jesus demanjded of all those who were candidates for entrance into the Kingdom of God — a Code of Morality not for the present world or for mortal flesh and blood, but for a future Avorld and the companionship of angels and saints ; not for a worldly but for a millcnial kinodom ; not for a world which has to climb to its goal by slow stages of civilization and progress, but for a world-consummation close at hand ; not for a society where political economy rules, but for a society where money is of no value and where, in the language of one of the old Apocalyptic writers, the earth is so fruitful that one vine produces a thousand branches, one branch a thousand bunches, one bunch a thousand grapes, and one grape a thousand measures of wine ; not for a society where pride, vanity and ambition rule, but for one Avhere the last shall be first and the first last, and he that is greatest of all shall be the servant of all — and all following as corollaries from the two-fold fact that God was a God of Love, and that the kingdom for which the morality was designed was close at hand, even at the very door. And with this the Religion of Jesus becomes a complete, consistent, and harmonious whole. It contains each of the elements which we have seen to be essential to all religions, a new Conception of God, a new Code of morality, and a new Supernatural Ideal. The new conception of God was 11 294 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. of a God of Love, and not merely a God capable of Love on commandments kept, or on consideration given, as in Judaism. The new Code of Morality corresponded to this conception of God, and consisted in the duty not merely of universal love, but of a love raised to the transcendental pitch and fitted rather for the society of angels and saints for which it was instituted, than for the work-a-day world of fallible men and women. The new Supernatural Ideal^ again, was the Kingdom of God which was to be inaugurated in the immediate future not by a conquering kingly Messiah, but by a lowly suffering one ; and was to consist not of Priests and Pharisees, but of the poor, the outcast, the weary, the heavy-laden, and all the wretched. This kingdom was to be ushered in by some great manifestation of Divine power in the life-time of Jesus, and Jesus himself was to be the judge as to who were or were not to be received as its members. Such was the new religion of Jesus Christ, with the new and ideal Code of Morality founded on it — a code of morality, we may remark in passing, which was not laid aside like an old coat of mail when the kingdom for which it was intended and fitted failed to appear, but was emblazoned on high, as an ideal, to draw on the nations to hio^her and hig'her reaches of civilization and progress — like a star which, although always approached, is never reached. So far then the religion of Jesus was consistent, harmonious, and complete in itself. But changes were now to be made in it which, although in no way affecting its essential character, were destined to furnish the starting-point for an evolution which was to alter the whole future of Christianity. For both external events and the progress of his own thought necessitated a further and more advanced position than that which he had up to now held. At the outset it is probable that Jesus was imbued with the idea that the Kingdom of God would come in his own life-time. But the reception he met with from the rulers of the people, from the priests, the elders, JESUS CHRIST. 295 and the Pharisees, and the knowledge of the violent end that must befall all those who could be proved to have tampered in any way w^ith the Mosaic Law, or attempted to alter the established worship; — he himself having publicly declared that it was part of his mission to set aside the Mosaic ritual as well as many of the ordinances in reference to the Sabbath, divorce, etc., even while fulfilling them in a higher sense and carrying them to a higher and more ideal completion, — all this was more and more borne in on his mind as time went on, and made him forebode that his life might be forfeited before his mission was fulfilled. But this, although an operative, was not the only or indeed the main factor in determining the new course of action on wliich he was about to enter. For, as w^e saw, from the time that he heard God's own voice out of heaven proclaiming liim the Messiah, he had no way of knowing what specially he was expected to do at the diflferent junctures of his life, except by searching the Scriptures for the supposed references to the Messiah. Of these, all those passages that refeiTcd to a kingly Messiah might now be rejected at once as unworthy of the new conception of the nature of God Avhich had been revealed to him, but all those passages that seemed to point to a peaceful ]\Iessiah, to a Messiah of the poor and the lowly, to a teaching, organizing, and judging Messiah, all these he felt to have a direct and peculiar reference to himself ; and these he pondered deeply at each stage of his work and mission, in order to learn what the will of God in reference to himself and his future course of conduct specially was. Now of all these references, those in Isaiah on the suffering " Servant of God '' seemed to him to be the most explicit and pointed. It is probable that, at the outset of his ministry, he considered him- self commissioned to bring salvation to the Jews alone. At any rate, he is reported to have said to his disciples that they were not to go into the cities of the Gentiles or to the Samaritans ; and to the Canaanitish woman, who wished him to heal her daughter, lie said that he was sent only to the lost 296 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. sheep of the house of Israel. But the more he pondered the supposed references to himself in Isaiah, as well as the logical implications that flowed from his new view of the nature of God, the more he became convinced of two things. First, that his mission was to the Gentiles as well as to the Jews; and secondly, that he must suffer and perhaps die for the cause. In Isaiah, chap. xlii. is written, " I, the Lord, have called thee in righteousness, and will hold thine hand, and will keep thee, and give thee for a covenant of the people, for a light to the Gentiles, to open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house," etc. Again, in Hosea, vi. 2, it says, "In the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight." In Isaiah^ chap. liii. 5, 12, " Himself took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses. . . . He was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities," etc. " And he was numbered with the transgressors, and he bare the sin of many and made inter- cession for the transgressors," etc. Accordingly, for about six months or a year before his death, he began to announce to his disciples his intention of going up to Jerusalem to carry out the programme marked out for him by the Prophets. This programme is given in almost the same words by all the Evangelists, and, according to them, was as follows : He was to be delivered up to the chief priests and scribes, who were to condemn him to death and deliver him over to the Gentiles, who in tm-n would mock and scourge him, and spit upon him, and kill him, and the third day he should rise again. Now, as with the exception of the passage from Hosea, where he was to rise on the third day, the other details of his being delivered to the Gentiles to be mocked, and scourged, and spat upon, and crucified, are nowhere definitively stated by the Prophets, it is probable that they Avere not foreseen by Jesus, but were added by the Evangelists after the event. But, be this as it may, it is certain that the thought that he was to go up to Jerusalem to suffer, and JESUS ciiniST. 297 perhaps to die, now took entire possession of his mind. Not that this new plan made any diflference in his religious scheme. His conception of God remained the same; his Code of Morality the same ; the Kingdom of God on earth the same ; and Himself, as judge of those who were to be admitted into it, the same. The only difference was that instead of living to see it and inaugurate it, he should first suffer death and go up into heaven, to return again, as he told the High Priest, " on the clouds of heaven and seated on the right hand of power." But although this new conviction of Jesus that he should have to suffer and perhaps to die before the Kingdom of God could come, made no difference in his scheme of salvation for men, still when his suffering and death actually came to pass, they had the most profound effect on the future of Christianity. His resurrection and ascension into Heaven, there to remain with God vmtil his second coming, had this as its first result, — that it gave Jesus a relationship to God, the relation of Son, peculiar to himself alone ; and when this had had time to sink into the minds of men, it was inevitable that it should raise the conception of the Messiah from that of a man more highly endowed with the Spirit of God than other men, to that of a God himself. That a man should die for other men would have been glorious, but that God Himself should die for men (unlike all the Pagan deities who lived only to exploit them)j — this it was that made the future of Christianity. Not Jesus the mediator, organizer, and inaugurator of the kingdom of God, but Christ crucified and risen — this was the thought that contained within itself the germ of all future develop- ments. The mere abstract idea of a God of Love would have soon been eaten away, as it was in the case of Job, by the corroding spectacle of the injustice and evil in the world ; but the conception of a God dying for man, while it admitted the existence of evil in the world (with which an omnipotent God of pure Love would have been inconsistent) showed man also the way to conquer it, viz., by reinforcing himself against the 298 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. €vil both In himself and others by calling into the field the great Captain of his Salvation who had suffered and died for Him. But this which made the fortune of Christianity in the Pagan world, rent it violently from Judaism ; for a crucified Messiah was to the Jews a stumbling block, an absurdity and an impossibility. For did not God Himself lay it down in His own Law (Deuteronomy, chap, xxi., 23), " He that is hanged on a tree is accursed of God." And yet in this crucified and risen Christ the whole of Pauline Christianity, as we shall see in a following chapter, and the entire future of the Church lay concealed. But to return : — ^let us now consider the effect of this new conviction of Jesus as to his sufferings and death on his disciples. It is probable that it was only shortly before he went up to JeiTisalem for the last time, that the disciples fully realized that Jesus was himself the Messiah that should come, and not merely, like John, the preacher of his coming ; and this belief they had reached by the most gradual stages. It was only, indeed, after the exhibition of his marvellous powers as a miracle- worker that Jesus could venture to declare that He was himself the Messiah. Before that, there was nothing to suggest any connexion ; and you might as well have seized the first man you met and expected them to believe that he was the traditional Messiah as that Jesus was. He was a poor carpenter's son, known of all from his youth upwards, without wealth, connexions, birth, or personal appearance to distinguish him from the miscellaneous multitude of his countrymen. He had not come on the clouds of Heaven to the sound of trumpets, but had been born in their midst and had Avalked In and out among them from his boyhood upwards. And it would appear almost certain that even after the vision in which he had heard the voice of God saying to him " Thou art my beloved son," he had kept his conviction of his Messiahship in his own breast, and had gone about ostensibly as the preacher and announcer of the kingdom of God merely. For the train JESUS CHRIST. 299 of thoutrht by which he liad been led to a belief in his own ^lessiahship was all so personal and peculiar to himself, that without a long novitiate it was not easily transferable to other minds. The new conception he had formed of the nature of God, for example, Avhich was the starting-point from which all else followed, was in a manner incommunicable ; and, except in connexion with after circumstances and events, was not demonstrable by any human arguments. The vision, too, in which he saw the spirit of God descend- ino- on him, and heard the voice from Heaven proclaiming him the Messiah, was a quite peculiar and personal experience not transferable to others. So, too, the conception which he had formed of the Messiah as a lowly, humble, and Tin warlike Saviour, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, had to be extracted piecemeal from detached passages in the Psalms, minor Prophets, and Isaiah. The suffering " Servant of God " in Isaiah, to which Jesus appealed in support of his claim to be the Messiah, was believed by the Jews then, as it is by modern critics, not to refer to the Messiah at all, but to the Jewish remnant, the ideal Israel, the Israel of God. It is reasonable to believe, therefore, that this conception of the Messiah could only have been very gradually instilled into the minds of the disciples. Indeed, had it been boldly announced bv Jesus fx'om the first, and before his wonderful success as a Healer had prepared the minds of the disciples for it, he would l)robably have been taken for a madman rather than for the Messiah. Not only was his character of wonder-worker the mainstay of the belief of the early Christians in his Messiahship (as we see from the earliest Gospel, that of Mark, where the Sermon on the Mount is entirely absent, and where he figures mainly as the great Thauniaturgist), but it has been, together with the resurrection, the mainstay of the faith of the Church in his Messiahship down to this day. It was, then, only after his preternatural powers had been demonstrated to the belief and satisfaction of all, that he felt 300 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. himself justified in hinting to his disciples that he himself was the Messiah who was to come. It came about in this way. He w^as on the way to Caesarea Philippi just before his last journey to Jerusalem, when he suddenly turned to his disciples and asked them who the people thought he was. They replied that some thought him to be John the Baptist, some Elijah, and others Jeremiah, or one of the prophets that were to precede the advent of the Messiah. lie then went on to ask more pointedly who they tliought he was, to which Peter, speaking probably for the others as well as himself, replied, " Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God." So pleased was Jesus with this reply, which he felt could only have come from the Spirit of God putting it into the mind of Peter, and that flesh and blood could never have imagined it, that he forthwith blessed him and gave him the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, that is to say, made him the judge along with himself of those who were to enter the coming Kingdom of God. And now that this Avas understood by his disciples, he began to unfold to them those portions of his scheme which had long been silently maturing in his mind, and which referred to the course events Avere taking, as well as to the role which the Scriptures had mapped out for him. For from this time, according to the testimony of Matthew, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go up to Jerusalem, there to suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and Scribes, and to be killed, and to rise again the third day. But the disciples, although able without too great a shock to their traditional prejudices to exchange a Kingly Messiah for a Miracle-working one, were not prepared to accept with the same readiness a Messiah who, with all these miraculous powers, should allow himself to suffer and die at the hands of the people, — much less at the hands of the Gentiles. For on any hypothesis, whether as King or Wonder-worker, the Messiah was one who was to deliver Israel from Gentile domination, as well as to introduce a reign of justice and righteousness on the earth. JESUS CHRIST. 301 Accordingly when this remark of Jesus as to his suffering and death was made to the people standing round, Peter, who was unable to conceive of a jSIessiah who should die, feeling that it would ruin the cause and prevent people from believing him to be the Messiah at all, took him aside and expostulated with him on the imprudence of speaking thus openly of his sufterings and death, as being sure to alienate from him the sympathy of many of his followers. But Jesus turned on him and said, *' Get thee behind me, Satan, for thou savoui'est not the things of God, but the things of men." And then it was that the effect of this chano;e of outlook be2:an to show itself in his relations with his disciples. The tone was no longer pitched in the joyous, happy strain of the eai-ly days of Galilee, when he sent them out into the world on their evangelical mission, telling them to take with them neither money nor changes of garment, to have no care or anxiety for the morrow, but to go from door to door joyously proclaiming the glad tidings of the coming Kingdom of God, and lightly shaking the dust off their feet from those places that would not receive them — ready when the Lord should come to rush in with impetuous violence, and in triumph to take the Kingdom of Heaven by force, and to seat themselves on the rioht and left hand of Jesus as judges of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Now all was changed, and the tone was one of gloom, foreboding and sorrow. Tliey were told that they, like himself", would have to pass through much tribulation before the Kingdom of God shoidd come ; that they would have to take up their cross, prepared like him to lose their life now, if they were to attain to life eternal in the Kingdom of God, when he should return with his angels to establish it in the glory of his Father. And so they journeyed up to Jerusalem, pausing here and there, while Jesus worked miracles of healini>; as he went alonsr, or discussed with his disciples his future prospects ; still in his uncertainty charging them not to make known to the multitude that he was the Messiah. In this way they journeyed on, he firmly resolved in 302 THE EVOLUTION OF CHEISTIANITY. his own mind to carry out to the letter the course marked out for him by the Prophets, while leaving the means and the issue to God ; they, hopeful and confident in their Master's power. When they came within sight of the city the difficulty the disciples felt in understanding the attitude of Jesus does not seem to have lessened. They were convinced, in spite of hia repeated protestations to the contrary, that the Messiah would not be permitted to die either at the hands of the Jews or of the Gentiles. There was no warrant, either in popular tradition or in Scripture, for a Messiah who should have to come a second time to complete a work left unfinished at the first coming ; and this was what his death would mean. Jesus was either, therefore, not the Messiah at all, or if he were, he would not be permitted by God to die. But since Caesarea Philippi they had no longer the least shade of doubt as to his Messiah- ship. The conclusion then was obvious — he was not to die. Jesus, on the other hand, although filled with the conception of the suffering that lay before him, if not of his death, was more or less perplexed and distracted by the conflicting bearings of the various texts which he believed to refer to himself — and it is in this perplexity, as we shall now see, that I find the key to his whole subsequent procedure. The general tenor of most of them was that he should suffer and probably die ; and if so,, his second advent, although foreign to the Jewish conception of the Messiah, would be rendered certain by the prophecy in Daniel which he now often quoted as referring to himself, the prophecy, viz., in which the Son of Man was to come on the clouds of Heaven. Accordingly, when the little party had come in sight of Jerusalem, and the disciples began to exult in the immediate prospect of the kingdom being ushered in (Luke xix. 11), Jesus was again obliged to repress their ardour by assuring them that he should have to die and leave them for a while, and that much would have to be done and endured both by them and himself before the Kingdom of God should come. To enforce the lesson he told them the parable of the nobleman JESUS CHRIST. 30S who on going Into a far country, left his servants ten, five, and one pound respectively, with the charge that they were to occupy till he returned, and pointed out to the disciples, who appai'ently imagined that there was nothing for them to do but to enter in and take their seats beside him, that like the man who hid his one pound in a napkin, they would be punished for any slackening of their efforts in the cause by exclusion from the Kingdom. But he hastened to give them assurance that he would not leave them always, but would soon again return, by adding, " Verily I say unto you, that there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the Kingdom of God come with power " (Mark ix. 1). So far all seemed clear and explicit. But observe there were other passages which seemed to imply that the kingdom would be established by God Himself without the necessity of the death of the Messiah; and it so happened that the passages suggesting this view were precisely the ones which Jesus had selected for himself to regulate the mode of his public entry into Jerusalem. One of the passages in question is Zech. ix. 9, where it is said, " Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion ; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem ; behold, thy king cometh unto thee ; he is just, and having salvation : lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass." And that it was to be a peaceful kingdom established by God Himself without any necessity for the Messiah's suffering and death, is apparent from the next verse, where it is said, "And I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim, and the horse from Jerusalem, and the battle-bow shall be cut off : and he shall speak peace unto the heathen : and his dominion shall be fi'om sea even to sea, and from the river even to the ends of the earth." So deeply indeed was Jesus convinced that this prophecy referred to himself, that he had an ass brought him, and rode into Jerusalem on it amid the shoutings and hosannas and waving of palm-branches of his disciples and followers ,• and when reproached by the Pharisees 304 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. for permitting this demonstration, he replied that it was out of the mouths of simple folk like these that God proclaimed the truth, and that, were they to be silent, the very stones would cry out that he was the Messiah. Here then were two series of apparently conflicting prophecies, bearing evidently each on himself ; and between the two he seems to have fluctuated in restless alternation ; now, in his happier moments, and perhaps under the stimulus of his disciples' hopes, seeming to feel that God would come to his assistance and bring in the kingdom without the necessity of his death ; and now, in his deeper and probably more habitual mood, resigning himself to those that seemed clearly to foreshadow his suffering and death. The effect of this strain and tension of mind, of this uncertainty as to what amid these cross-currents of prophecy should next befall him, was a state of agitation, anxiety, exaltation, and impatience, which was unknown in his earlier time, when as the simple bringer of the ffood tidinors he walked calm and serene among the fields and beneath the skies of his beloved Galilee, not yet having assumed his high Messianic role. He became uncertain and ■capricious in his moods, stormy gusts of violence and suspicion alternated with and passed again into his old habitual calm; the old sweetness, dignity, and serenity intervening as lull and pause between the conflicting and rapidly alternating fits of violence, pathos, exaltation, and despair. The first recorded outbreak was shortly after he had entered the city, when going to the Temple and seeing the money-changers and sellers of beasts of sacrifice chaffering and haggling over the gains which the Temple brought them, and remembering the words of Isaiah that God's house was a "house of prayer for all people," and of Jeremiah that they had made it " a den of thieves," he forthwith proceeded to violently overturn the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those engaged in selling doves, and stopped all those who were to be seen carrying vessels through the Temple Courts. All his actions are now JESUS CHRIST. 305 performed in this high state of tension and exaltation. He goes out to Bethany and coming to a fig-tree with leaves on it and no fruit, he, beins; hunjjrv, condemns it as if it had been a conscious offender, to a state of sterility for ever. Highly- strained metaphors and f^trong hyperboles can alone express the intensity of his feelings. The Scribes and Pharisees he denounces as serpents, vipers, hypocrites, whose chance of entering the kingdom of God, when compared with that of the very publicans and harlots, is small. Even the Temple he speaks of with scant respect ; and its perpetuity, which to the Jews was as secure as if its foundations were rooted in eternity, he disposes of by a wave of his hand, as if it were an air-castle or a dream. His ideas are so boundless, his exaltation so intense and keen, that he feels himself equal to a world in arms. He talks much and frequently of his coming on the clouds of Heaven ; parries and thrusts Avith the Pharisees and Saducees with the greatest lightness and dexterity ; disposing with the ease of a skilled fencer of all attempts to entrap or puzzle him on such questions as the authority of Caesar, the resurrection in relation to the Levirate law, etc., going into the infinite subtleties of the Jewish law, and meeting the objection that the Messiah was to be the Son of David, etc., with a zest and subtlety worthy of the Scribes themselves. But as time went on, and still no sign of the intervention of God anywhere appeared, the intermittent hope of a continuous, peaceful triumph, which the Zechariah prophesy had inspired, began to grow dim and cold ; and the old habitual feeling that he must suffer and die, with all the texts in which he was to give his life a ransom for many, came back to him in all its force, bringing Avith it all the old sweetness, dignity, pathos and resignation. With the sure premonition of his doom he prepared his last meal with his disciples ; breaking the bread and drinking the wine with Avords ever memorable for their dignity, beauty, and sweet serenity. But his feelings Avere at too high a pitch of tension to maintain except for moments this AT 306 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. serenity and repose ; and before they had well sat down he had begun again, while admitting the necessity of his death, to heap denunciations of woe on those who should betray him. The meal finished, after singing a hymn they went out into the street, and as they wandered along, Jesus knowing the shock of horror and disappointment with which his disciples would receive the news that he had been taken, said to them, " All ye shall be offended in me this night," justifying himself, however, as usual, by the words of prophesy which he felt were intended for him, " I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered abroad " (Matt, xxvi, 31). But at the same time to recover the ground which, in spite of their protestations, he knew must be lost by his admission, he appealed to the Jewish belief that none could rise from the dead but the elect of God, by adding, "But after I am raised up I will go before you into Galilee." And when they had all begun protesting their undying allegiance and devotion (Peter, as usual, with special ardour), he turned on him and said, " Before the cock crows thou shalt deny me thrice." Arrived at the Garden of Gethsemane, his suspicions heightened to the preternatural pitch by the move- ments of Judas, he charged the rest of them to watch and pray, lest they, too, should enter into temptation to betray or desert him. In this extreme agitation of mind he completely loses for moments his self-control, twice falling on his knees, praying fervently to God that He would take away this cup of bitter- ness and death from him, and only completely resigning himself to the Divine AMll w hen he saw the armed multitude with Judas at their head approaching him from tlie distance. This tone of resignation he maintained throughout his trial, claiming for himself with great dignity and impressiveness, when challenged by the High Priest, the title of King of the Jews which he had received from Zechariah ; but exhibiting a glimpse of the burning fanaticism which had now become a settled conviction of his life, when he quietly but proudly added, "And JESUa CHlilST. o07 henceforth ye shall see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power, and coming with the clouds of heaven." But however violent and sudden may have been the fluctuations and alternations of mood during these last hours, Jesus aiever seems to have let go the secure thread of Prophecy as guide in the maze of conflicting alternatives, but at each Juncture up to the very gate of death, if we are to believe the Evangelists, let his conduct and action be guided by it down even to the most trivial particulars ; as, for example, when on the cross, knowing, as the Evangelist says, that all things were accomplished, he said " I thirst," in order that the Scripture might be fulfilled, which says, " In my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink." All, however, was now soon to be over, and Jesus, still hoping against hope that the Zechariah prophecies would prove true and that God would even yet intervene for his rescue and release, but finding that it was not so to be, with the loud cry of despair on his lips, " My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me ? " expired. And so passed away in his prime and with a cry of anguish nnd despair, this great and beautiful spirit, more fruitful for humanity in his death than in his life ; leaving his poor disciples not oidy mourning and forsaken but utterly dumb- founded and perplexed. For a Messiah to die had seemed to them simply impossible, and now that he was dead, his resurrection would have been to their minds an equal impossibility. But this mood did not last long, for the resurrection, in which they firndy believed, following closely after, swiftly reassured them. It was the one thing needed to enable them to weave too;cther the scattered threads of his eventful life and teaching, never before really understood by them, into a single, continuous, harmonious, and consistent whole. It was the last proof needed to convince them of his Messiahship ; for, as we have said, no one could be conceived as rising from the dead before the Judo-ment, unless he were indeed like Enoch and Elijah one of the elect of God; and 308 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. they were satisfied. And this it was, which now uniting with the memories of his miraculous powers and of those appeals to Scripture in which they now saw every action of his life fore- shadowed ; this with the remembrance of his beautiful character, his serene wisdom, and the new and blessed emotion inspired by his revelation of the Father's love ; this, together with the aroma left behind by it all, and which has sweetened the centuries — all this, with the steady light shining in the surrounding gloom, of his return in glory when they should take their seats by the side o£ their beloved Master, united to produce a con\dction which never again wavered or grew dim, but kept alive by the Holy Spirit and the very presence of Jesus himself in the ever-recurring sacramental meals, launched Christianity on its world-conquering career. How it fared with it afterwards, what evolution it underwent in the minds of men as time went on, and what the principles were which guided the course of that evolution — all this will appear in the following chapters. CHAPTER III. TPIE KINGDOM OF GOD. l^rOTHING now remains to complete our study of the -^^ doctrine of Jesus, in so far, that is, as is necessary for the pur230ses of this history, but the attempt to settle from the standpoint we have gained, the outstanding dispute as to the precise meaning attached by Jesus and his disciples to the phrase the ' Kingdom of God.' To do this satisfactorily it is necessary at the outset to put out of our minds the ideas which we ourselves have been accustomed to attach to the phrase ; as these ideas, like so many of those we hold in reference to various doctrines of the Church, are not the reflection of the original ideas of Jesus and his immediate disciples, but the higlily elaborated product of many ages or centuries of modiflcation and evolution. The first question is one that exercised chiefly the mind of tlie Early Church, viz., as to whether by the Kingdom of God was meant a kingdom on earth or a kingdom in heaven : the second is one that divides the opinions of men in our own time, viz., as to Avhether it was a visible or outward kingdom at all, either earthly or heavenly, that was meant, and not rather a moral state, an inner condition of the mind and heart. Now if we are to get the advantage of any light thrown on these questions by our studies in the foregoing chapters, we must first ask what is the view of the Kino-dom of God which 310 THE EVOLUTION OP CHRISTIANITY. would natunilly arise out of the Jewish conception of the Messianic Kingdom when that conception was modified by the new view of Jesus as to the nature of God, by his new Code of Morality, and by his new conception of the Messianic functions. To begin with then we may say that so far as the new con- ception of Jesus as to the nature of God is concerned, that is to say his conception that God is a God of Love making His rain and sunshine to fall alike on the just and the unjust — this of itself would not necessarily have had any influence in modifying the traditional view of the Messianic kingdom, viz., as an out- ward, visible, earthly kingdom ; except in so far perhaps as this, that instead of being a powerful and triumphant kingdom of outward pomp and pride, under a prince of the house of David reigning at Jerusalem, and with other nations as its vassals, it would be a kingdom of the poor and the lowly, of righteousness,, piety and peace. It will be remembered that in the Messianic reign the earth was of itself and without labour to produce all things in abundance for the use of man ; and as all stimulus, in consequence, to the acquisition of money or to worldly ambition and power would be withdrawn, the kingdom, although a kingdom of righteousness and peace, need not necessarily he a kingdom in the heavens, but might Avith equal propriety be a kingdom on the earth. It is not till we come to the Moral Code of Jesus as embodied in the Sermon on the Mount, that we are confronted with any serious difficulty and perplexity. For when we remember that the Sermon on the Mount was not so much a code of morals for the existing world of fallible men and women, as a transcendental code, fitted rather, like a counsel of perfection,, for the society of angels and saints ; and when we further remember that Jesus himself said that in his kingdom there would neither be marrying nor giving in marriage, but that men should be like the angels in heaven ; and Avhen, lastly, we find him in the passage in which he gives the keys to Peter, giving him along with them the power of binding or loosing in heaven THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 31J those whom he bound or loosed on ca'-th ; it would seem as if in the mind of Jesus at least, the Kingdom of God was a heavenly and not an earthly kingdom. And this conclusion receives additional support from the fact that ^latthew in his Gospel deliberately uses the phrase 'Kingdom of Heaven' in those instances where 'Kingdom of God' is used bv the other Evangelists ; as, for example, when in describing the mission of .Fohn the Baptist, he uses the words " repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand," for the parallel passage of Mark, " repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand." And this agaia is still further strengthened by the reply of Paul to the question aSked him by the Corinthians as to the kind of body with which the believers should rise, when he says (I. Corinthians xv., 35 seq.) that those alive on earth at the time will have their bodies chano;ed from natural bodies to what he calls spiritual bodies, as if to fit them for some other sphere of existence than this Avorld ; or again, when in I. Thcssalonians iv., 16, he says that "at the Last Day the Lord Plimself will descend from Heaven with a shout, with the voice of the arch- angel and with the trump of God ; and the dead in Christ shall rise first, while those alive at his coming are to be caught up with them into the clouds to meet the Lord in the air and so be for ever with the Lord" — where the implication again would seem to be that the kingdom of God was to be established not on the earth, but somewhere in the heavens. Now this convergence of authority so strong, would at first sight leave little room for doubt that the Kingdom of God Avas a heavenly and not an earthly kingdom ; and yet I am con- vinced that a wider survey of all the evidence will reverse this conclusion and lead us back to the belief that in the minds at least of Jesus and his disciples, the Kingdom of Gotl was a kingdom not of heaven but of earth. But before entering on this it may be well perhaps to consider first what can be legitimately said in a general way with the 312 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. view of minimizing or destroying the force of the above. And in the first place we may affirm that although the Sermon on the ISIount contains a code of morality adapted rather to a society of angels and saints than to the work-a-day world of imperfect human beings, and therefore to a heavenly rather than to an earthly kingdom, still it does not follow that this code should not find a fitting place on the rejuvenated earth which, according to all the apocalyptic writers, was to be the scene of the Messianic reisrn — an earth on which, in the lanofuase of one writer, men were to lead a life of easy blessedness under green trees, in magnificent fields, with joyous feeding flocks and flying angels clothed in white. On the contrary there are several considerations which directly support the view that it was intended for an earthly kingdom, and that, too, in spite of the express declaration of Jesus himself that his kingdom was not of this world, and that in it there should be neither marrying nor giving in mar-riage, but that men should be like the angels in heaven. The first is that Jesus, as a Jew in all probability untinctured with Greek thought, and therefore a believer in the resurrection of the body as well as the soul, could scarcely have dreamt of a kingdom in Heaven, as that would only have been a fitting abode for angels and spirits. The second is that in his Moral Code Jesus did not propose to eradicate the natural desires by bodily asceticism, as he would have done had he intended to train men for a kingdom in Heaven (and as the ascetics of the Middle Ages did when once the hopes of the immediate coming of Christ had vanished) ; on the contrary he came eating and drinking, as his enemies said, leading a joyous but purely natural life, and proposing rather to fit men for a better life on earth by the power of a transfiguring love, than to prepare them for a future life above, by the mortification of the body Avhile here on earth. Again, as for the use of the phrase 'the Kingdom of Heaven' by Matthew, instead of the corresponding phrase ' Kingdom of God ' used by the other Evangelists — this, under all the circumstances, need carry but little weight in the THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 313 solution of the question ; for as the faithful at the time this Gospel was written were in hourly expectation of the coming of Christ from heaven, it was not unnatural that the kingdom which he was to brin^ clown with him from heaven should be described by a disciple as the Kingdom of Heaven. Then again, as to St. Paul's conception that the dead in Christ were to be raised with incorruptible bodies to meet the Lord in the air — this may be regarded rather as the first stage in the evolution of the doctrine, than as the original doctrine itself as it existed in the mind of Jesus and the disciples. Indeed some such evolution must almost inevitably have taken place so soon as the Jewish conception of the resurrection should come in contact with Greek thought. With the Jews, as we have seen, the resurrection was always conceived as a resurrection of the whole man, body as well as soul ; of a being, therefore, fitted for life in the natural world. With the Greeks, on the contrary, the after-life was a life of the soul alone, which was fitted only for the abode of souls, viz., for Heaven. Now Paul was imbued with the Greek conception of immortality as well as with the Jewish conception of the resurrection, as is seen in his accept- ing the Greek division of man into body, soul, and spirit. The consequence was that in the endeavour to gain some clear con- ception of the matter for himself, as well as to adapt it to the comprehension of his Greek converts, he was forced to a com- promise in which, while retaining the Jewish resurrection of the body, he at the same time changed that body into a ghost- like incorruptible one, whose natural abode was neither frankly on earth nor yet among the pure spirits in heaven, but at that intermediate point in the air where the incorruptible bodies of the saints should in their ascent meet Jesus in his descent from the throne of God. As a compromise, therefore, it cannot fairly be regarded as rej)resenting the original view of Jesus himself and his disciples, but rather as the first stage in tlie evolution of the doctrine, when impregnated and modified by ideas familiar to Greek thought. And lastly, as to the passage 314 THE EVOLUTION OF CIIllISTIAMTY. in which Jesus in giving the keys to Peter, gives him the power as well of loosing and binding in heaven those whom he had loosened and bound on e:irtli — 1 can only suggest that if not a later interpolation, the words were probably used meta- phorically, to express the moral distinction existing between the two worlds of earth and heaven, rather than to indicate their topographical distribution ; much in the same way as when he said that his kingdom was not of this world, it is open to us to believe that he was referring to a kingdom not of outward power and pride like that of Cjesar, but to a kingdom of righteousness, piety, and love. If then the difficulties suggested by the above passages have been more or less satisfactorily met by the arguments we have ventured to bring forward, we may now proceed to consider the positive proofs that may be adduced in support of the proposition that the Kingdom of God was not a heavenly but an earthly one. And here, perhaps, the most genei-al consider- ations will be found, as is so often the case in questions of this kind, to have the greatest weight. To begin with, then, it will be remembered that it is said by Luke (chap. xix. 11), that the disciples just before the final entry into Jerusalem were convinced that the Kingdom of God was immediately about tO' appear, and that Jesus to dispel the illusion was obliged tO' narrate to them the parable of the nobleman, who before going away to a far country to receive a kingdom that had been given him, called his servants together and gave them each a sum of money which they were to put out to some pi'oductive use until his return. Now as in the parable the analogy evidently was that Jesus was to go to Heaven to receive his kingdom, it is clear that it was to the earth that he was to- return in glory to establish it. Again it is related immediately after, that when they came in sight of Jerusalem, Jesus to carry out the prophecy of Zechariah, sent for an ass on which to ride into the city to establish there his kingdom of righteousness and peace. And as it Avas in Jerusalem that the kingdom of THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 315 Zccliarifili was to have its seat, it is surely just to infer tliat in the mind of Jesus it was in .Teru.*alem that his kingdom was to be established also. Again, in Acts i. G, we find it recorded, that when Jesus appeared to his disciples after his resurrection, they asked him whether he were now going to restore the kingdom to Israel. Now if this account be true, it is scarcely possible to believe that the question coming as it did, after his death and after his many expositions of the Kingdom of God, could have been asked, had it not been taken for granted by all, that the Kingdom of God was to bo an earthly and not a heavenly one. Indeed the general fact that Jesus after having ascended into Heaven was for o-enera- tions hourly expected to return to earth, ought of itself to be sufficient to convince us that in the mind of the Early Church the Kingdom of God was a kingdom on earth and not a kingdom in Heaven. Even John, who must have known the mind of Jesus as intimately as any other, has, if the Book of Revelation which was Avritten some thirty or forty years after the death of Christ, be his, represented the New Jerusalem, that is to say, the Kingdom of God, as descending from heaven to be established on earth, and not vice versa. But it may be asked why, if by the Kingdom of God an earthly kingdom were really intended, it should ever have come to be represented as a heavenly one ; the answer will, I imagine, be found in the following circumstances. Firstly, that as Jesus did not return to earth as he had promised, men's minds naturally sought consolation in the idea that perhaps after all a heavenly kingdom rather than an earthly one had been intended, and laid stress on those texts which supported the view that the kingdom was to be a heavenly one, to the neglect of those which represented it as an earthly one. And secondly, that as the Saviour who should give his life a ransom for many, must himself, as we shall see in the next chapter, be a God, and not merely a man more fully endowed A\ith the Spirit of God than other men, it was more natural that as a reward for 316 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. virtue men should have the privilege of going to him, than that he should come to them. If then we have made good our contention that in the mind of Jesus the Kingdom of God was meant to be an earthly and not a heavenly kingdom, we may now pass on to consider the arguments of those who hold that by it was meant neither an earthly nor a heavenly kingdom, nor indeed any outward visible kingdom at all, but only a state oj the soul^ an inner condition of the mind and heart. This view, it may be said in passing, is one that is held largely by that great body of rationalistic thinkers of the present day, who, otherwise sound in the faith, feel that neither a Heaven nor a Hell in the old materialistic sense in which our forefathers believed in them, is any longer tenable. But just as we have maintained in opposition to the orthodox view, that the Kingdom of God was to be an earthly and not a heavenly kingdom, so in opposition to the above-mentioned thinkers we shall have to maintain that it was an outward, visible kingdom ; and that the condition of the soul referred to, and on which so much stress has been laid, was not the kingdom itself, but the means, the indispensable condition, of entrance into it. It may perhaps serve to make our demonstration more conclusive, if we first clear the way by asking on what authority these thinkers rely, in their assertion that by the kingdom of God, Jesus meant, not an outward, visible kingdom, but an inner condition of the mind and heart. The main authority, I believe, is to be found in that passage in Luke (xvii. 21), where Jesus on being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was expected to appear, replied that it would not come with observation, that is to say with outward show or demonstration ; that they were not to look here or there for it, because it was within them or in the midst of them. And as corroboration and support of this view, the appeal is made to the authority of St. Paul, who when rebuking those of the Judaizing party of the Church who laid so much stress on Avhether what they ate was ceremonially clean or no, said THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 317 (Romans xiv. 17) "the Kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost." Now I must confess that at first sight these passages do indeed support the view that the kingdom of God is not something outward and visible, something in the future, but is something at present existing, some condition of the mind and heart. And in face of testimonies so conflicting as those we have considered, and on each side so distinct and decided, I should despair by any mere collating and comparing of passages of ever arriving at any conclusion. My aim is rather to see if some general statement cannot be found, which will exhibit these conflicting and aj^parently contradictory passages, as merely different aspects of one harmonious whole. In attemjjting this, an analogy will perhaps help to make our position the more clear. If then we picture to ourselves a detachment of the Salvation Army going for the first time into the slums of some great city, it is evident that although the salvation which they off'er is really something to be enjoyed in a future life, it may still in a secondary sense be said to have come nigh to their hearers, to be something present and in the midst of them, and to already exist where a certain disposition or attitude of mind and heart is found. Now the same may be said with equal and indeed with greater truth of the Kingdom of God. For whereas Avith the Salvation Army the continuity of the offered salvation is broken by the change of place from this world to the heavenly world after death, Avith the kingdom of God there is no such break: for if we are rioht in believing it to have been a kingdom on earth, the promised kingdom is conterminous as it were with the preparatory kingdom ; the men who are members of the Church and who are alive at the coming of the Messiah, being the same men who after his coming will make up the kingdom of God, no change of place or personnel having occurred, nothing having happened save the sudden advent of the Messiah in their midst together with the 318 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. chang-es in Nature and in the conditions of human life which he was to bring with him. All the metaphors and analogies therefore which can be used by the Salvation Army as descriptive of their mission, could with even greater appropriateness be used by Jesus of the Kingdom of God — as for example, when thinking of its small begmnings from him- self and a few followers and its rapid growth and spread, he compared it to a mustard seed which from the smallest of seeds grows till it becomes a tree, or to a piece of leaven which mixed in among the meal will in time leaven the whole lump. Or again looking at the Kingdom of God from the point of view of its composition and quality, and figuring it to himself in its progress growing like a snowball and drawing into itself from all sides the bad as well as the good, as an army draws after it camp-followers and adventurers, he could appropriately compare it to a man who sowed good seed, but in whose field tares were sown also, which must continue to grow along with it mitil the harvest ; or to a net cast into the sea, which drew up fishes of all kinds, the good being kept and the bad thrown away. Or thinking of its priceless value he could compare it to a treasure hid in a field which, to get, you sell all you have to buy the field ; or to a pearl of great price, which to possess men are willing to give all they are worth. In the same way, too, the kingdom may be defined in reference to those qualities of mind and heart necessary for entrance into it — and which, as we have seen, our modern commentators imagine to have been the kingdom itself. These qualities have been abundantly indicated by Jesus by a number of concrete types and con- trasts — as for example the mental attitude of the poor, the sorrowing, the peace-maker, in contrast with that of the vulgar, purse-proud rich; of the self-righteous Scribes and Pharisees in contrast with the publicans and harlots conscious of sin and open to a higher life : of those who do the will of the Father in contrast with those who cry Lord ! Lord ! but do not do it ; of the repentant prodigal in contrast with his immaculate THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 319 brother ; of the Good Samaritan and the unneighbourly Levite and Priest who passed on the other side ; of the Virgins who had kept their lamps trimmed in contrast with those who had fallen asleep ; of those who make use of their gifts and oppor- tunities in contrast with those who hide them in a napkin — in all of Avhich types and contrasts one sees clearly mirrored the qualities of mind and heart necessary for admittance into the kingdom. And yet although the kingdom may in a secondary sense be said to consist of these qualities, it is evident that they are the conditions necessary for entering it, and not the Kingdom of God itself. But that the Kingdom of God was no present thing, neither an existing organization, nor existing qualities of mind and heart, but was a future condition of man either in heaven or on the earth, may be clearly seen if we apply to the problem the simple principle that although what is future may be spoken of metaphorically as present if, like a tree, its germ is already here, no present reality can by any metaphor be spoken of as exclusively in the future. If then we remember that by the hypothesis which we are discussing, the Kingdom of God was ah-eady present among the disciples, that they already liad the kingdom both as having the qualities required and as being members of the Christian Community — it would be absurd for them to ask, as they did in ]Matthew xxiv. 3, what were the signs of its coming, as it would also be for Jesus to say as he did (Matthew xvi. 28), that there were some standing there who should not taste of death till they saw the Son of Man coming in his kingdom ; or again as in Matthew xxvi. 29, at the Last Supper, where he gave the cup to his disciples, saying " I will not drink henceforth of the fniit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's Kingdom." Or how on the same hypothesis could it be reported of the disciples that they (who were the kingdom) should expect the kingdom to appear after their entry into Jerusalem ; or that they should ask Jesus for permission to sit down with him on 320 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. the right hand and on the left in the Kingdom of God; or more than all that Jesus himself should say of a kingdom that was already here, that no one but God knew when the coming of the kino-dom should be ? But if no other reason were to be found for believing that by the Kingdom of God was not meant any inward moral state, this of itself would be sufficient, viz., that the great masses of men of every age (and it was these that made the fortune of Christianity), are led not by any merely abstract moral per- fections however high, but always by some composite concrete ideal, some objective future world that leads captive the imagination by blending into a harmonious whole all those motives that appeal to the composite nature of man. The truth is, all mere codes of morality or abstract virtues, failing as they do to inspire the longings which these concrete ideals arouse, are felt as an infliction and a bore by the unregenerate human spirit, and can no more be used as a lever with which to move the torpid imaginations of men, than can the catalogues of virtues, of the philsophers. To imagine therefore that the kingdom of God could have meant to the disciples and the Early Church merely some internal state of the soul which was to be pursued as an end in itself, and for its own perfections, is a dream of the modern mind. Such a doctrine is a product of evolution, and not the original idea as it existed in the minds of Jesus and his disciples. The condition of the mind and heart was a means merely of entrance into the kingdom of God, and not the kingdom itself. CHAPTER lY PRIMITIVE JEWISH CHRISTIANITY. XXAVING in the preceding chapters attempted to exhibit the views whicli Jesus had formed to himself of the nature of God and of his own ]\Iessiahship, as well as those with which he had indoctrinated his disciples in regard to himself and the coming kingdom of God, we liave now to consider the chan2;es which these beliefs were destined to undero;o in the minds of men, before in their developed form as Christianity they were fully equipped for their great mission of giving a new and higher morality to the world. By changes I mean not so much changes in the essential spirit of Christianity as changes in its outward form — those changes in doctrine that were needed to remove the contradictions, limitations, and imperfections of statement wlilch interfered with its success, and which had to be removed before it could satisfactorily meet the full demands of the intellect and heart of tliat great Pagan world which it was ultimately to subjugate and subdue. I propose accordingly to trace these changes from stage to stage, exhibiting first the difficulties to be overcome and then the manner in which the Church overcame them — beiiinnino; with a few words of recapitulation and introduction in order that the full scope of the problems before us may be clearly seen. It will be remembered, then, that v.e laid it down at the outset that one of the main purposes of this history v/as to show that the 322 THE EVOLUTION OF CPIIIISTIANITY. great end and aim of Civilization was the gradual establishment among men of higher and higher codes of morality, of intel- lectual, moral, and social expansion; and that to this end religions, philosophies, and political systems are but the means — much in the same way as in the cross-fertilization of flowers by bees, the sweetness of the honey, the brightness of the flower, and the fragrance of the perfume are but cunningly devised means of attraction and allurement, while the real end is the scattering of the seed and the propagation of the species. Now the great work done by Christianity we defined to be the carrying of the Pagan world across the gulf which intervened between a state of society in which politics, custom, social life, jurisprudence, private morality, and indeed the entire ensemble of relations between man and man, were all alike founded on the type of the moral relation lietween master and slave, to a state of society founded on the type of the moral relation of parent and child, in which men being children of a common father are all alike brothers and moral equals. Not that if we were to cut a section out of the Pagan and Christian worlds respectively at any given time, and were to subject each of them to a minute and careful scrutiny, we should find this result verified in every individual. On the contrary we should find that personal generosity and kindness of heart, and the Stoic doctrine of ' natural rights ' with which the later Roman jurisprudence was imbued, operated as power- fully in the Ancient World in mitigating the harshness of the real spiritual relations in which men stood to each other founded on the relationship of master and slave, as in the Modern World the division of classes, and the inequalities of political, social, and industrial power have operated to postpone the reign of moral justice and brotherly love between man and man. But we cannot proceed in this way by a comparison of individual instances. To do so would be to confound all categories of social and moral judgment — to confound the laws which regulate the lives and actions of individuals with the laws PKIMITIVE JEWISH CHRISTIAXITY. 323 that regulate the movements and activities of commmiities or men in the mass, — a prime error in political speculation and one which gives your opponent the opportunity of stepping like a circus-rider from one argument to the other as occasion or necessity requires, to the confusion of all sound and just thought. No, if we are ever to reach a true philosophic view of the progress of Civilization, it is necessary not that we should dissect and curiously compare the actions of particular individuals of one age with those of particular individuals of another, but rather that we should compare the spirit of one age with tliat of another — by which I mean that spiritual something which surrounds individuals like an atmosphere, which approves or disapprov^es, applauds or censures, urges on or restrains, and by the ideal it sets before them either draws them upwards and onwards to higher reaches, or confirms them in their immorality, superstition, or stagnation. Now that there was when viewed In this wav a moral o-ulf between Paganism and Christianity as great almost as the entire breadth of heaven, is scarcely open to doubt ; and may be seen on the most casual glance at the great characteristics separating the society of the Middle Ages from the society of the lloman AVorld. At the time of Augustus the civilized world consisted (jf a number of separate nationalities kept in the unity of outward peace l)y the gigantic despotism of the Cresars, but sunk in the lowest and most debasing immoralities, — the unnatural vices of Greece and Rome ; the abominations of Syrian Nature worship with its Bacchanalian rites, its obscene orgies and mystery cults ; universal slavery with the consequent absence of respect for man as man, — all not only tolerated, it is to be remembered, but encouraged and even consecrated by the religions of the Ancient World. So much so, indeed, that Seneca in his own time could say that "in Rome the intending sinner addressed to the deity of the vice which he contemplated a prayer for the success of his design ; the adulterer imploring of Venus the favours of his paramour ; the thief praying to Ilcrmes for 324 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. aid in his enterprise, or ofFciing up to him the first fruits of his phmder; youths entreating Hercules to expedite the death of a rich uncle," etc. If from a state of morality like this we jump to the Middle Ages, we shall find that although there was as yet no policeman like the Ctesars to keep the formal and merely external and political peace among nations, still, under the beneficent despotism of the Church all alike were kept up to a single and uniform standard of high morality — a morality always and everywhere the same, recognized by all, binding on all, restraining all, judging all, and impelling all to realize on earth as far as possible the Kingdom of God as it is in Heaven — and this religion far from encouraging and consecrating vice, as was the case with Paganism, execrated and condemned it, and was everywhere and always its relentless and untiring foe. The difference between the morality of Paganism and the morality of Christianity is well exemplified in the difi'erence between the morality of the native States of India under the British rule, and the morality of Europe at the present day. In British India as in Europe in the time of the Caesars, we see a vast Empu-e composed of the most heterogeneous nationalities and kept in a more than Koman peace under the mild despotism of British Rule, but which long covered the most abject superstitions and moral abominations, — Nature- worship as immoral as that of Ancient Syria, with rites as obscene ; wife- burnings, Thugee, etc. — a state of morality encouraged, hke that of Paganism, by Religion instead of being repressed by it^ and unknown in Europe since the break up of the Roman Empire. If this be so, and the above comparison and contrast fairly characterize the immense moral advance made in the world by the genius and spirit of Christianity, we have now to enquire whether any, and if so what, changes in the externals of Christianity — in its doctrinal creed, its special applications of morality, the peculiarities of its supernatin-al ideal and the like — are necessary to enable its spirit to have free course rrjMITIVE JEWISH CJlRISTIANITr. 325 through all the quicksands of Pagan philosophy, politics, and morality that it has to encounter from stage to stage as it comes nde, kept these individuals (few in number it is true) constant in their conviction that Jpsus was the Messiah, and, in consequence, constant in their loyalty and devotion to the new Code of ^lorality which it was part of his mission to proclaim. To begin with the Disciples themsches — with them there •was no difficulty; they had been eye-witnesses, or believed OoO THE EVOLUTION CI CHRISTIANITY. themselves to have been so, of the resurrection and ascension of Jesus ; and on comparing in retrospect the particulars ot his life and death with v.hat they found written in the Fropliets concerning the Messiah, they found the two to correspond. Nothing could be more convincing, and indeed to a .Jew nothing more was needed. A more important question is, by what were those Jews converted who had not known Jesus in the flesh'? To begin with there were still living among them the eye-witnesses themselves who Avcre vouchers for the truth of the resurrection and ascension, for the miracles of healing, for the casting out of devils and the like — all of which, if true, proclaimed Jesus to be a man sent from God. Of equai importance Avas the close correspondence and agreement of the texts adduced by the disciples from Prophecy, with the admitted incidents of the life of Jesus. And lastly, and as explaining the hold which the new faith had taken on the simple-minded, the lowly, the pious, the poor — who indeed formed the bulk of the converts, and whom by a secret affinity as of a magnet it drew from among the worldly Jewish masses — was the bright Heaven it opened up before the Aveary eyes of the down-trodden and heavy-laden ; the object of ideal love it gave them in the person of the Saviour, when contrasted with the austerity of the Jewish Jehovah; as well as the hourly expectation of the return of Jesus to earth to establish the kingdom in Avhich they were to sit as honoured guests. But before Ave can use these considerations to throw liofht on the Avell-known dIfFerences between JevA'ish and Pauline Christianity, it is necessary to pause here and remark that, given in the hearers the particular frame of mind and temper of heart to Avhich Christianity Avas adapted and for Avhich it had an affinity, nothing more Avas needed in this early stage of the new belief to convince men of its truth, than the application of the ordinary and natural canons of belief and probability. The belief Avas a quite natural and liinnan one, and required nO' help of a supernatural kind as it did later, as Ave shall sec, Avhen PEIMITIVE JKWisri ClIKISTIANITV. 331 it was presented for acceptance to the Pagan world. And now observe the effect of all this on primitive Jewish Christianity. All things being left jnst as they were before the death of the Master, and no strain being put on natural belief, the conditions of entering the kingdom were the same as during his life-time, viz., obedience to his commands and imitation of his example. Now this note of obedience is the key-note of all Jewisli Christianity as distinguished from Pauline Christianity whose watchword was faitli. This 'faith,' containing as it did a supernatural element which had to be communicated by Divine Grace, would have Ijeen an unnecessary and unmeaning pre- requisite with the Jewish Christians, but Avas absolutely indispensable, for reasons wliirh we shall presently see, before Christianity could make its way with the Pagan world. This is perhaps best seen In the Epistle of James, one of the earliest documents of Jewish Christianity. Here one sees as In a mirror the ideas witli which Jesus had indoctrinated his little band of disciples and followers during his life-time almost entirely unaffected by the fact of his death. Ills second coming is eagerly waited for, not without grumbling and impatience it is true, and a tendency to fall into temptation, but still with their faith and ho[)o sure and strong. The watchword of their lives Is still the same as when .fesus was with them, viz., obedience to his precepts and imitation of his example. The Epistle, accordingly, is practically a trKuine of his teaching In the Synoptics In reference to all such matters as prayer, confession, the taking of oaths, judging, the not taking thought for the morrow, meekness, patience, humility, forgiveness, and the like. The poor, as with Jesus, are practically the sole inheritors of the kingdom, and the rich are reprimanded and unceremoniously warned off. All the old piety, humility, and piu-Ity of life of the disciples In the life-time of Jesus are still noticeable, but the sweetness and charm of Jesus are not felt as a pervasive atmosphere in the picture; Avhile his occasional harshness has 332 THE EVOLUTION OF CIIIIISTIANITY. degenerated here, especially when the rich are mentioned, into a kind of envious, puritanic sourness, mingled Avith a querulous impatience at the delay in the second coming. The emphasis laid by James on Works rather than Faith is no mere re-action against the one-sided teaching of Paul, but is a direct corollary from the doctrine of Obedience which as we have said, is the key-note of all Jewish Christianity — although doubtless it was made more pointed and brought into more direct antagonism by the echoes of Pauline teachinn; wdiich reached the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem from the outlying Gentile World. Indeed to the members of the Church of Jerusalem, many of whom had been eye-witnesses of the miracles and of the death and ascension of Jesus, the ' faith ' which Paul demanded must have seemed as much a matter of supererogation as a means of salvation, as it would if demanded as a means of seeing the sun at noonday. In the first Epistle of Peter, again, the standpoint is still the same, viz. that of the Jewish Christian, and of one besides who had been himself an eye-witness of the miracles and of the death, resurrection, and ascension of the Master. The key- note, accordingly, is still Obedience — obedience to the precepts of Jesus as well as imitation of his example. In waiting for the second coming they Averc to imitate his patience, and in the midst of j)ersecution and trials his forbearance ; when reviled they were not to revile again ; and hypocrisy and guile they were to put far from them. They Avere to abstain from fleshly lusts, to love the brethren, and to honour the king — and besides were to offer up to God for the gift of salvation obtained for them by the sacrifice of his precious blood, their OAvn lives holy and pure. But in the ideas of Peter there is a certain evolution noticeable over and above those of James. The blood of Jesus is set forth more distinctly and firmly as a sacrifice for sin, not only for past sins but for Sin in general. Jesus himself, besides being a man 'exalted' by God for his obedience and PRIMITIVE JEWISH CURI8TIANITV. 333 death to a seat in g'loiy at His right hand, is represented also as ' pre-existing ' with God before the worhl began. And writine- as Peter does to the distant churches of the Jewish Dispersion in the midst of Pagan populations far beyond the immediate circle of eye-witnesses, his doctrine of Obedience is dashed to a certain extent with a doctrine of Faith as well. But it is not the faith demanded by Paul of his Pagan converts which, as we shall see, is a gift of God — a supernatural virtue to be imparted by the Holy Ghost to the believer. It is rather an extension of ordinary belief, if I may say so, to thino-s which they were to take on trust from him as an eye- witness. Owing probably to the influence of Paul, his devotion to the observances of the INIosaic ritual was less marked than was the case with James, for he charges his readers especially not to let their freedom from the Law be made a cloak for license and sin, but rather to let it be an opportunity for transferring their allegiance from the service of jNIoses to the service of Christ — to the end that by obedience and patience and the imitation of the example of Jesus they may ffi'ow in ffrace and become living stones in the temple which they were to have ready for him at his coming. The Epistle to the Hebrews again, written, as many believe, by Apollos or Barnabas immediately after the Neronlan persecutions, is thoroughly Jewish in texture, but so inwrought and overlaid with elements drawn from Paul as to be with difficulty distinguishable from the writings of that Apostle. It was a highly evolved, elaborately polished, and carefully constructed document, intended to span like an arch the two great separate and frowning pillars of Jewish and Pauline Christianity, and to build them into a compact, harmonious whole. Although its deep Jewish substratum everywhere crops up like a rock through the light surface soil, it is both in method and substance a compromise between the two. A compromise in method — for while on the one hand the ordinary laws of probability were ground good enough for the belief of the odi THE EVOLUTION OF CIIllISTIANITr. Jewish Christians, and while on the other hand a supernatural grace was essential to the faith required by Paul, the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews draws on both, without altogether identifying himself with either. Ilis readers were too far off both in time and place for the events recorded of Jesus to be accepted in a natural way without question ; and some measure of faith or trust was in consequence necessary. But this faith spanned the entire interspace between the faith of Peter and the faith of Paul, that is to say between a faith which is a mere extension of ordinary belief — a taking on trust the things hoped for in the belief that events will justify the trust — and an act of blind trust which required the supernatural grace of Paul to justify it. As examples of the first kind he adduces the cases of Abel whose sacrifice was proved to be more excellent than that of Cain by the fact of its having been accepted ; of Enoch who was proved to have been well-pleasing to God by the fact of his having been translated; and of Noah whose faith was justified by the events of the flood — all of whom lived to prove in their own persons that their faith was justified. As instances of the second kind of faith he adduces that of Abraham and Sarah, of Isaac and Jacob, of Joseph and Moses, of Rahab and Gideon, of Barak and Jephthah, of David and Samuel, of the Prophets and of the Martyrs who died in the Jewish persecutions ; — all of whom having died without having themselves received the promises, served as exemplars for a faith which would almost demand as a pre-requisite a special manifestation of divine grace. In matter and substance, too, the Epistle is a compromise between the extremes of Jewish and Gentile Christianity. It is an attempt to eifect a reconciliation between these two hostile camps by shifting the controversy from the question of the observance or non-observance of the Jewish Law in reference to circumcision, Sabbath observance, meats, etc. — a question on A\hich the cleavage was so deep as not to be bridged over — to the question of Sacrifice, about which little PR13IITIVE JEWISH GHIilSTIANITY. 335 controversy had as yet arisen , and thus to build a bridge by which not only the Jewish Christians could meet their Gentile brethren, but by which anconverted Jews themselves if so disposed might find their way to Christianity. Jesus himself, it will be remembered, followed the older Prophets in degrading sacrifice to a secondary position ; and of his own initiative minimized the importance of many provisions of the Mosaic Law. After his death, James and the Jerusalem Church who now regarded Jesus himself as the perfect and all-sufficient sacrifice, could afford to dispense with the imperfect sacrifices of the Law, but continued rigidly to conform to its ceremonial observances in reference to food, to personal purity, to the Sabbath, to circumcision and the like — at the same time that they carried out faithfully in addition the precepts and commands of Jesus in reference to patience, meekness, poverty, humility, brotherly love, forgiveness, and so on. With Peter too, as with James, the sacrifices of the Mosaic Law were superseded and abolished in the greater sacrifice of Jesus, but the obligation of observing the ceremonial part of the Law was, doubtless under the influence of Paul, greatly relaxed if not altogether abrogated. Paul himself swept away as by a wave of his hand both the sacrificial system and the ceremonial law as hindrances rather than furtherances of salvation ; holding that the only merit they ever had was the merely negative one of forcing those who practised them to see how impotent they really were for their purpose. Now to the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews who is addressing Jewish Christians who have been in the habit of carrying out faithfully the Jewish ordinances in reference to circumcision and the like, this extreme position of Paul — which had a tendency to alienate completely the Jewish from the Pagan proselytes to Christianity — is avoided, and stress is laid on Sacrifice, and especially on that aspect of it in which the idea oi pmity is the central point, as on this not only has there been no dispute, but it is the point on which the most harmonious scheme of Christianity having a Jewish basis, can be built. 336 THE EVOLUTION OF CHKISTIAXITY. Accordingly the sacrificial parts of the Law (and doubtless also the ceremonial parts), instead of being represented, as by Paul, as positively detrimental to salvation, and as even hiding it from men as if it were in eclipse, are represented by the writer of this Epistle as having had in their time and place a real and positive value, although now superseded by the greater sacrifice of Jesus himself. They are represented as being good in themselves, although but imperfect and blurred copies of the perfect sacrifice of Christ — as shadows when compared with the perfect image. Besides, by taking the point of sacrificial purity as the point of compromise, and by representing Jesus himself as the pure and spotless High Priest who was slain for our redemption, he is obliged to represent God as a God of Purity after the manner of the Jews, ratlier than as the God of Love of Jesus. The Epistle, in short, is as we have said a highly evolved product of Jewish Christianity interwoven with Pauline elements, the whole being clipped and trimmed like a close-cut hedge, and polished to an almost perfect symmetiy and proportion. Jesus, for example, who in the Synoptics exhibits many a human trait, who is weary, and hungry, and tempted, and depressed, and angry, and does not know when the day of the Son of Man will be, becomes with the author of our Epistle, the holy, the unspotted, the sinless, the perfect — almost a god in his abstract perfections. Indeed, instead of the man exalted by God, of James, and the man 'fore-known' by God from the beginning, of Peter, he has now become the veiy image of God Himself and the effulgence of His Glory. Instead of the Jewish atonement of bulls and goats which had to be repeated once a year on the great Day of Atonement, you have the sacrifice of the pure and spotless High Priest himself, which once done, remains complete, perfect, and eflficacious for all time. And instead of the new Law of Liberty in Christ being mixed up with the old Mosaic Law, as in James and Peter, like new wine in old bottles, it is kept sedulously apart in bottles of its own — the old Law being PEI311TIVE JEWISH CUEISTIANITY. 337 a preliminary, inferior, and imperfect distillation which is to be thrown away now that the new and better has come. The whole Epistle, indeed, is a blend of Jewish and Pauline elements, of Pauline Christianity on a Jewish basis ; and seemed once and for all to bind toi^ether into an indivisible unity and as parts of a progressive Divine plan, the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament — a unity which the Pauline Theology would, when pushed to its extreme point, have destroyed (as we see in the heresy of Marcion which nearly wrecked the Church in the second century), and to which the teaching of the Jerusalem Church, with its doctrine of Jesus as a mere man like the other prophets of the Old Testament, would have been equally fatal — had it not, as Ebionitism, been left isolated as a heresy on the soil of Palestine, to lose itself as the centuries advanced in the desert sands, there to become the parent of that Mahommedanism which was afterwards destined to play so great a part in the history of the World. But to return to early Jewish Christianity and the simple natural belief which resting on the testimony of eye-witnesses and the fulfilment of prophecy — and founded therefore on the ordinary laws of probability — was sufficient to keep the hopes of the faithful alive and aglow, their brotherly love warm, and their patience and endurance strong, during the short period that must elapse before the return of the Master. Now tliis natural belief althousrh sufficient for the Jews of Palestine, was of little or no avail when the scene was shifted to the great Pasan world outside. With Greeks and Romans who knew little and cared less for the affairs or persons of a distant and despised dependency, neither the disciples nor the ordinary eye-witnesses had any influence Avhatever ; while as for the Old Testament and its prophets and prophecies which with the Jews were the seat of all authority, the touchstone of all truth — with the Pagans these had no authority at all. The problem, accordingly, of the conversion of the Pagan world was quite a different one from that of the Jewish world, and required an Y 338 THE EVOLUTION O^ CHRISTIANITY. entirely different set of considerations to successfully meet it. To convert a Jew to Christianity it was not necessary to prove to him that there was One Supreme God who loved His children — for that he already knew and believed. But it was necessary to prove to him that the Messiah he should look for was not the conquering Messiah of the older prophets, but the lowly, suffer- ing Messiah of Isaiah, and that this Messiah had already come in the person of the man Jesus, to make by his death atonement for the sins of all. To convert a Pagan, on the other hand, it was necessary first of all to show him that there was only one true God, and that this God loved him ; and that his own gods who exploited him were either no gods at all, or else were bad gods whom the Supreme God was permitting for the time to work their evil will on him. But how was this to be proved ? Clearly it would go a long way if it Avere shown that the sin and evil and misery of the world were not a natural condition of things (as was proved by the revolt of the conscience against them), but that they were something extraneous, something that had been fastened like a foreio-n voke on the human soul ; and that the gods to whom men prayed for deliverance were the very demons by whom they had been enthralled. So far, well. But how know that the Supreme God, if there were such a Being, had either the power or the will to deliver them ? It would go far to solve this question, too, if it were possible that the Supreme God should send a man who on the one hand could defy the power of their gods or demons by a life free from sin, and on the other could defy death by raising his own body from the grave. And if tliis deliverer of men, who thus suffered and died for them to deliver them from the power of the gods, were the son of the Supreme God Himself — would this not prove that He not only liad the power, but that He wished to save men, rather than to exploit them as the gods did; in a word that He loved them ? And if, further, credible inform- ation had reached the Pagan world that a man proclaiming himself to be the Son of God had come into the world and PKI3IITIV^E JEWISH CIIUISTIANITY. 339 had announced that he had come to save men from the tyranny of their gods ; and to give proof of the truth of his mission had lived without sin and died only to defy the power of death to keep him in the grave — would not the report of this add greatly to the probability that it all was true ? And when it came over the mind, would it not come like a sudden illumination in the darkness, which would leave behind it dim visions of something that would haunt the memory ? And yet what proof that there was any truth in it ? Had the events recorded occurred Avithin recent memory and in the presence of accredited eye-witnesses, they might have been believed and laid to heart as other natural facts ; but as the years waned and faded, and the Second Coming was still delayed, and the actual eye-witnesses sank one by one to their rest, the belief which had arisen in a natural way with them would have died out with them. At each remove the tradition would have become fainter, the evidence more and more hollow and uncertain — the faith of the oris^inal believers beino; more and more untransferable to their descendants of the new generations, — until soon it would have been swallowed up again in the great Pawan nioht that surrounded all. How then was the belief to be kept alive and aglow so as to be able to propagate itself down the centuries ? Evidently primarily by its own inner illumination — bv that something which would so light up the mind that the darkness of itself would seem to lift and all become clear ; that somethino; which was so strong in itself that instead of depending as Jewish Christianity did on evidence, it could exist on the barest minimum of fact, being sufficient of itself alone — a supernatural rather than a natural belief. This is what St. Paul means when he says " by faith are ye saved, it is not of yourselves, it is a gift of God." In the next chapter we shall see the part this illumination by the Holy Spirit, as Paul conceives it, plays in his scheme of salvation as adapted by him to meet the intellectual and moial wants of the Pagan or Gentile world. CHAPTER V. PAULINE CHRISTIANITY. A FEW years after the death of Jesus, Paul was converted ■^^ by a vision, — a form of evidence, as we have said, more convincing perhaps in the Ancient World than any other, and one which in itself and without further accessory was sufficient to engender the most fixed and endurino; belief. But beinij- a purely personal and private experience it was not transferable to other minds, and the consequence was that if he wished the world to believe his doctrine with the same fervent intensity and assurance with which he believed it himself, he would be obliged to draw on other sources of conviction. The upshot of his meditation was, as we know, a body of doctrine which for subtlety, penetration, harmony, and completeness, is un- surpassed in the history of religious speculation. It bears the same relation to dogmatic Christianity that Platonism does to Greek Philosophy, being the source to which Christianity has aad to return for refreshment and renewal at every crisis of her history. It proceeds on the assumption that if Christianity is to be fitted for universal acceptance, it must rely on something more than the mere testimony of eye-witnesses, or the demonstrations of fulfilled prophecy — or even of such chance TAl LINE CIlItlSTIANITY. 341 virions as he himself had had, which however important and convincing to liimself could liave availed little with the grreat Pagan world which it was his mission to convert. Any doctrine which aimed at being embraced by the world in after ages, must be one mainly a priori, that is to say it must be one which by its own inner illumination carried its credentials with it, needing only sufficient historical guarantee to bring it ide of Him, it was contained within Him. Indeed, they believed He was made up of good and bad elements, male and female, AVisdom and Satan ; and in this way they accounted for the dualism that bisects Nature and runs through all existence; Heaven and Earth, Day and Night, Angels and Demons, Judaism and Paganism, Monotheism and Polytheism, and so on. Now these Ebionite heresies, again, like those of Gnosticism, were all alike brushed aside by the authority of the gospel of St. John, as enforced and interpreted by Irenaeus, Tertidlian, and others of the early Fathers, where Jesus instead of being represented as a man, is everywhere represented as the incarnate Logos, as God Himself and the Son of God. In chapter x. 30, it is said, " I and my Father are One." In chapter xiv. 9, " He that hath seen me hath seen the Father ;" in verse 10, " I am in the Father and the Father in me," etc. And so, with this ascent of Jesus from being a man to beinsr the Son of God and a Person of the Godhead — and the consequent abolition of all angels, principalities, a^ons, and the like who stood in the way of his full Divinity — the age of Apostolic Christianity closes. The next stage will consist in the evolution of Jesus from beino- the Son of God begotten of God but not yet equal or co-eternal with God, to the point where he is both co-equal and co-eternal with Him ; and in the evolution of the Holy Ghost from being an emanation or effluence of God merely, to being a Person of the Godhead co-equal and co-eternal with both the Father and the Son. CHAPTER Vlir. THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON. A T this point it may be as well perhaps to pause with the -^-^ view of bringino- into line certain aspects in the Evolution of Christianity which have unavoidably been allowed to lag behind in the course of this history, as preliminary to a further advance. Many if not all of these will most fitly find their jjlace in connexion with the formation of the New Testament Canon, some account of which it is now necessary that I should lay before the reader. It will be remembered that our uniform contention throughout this work has been that the supreme importance of Christianity to the world lay not so much in the present or prospective joys which it opened up before the imaginations of men for their contem- plation and delight, stimulating and sustaining as these have been, as in the precious cargo of morality with which it was freighted as trustee for the whole human race. And it has been our furtlier contention that before it could supplant the high civilization and culture of the Pagan world, it was necessary that its ' Scheme of Salvation ' should not only be harmonious and logic-proof at all points, but that it should be capable of being given like some rare gem an appropriate setting in a great scheme of World-thought — that is to say that it should be callable of being expanded into a World-philosophy as well — as into a World-religion. But on enquiring as to how this THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON. 383 was to be effected, it was found tliat it could only be done by taking the life and work of Jesus and lifting them out of their relations to time and place, to circumstance and environment, and making them a mere episode as it were in some great vScheme of Redemption let down from on high for the salvation of men ; and so giving them an immutable, fixed, and eternal chnracter. And yet when one came to consider it carefully, it seemed clear that however necessary some scheme of this kind might be for the subjugation of the great Pagan world, still the truth or falsehood of Christianity must primarily and always be a question of historical fact ; and further that before any philosophical framework in wliicli it could be set could have the least chance of success, not only the facts of the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, but above all the meanino; and sio-niflcance of these facts, must be so safe-guarded at all points as to be put beyond the reach of change, cavil, or decay. But it soon became evident that what with the deep- lying scepticism with which the pi'etensions and claims of one coming in the humble guise and environment of Jesus were sure to be met among the cultured both of the Jews and Greeks ; what with the corroding effects of Time in dulling the impact and obliterating the memory of all mortal things ; — it was evident that when once the original eye-witnesses and the generation immediately in touch with tliem had passed away something more than the mere traditions of the Church, or eve- the personal memoirs left by the Apostles, was necessary if the precious facts of the life and death of Jesus with all they meant for the world and mankind were to retain their oris^inal integrity and purity undlmmcd. And yet where else was the Church to look for proof — to Avhat else could she appeal? Many of the converts, it was well known, as well as many who had been in doubt and perplexity, had been vouchsafed visions of the risen Jesus, persuading, comforting, and consoling ; but although many conversions had been due to these visitations, and the faith of many had been indcfmitely strengthened 384 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. thereby, stili in spite of the burning enthusiasm and belief which they engendered in those thus privileged (as notably in the case of Paul), they were at best but individual and personal experiences, and so were untransferable in their full impres- siveness to other minds. Some external evidence or authority more relevant than this was clearly needed if the doubts and perplexities of the Pagan world were to be removed. Now if it could be shown that some person or persons laying claim to supernatural vision or acknowledged to be the recipients of Divine communications, had in writings accessible to all, and of undoubted antiquity, predicted that the facts of the life and death of Jesus should take place in the way in which they had taken place, and with the meaning and significance which Jesus himself had claimed for them — would not this be a form of proof which if it could be substantiated ought to and would carry conviction to Jew and Greek alike — and all the more so if the facts and their significance were of that exceptional character which removed them fi'om the range and power of all merely natural human penetration and insight? Clearly it ought and would ; and hence it was that the ' proof from prophecy ' as it was called, which had been of first importance for the Church from the earliest ages, became now that the eve-Avitnesses and the first o-eneration of believers had passed away, the very citadel of the faith. And hence, too, it was that the Old Testament Scriptures which safe-guarded and enbalmed these prophecies, retained with the Christians as with the Jews, their character as a first-hand Revelation from God. Indeed, for the Church to have repudiated the Jewish Scriptures along with the Jewish Religion would have been to have destroyed the very foundation on which Christianity itself reposed ; and must not and could not be. For if one circumstance more than another could show how essential the proof from prophecy was to the very existence of Christianity it was this — that these early Christians should in the face of the bitter persecutions which they met with at the hands of THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON. 385 the Jews, have consented to receive In all humility and on bended knee these Scriptures of their dearest foes along with the kicks and curses with which they were accompanied. As well expect the souls of the Armenians butchered by the Turks, to approach the throne of Grace Avith the words of the Koran on their lips ! From all of which it will be readily understood that compared with the Old Testament Scriptures which was the source of these prophecies, even the memoirs of the Apostles themselves must have held in the esteem of the Church a position of quite secondary and subordinate im- portance. Of secondary authority too, when compared with the Old Testament — although of very high importance to the Church itself in all that concerned disputed questions of doctrine and practice — must have been the Epistles of those Apostles who had been the bosom companions of the Master, or who had received their authority and commission from him. And yet curiously enough, the Epistles of Paid which as the ages rolled on became more and more the mainstay of the Church — so far that is to say as its dogma was concerned — were in his own time and so long as the eye-witnesses were alive (and especially 60 lono; as the safe-ouardins; of the historical facts was of life and death moment for the Church), held in compai*atively little esteem except of course in those mother-churches which he had himself founded, or those daughter-churches which had sprung from them. And this for several reasons. In the first place he had not himself personally known Jesus in the flesh — a point of much moment witli these early Christians and one not lightly to be countervailed. In the second place although his ethical teaching generally was one with that of Jesus, he nowhere dwells lovingly like the other Evangelists on the facts of the Life, and scarcely, if at all on those proofs from Prophecy which alone could give these facts their real signifi- cance either for the Church itself or for the world at lars^e. On the contrary he eveiy where in his writings regards the mission B B 386 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. of Jesus and his appeai'ance among men as but mere episodes in a great world-scheme of redemption planned in Heaven and having its full significance only in the secret Councils of God. And hence it Avas that during the long period in which the historical facts of the Life and the Proofs from Prophecy were the most pressing necessities for the Church, his writings were relegated to an inferior and subordinate position — inferior not only to the memoirs of the Evangelists, but to all those other writings in which the facts of the Life and the proofs from Prophecy were insisted upon. What befell them subsequently we shall see further on. In the meantime, with tlic second generation of believers a new necessity had arisen for the Church — and that was that the Historical Facts of the Life and Death should be g-iven such a setting as would enable them to dovetail harmoniously into some larger scheme of Thought, that is to say, into a system of World-Philosophy. Now to meet this necessity the Gnostics had already anticipated the Church, and had en- deavoured in the way we have already seen, to fit the Gospel into a complex syncretic scheme made up of Platonism, Pythagoreanism, and Oriental Mysticism generally — a scheme however which brought with it from Egyptian and Syrian Nature-Worship so many impure and divergent elements, so many elements that were incapable of amalgamating with the simple faith of the Gospel, that had these heretics succeeded in their endeavour to erect Christianity into a harmonious system of philosophy, they would have wrecked it as a religion. And accordingly we find that the Apostolic Fathers who belong to this period — Clement, Barnabas, Hernias, Ignatius, Polycarp, Diognetus, Papias and the rest — were so distracted by the confused whirlwind of opinion blowing in on them from all sides, that while holding on desperately in their extremity to the Church Tradition as embodied in the ' Rule of Faith ' of the Baptismal Confession, and clutching convulsively now at this and now at that aspect of the faith, they managed to lose THE NEW TESTAMENT CANOX. 387 both the whole-heartedness and simplicity of the Evangelists and the all-round symmetry and completeness of Paul. Some like Barnabas, for example, while clinging to the Proof from Prophecy, degraded into a mere allegory the very Old Testament which was the basis of that prophecy I Others again, like Papias, clung to the Second Coming and the immediate hopes of the Millenium, and ignored Paul and his scheme of Salvation altogether. Some, again, like Ignatius and Polycarp, imitated Paul in parts, but showed no signs of having accepted his doctrines as a whole. But it is significant of the trend that Christian thought was beginnino; to take, that the only document perhaps to which all alike were agreed in paying homage and respect, and on which they all seem to have based their faith, was the Epistle to the Hebrews — in which, it will be remembered, Jesus as the central point in the Scheme of Eedemption is figured as a Sacrifice — the perfect sacrifice wlio had * shed his blood for us ' after the manner of, and as an analogy with the old Jewish sacrifices. In the meantime a vast Apocryplial Literature had been springing up, rank and luxuriant as a Brazilian forest, and over- spreading the whole field of tradition, threatening by its very thickness and density to bury out of sight the simple idylls of the Gospel. These writings were for the most part based on ■our own Gospels, and were constructed generally on the simple plan of taking the names of those characters who had received bare mention in the Gospel narratives, tricking them out in all manner of fantastic and legendary guises after the manner of the Jewish Haggada, and filling in their original baldness of incident with all manner of sentimental or pious details drawn from the writers' own imaginations. Such were the histories of Joseph, of Nicodemus ; the Acts of Pilate, of Philip, of Thomas, of Paul and Thecla, and many others. One of the favourite themes for the pens of these romancers, and around which a world of fables hung, was the Infancy of Jesus — the wonders which he performed in his cradle far out-doing the 388 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. classic exploit of the strangling of snakes by the Infant Hercules. But all these histories were purely apocryphal, and were, as Renan says, more like the verbiage of old gossips, and the familiarity and vulgarity of nursery maids and wet-nurses, than serious contributions to Christian Thought. Yet like the legends of the Saints and Martyrs of Mediasval Catholicism, they pleased the people by the free play they gave to sentiment, imagination, and piet}' ; and it was from these Apocrypha that the Apostles received each those special characteristics which cluno; to their names down throuo^h the Middle Asres. It was from them, too, that came the Church Festivals of the Assumption, the Presentation of the Virgin, and the rest, as well as those beautiful legends which have made the Christmas season the joy of the year. Then again there were the Apocalypses which were constructed on the model of the books of Daniel and Enoch — Apocalypses of Ezekiel, of Elias, of Moses, of Abraham, of Setli, of Paul, of Peter, of John, and indeed of nearly every prominent figure In the Old and New Testaments — of all of which onl}- the Apocalypse of John received a place in the New Testament Canon. Sooner or later of course all this legendary and apocryphal literature would have had to be put under a ban by the Church, and its further manufacture suppressed, If Christianity were not to become the laughing-stock of the whole cultured world. But its multiplication might have gone on for an Indefinite period yet, had it not been for a crisis which occurred in the history of the Church, and which brought it all to a sudden termination. It appears that Mai'cion — the most dangerous of the heretics — on finding himself unable to bring over the bishops of the Church, and in consequence the great body of their flocks, to his own peculiar views, had hit on the ingenious expedient of selecting from the great mass of Christian literature then in circulation, such works only as lent support to his own side in the controversy ; binding these Into a Canon of his own ; and rejecting and condemning all the rest as being THE NEW TESTAMENT CANOX. 389 either apocry])ha], un-apostolic, or in some way wanting in real authority. In making liis selection of books he had restricted himself entirely, it is true, to writings of apostolic orio-in and of unquestionable authenticity — admitting none that were not afterwards admitted into the orthodox Canon, although indeed excluding many that were regarded by the Church as of vital importance to the faith. In these exclusions he seems to have been guided practically by one consideration only, viz. as to whether the documents in question did or did not lend countenance and support to the Old Testament. If they did, they were ruthlessly excluded ; if not, they were admitted. Acting on this principle he excluded Matthew and Mark because of the way in which they had connected the facts of the Life of Jesus with the fulfilment of Old Testament Prophecy. The Epistle to the Hebrews, again, he excluded because of the recognition accorded by that document to the Old Testament Dispensation as having had for its time and place in its system of sacrifices a real atoning eflScacy ; while the Acts of the Apostles were excluded, because of the recog- nition that was accorded in them to the Jewish party in tlie Church, in the account given of the Council at Jerusalem. Meantime the Gnostics also had been busy with other schemes. Finding themselves excluded from conununion by the power and authority of the bisliops, they had hit on a different expedient from that of Marcion, the expedient, viz., of denying that the traditional interpx*etation of the Gospels was the true one, and maintaining on the contrary that it was adapted only to those simple souls who indeed formed the bulk of the Church, but who they alleged could only be made to feel by means of sensuous symbols, and only be led by sensuous satisfactions, here or hereafter. To get at the real truth hidden in the letter of the Old, and what was afterwards to be the New Testament, these works, they said, had to be interpreted allegorically, and even cabalistically, partly by means of numbers, and partly through a mystic and » 390 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. secret process to wlncli they alone liad the Icey. They further | professed that they were the recipients of a secret and esoteric tradition -which had descended to them by a kind of free- masonry through a long line of initiates from Jesus himself — who it was affirmed had communicated these precious secrets to those of his disciples who were capable of receiving them, and by Avhom they had again been passed on through a chosen number of the Uhmiinati from generation to o-eneration until they had reached these latter-day Gnostics themselves, and by them had been given to the world. Among l)ooks of theirs, one — the Pistis Sophia — has come down to us, and in It the curious can still see the great part played In these systems by those numbers and symbols which were so dear to the genius of the East. Now In taking up this aggressive attitude towards the Church, the Heretics do not seem to have perceived that had they been successful they would not only have destroyed the Church and orthodoxy, but would by the same act have annihilated themselves and their own heresies as well. For they would have torn up by the roots the only proofs on which a Christianity of any kind could rest, — the proof from Tradition and the proof from Prophecy ; the Gnostics, by supplanting the Church tradition by a secret unprovable tradition of their own ; ]Marcion, by repudiating the authority of that Old Testament which gave to the proof from Propliecy all Its value. Now It was to checkmate these moves on the part of the heretics, that the New Testament Canon was compiled. The principles which guided the unknown compilers in the selection of the books which were to be included in it may practically be reduced to three. The first was the necessity of safe-guarding the Historical Facts by documents support- ing the open traditions of the Church as against the secret tradition of the Gnostics. The second was the necessity of safe- guarding the authority of the Old Testament from which the THE NEW testa:\[ent canon. 391 proof from Prophecy was drawn, as against the repudiation of both by Marcion. The third was the necessity, now becoming every day more urgent, of giving to the facts of the Life sucli a philosophical setting as would commend tliem to the culture of that great Pagan World which it was tlie mission of Christianity ultimately to subdue. There were other minor considerations to which we shall have to refer presentlv, but the above were the three most consciously present to the minds of the compilers — and we now have to ask what those special considerations were which in each case guided them in the choice of the particular books of the New Testament. To begin with then we may say that in all probability tlie Gospel of Matthew was selected for the first place not so much for the testimony which it bore to the facts of the Life of Jesus, nor yet for the very complete account it gave of his moral teaching as recorded in the Sermon on the Mount — for in a general way both the details of the Life and the Sermon on the Mount were given by LidvC also — but it was given the first place rather because of the persistence with which Matthew everywhere connects the main episodes of the Life and Death with Old Testament Prophecy in his ever recurring phrase "that the Scriptures might be fulfilled." Mark, again, the earliest in time as well as the most simple, na'ive^ and unsophisticated of the Evangelists Avas given a second place in the Canon in all probability because he has everywhere kept in the foreground of his narrative those purely thaumaturgic and miraculous powers of Jesus which have been found so necessaiy in all ages and times for securing at once the awe and the admiration of the multitude. Luke, again, in spite of his variation and in parts divergence from the other Synoptists, was given a place in the Canon in all probability because he had everywhere extended the privileges and promises of the Gospel to the great outlying Gentile Avorld — in contra- distinction to Matthew who in several [)assages had definitively restricted them to the Jews, and in all had given the Jews the 392 TEfE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. first place in the heirship to the kingdom. He had also in harmony with this view emphasized the fact that the original Gospel of Jesus was a gospel for the poor and the hungry, rather than for the 'poor in spirit' and the 'hungry and thirsty after righteousness ' — which was the gloss that Matthew had given to it. As a further testimony to this broad and universal spirit of Luke, it may be noted in passing that while Matthew traces the pedigree of Jesus up to David and Abraham, the fathers of the Jews alone ; Luke carries it back to Adam himself, the father of all mankind. The Gospel of John again is assigned the fourth place in the Canon, not so' much on account of its age or its doctrine, for in both these respects its natural place would have been at the very end, but rather because being mainly a record of the Life, it naturally found its place among the other memoirs of the Life. Of its real sionificance we shall see more in another place. The Acts of the Apostles, again, were admitted into the Canon, to meet a "want which was unexpectedly sprung on the Compilers when confronted with the necessity of constructing a Canon which should be complete and satisfactory at all points. For it was a matter of the first ini[)ortance, it is to be remem- bered, if all gaps for the entrance of heresy were to be closed, that each and every article of faith, doctrine, or tradition, should have had the unanimous support of all the Twelve Apostles. Now it had been a tradition in the Church from very early times, that the split alleged to have occurred between the original Church of Jerusalem and the Apostle Paul on the question of circumcision and other observances of the Jewish Law, as well as of the extension of the Gospel to the Gentiles, was in reality only a myth, and had no existence in fact at all. But when the Compilers came to look for documents of the Twelve to support this contention, it was found that many of the Apostles had left no authentic docu- ments of any kind behind them. What then was to be done? THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON. 393 After some search it -was discovered that there was a work in existence which in part at least was of undoubted age and authority and which went far to meet the difficulty. This -was the Acts of the Apostles. For although it is now all but universally agreed that this document is a very mixed and heterogeneous one, it is also all but universally agreed that the log-book giving us an account of the journeys of the Apostle Paul is authentic, and that the doctrine of the early chapters — in which Jesus is figured rather as a man chosen by God and exalted for his obedience, than as God Himself or the Son of God — could only have been a production of the Apostolic Age. But the immediate and pressing interest the Acts of the Apostles had for the Compilers of the Canon was that it contained just such an account of the reconciliation between Paul on the one hand, and the Twelve as represented in the Council of Jerusalem by Peter, James, and John, on the other — on this matter of circumcision and of the extension of the Gospel to the Gentiles — as was fitted to meet the difficulty. It was accordingly added to the Canon. The question of whether or not the Ejiistles of Paul should be included offered less difficulty to the Compilers. For it was not now with Paul as it had been in the earlier days when owino- to his not havinir known Jesus in the flesh, and not having lent much support to the proof from Prophecy, his writings had been a source of some perplexity, and had been regarded with very mixed feelings by the Church at large. The time had now come when, as we have said, it was a vital necessity to the Church that the significance for mankind of the Life and Death of Jesus should be so exhibited as to be capable of fitting harmoniously into some scheme of Philosophy adapted both to Jews and Greeks, and able to enter the lists as a rival to the other philosophies of the time. In our next chapter we shall see tliat it was in its character as a Philosophy, that Justin and the other Apologists laid their views of Christianity before the great Pagan Emperors and 394 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. plillosophers, the Antonines, for their serious consideration and judgment ; and it was as supplying a partial basis for such a Philosophy that the writings of Paul now laid claim to the distinction and prominence which as the ages rolled on they were more and more to receive from the Church. Only partially, I have said, not fully ; for with him Jesus is still only a creation of God — the second Adam, the man from Heaven, having a body although a glorified and ethereal one,, the Angel and Wisdom of God who stood at His right hand to do His will — but not a Being spiritually begotten of God, the Son of God, the Logos, a pure Spiritual Essence, as he after- wards became with the author of the Fourth Gospel. In the writings of Paul therefore, Christ could not as yet take hi& place as one of a Trinity of pure spiritual essences ; — and this he must become if Christianity were ever to hope to take over and absorb into itself the highest production of Pagan Philosophy, the Neo-Platonic, viz. which was now running in full sail alongside of Christianity, but gradually approaching it, and presently to be amalgamated with it. It was only partially, therefore, that Paul could fulfil the necessity laid on the Church Ijy the spirit of the time. His real merit con- sisted in this, that when once the writer of the Fourth Gospel had taken the step which made of Christ not a pre-existent man — the second Adam, the man from Heaven, created by God— but a pure Spirit, the Logos, the Son of God; when once, I say, the scheme of Paul was re-constituted with thi& alteration and addition, it became the most complete and harmonious scheme of the World which the Church had yet known, the great model to which Augustine and Luther alike had to return when they sought to repair the breaches that had been made in the faith, or had to bring Its theology more into harmony with the needs of the time. But apart from this, the writings of Paul must have been added to the Canon to meet an even more pressing and immedi- ately urgent necessity, viz., to checkmate Marcion. Now to TUE NEW TESTAMENT CANOX. 395 appreciate fully the wariness and sagacity with which the Church moved in its life and death struggle with this great heretic, a few observations to bring clearly into view the points in the dispute, and the difficulties that had to be overcome, will perhaps be necessary. It will be remembered that Paul while abolishing the old Jewish Law in favour of the Law of Liberty in Christ Jesus, still held that both the Jewish and the Christian Dispensations were but different stages in a single Divine plan, the work of one and the same God. But ^larcion finding that the God of the Old Testament was represented as a Being rpiite different in nature from the God of the New — being rather a God of stern justice, and even of cruelty and revenge than a God of mercy and of love — and perceiving that Paul by the very fact of his havino- set aside the Law of the Old Testament Jehovah in favour of the Law revealed by Jesus in the Xew (and more especially by his having denied the efficacy of the Old Law for the remission of sin), had practically admitted a difference of authority in the authors of them, boldly advanced to the natural and in its way logical conclusion, that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the Xew could not be one and the same Being, as Paul had implied, but must be two different Beings. And as a consequence of this he declared further that Jesus was not the Messiah of the Old Testament at all— for that Messiah being a conquering, kingly ^[essiah, was still to corne — and indeed that he had no connexion whatever either with the Old Testament, its Prophecies, or its Messiah. Now In taking up this position it is obvious that Marcion had quite overleapt the fence of orthodoxy within which Paul had managed to confine himself, and had fallen on the other side. For in thus denying the authority of the Old Testament, he tore up by the roots that proof from Prophecy on Avhich, as we have seen, not only orthodoxy but even his own heterodoxy must ultimately repose if it should ever hope t(» remove the scepticism or escape the destructive criticism of the great 396 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. Pagan World. To arrest this imminent danger to the faith, the Church accordingly, wary as usual, executed one of those strategetical movements for which in all ages she has been so justly celebrated. Unable to take Marcion in front by making a direct breach in his logic, she managed effectually to turn his flank by inserting in the new Canon those very writings of Paul on which he had relied for the support of his heresy ! In this way the Compilers brought divine authority to the support of orthodoxy, which by making the Old and New Dispensation stages merely in the providential plan of One God adapting his means to the different stages of moral advance of different ages and peoples, had stopped short just at the point where the proof from Prophecy was still available. And here again we may pause to remark that if yet another proof were wanted (beyond that of their accepting tlieir Bible at the hands of their greatest enemies the Jews) — of how essential to the very existence of the Church Avas this proof from Prophecy, it would be found in the promptness with which she expelled Marcion as a heretic in sjnte of the fact that the deductions w-hich he drew both from the Old Testament Scriptures them- selves and from the avowal of Paul, were at once logical and reasonable, and must have been accepted were it not for the blow which their admission would have struck at the very foundations of the Faith. And now, returning to the Fourth Gospel, we are in a position to appreciate more fully the reasons which made it so important an addition to the Canon. It was not only because by advancing the conception of Christ from that of a creation of God, the man from Heaven — where it had been left by Paul — to that of a pure spirit begotten by God, the Logos or Son of God, it first made possible, although as yet only in general terms, that future evolution of the Trinity which received its final and perfect shape from Athanasius, and which was absolutely necessary if Christianity were ever to absorb and replace the thought of the Ancient World. This no doubt THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON. 397 was the ultimate and final reason for its Inclusion in the Canon ; but, as in the case of Paul, there were other reasons of more immediate and pressing importance. Of these the most important Avas that it htid identified Christ not only with God but with the real man Jesus — the Jesus of the Synoptics — and so had swept away at a stroke all those heresies which still huno- like Cossacks on the flanks of the Church to perplex and harass her. Besides sweeping away the Ebionites — who believed that Jesus was a man and not a God — by Its doctrine of the Logos ; It now by Identifying Chiust with the real man Jesus swept away the Docetists and Marclonltes who regarded the body of Christ as a phantom, a spectacular Illusion, and not real flesh and blood at all ; as well as the Gnostics, who reo-arded the body and soul of Jesus as two distinct and separate entities, with different origin and destination, occupying like lodgers the same dwelling-house for a season, but unable to combine so as to form a real hwnan personality. For although In the Fourth Gospel the facts of the Life are everywhere given such a setting as shall keep in erldence the Divinity of Jesus rather than his humanity, and although the human weaknesses so patent in the other Evangelists are studiously kept In the background In John, and only such traits of love and mercy as are consistent with a Divine nature are permitted to appear ; still throughout the Gospel, the Son of God Is so Identified with the man Jesus as to leave no doubt of his real and true manhood ; and so for the first time in the history of the Church, Christ appears not as the man sent from God, or as the angel that appeared to Abraham, Moses, and Joshua, but as the God-man. In our next chapter we shall see Irenreus starting from this new conception of the God-man, and after fitting it Into the great framework of Pauline Thought, constructing out of it a new system of Theology. With the Four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Epistles of Paul, as its mainstay, the Canon might so far as the chief doctrines of the faith are concerned, have been 398 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. practically closed. But the necessity for an uniformity of discipline was in its way almost as pressing as the necessity for an unity of doctrine. Among other problems there was the great political one of the relation of the Church to the Empire, as Avell as the social one of the relations of the members of the Church to the Pagan world by which they were surrounded and in which they still lived as strangers and aliens. Then again there were the perplexing rpiestions as to the relation of master and slave when one only was a Christian, and between husband and wife when the marriage was a mixed one. There were the problems too of Church Government, of the authority of the Bishops, and of the duties of the members to each other ; as well as of husband to wife, jmrent to child, and vice versa. Then again there was the whole field of practical morality to be considered, and answers to be given to such questions as whether marriage or celibacy, moderation or asceticism, temperance or total abstinence were preferable, and so on, — to all of Avhich the Church, holding on as usual to that wise moderation, that golden mean in all things which has always characterized her when circumstances were not too strong for her, replied by the inclusion of the Pastoral Epistles — the Epistles to Timothy and Titus — in the Canon. If evidence Avere wanted of how important it was to the Church to have the hall-mark of Apostolicity stamped on all its documents, it could nowhere be better seen than in the inclusion of the Epistles of Peter, James, and John, in the Canon. There is nothing distinctive in doctrine in any of these productions; at the same time there is notiiing heretical, and nothing to stand in the way of further develop- ment. The Ethics of them all, too, are sound and orthodox ; and in James and Peter the hopes of the Second Coming are strong. The style, tone, and sentiment of the Epistles of John, which mark them out as in all probability productions of the author of the Fourth Gospel, strengthened rather than otherwise the authority of that Gospel now that it was added THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON. 399 to the Canon. Otherwise there was nothing distinctive about any of these writings. Whether they were the genuine productions of the authors Avhose names they bore Avas but of secondary importance to the Compilers. It was enough that they had long been in circulation as such, and that they contained nothing that was incompatible with the then existing standard of orthodoxy. This may seem a strange assertion, but if proof were wanted that mere authenticity alone was not sufficient to ensure admission into the Canon, and that nothing, however old or sacred, could be allowed to stand in the way of the existing requirements of orthodoxy, it would be found in the fact that the ' Gospel of the Hebrews,' which was the earliest of all the documents of the Apostolic Ao;e and is reo'arded as the original of our Matthew, which had been in circulation from the very earliest times, and from which many of the quotations from the Fathers not to be found in our Gospels were believed to be drawn — this Gospel, which on every ground of age, authenticity, and authority, ought to have occupied the first place in the Canon, was excluded from it and ruthlessly suppressed. And for what reason ? Because it supported what had indeed been the doctrine of the immediate followers of Jesus, but which by the time the Canon was compiled had become the damnable doctrine of the Ebionites, that is to say of those who denied the Divinity of Christ. And lastly there was the great body of the faithful to be considered — simple souls who had been living all these years in the delusive expectation of the second coming of Christ to establish his kingdom at Jerusalem on the ruins of the Roman Empire, now believed to be given over entirely to the power of Satan. These hopes had been growing more and more dim and uncertain as the years passed away, and much murmuring in consequence was to be heard among the faithful at the delay, but the slightest breeze on the political horizon had alwavs been sufficient to fan tlicm into life again. In tliis way 400 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. they had been kept aglow far into the second century, and long after the generation to whom the promises had originally been given by the Master had sunk to rest. To meet the hopes of so many earnest and pious souls who had staked their all on it, and to fulfil promises of which the Synoptics and the Epistles of Paul, now that they were included in the Canon, were the perpetuated pledge and reminder, the Book of Revelation — an old Jewish Apocalypse with a Christian beginning and ending superadded, and with some internal alterations made in it to suit Christian sentiment — was added to the Canon. Other books again like the Apocalypse of Peter, for many ages yet hung uncertain, partly within and partly without the Canon, as it were, but in the end, somewhere in the fourth or fifth century, were either positively excluded, or quietly allowed to drop out of the divinely inspired circle of the faith. The Canon thus compiled, the Church was now not only safe-guarded at all points from the enemies within her fold, but was prepared to confront the Pagan World with a scheme which should account for the World and for Human Life in a manner not possible to the other philosophies of the time. The historical facts of the life, death, resurrection, and ascension o£ Jesus were safe-guarded by the Synoptics ; and their meaning and significance for mankind by the ' Old Guard ' of the faith — the proof from Prophecy. The authority of the Old Testa- ment, again, on which this proof from Prophecy itself reposed, was secured by the authority of Paul and the Synoptics. The Fourth Gospel answered for the full Divinity of Christ as well as for his real and true manhood ; while the Acts threw over all the common mantle of the Twelve Apostles. The Politics of the Church, too, in its relation to the Empire, its internal organization and the code of morality it was to follow amid the difficulties and complexities of its environment, were made uniform and final by the Pastoral Epistles and by the genuine Epistles of Paul ; while the Second Coming to which all with varying degrees of longing looked forward, was guaranteed, in I THE NEW TESTiUIENT CANON. 401 a way that could be literally or allegorically construed according as the event turned out, by the Book of Revelation. And now we have to ask what effect the compilation of the Canon had on the future of the Church and her Theoloov ? To begin with we may say that its most immediate effect was to weed out from the congregations those heresies that had grown up among them, and to compel the heretics to cut them- selves off from communion with the Chui-ch, prior to their final condemnation a century or two later by the great Councils. Its next effect was to put a stop once and for all to the manufacture of that Apocryphal Literature on which these heresies had so long lived and thrived ; and, by makino- the Canon alone of divine inspiration, to degrade all other Christian literature to a subordinate rank as merely human productions, good or bad as the case might be, according as they did or did not lend support to the current orthodoxy. But not only did the Canon degrade all Church literature outside of itself to a secondary and merely human rank ; it relegated even the Old Testament Scriptures to a place in the dim and shadowy background. For although both Testaments were theoretically of equal authority as being both divinely inspired, it was found as time went on that while the New Testament could be interpreted literally for purposes of instruction in doctrine or discipline, the Old Testament could only be applied through the most far-fetched, strained, and allegorical interpretations, which would unsettle everything and could settle nothing. The consequence, again, of this decline in the relative authority of the Old Testament, was in the first place to divert the future evolution of doctrine from the old Jewish channels within which it must more or less have continued to be confined so long as Old Testament Scripture alone counted for anything, and to throw Christianity freely open to the reception of as much Greek Thought and influence as could be made to harmonize with its own creed. Another effect was to lower the value of the proof from Prophecy— now that the Gospel cc 402 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. of Jesus Christ could stand alone on documents of its own, and which were dictated by the very Spu'it of God Himself. Another important result of the formation of the New Testament Canon was to make it the main theatre and battle-ground on which all future heresies were to be fought out, and from which all sides alike drew as from an armoury weapons for the fray. The Montanists, for example, drew support for their belief that the Holy Spirit had descended on some of their members and had made them the medium for Divine revelations, from the promise of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel that he would send the Paraclete after he had gone. The Monarchians, as we shall see in a following chapter, appealed to the passages in .John and Paul where the Son is made subordinate to the Father in all things ; the Trinitarians, again, to those in wdiich the Father and Son are assumed to be co-equal and co-eternal. And thus it would appear at first sight that the formation of the New Canon and the subordination of the Old to it was calculated to deflect the even course of evolution from its old path on to new lines ; but in reality it was practically pre- served from this by three main influences. The first was the persistency with wliicli the Church clung to the ' rule of faith ' and the simple facts of the gospel as a clue to guide it through all its perplexities. The second was that, although interpreting all things by the words of the New Testament texts, the Church still claimed that the meaning of these texts was to be got only through her own Tradition. And the last was that as the Canon had been formed of documents embodying each and every stage of Christian doctrine from the time of Jesus onwards, so passages were always to be found some- u'here that would suj^port any or every view which could be taken of the Trinity, of the nature of God or of Christ, of Redemption, of Sin and Grace, of Faith and Works, and so on. But the compilation of the Canon, although a matter of the most pressing necessity for the Church at the time, THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON. 403 nevertheless carried in itself the germs of future mischief. For by its doctrine of the verbal inspiration of each and every part, the Church consecrated the bad as well as the good, the transient and local, as well as the universal and abiding; and so gave fixedness and perpetuity to contra- dictions and errors that in after ages were to be fatal to her peace. Besides, by making it appear that the Book had been dictated by the Spirit of God Himself, it entirely destroyed its character as a historical document, the product of different ages, of many minds, and of various phases and stages of thought and development — all of which will more clearly appear as the course of this evolution proceeds. But before closing this chapter a word is necessary, perhaps, on the evolution of the centre of authority in the Church during the period we have been traversing, and up to the formation of the Canon — but only a word. For what happened with the Church was what happens with every association, society, com- munity, or nation, which originally voluntarily formed finds itself obliged to protect itself either against internal enemies or foreign foes. It had to organize itself, and the method of doing this is pi-actically the same whether it be in a joint-stock enterprise, a revolutionary movement, or an established govern- ment. Beginning as a pure democracy in which all its members (always of course excepting the Apostles) had an equal voice, the Church passed to the stage where a number of elders were elected from the rest with a purely delegated authority and for the purpose of doing the necessary business connected with the society ; and from that again to the stage where a president appointed from among these elders took the initiative and retained the casting vote — the great body of the Church being only occasionally consulted on matters of more than ordinary importance. From that again it is but a step to the point where this President or Bishop has full administrative and executive powers given him in the name and on behalf of the Church ; and but another (especially when heresy begins to 404 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. appear) to his being invested with full Apostolic power by the gift of the Spirit, for the decision of all questions of faith and morals. The Bishops thus set apart as an order by themselves, the same process repeats itself with them as had taken place with the Church at large. Beginning at first as equal in authority among themselves, presently to one of the Sees — either from its age, its historical or political associations, its geographical position, or its economic resources — is yielded the position of referee in any disputes that may chance to arise. From this it is but a step to its becoming the initiator of new policies, and the referee in disputed questions of doctrine or discipline ; and from this, again, but a single step to the Popedom. After the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Jerusalem Church, the Churches of Rome, Alexandria^ and Ephesus took the lead ; but presently among these again, Rome became first the mediator, then the referee, then the Dictator. But at the time of the compilation of the Canon these latter developments had not yet arisen ; and the bishops although supreme in their own dioceses were still more or less on an equality among themselves ; the lead being in the hands of the Bishops of Rome, Alexandria, Ephesus, or Antioch, but already with a pronounced tendency in favour of Rome. II C H A P T E E IX THE PAGAN PERSECUTION OF CIIKISTIANITY. "OUT before proceeding further with our History, another "^ important and much disputed question remains to be considered, viz., as to how it was that of all the religions of the time the Christian i-eligion alone was persecuted by the Eoman State ? Historians have in the main been inclined to regard the problem as one connected with Religion and not with Politics, misled in this doubtless by the fact that the persecutions ensued on the refusal of the Christians to oiler up prayers to the Pagan gods or burn incense before the images of Ca'sar, as well as by the fact that it was ever a main article of the Christian creed to render unto Ca\sar the things that were Ca?sar's, a doctrine Avhich would naturally have made them politically inoft'ensive. But as I believe the question to have been a purely political one and one not bearing on religion at all, I must ask the reader's indulucnce while I make a few observations with the view of clearing the subject from the complications which siu-round and obscure it. At the outset then we may lay it down as a general principle that Polytheisms by their very nature tend to religious toleration, as Monotheisms do to religious persecution. In Monotheisms, where the very existence of more gods than one is denied, the worship of any other god is a direct insult to the 406 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. Deity, and is of itself sufficient to arouse the deepest passions of the human heart. But in Polytheisms, where the existence of other gods is freely admitted, this difficulty does not arise ; and where the conquest of another people carries with it the conception of the conquest of the gods of that people, it is evident that if you wish to incorporate that people and not to exterminate it, there is no more reason for suppressing its peculiar worship than for suppressing its peculiar manners, customs, and laws. It is enough if the gods of the conquered people arc admitted into the Pantheon of the conquerors on a lower footing and with subordinate rank. And indeed this has been the policy of all the great Polytheistic Empires of the world. When the Assyrians and Babylonians, for example, incorporated a subject people, they gave the gods of that peo];)le a place among their own ; and it was because the last king of Babylon attempted to confine the worship of the conquered gods to the Capital, and to suppress it altogether in their native homes, that the invasion of Cyrus was regarded by the people as a delivei-ance, and his entry into Babylon as a triumphal progress with open gates, rather than a conquest. The Romans, too, before besieging a city were in the habit of proj)itiating the gods of the city ; and when they had taken it by assault they usually left behind a number of their own priests to keep up the sacrifices in honour of these gods after their departure. So natural to polytheisms is the practice of religious toleration. Nor was the Empire itself any exception to the rule. Owing to the extensive colonizations first of the Greeks and then of the Romans, the gods of Greece and Rome were worship[»ed everywhere throughout the wide dominions of the Empire; but besides these gods there were the gods peculiar to the separate nationalities — Syrian gods, Egyptian gods, Phoenician gods — and all alike enjoying full and equal toleration. It is true that in Republican times some of these foreign cults, notably those of Isis, Serapis, and Bacchus, were driven out of Rome — but that was because THE PAGAN PEESECUTIOX OF CHKISTIAXITY. 407 of the immoralities connected with their worship, and not from motives of religious intolerance. It is true, too, that the early Cajsars, Augustus, Tiberius, and Claudius, looked with disfavour on tlie swarming of these foreign cults toKome, and that they did all that was possible to discourage and suppress them — but that was because they were aggressive and propagandizing. Even the Jews, who, if they hud had the power, would, like all other monotheists, have remorse- lessly suppressed the worship of all other gods but their o\vn Jehovah, were equally M'ith the rest protected in the worship peculiar to them. It was only when they entered on an active religious propaganda in Rome itself, as was the case under Domitian, that they roused the Imperial jealousy and were persecuted. They had originally been favoured l)y Alexander the Great and by the Syrian Kings who followed him : even the persecutions of Antiochus Epiphanes, Avhich called forth the noble patriotism of the Maccabees, being instigated not so much by religious motives as by political, and being really the attempt to gain political ends through religious means. In Egypt, too, the Jews under the Ptolemies enjoyed exceptional privileges ; the Jewish quarters in Alexandria and Cyrene being under the local control of their own judges and administrators. Julius Cassar, too, confirmed them in their [)rivileges both in Alexandria and Rome ; and not only protected them in their peculiar worship, but exempted them from service on the Sabbath. From all of which it would seem, in spite of appearances to the contrary, that the Christians who were not more stifl-necked in their religious opinions than the Jews, could not have been persecuted for these opinions. On the contrary I have now to show that they were really persecuted for political reasons enly. We may begin then by pointing out that the Romans con- structed their gods out of the abstract virtues found to be essential to the welfare and prosperity of the State, whether 408 THE EVOLUTION OF CHUISTIANITY. for defence against foreign aggression or for internal well-being. There were the gods of Public Honour, of Commercial Integrity, of Landmarks and Boundaries, of Domestic Purity ; and to these Ave may add the gods or goddesses of Patrician Modesty, of Plebeian Modesty, of the Safety of the Age, of the Genius of the Custom House, of the Safety of the Roman People, and the like. Hence it was that when any new duty or function had to be assumed by the State it had to have a new god to consecrate it and to give it permanence and stability. Now when the Empire succeeded to the Republic, it directly assumed two additional functions. The first of these, which if not absolutely new was now for the first time brought into distinct prominence, was the duty of keeping the peace among the many and diverse nationalities that made up the Empire ; of protecting the rights of Roman citizens everywhere through- out these vast populations and regions ; and of administering the principles of equity, the jns gentium, in all cases which fell outside and beyond the range of the local jurisdictions. In all other respects the Empire allowed these nations to freely follow their own religions, customs, laws, and modes of life ; the only exceptions, perhaps, being in those cases where the religious rites were of a brutal and inhuman character — as for instance human sacrifices — or where the religious code was of unnatural harshness — as among the Jews, who in consequence were not allowed to carry out the death penalty prescribed in the Laws of Moses without the prior sanction of the Imperial authorities. The second duty assumed by the Empire was an entirely new one, viz., that of securing the allegiance of all the subject peoples to the Roman State and to the person of its living representative, the reigning Ca3sar. Now the assumption of these two new duties or functions was, as we should naturally expect, attended by the creation of two new deities to represent them, viz., the Goddess of Rome THE TAGAN PERSECUTION OF CHIUSTIANITY. 409 and the Genius of the Emperor. And as these two new functions could not be localized, but were co-extensive with the Empire itself, the statues of the two new deities Avho were to consecrate them were erected everywhere throughout the length and breadth of the Empire — in the market-places of cities and towns, and ai'ound the chimney-corners and hearths •of private houses. The worship of these deities either Ijy supplicating the goddess of Rome, or by burning incense and pouring libations of wine before the image of the Emperor, was accordingly made, like our oath of allegiance, the test of political loyalty. From all of which it would appear that in spite of appearances to the contrary this was not a religious act at all but a purely political one. Our next question then is, what were those political suspicions which attached to Christianity and which caused it to be persecuted by the State ? To begin with then we may say that the suspicions and misunderstandings which gave colour to the persecution of •Christianity must to the Roman official mind have been many and cumulative. The Christians were constantly repeating that Christ was their King, and constantly giving umbrage to the Imperial authorities by declaring that he had been raised to the position of a God — an honour then practically reserved for the Ca3sars alone. This apparent rivalry to the reigning Emperor was still further accentuated by their predictions, as in the Apocalypse, of the near destruction of the Empire and the triumphal return of Christ in glory to take over the govern- ment of the world. So deeply, indeed, were the Imperial authorities affected by these predictions that Domitian himself had the two grandsons of Judc the brother of Christ, Avho were living in Batanea, brought to Rome to be personally interrogated by himself as to their claims. And it was only when he found that they were poor peasants, their hands gnarled with toil, and who on being questioned as to whet her dhrist was their King replied simply that he was, but that his 410 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. kingdom was not of this world, that the Emperor dismissed thein with contempt as beneath his notice. But a still graver clement of suspicion and one that brought them directly into conflict with the laws of the State was that they were a secret society or confraternity — the being a member of Avhich, unless by special license, was to subject oneself to the penalty of death. That Christianity was not only a confraternity but a secret confraternity was evident from this, that for several centuries the catachumens as they were called, were allowed to be present at tJie meetings only during prayers and the reading and ex- position of the Scriptures, but were excluded Avhen the real mystery, the mystery of the Eucharist, was celebrated. Now these secret societies or confraternities were for political reasons Avatched by the authorities with the most jealous eye. They were only permitted, when permitted at all, to the lowest and poorest classes of the population, including the slaves, and only for certain harmless and defined ends such as burial, etc. Even then they were only legal when they had been licensed by the authorities ; when their membership was limited in number ; when they contained no patrician elements ; when they had no common fund and no continuous president ; when they were attended by no religious performances ; and when no common vows were taken. Now in all these particulars it is clear that Christianity as then constituted was an illegal confraternity. Its meetings were unlicensed, its membership unlimited ; they had both a common fund and a continuous president ; its members met for religious observances and took vows in common, although onlv for such harmless and praiseworthy objects as abstaining from theft, from adultery, from highway robbery, from false swearing and the like. They carried on, too, an active religious propaganda through all parts of the Empire ; their most sacred mysteries, as we have seen, were conducted in secret ; and it was extensively believed among the populace that when the lamps were overturned, horrid orgies of incest and adultery, and even THE PAGAN PERSECUTION' OF CHRISTIANITY. 411 banquets of human flesh, Avound up the proceedings of the night. And when in the face of all these accusations and illegalities — the claim that Jesus Avas king, his apotheosis, the expectation of his second coming, the secret meetings, the active propaganda, the wide ramifications of the society — they obstinately refused to remove the suspicions of infamy and treason entertained against them bv burnino* incense and pouring out wine before the image of the Emperor, what could the authorities when pushed on by po])idar suspicion and hatred do, even if like Pliny they had found no evidence of any crime against them, but punish them for their obstinacy and perversity in defying the law ? It is true that the Jews were equally obstinate, but then they were a privileged people who for ages had been protected in the exercise of their own peculiar worship and observances by numerous edicts and enactments. Besides they met openly in their synagogues ; they were insignificant in numbers when compared with the vast populations of the Empire ; their habits and customs were repellent to the Gentiles ; they lived in separate quarters of their own in the great cities and towns ; were a distinct race easily identified ; and were not given like the Christians to an active propaganda. They were not, in consec|uence, a source of political danger, and were not per- secuted, except indeed for personal reasons and from preter- natural suspicion, as under the Emperor Doraitian. Their motives being well known and their fanaticism being purely religious in character, they were not required to salute the Pagan gods or to offer incense to the images of the Emperor. And even had they done so there woukl have been no danger of the action being mistaken for other than a merely formal acknowledgment of political allegiance, without religious signifi- cance. To have imagined that a Jew would have put any man, even the great Cnesar himself, in the same category with Jehovah the One and only God of all the earth, would have been felt both by Jew and Gentile to be ludicrous. 412 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. With the Christians, however, it was quite otherwise. For however much they may have wished to testify their political allegiance to the Emperor — as indeed in all their apologies from Justin and Athenagoras to Minucius Felix and Tertullian they did most humbly — it was impossible that they should do so in the only way recognized by the State, viz. by burning incense and pouring out libations before the goddess of Rome and the Genius of the Emperor. For a Christian to worship the image of any man, however exalted, would have been felt by himself, if not by others, to be a disloyalty and treachery to the one man of all others to whom his love and reverence were due, the man Christ Jesus. And when, as was generally the case, the Christians were asked not only to worship the image of the Emperor, but to curse the name of Christ as well, it is evident to what an impasse matters had been brought. Between Christianity and the Roman Government, therefore, no compromise on these terms was possible ; and with the new religion spreading through the Empire with ever-increasing rapidity, there was but this alternative — either the extermination of the Rclio-ion or the submission of the State. The result is well known. With Constantine the persecutions ended ; Christianity entered into an alliance with the State and became persecutor in her turn — with results which we have yet to see. CHAPTER X . THE APOLOGISTS. "YT"riTPI the New Testament Canon as a permanent rampart against the Heretics who had by its means been extruded from the Church, but who still hung on her outskirts ready to seize and carry oflf any stragglers who might chance to wander bevond the fold, the Fathers of the Church who had all along, like the builders of the walls of Jerusalem, been equipped with both trowel and sword, now set seriously to work to repair those breaches in its internal structure which the heretics had made, as well as to give to its doctrine such a philosophical presentation and setting as should commend it to the srreat Pagan World that lav around. The first of these objects was accomplished by the Old Church Fathers as they are called — Irenajus, Tertullian, and others — and consisted in giving to the great questions of the nature of the Godhead, and of the union of the human and Divine Nature in Christ, a greater definitiveness and completeness of statement than they had yet received — a statement however which only received its perfect and final form at the hands of Athanasius and the great Councils of the Church. The second was accomplished by the Apologists — Justin, Athenagoras, Tatian, Tertullian, and the rest — and consisted in showing that even as a philosophy Christianity was superior in depth and truth, in harmony and completeness, to all the Pagan philosophies of the time. Now 414 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. of these Apologies — written usually in the form of appeals to the Roman Emperors deprecating the persecutions from which the Church was still suffering — some it is true had been written before the Canon was formed ; but as in a controversy on the relative merits of philosophic Paganism and Chi-istianity only the most general characteristics of each could be compared, the finer subtleties which came in after the Canon could lend no additional weight to the broad general argument, and so were not employed. So great, in consequence, was the similarity in the line of argument adopted by those Apologists who wrote before and those who wrote after the formation of the Canon, that in the generalized form which I am about to give it, it may fittingly find its place at this point in our history. At the outset then it is necessary to remark that the main speculative object of these Apologies was not to controvert or to set aside the doctrines of the great Pagan Schools on the questions of God, Virtue, and Immortality ; for on these great problems the best of the Pagan Philosophies were so far as they ivent in accord with the doctrines of Christianity. The Stoics, for example, and notably in the persons of their latest representatives, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, were believers in God; and in Virtue and Righteousness as the highest good ; while the Platonists following their great Master had all along held to the doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul. It is true, indeed, that Christianity had raised the conception of God from that of the vague and cloudy Abstraction of the Stoics and Platonists, to that of a Creator and Father of all men ; that it had added to the list of high virtues of the Stoics the still higher ones of renunciation, forgiveness, and self- sacrifice ; and that instead of leaving Immortality as a vague and shadowy hope to be entertained or not according as the balance of argument and opinion swayed to this side or that, it had erected it into a fixed dogma, a sure and certain hope, a precious possession within the reach of all. Of all this the Apologists were well aware, and they were prepared when THE APOLOGISTS. 415 opportunity offered to enter the lists in defence of their own views ; but what they specially set themselves to do in these letters to the Emperors was not this, but something of much more value and importance, viz., to prove to them that these beliefs of the Pagan philosophers were even in their imperfect state not mere opinions to be put on or olF like garments according as the arguments swayed this way or that, but were livinof and burning realities. For, as I have contended throughout this work, no mere Philosophy as such can ever be relied on either to deeply stir the Imaginations or to radically affect the lives and actions of men, and for this reason — that except in individual instances of over-weening vanity, pre- sumption, or fanaticism, the human mind with its restricted outlook through Its paltry five senses and their adjuncts, can never feel sufficient confidence in itself to rely on its own unaided powers to comprehend in all its vastness, subtlety, and complexity, this great Universe of which it is but an in- finitesimal part, and wliich stretches on all sides of it into an Infinitude where neither the microscope nor telescope, neither the outer senses nor the Inner vision can follow it. And hence it was that the Pagan Philosophers although holding in a misty, vague, and imperfect way, those general doctrines on God, Virtue, and Inmiortallty, which to the Christians were sun-clear and eternal truths, could get neither out of their philosophies nor out of their mode of proof that something which was necessary to convert their opinions Into burning beliefs, on the issues of which they were prepared to stake their lives for time and for eternity. Now this was precisely what the Early Christians believed they had secured — and it was this that the Apologists proposed to demonstrate to the great Pagan Emperors, the philosophic Antonlnes. The form of proof, then, which was to work this marvellous transformation in their thouuhts and feelino-s was, as miucht have been expected, the same proof that had converted the Apologists themselves and indeed the Church generally, the old 416 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. sheet-anclior of the faith — the Proof from Prophecy. But a& this proof depended rather on certain exceptional incidents and experiences rising like mountain peaks above the ordinary plane of human life, than on the generalized uniformities and sequences of Philosophy, it was necessary in refurbishing it for the consideration of men of the philosophical eminence of the Antonines, to give it the form and semblance at least of a scientific demonstration. And accordingly it was necessary to impress on the Emperors at the outset that the Logos which they in common with the whole Stoic and Platonic Schools regarded as the active life-principle of things — inasmuch as it contained the seeds and principles of which men and animals and all the multiplex variety of Nature were alike the offspring or emanation; — that this Logos was in reality not the mere abstract and shadowy essence which they had imagined it to be, but was a real Being, a real Person, and no other than the Son of God. In testimony whereof they appealed to the Sacred Scriptures of an ancient race wherein his actual appearances among men were recorded. These appearances and visitations were casual and intermittent it is tme, but their object was always the same, viz., to instruct men in the knowledge of things of supreme importance to them, but which they could not find out for themselves. Among other things this Being had told them what God was, both in His own nature and in His relation to man ; that He was not the shadowy essence whose ghost-like reflection was all that men could catch of Him by their own natural faculties, but that He was a Father, that He was his own Father as well as the Father of all mankind. He had told them, too, what men's duties were; and it Avas he who had instructed them in those very virtues which they, the Emperors, as Stoics prized so highly, and to which, without knowing why, they yielded so sincere a homage. These duties and virtues he had first announced to Moses, who recorded them in the Sacred Scriptures of his nation faithfully as they had been THE APOLOGISTS. 417 delivered to him ; and from these Scriptures they had been copied and adopted as models by the rest of the world — and notably by those philosophers and sages of Greece from whose writings the Emperors had themselves derived them. This Being had further instructed men by the mouths of the Prophets as to the reason why God, Avho was their Father and friend, had yet made them subject to that Death which they so feared and hated : — that it was because they had been disobedient to His commandments and had broken His laws. But how were the Emperors to know that tlii:? Being had really come from God, and that all this was not a mere fable ? By consulting these same Scriptures, said the xlpologists, where, in Avritings of an antiquity going far back beyond their own recorded annals, they would find that he had inspired these prophets to utter predictions about himself and others which centuries later had been literally and exactly fulfilled. Among otner things he had announced to these Ancient Prophets that when the time was ripe, and when the floral Code, which he had formerly given to Moses as a preliminary and imperfect instalment adapted to the low stage of culture and morality of the times, had run its appointed course, and men tempted by the demons still fell into idolatry, still continued the slaves of sin, and still suffered in consequence the penalty of death; — he had told these Prophets that in due time he would come in person to the earth to give men a New Law, and one which should make good the deficiencies of the Old ; one, too, which should have the power not only to deliver men from idolatry and sin, but from death. But for the natural operation of this law two conditions were necessary. The first was that the deep-dyed stain of sin should be washed away ; the second, that the demons, who tempted men to sin and kept them in consequence under the fear and don^inion of death, should themselves be overcome, and should hence- forth lose their power. Now the old dye of Sin was washed DD 418 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. out by the blood of Christ on the Cross ; while the power of the demons was broken by his leading a sinless life and by his resurrection from the dead. And all this had been ,'( literally and exactly fulfilled just as it had been foretold , 4 in those old Scriptures which he had himself inspired. Now the man in whom the Logos appeared and took flesh, con- tinued the Apologists, was the man Jesus Christ, who suffered death in the reign of Tiberius, and whose every act, as can still be read in the memoirs of the disciples who were his constant companions, was thus the fulfilment of what he had himself foretold through the Prophets some centuries before. And as for the demons over whom in his life and death he triumphed, and in whose interests you are now persecuting us — these, added they, are your Pagan gods ! Now as the power of prediction is admittedly the highest test of Scientific or Philosophic Truth, the Apologists as philosophers addressing philosophers might have stopped here, but in addressing the Emperors who were men of the world and of affairs as well, something more was necessary before their demonstration could be said to be complete at all points. Christianity was an existing fact, and a very stubborn and significant one ; and it might well occur to the Apologists that it was still necessary to prove that the moral results which were to flow from the alleged redemption brought to men by the death and resurrection of Christ had actually been realized in their lives and conduct. This then they now proposed to demonstrate by a direct appeal to facts within the reach of all ; and to show that the Spirit Avhich Christ promised to send his followers after his death to keep them from sin was everywhere at work in the minds and hearts of his followers ; that the freedom of soul to which the Stoics aspired, but which they rarely reached, had been achieved ; that the sin to which they so often succumbed had been overcome ; and that the death which was so feared and hated had lost its terrors and was ' welcomed as an entrance into that immortal life for which all THE APOLOGISTS. 419 longed, and which was now lui abiding possession. To prove all this, the Apologists in face of the false and terrible accusations under which the Christians lay — of incest, the eating of <'hildren, and other nameless atrocities — boldly challenged the Emperors to the most severe and searching scrutiny of their lives and morality. They asked them to consider well what was an unquestionable fact, that men and women many of •whom had once been criminal, reprobate, and vile, most of whom were poor and illiterate, and nearly all of whom were drawn from the lowest and most despised of the population — barbarians and freednien, cooks, cobblers and slaves — that these men and women were to be seen exhibiting in their daily lives a purity, virtue, and simplicity, a joyous elation and exaltation of soul, a reliance on God, and in the face of martyrdom and ■death an inward serenity and peace, which had been the very ideal of the Stoic's dream. All tliis they invited the Emperors to contemplate and consider, and if on satisfying themselves of its truth they should still desire further proof that the Spirit of God was with these persecuted, despised, and rejected people, they would find it in the open challenge which the bolder of their leaders proudly flaunted before their Pagan persecutors, viz., that the humblest of these Christians would without sorcery, magic, or other unlawful aid cast out demons and evil spirits from all and sundry who were afflicted with them — and that too after all the priests and philosophers, all the pro- fessional sorcerers and mao-icians of Pao-anism had tried in vain. Such in rough outline and with its matter more or less rc-arranged to suit our present purpose, was the chain of demonstration which the Church submitted to the philosophers •of the Pagan world as proof that the doctrines which in an imperfect form the best of them held on the great problems of ■God, of Virtue, and of Innnortality, were living and eternal truths. It was this chain of demonstration that had converted the Apologists themselves, most of whom had been philosophers and had worn the pallium or philosopher's cloak; and it was 420 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. this that they believed ought to, and in the end must, convert the world. And indeed it must be confessed that if each link in this chain should prove to be strong enough to stand any strain which criticism might bring to bear on it, the chain as a whole ought in the then state of culture, when the belief in miracles, omens, prophecies, demons, and supernatural inter- ferences generally was as prevalent among the cultured as it is to-day only among the lowest and most ignorant of the popu- lation — this chain of demonstration ought to have been accepted as conclusive and convincing, ought to have been embraced not only as a true Religion but as a true Philosophy. But the Emperors remained unconvinced and obdurate — even the good Marcus Aurelius. Whether it were that they felt that the whole demonstration was more like a chain of air- balloons held together by a continuous thread, than a solid and well-jointed structure ; and that a series of predictions in which the Old Testament drew on the New for support, at the same time that the New was drawing on the Old for the same pui-pose^ were of no more value as proof than those present-day ' accommodation ' notes drawn by business men on each other, which, mimicking as they do the forms of business transactions, have all the apj^earance of genuineness without the reality ; whether it was that they saw or suspected that much of the New Testament had been consciously enacted for the very purpose of fulfilling these Old Testament prophecies so that its value as testimony was lost ; or whether indeed they ever read them at all — cannot be known. But certain it is that the Emperors rejected the proffered demonstration ; and Christianity delivered over again to her enemies to wade for another century and a half through martyrdom and blood before her final triumph was assured, had no alternative but to retire into herself again, and using the trowel rather than the sword of controvers}", to seek to repair her own internal structure and to make it har- monious and logic-proof at all points. In the remaining chapters of this volume we shall see in detail how this work went on. CHAPTER XI IREN^EUS; TERTULLIAN ; ORIGEN. "TTP to the time of the compilation of tlic Canon, say, roughly, about 180 A.D., what with the multiplicity of •documents and doctrines all laying claim to the allegiance of the faithful — Apostolic Memoirs, open Church Traditions, secret Gnostic Traditions, Old Testament Scriptures, Ebionite and Marcionite Gospels, Pauline Theology, and the endless apocryphal writings — and what with the difficulty of finding any common standpoint amid this bewildering and distracting promiscuity, no general ' scheme of salvation ' was possible ; and the Church was obliged, as we have seen, to rely for her propaganda on the ' Rule of Faith ' as embodied in the Baptismal Confession, and on the 'Proof from Prophecy.' NoAv in putting these into the forefront of her teaching, the Church bore testimony only to the general fact that salvation had been brought to men by Christ Jesus; but as to how or in what way — as to who or what Christ was in his essential nature, how he was related on the one side to God and on the other to Man, or as to how the human and Divine in him were united — all this in the confused medley of doctrines and traditions had to be left unresolved. It is true that Paul had formulated his great ' Scheme of Redemption ' from the very eai'liest days of the Church ; but owing partly to its being only one among a number of other schemes claiming to 422 EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. be of equal, if not greater, authority, and partly to the fact that it Avas constructed on the basis of the insufficiency of the Old Jewish Law for the purposes of salvation, and not on the Proof from Prophecy, it could not, and in fact did not, take effect. That it had not as yet been adopted by the Church as the basis of Orthodoxy will appear from a number of considerations. In the first place, Justin, who wrote his Apology to the Emperors shortly before the compilation of the Canon, distinctly declares that the Jewish Christians who held that Jesus was only a man who had been adopted by God and afterwards * exalted ' for his obedience, were, equally Avith those Gentile Christians who believed with Paul that he had had ' pre-existence * with God before the World began, entitled to the privileges of Communion, provided only that they did not insist on the Gentile Christians conforming to their peculiarly Jewish rites and traditions. The Church, therefore, could not be said as yet to have taken Paul as the standard of Orthodoxy. In the second place this same Justin represents salvation a* conditioned by repentance and obedience to the new and higher Law of God as revealed by Christ, and not as depending on supernatnval grace as was the case with Paul. And in harmony with this, too, we find him representing Baptism, not as a means of grace as it was with Paul, and as it continued to be with the Church after the formation of the Canon, but as a sign of repentance merely. And further, as we saw in our last chapter, it was on its conveying a more full, perfect, and complete hioioledge of God and of Human Duty than Pagan Philosophy did, that the Apologists in their appeals to the Emperors rested their claims for the truth of Christianity, and not on its being a means of grace through faith and the operation of the Holy Spirit, as it was with Paul, — and, indeed, as it has ever been with the Catholic Church since the Canon became authoritative. i IRENJEUS ; TEUTULLIAN ; OPJGEN. 425 But from the time that the Canon had thinned and reduced the dense and bewiklering thicket of Christian Literature to tlie comparatively few books of the New Testament, it was possible for the Church, with the area of controversy thus narrowed and brought within manageable compass, to construct out of the materials before it, a general scheme of salvation which should be at once apostolic in origin and authority, and divinely inspired ; and one too that should be more or less complete and harmonious in itself. And all the more so indeed when the P'athers on settino- to work to sift the documents before them, found that practically the scheme of salvation rested mainly on two authorities only — the Gospel of John and the Epistles of Paul ; Paul supplying the general basis of the scheme, and John the conception of Christ as the Logos or God-man, in the place of Paul's conception of him as the Archetypal Man, the Second Adam. On these two sets of documents, accordingly, with the other books of the New Testament as running connuentary and illustration, the Old Church Fathers, as they are called, some of whom were them- selves Bishops, and all of whom were more or less in touch theo- logically with the Bishops, set to work to construct each in his own way a general scheme of salvation which shoidd be felt to be on a level with the feeliniis and necessities of the time. A general scheme I have said — for until the scheme as a ichole had been presented to the Church from different points of view, it was hardly probable that the Fathers should proceed to the more exact dehnition of the relations of the different persons of the Godhead to each other, or to the mode of union of the divine and human natures in Christ — problems on which we shall find them engaged in our next chapter, and which were definitively settled for the Christian Church for all time by the great Councils of Nice, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon. The first of the Fathers, then, to imdcrtake the task was Irenjeus, Bishop of Lyons, and his work consisted essentially 424 EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. in what we may call the simple Pinion of Paul and John, without further attempt at differentiation or development. He took, that is to say, the Jewish ' Scheme of Redemption ' of Paul, founded, as we have seen, on the inadequacy of the Jewish Law for purposes of salvation, and taking out of it the conception of Christ as the Archetypal Man, the Second Adam — a creation of God — replaced it by the Greek conception of Christ as the Logos, or Son of God, of John ; and having pared off the rough edges, attempted to give to the whole such a setting as should bring it into harmony with the rest of Christian doctrine and tradition. His first position, accordingly, is that the Being, Christ, who was with God from all eternity and who created the World, was not a purely Spiritual Being, the Logos of John, who came to Earth and entered a body of flesh at a particular point in Time ; nor yet the Second Adam of Paul, who was a purely abstract Human Entity or figure-head, if one may say so ; but was the identical Jesus who was born of the Virgin Mary, who passed through life, was crucified, rose from the dead and ascended into Heaven — a combination, as it were, of the two conceptions of John and of Paul. This is the first distinctive feature of Irenajus' Theology, and by its very absence of definition it saved him, it may be observed in pass- ing, from that modified Gnosticism into which Tertullian, Origen, and nearly all the other Ante-Nicene Fathers fell, when they tried to separate and define the relative parts played in the life and work of Jesus by his human and by his Divine natures respectively. His next main position, and one too in harmony with the last as arising out of the union of Paul and John, was to give to the personal acts of Jesus an importance and significance which they had not hitherto received. But for this a word or two of preliminary is necessary, to bring out fully the contents of his thought. It will be remembered, then, that Paul, the object of whose writings was to press on the acceptance of men his scheme of IREX.EUS ; TERTULLIAN ; ORIGEN. 425 salvation as a lohole, naturally regarded Jesus as the mere abstract organ or instrument of God for bringing that salvation to men, and in consequence considered the detailed actions of his livinff and working life as having in themselves little or no importance or significance. Indeed except in the most general way he rarely refers to them at all. John, on the contrary, whose object it was to prove that the man Jesus was the Logos and a Divine Being, naturally laid special emphasis on those particular incidents in his life which went to demonstrate his divinity — notably his exceptional miracles of the raising of the dead, and of the converting of water into wine, as well as on those speeches in which he enforces at great length the fact that what he does and savs is what his Father in Heaven had sent him to do and to say, and so on. The Apologists, again, who as we saw in our last chapter made salvation depend on the fuller and more complete knowledge of God, Duty, and Immortality revealed by Jesus, (on the ground that Jesus had received the full Logos or mind of God, whereas the Pagan Philosophers and Hebrew Prophets had only received what Justin calls ' the seed of the Logos ;') — the Apologists naturally regarded Jesus as the mere vehicle or pipe by which this knowledge was to be distributed, and so, like Paul, looked upon the particular acts of his life as having little or no significance in themselves, ahvays excepting of course the great facts of the Crucifixion and Resurrection ; — another proof, indeed, if one were wanted, that until the compilation of the Canon bi'ought John and Paul together, no further evoluti beinsf the source of all evil: in Stoicism there are two element"- only — Body and Soul — of which Soul is good and pure, and Body alone evil. The effect of this on the respective theolojjies of Irenasus and TertuUian is, that whereas with Irenasus who is a Platonist — inasmuch as he holds by the Pauline distinction of body, soul, and spirit, — besides the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the Bible alone as due to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit is pure and good ; with TertuUian not only Father, Son, Holy Ghost, and the Bible are pure and good, but Nature, the Soul of Man, and the Conscience in Man also. In a word, while Avith Irenajus, all earthly things are evil, only heavenly ones Ijeing good ; with TertuUian, all earthly things are naturally good — as all alike are pervaded and informed by Soul ; and if, with him, since the Fall, Man is bad, it is because the demons, or the Devil, have enslaved his will to the pleasures of the body, and because his soul has become weakened through hereditary taint and transmission. And accordingly while with Irena^us the truth necessary for salvation can only come from the ideal world — from Heaven, the realm of pure Spirit, and therefore from Revelation alone and fresh infusions of Suiicrnatural o-nice throug-h the Holv Spirit ; with TertuUian, (now that Christ by His death and resurrection has overthrown the demons), it comes from the real world, — from the will of ^lan himself, reinforced and! strengthened, it is true, by the Holy Spirit as well as by certain niatenal means of grace. But if we ask what specially those real things are, which according to TertuUian contain the truth necessary for our salvation, and how and where they are to be found and recognized, his reply is that as all thing.s are in the beginning good, the oldest and earliest of written records are those which contain the truth. Antiquity and Prescription therefore are his watchwords and his criteria of truth. And hence we have him declarinsj that the Old 430 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. Testament Scriptures ai'e the record of the Truth, because of their antiquity alone; having all been written, as he thinks, (very erroneously as we now know) before the Greeks who tried to embody their wisdom, began to philosophise. Church Tradition, too, contains the Truth, because it can be traced back through the Apostolic Churches to Jesus Christ himself ; wdiereas all the various forms of Heresy have sprung up since then. The New Testament Canon, on the other hand, he does not regard as hy itself authoritative ; for although containing in itself all the truth, it can, he thinks, be made to support anything or nothing — a fact for us Modern Protestants to consider ! Miracles, again, ai'e proofs of the truth of Christianity, as being real and palpable witnesses to the presence of the Holy Spirit. Baptism, too, has real efficacy, because, among other things, the water used in it contains part of that original Soul breathed into it at the Creation ! Indeed to so gross a point •does he carry his Stoic Realism, that we find him laying stress on the Crucifixion, mainly because it was * the blood of God ' that was shed ; while its spiritual efficacy counts with him for little or nothing ; — that mode of death being merely the form of obedience to God's will which Avas best adapted to impress the carnal mind. Another important variation made by Tertullian on the Theology of Irenaeus and the Church, and one too which followed directly out of his Stoic doctrine that Soul has extension, is this, — that while with Iren?eus, as with all the Platonist Theologians, God is a Spirit; with Tertullian, He is a Corporeal Being ; and not He alone, but the Son and Holy Ghost as well. So strongly, indeed, does he hold to this opinion, that we find him figuring the Son and Holy Ghost as being detached and cast off from the substance of God the Father, in a sense almost as real and palpable as the successive detachments of the rings of Saturn from the body of that planet. The Word, he says, who, as Reason, had all along been in the bosom of God the Father, was first cast oiF as a separate entity for the purpose of i IREN^US ; TERTULLTAN ; ORIGEX. 431 creating the World ; and the Holy Ghost, from the "Word in turn after his ascension, for the purpose of keeping the Church up to its high vocation and guiding it by new revelations from time to time as necessity arose. And here it was that the peculiar views of Tertullian led him into that heresy with which his name will ever be associated in the history of the Church — the heresy of Montanism. But to see clearly the stages by which he was led to this, we must remember that it was part of his doctrine of Antiquity and Prescription that the Bishops were merely the guardians and depositaries of Church Tradition, with no right to add to, or take away from, the sacred deposit in any particular. If, therefore, the Holy Spirit had really been detached from Christ after His ascension, and if its presence were to be looked for, as he had promised, for the guidance of the Church, it must of necessity find for itself new organs. And, accordingly, Avhen Montanus announced that he and his two prophetesses, Prisca and Maximilla, had received the Holy Ghost, and that the message the Spirit had com- missioned them to deliver was that men should fast, pray, remain unmarried, and welcome martyrdom with joy, while waiting for the New Jerusalem which Avas shortly to descend from the clouds and to establish itself in the city of Pepuza in Phrygia ; Tertullian Avho had long looked with horror on the increasing laxity of Christian morals, who was himself a believer in the Millenium, in martyrdom, and in bodily asceticism, and who felt that if the Spirit blew wdiere it listed, as it did of old in the days of the 'gift of tongues,' there was no reason why Montanus and his prophetesses should not be the organs chosen for these communications, gave in his adhesion to the new movement — and so fell into heresy. For now that the Canon was compiled, and all truth present and future as well as past, was to be found within its sacred rolls — to have allowed these unlicensed vaij-aries of the imao-jnation to intrude themselves into the finely-poised and delicately-adjusted wheel-work of orthodoxy Avould have been to have wrecked 432 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. the Church and to have thrown all its orderly doctrines and practices into chaos and anarchy again, — another proof, if one were wanted, that the Christian Scheme of Salvation w^hich carried in its bosom the precious jewel of a higher Morality for the World, must be safeguarded at all hazards, however natural or logical might be the doctrines or practices that would have upset it, however strongly supported by early precedent or by Scripture, and however praiseworthy in them- selves. But the Bishops as usual soon found a way to turn all this to the advantage of the Church. For perceiving with their accustomed sagacity that fresh revelations of the Divine Spirit were continually being called for by the increasing complexity, laxity, and confusion of the times, — in which new questions both of faith and of morals were continually demanding solution, — they boldly stepped into the gap left by the expulsion of the Montanists, and saying in effect, ' Not Montanus, Prisca, and Maximilla, but ice are the organs of the Holy Spirit,' quietly annexed the new territory, and added it to their own domain. For although they had always secretly modelled the faith, as well as the discipline and practice of the Church, in conformity with the necessities of the times, they had never openly avowed it. But from this time forward they claimed the right, as the legitimate organs of Divine Inspiration for the Church, to give fresh definitions to all questions of Faith and Morals as they arose. On the problem, again, of the union of the divine and human natures in Christ, Tertullian in endeavouring to distinguish and define the relative parts played by each in the life and work of Jesus — as for example when he says that it was the human nature only that suffered on the Cross, while the divine remained untouched ; that it was the human nature that appeared in his weaknesses and weariness, and the divine in his miracles, and his words of wisdom and power — fell into a dualism and heresy, from which Irenteus saved himself by the simple expedient of refusing to make any attempt at definition or distinction at all I IRENyEUS ; TEKTULLIAX ; OllIGEX. 433 The last peculiarity of Tertullian wliicli we have to mention here is, that he was the first to pave the way for an entire change both in the doctrine and in the discipline of the Church, by drawing certain preliminary conclusions from a doctrine which he himself hekl with great tenacity, and propagated with great eloquence and fervour, — the doctrine, namely, tliat God was a God of Justice as well as of Love. Marcion, it will be remembered, had declared that God was a God of pure Love, but not of Justice. Justice, he said, was an attribute of the Jewish God, .Jehovah, — an inferior agent of the true God, and a God with whom the Christians had nothing whatever to do. But Tertullian to prevent the fatal divorce between the Old and Ncav Testaments which would have ensued on the acceptance of this doctrine by the Church, boldly announced in opposition to Marcion, that God was a God of Justice also, and that evidences of this justice were to be seen on every hand in the Works of Nature as well as in the Conscience of J\Ian; and moreover that without it, Love which is holy and condemns its opposite, would cease to be love. But the controversy with Marcion, and the way in which that heretic had united the Justice of Jehovah with his Cruelty and Revenge, and had lumped them together in one condemnation, Avere too recent for the Church boldly to advance to the conclusion that the offended Justice of God, equally with his Love, had to be satisfied by the death of Jesus on the Cross. That step accordingly was left for much later Theologians to take, in the doctrine of the Vicarious Sacrifice. In the meantime Tertullian contented himself with taking the first step only towards that goal, by declaring that penance, fasting, alms-giving, public confession, celibacy, martyrdom, etc., equally with love and prayer (which up till then had been the only sacrifices required of a Christian) were not only accessory 'means of grace,' but were ' propitiations ' for sins as well ; and so by his Stoic Realism opened the door to the doctrine not only of the efficacy of Baptism as a means of grace, and of the Lord's E E 434 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. Supper as a sacrifice, but to the efficacy of ' meritorious works* also ; and from this to a Priesthood as the spiritual medium for dispensing the forgiveness of sins through these sacraments and works, was but a step — a step which his successor Cyprian was not slow to take. We have now to see the variations which were made in the general scheme of Salvation when it was passed through the Neo-Platonic mould of Origen, the great Alexandrian Father. Now, in reading Origen we have not gone far before we perceive that the extent of his departure from the Theology of Irenseus and Tertullian, is greater than can be legitimately accounted foi by the differences between his Neo-Platonisra and their Platonism and Stoicism respectively. And on searching for the causes of this divergence, we discover it to lie in the broad fact that whereas Irenseus and Tertullian have taken the Pauline scheme of Salvation as their basis, and have inwrouffht it, the one with Platonism and the other with Stoicism ; Origen on the contrary has taken the philosophy of Neo-Platonism as his basis, and has worked into it only as much of the Gospel scheme of Salvation as it would allow — a radical difference of procedure, it is to be observed, and one that will give rise to the widest divergences of doctrine. When once this is recognized, and when the causes that have given rise to it are clearly seen, we shall then have found the key to the Theology of Origen, and can almost anticipate his particular doctrines point by point. Now the first observation we have to make bearing on this question is, that a very considerable period of time must have elapsed before the New Testament Canon which was the work mainly of the Churches of Eome, Asia Minor, and the West, was accepted as authoritative at Alexandria, This was chiefly owing to the circumstance that Gnosticism and other forms of heresy were •so strongly massed and entrenched in that city, that the authority of the Bishop alone was not sufficient to expel them. And as Gnosticism, especially Egyptian Gnosticism, held, as IREX.EUS; TERTULLIAN; ORIGEN. 435 •\\e have seen, by Pliilosophy and Knowledge, rather than by Faith, which was the watchword of Paul, it was with great difficulty that a Canon which made the Pauline scheme its basis of Salvation, could make its way amid surroundings so hostile. And accordingly in the interval that elapsed between the formation of the Canon and its full acceptance at Alexandria, a School of Theologians holding to the simple facts of Gospel History (and so, unlike the Gnostics, orthodox) had time to arise ; and basing their theology on the Gospel of John rather than on Paul, on knowledge and faith rather than on faith alone, had, before they could be put down by the orthodoxy of the West, constructed vast and far-reaching systems of their own. These men had originally come to Christianity from the Schools of Neo-Platonic Philosophy which had made Alexandria their home, and which, indeed, had 60 many points of affinity with Christianity that it was quite easy to pass from the one to the other. But as John had formulated no scheme of salvation, and had contented himself mainly with identifying Jesus Avith the Logos of God, it was natural that these Neo-Platonic Thinkers, with the Scheme of Salvation left open for them as it were, should construct one for themselves ; and that they should do this rather by pouring their religion into the mould of the Neo-Platonic Philosophy in which they had been brought up, and which prevailed every- where around them, than by pouring their Philosophy into the mould of a purely Jewish scheme of Salvation like that of Paul, which was alien to their entire mode of thought, which they had scarcely heard of, and which had had no great authority anywhere until the Canon had stamped it Avith the mark of Divine Authority. And they were still more disposed to take this course, inasmuch as between their own philosophy and the Logos Christology of John there was no wide gap in crossing which their whole past would have to be abandoned, but only the simple and easy step of turning the abstractions of the one into the wills of the otlier, — the Supreme One of 436 THE EVOLUTION OF CHKISTIANITY. Keo-Platonism into God tlie Fatlicr, tlie Logos into Jesus^ Christ, and the Soul of the World into the Holy Ghost, Now had the Canon been regarded as authoritative in Alexandria before they began their labours, they would have been blocked on the threshold; and the Alexandrian Theology, it may confidently be affirmed, could not have arisen at all. As it was, it had scarcely had time to over-run the East — as it quickly did by reason of its profundity and subtlety, by the vast amount of simple Christianity which it contained — when the Canon overtook it, as it were, and the great Origen who had been the pride of the Church and the teacher and guide of so many of its dignitaries and leaders, was deposed from his throne, and condemned to a lower circle in the Inferno of Heretics than any of his predecessors. For in the meantime, the doctrine of ' sacramental grace ' which was started by the Stoic Realism of TertuUian, had been extended by succeeding Fathers until it embraced not only the water and the bread and wine, but relics and images as well ; and was soon to over-spread the whole field of ecclesiastical discipline and ritual. But the Stoicism of TertuUian which ousht to have accompanied the extension of these practices as their theoretical basis, was inconvenient, by reason of its insistence on the corporeality of God. It was replaced, accordingly, by the Philosophy of Aristotle, which, while it possessed the advantage of everywhere making bodily things instinct with spiritual power, at the same time made of God a Spirit, and not a body. It became, in consequence, the official philosophy of the Catholic Church, and has remained so, down through the Middle Ao-es to our own time. With these preliminary observations, we are now in a position to proceed to consider the variations which were made by Origen in the theology of the time. And perhaps we cannot better bring out their peculiar features than by instituting a running comparison between them and the Neo-Platonism which moves throughout on parallel lines with them, and in IREN.EUS; TERTULLIAN; ORIGEX. 437 the mould of wliicli he consciously cast them. If, then, -vve begin with his viev/ of the great problem of the nature of the Godhead which was soon to rend the Church in twain, we shall find that just as in Neo-Platonism the Logos and the World are both emanations from the Supreme One, and are, on the analogy of rays from their central source, co-eternal with that Supreme One ; so with Origen^ God the Father must always have been a Creator, and the World always have had an existence ; and, therefore, God the Son as the creator of the World must also have been co-eternal with the Father — and not, as with Tertullian and most of the Ante-Nicene Fathers, begotten by God, only when he was wanted for the creation of the World, In taking up this position, Origen happens to fall into line with orthodoxy. In his second position, however, he is less fortunate. For, again, just as in Neo-Platonism the Logos was inferior to tlie Supreme One, and the Soul of the World to the Lo2:os — as beino- emanations at the first and second removes respectively — so with Origen, God the Son is inferior to God the Father, and God the Holy Ghost to God the Son — and here he falls into heresy. But by reason of this very inferiority of the Son and the Holy Ghost to the Father, Oi'igen is enabled logically to assign a division of labour to each of the three Persons, which greatly reduces the complexity of the Problem of Salvation ; for in accordance -with this idea of inequality and inferiority, he makes God the Father preside over the Universe as a ichole, God the Son over the narrower field of rational svuls — the special province of salvation — and God the Holy Ghost over the members of the Church only. Having in this way thrown out the Universe as a Avhole from his purview, we find that just as in Neo-PIatonism the reasonable souls of the Universe — stars, planets, sun, and moon (all of whom are gods), demons, men, etc. — are all of the same substance and nature as the Logos from whom they are emanations ; so too with Origen, his national souls, who consist of gods, thrones, principalities, 438 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. powers, stars, angels, demons, anil men, are of the same nature as God the Son who created them and bears sway over them. And as, further, In Neo-Platonism, the niimher of these souls Is strictly limited, so too Is It with Orlgen — the only distinction being, that Avhereas In Neo-Platonlsm the angels and men who fell did so because of the mixture of matter in their composition ; with Orlgen they fell, because of their rebellious and disobedient loills. And just as In Neo^ Platonism, too, bodies were given these fallen spirits, of a. nature and quality coiTCsponding to the depth of their fall, and the amount of matter in their composition ; so, too, is it with Orlgen — the angels having bodies of ether given them,, men bodies of flesh, and demons bodies of darkness. And 60 the parallel between Neo-Platonism and the theology of Orlgen, goes on with almost wearying monotony. For just as with Plato, again, human souls have to purify themselves by successive rounds of re-incarnation*; so, too, Is it with Orlgen — the only difference being that whereas with Plato these re-incarnating souls have to plod their weary eternal rounds of punishment and sorrow, until bitter experience has purged them of the last trace of Injustice, disobedience, and folly, and so they regain their lost homes among the stars ;. with Orlgen, the process of re-incarnation which had been going on until the appearance of Christ on the scene, is then suddenly arrested ; for by the work he has accomplished by his death on their behalf, he lifts fallen angels and fallen men alike from their degradation, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to their homes in Heaven. But Instead of this being done through faitJt — as with Paul, Irenseus, and Tertulllan — it Is done through hioidedge primarily, as with the Gnostics, by the knowledge of who and what we are ; and secondly, by the ransom which was paid by the death of Christ,, not to the oftended justice of God as in later theology, but ta the demons for setting men free. Indeed, if the death of *See Appendix. IKEX^US ; TEUTULLIAN ; ORIGEX. 439 Christ is with Origen a sacrifice at all, it is in the sense, a he says, in which the martyrdom of the faithful is a sacrifice naraelv, as a victorv over the demons. On the problem, af)jain, of the nature of the union of the divine and human in Christ — Origen, like TertuUian and all the other Ante-Kicene Fathers, is unable to make the two unite without falling into heresy. He tries to solve the diflSculty by making the Logos unite himself only Avith a pure and spotless human soul to form the man Jesus ; but as the souls of men needing redemption are by no means pure and spotless, it is evident that unless the Logos took on himself our impure nature, for the purpose of making it pure and good by irradiating it with his own perfect purity and obedience, his victory would for fallen human souls be a barren one — and so void of effect for pm-poses of Salvation. In this, too, Origen is heretical. On the question of Church Government, again, Origen who, after the manner of Neo-Platonism, regards the visible Earthly Church as but the copy of an Invisible Heavenly one, is in consequence not disposed to submit it — except in mere exoteric matters of Church tradition and administration — to the guidance of the Bishops; but only to that esoteric wisdom of divine things, which can come fi'om knowledge alone. As regards those who have been guilty of 'mortal sins,' they cannot receive pardon on Earth, but can appeal only to that Invisible Church which is in Heaven. As for the second coming of Clirist on Earth — it had no place with the Alexandrian Fathers, as it had with Irenreus, TertuUian, and the Fathers of the West. Montanus, with his prophetesses and his New Jerusalem descending on Pepuza, had well-nigh killed it ; and the theology of Clement and Origen practically ex- tinguished it in the East. Caius the Presbyter made an attempt to extinguish it in the AVest; but it was premature; and the expectation of the Millennium lingered on there until the end of the Third Century, when it seems to have died a natural death. 440 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. In the meantime the Bishops of the Great Metropolitan Sees were drawing to themselves more and more power and authority- over all matters of faith, discipline, and morals; while the great See of Rome was slowly but steadily and surely marching to supremacy. But practical difficulties of administration were constantly arising, and tending to push the Church further and further from her old landmarks. In the early days, when Catecliumens were not allowed to be baptized until after a long and searching novitiate, Baptism itself was believed to be sufficient to preserve the believer ever after from the com- mission of ' mortal sins.' But from the time that raw and unseasoned converts began to pour into the Church from all sides — and especially when the sword of persecution swooped down upon them — many of those who had been baptized were found to fall away in the time of trial, and to deny their Lord and Master — and so fell into Avhat was regarded as the most heinous of mortal sins. To meet crises like these, the Church was obliged to abandon her old position — of the efficacy of Baptism to protect from sin — and accordingly after a number of preliminary and tentative deliverances of the same nature on the part of other Fathers, Ave find Cyprian boldly coming forward and declaring, tliat only sins committed before baptism were washed away by it, but that those sins committed after baptism were left untouched by its cleansing efficacy. What then was to be done with those who had been guilty of these post-baptismal sins % After the Decian persecutions, it would appear that the number of tliose who had been guilty of abjuring the faith and denying their Lord, was so great, that to have extruded them wholesale from the Church — leaving them to the tender mercies of God, as Novatian and others of the stricter sort recommended, or to the Invisible Church in Heaven, as Origen had advised — would have been to have driven hundreds back into Paganism again. After much controversy and even schism in consequence, the difficulty was met by Cyprian, who, acting on a theory of ' meritorious works ' let fall by his great IREN.EUS; TERTULLIAN; ORIGEX. 441 master Tertulllan, freely openeiT a way of pardon to all, by announcing that these meritorious works were to be regarded as so much to the credit side, as it were, in the balance sheet of good and evil ; on the one hand, as atonements for sin, and on the other as laying up a store of rewards for the future; making the distinction, however, that while ordinary good works such as Almso-ivins were efficacious as a set-off against ' venial sins,' Penances, and the more rigorous mortifications were absolutely essential for the atonement of the mortal sins which were now mainly in question, viz., the sacrificing to the Pagan gods, and the denying of Christ. And he further contended that when these penances had been accepted by the Church as satisfactory, the Bishops had the right, on the theory of ' the power of the keys,' to grant absolution. They had already claimed and exercised the right to allow repentant heretics to enter the Church without re-baptism, provided only that they underwent the ceremony of Confirmation or ' the laying on of hands' — a ceremony which was valid only when performed by the Bishops themselves. Absolution, in consequence, had now become a means of grace equal in value to Baptism ; but this absolution, requiring a priest, is still qualified by the belief in the efficacy of Penance and Meritorious A\'orks also. From this time, then, the Bishops had become a Priesthood, after the manner of the old Jewish Priesthood, as the necessary intermediaries between God and Man for the remission of Sins. With these variations in the matter of Ecclesiastical Authority, the theory of the Lord's Supper had to keep pace. With Ignatius, it had been a real conversion of the elements into the very body and blood of Christ ; with Justin and Irenaius, it had been an offiiring of thanksgiving for the fruits of the earth, getting all its value from the deposition of the believer, quite apart from the intervention of any priesthood to administer it ; with Tertullian, it had been at once a spiritual communication, and (in accordance with his Stoic Realism) a siqjetmatKval influence produced on the body by the ingestion 442 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. of the elements, and preparing it for immortality. But with Cyprian, it became a sacrifice — a duplicate in miniature of the suffering of Christ on the Cross, and having in itself all the virtue that attached to that sacred sacrifice. It had not only a special, but a general expiatory value, as in- corporating the Church and all its members with Christ. But with him, the Lord's Supper is more than a sacrifice ; it is an imparting of Divine gifts as well — a pledge of the in- corruptibility of the body, of the resurrection, and of the union of the flesh with the Holy Spirit ; it is the nourishment of the soul ; and, as containing Christ, is the bearer of truth, of knowledge, and of sanctification — and out of this speedily arose the celebration of the Mass. With Origen, on the contrary, it remained a feeding of the soul on the Son of God merely ; bearing the same relation to Christ that the symbol does to the thing symbolized. CHAPTER XII. THE TKlNITr. "TTP to this point In our history we have seen that the line ^^ of development of Christian doctrine, especially in reference to the person of Christ, was marked out beforehand by necessities inherent In the mediatorial scheme of Redemption and Salvation ; so that if tliat Scheme were to be complete and logic-proof at all points, Christ must be regarded as at once Eternal God and complete and perfect Man. But at the point now reached, with the Gospel of John in the Canon, and Christ from being as he was originally a man more specially favoured by God than other men, now become God or the Son of God, quite a new element enters to determine the future course of evolution of Christian doctrine, — the necessity, viz., of malntainino; the Unitv and Soverel^ntv of God. The necessity of enforcing this doctrine did not arise so long as Jesus was regarded as the Messiah and a man, but now that he was proclaimed to be a God, it was felt that in the midst of Pagan polytheism the doctrine of the unity and sovereignty of the Deity must be upheld at all costs. For the period accordinglv on which Ave are now enterinsj, it is evident that the narrow line along which orthodoxy must travel, will be bounded on the one hand bv the doctrine of the unitv and sovereignty of God the Father, and on the other by that of the co-eternity and co-equality of the Son : and that the tendency 444: THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. of heresy in consequence will be to overweight the unity and sovereignty at the expense of the co-eternity and co-equality, either by overloading and aggrandizing the person and office of the Father, or by degrading the nature of the Son. The first of these errors took form in the heresy of the Sabellians, the latter in that of the Arians. The feature common to all forms of the Sabellian heresy 13 that it was God the Father Himself who assumed our flesh and suffered and died for us, and not a historical person known as the Son ; and for this reason the adherents of this doctrine were in the West called Patripassians. In taking up this position they ])rofessed to be able to preserve the unity of God without derogating from the full divinity of Christ. This heresy first made its appearance in Rome and Asia Minor about the year 200 A.D. and is associated with the names of Noetus, Praxeas, Cleomenes, and Sabellius. Its simplest form perhaps was the doctrine of Noetus, who contended that the Christ who suffered and died was the Father Himself; the passages by which he supported this view being mainly those of John, X. 30, " I and my Father are One ; " and John xiv. 0, " He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." Cleomenes took up practically the same position and contended that it was the same God who was now visible, now invisible ; now tangible, now intangible; now mortal, now immortal; and that when He was unborn He was the Father, when born He was the Christ. To support this view he appealed to the Theophanies of the Old Testament where God appeared to Abraham, Moses, Jacob, and Joshua. Praxcas, again, declared that there was no difference between Father and Son but the flesh of the man Jesus, and appealed in proof to the same text to which Noetus liad appealed, " He that hath seen me hath seen the Father ; " as well as to Isaiah, xlv. '2^, "lam God, and there is none else." And lastly Sabellius from whom the heresy took its name, preferred to say that it was the same God who played like an actor the successive parts of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. In THE TKIMTY. 445 adding the Holy Gliost to tlie Father and Son, and so givhig the appearance of equality to the Father, Son, and Spirit, Sabellius we may remark in passing, prepared the way for the recognition of the real equality of these three Persons of the Godhead when the question at lust came up for discussion during the Arian controversy. And thus it was that in their anxiety to safeguard the unity and sovereignty of God, the Sabellians so aggrandized the part played by God the Father as to destroy the mediatorial efficacy of Christ in the scheme of Redemption and Salvation. For not only was the incarnation of God the Father too great a shock to traditional feeling, but the belief in the separate existence and personality of the Son as distinct from the Father had by this time become so deeply embedded in the doctrine of the Church, that the heresy although a wide-spread and a tenacious one, was easily enough put down when once its real slsfnificance and the havoc it would make in the scheme of Salvation began to be clearly seen. ^leanwhlle another heresy which had the same aim and object as that of the Sabellians, — the safeguarding of the unity and monarchy of God, — was arising, but this time from the opposite quarter of the theological field. For while Sal)ellianism tried to gain its end by aggrandizing the Father, the new heresy tried to gain it by depreciating the Son. This heresy was Arianism. The broad general position which it took up was that the Son far from being co-equal and co-eternal with God the Father was only a creature, made like other creatures out of Nothing, and liable to error and change ; that he was the Son of God in name only and by adoption, and not by nature; and that he differed from angels, men, and other created beings only in this, that he was nearer to God the Father than they. Now this doctrine had its historical root far back in the days of the primitive Church, at a time when it was believed that Jesus was a man who had been olorlfied and exalted to the 446 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. right hand of God for his obedience and good works, and would soon come again as Judge under the Kingship of God Himself. But now that the Son had in the Gospel of John attained to the rank of a God, jealousy for the unity and sovereignty of God the Father was for the first time definitively aroused ; and a determined attempt was in consequence made to degrade the Son to the rank of a man again. This attempt was first made at Eome by one Thcodotus, a leather-dresser from Byzantium, who, while admitting that Christ had grown up under the special influence of the Holy Spirit, nevertheless boldly denied his Divinity ; appealing in support of this position to the Old Testament prophecies, which declared that the Messiah should be born of a woman, and to the Gospel declarations of his humanity , and affirming that the union between the Divine and human in Jesus was a moral union merely, and that only a moral superiority separated him from other men. Artemon, too, allowed the moral and spiritual oneness of Jesus with the Father, but denied his Divinity; while Paul of Samosata who was afterwards dejDOsed for heresy by a Council at Antioch, contended that instead of having any real pre-existence with the Father, Christ only pre-existed as an idea in the mind of God the Father, not existing in his own proper essence until his appearance on earth. Jesus could therefore only be called the Son of God through holiness, and not in his own proper nature ; and the truth was that instead of God becoming Man in the person of Jesus, Jesus the man had become God. All this led up to Arianism proper, which descended traditionally through this same Paul of Samosata to Arius by way of Lucian his teacher who was himself a pupil of Paul. But it was not until Orio^en and the Alexandrian School, building on St. John's Gospel and Avith the support of the Western Fathers, had enunciated the doctrine that the Logos or Son had come forth from the bosom of the Father for the purpose of creating the world, that Arianism assumed its own proper expression, which was that the Son although THE TRINITY. 447 with the Father before the workl and for the purpose of creating the world, was nevertheless only a creature made by God, and neither co-equal nor co-eternal Avith Him. As was naturally to be expected during the long continuance of the controversy various stages of degradation were observable. The pure Ai'ians would not even admit that the Son was like the Father in nature ; the Eusebians or Court party, again, while admitting a general likeness of nature denied any likeness of substance ; while the Semi-Arians going so far as to admit a likeness of substance (homoiousion) refused to admit the identity of substance (homoousion) which was the test of orthodoxy. Now this heresy unlike Sabellianism which was refuted by the explicit declaration both of Scripture and the tradition of tho Fathers that the Son was a distinct personality separated from the Father, found such abundant support not only in the Gospel of John, in Tradition, and in unguarded expressions of the Fathers, but also in the reigning philosophy of Neo-Platonism, that before it was finally exi^elled it had well-nigh rent the Church in twain. The Gospel of John it will be remembered, although opening boldly with the broad declaration that " In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was Avith God, and the Word was God," nevertheless contains so many detached passages pointing to the subordination of the Son to the Father, as to neutralize the force of the original declaration, or afford room for interpreting it in a spiritual or allegorical rather than in a literal sense. It was said that the identity of the Son with the Father was a moral rather than a natural identity ; and that " in the beginnino- " meant not from ever- lasting but from a point of time immediately prior to the creation of the world. And indeed these views are largely borne out, not only by many isolated passages, but by the general spirit and impression of the Avhole gospel. For although it nowhere definitively countenances the heresy that the Son is difi'erent in nature or substance from the Father, still 448 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. in all that concerns the speech or action of the Son we find distinctly stated there that the Father suggests the words which the Son is to utter, and gives the command which the Son is to obey ; so much so, indeed, that the impression is everywhere left that the Son is the purely passive instrument in the hands of the Father, or else His echo and mouthpiece. Among other instances, for example, we may take John v. 19, where Jesus states that he can do nothina; of himself but what he sees the Father do ; or again, John xii. 49, where he says " I spake not from myself ; but the Father which sent me, He hath given me a commandment what I should say and what I should speak." In everything he follows the Father's initiative. "As the Father hath sent me, even sa send I you into the world" he says in reference to his disciples (John xx. 21). Even his life is derivative. " For as the Father hath life in Himself, even so gave He to the Son also to have life in himself " (John v. 26). It is nowhere said, as Dr. Martineau points out, "that all things that the Father is am I," but only " all things that the Father hath are mine." And although it is said that the Father is in the Son (John x. 38), it is also said (xiv. 28) " the Father is greater than I ; " and (xvii. 3) that to the Father alone belongs the name of true God. But besides these passages from the Gospel of John, the Arian heresy of the inferiority of the Son to the Father receives support from many passages scattered throughout the Old and New Testaments. In Matthew xix. 17, for example, Jesus himself is made to say " why callest thou me good, there is none good but One, that is God." In Mark xiii. 32 again he goes so far as to declare that no one knows the time of his second advent, neither the angels in heaven, nor himself, but only the Father. So too again in I. Corinthians xv. 28, Paul declares that in the last times the Son himself shall be subject to " Him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all." Atlianasius in his orations against the Arians singles THE TlilMTY. 449 out for refutation many passages quoted by them in support of their doctrine. Among others lie mentions Hebrews i. 4 where it is said Christ was made so much better than the angels — the implication being that he is a creature and inferior to God the Father. Also Hebrews iii. 2 where his faithfulness is compared to that of Moses, as if he were merely a man like him. Again Acts ii. 3G where it is said that God had made Jesus both Lord and Christ. And a favourite passage of the Arians to prove that Christ was not co-eternal with God, viz., Proverbs viii. 22 " the Lord created me in the beginning of his ways for his works," and so on. Now although many of these passages may be said to have an allegorical interpretation, or to refer exclusively to the huinan nature of Christ, still they were sufficient in number and importance to justify the existence of the heresy Avhen once the question of the relation of the Son to Father had been definitively raised. But besides being strongly supported by Scripture, the Arian heresy received the support in one or other of its main positions, of practically all the earlier Fathers of the Church both in the East and West. The heresy, as we have seen, differed from what was afterwards to be the orthodox doctrine mainly in two points, viz., in its denial of the co-eternity of the Son with the Father, and in its denial of his co-equality — the Western and Asiatic Fathers denying the co-etemity, the Alexandi'ian Fathers the co-equality. A few words on the causes of this phenomenon may not be out of place here, and will help perhaps to make the nature of the controversy more clear. At the outset then it is necessary to remark that it was the Neo-Platonic Philosophy which furnished the mould or frame- work into which the Fathers of the Church cast their speculations on the Godhead, when once Christ had been elevated to the position of a God, and the three persons of the Trinity, — the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, — were seen to correspond in nature and function to the three abstractions of F F 450 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITV. Neo-Platonism, — the Supreme One, the Logos, and the World- Spirit, respectively. This Neo-Platonic philosophy it may be mentioned in passing had been inaugurated at Alexandria by a Jew named Philo, about the time of Christ; and its main contentions were tliat the Logos emanated from the Supreme One at a first remove, and the World-Spirit from the Logos again at a second remove, — much in the way in which a ray of light emanates from the sun, or a spring from its fountain head — and being like these coeval with their central source. Now it was the author of the fourth Gospel who was the first to definitively identify Christ with the Logos of Neo-Platonism ; but whether it were from the general impression left by that Gospel, or from the tradition of the Church, or from the difficulty of conceiving a Being possessed of will and personality like Christ without a definite beginning ; certain it is that with both the Western and Eastern Fathers, with Justin, Tatian, Tertullian, Novatian, Hilary, and the rest, it was taken for granted that although the Logos might have existed with the Father from eternity, the Son had not, but on the contrary had come into existence only when he was wanted as the instrument of the Father for creatins; the World. Tertullian put the matter in his direct and pregnant way when he affirmed that there was no need of a Son before there was a world to create or sinners to judge ; from which he argued (contra Herraog. iii.), that there must have been a time when the Son was not — a main position of what was afterwards to be the Arian heresy. With the Alexandrian Fathers, again, the case was different. They were more deeply imbued and interpenetrated with the Neo-Platonic philosophy which flourished side by side with them at Alexandria than were the Western and Asiatic Fathers; and accordingly more closely identified the Father, Son, and Spirit with the Supreme One, the Logos, and the World-Spirit of Neo-Platonism. The consequence was that just as the Logos was co-eternal with the Supreme One in Neo-Platonism, so they THE TiilNlTY. 451 made the Son co-eternal with the Father in their theology — and not, like the Western and Asiatic Fathers, dating merely from before the creation of the world. But while thus keeping clear of heresy on the question of the co-eternity of the Son with the Father, tliey fell into it on the question of the co- equality. For with their passion for carrying out to its full extent the analogies between the Trinity of the Godhead and the Trinity of Neo-Platonism, they made the Son inferior to the Father as being begotten of Him, in the same way as the Neo- Platonists made the Logos inferior to the Supreme One as being an emanation at the first remove from it. They thus denied the co-equality of the Son with the Father, and so fell into what, when once the question was raised, became a heresy. In this Avay then the Western and Asiatic Fathers by denying the co-eternity of the Son witli tlic Father, and the Alexandrian Fathers by denying the co-equulity, lent, either directly or by implication, either wittingly or unwittingly, the weight of their great authority to the Arian heresy. But a main support of the heresy, especially with the thoughtful, was its logical con- sistency, if it may be so called, its harmony with the laws of just thinking ; whereas the orthodox view was encompassed with difficulties on every hand, and outraged all the laws of ordinary human thought. If, for example, the very conception of a son is of one born later than his father how could it be said that the Son was co-eternal with the Father ? To be co- eternal he would have to be an emanation, he could not be a personality, and so not one of the persons of the Godhead. On the other hand if he were a person and not a mere emanation, he must have had a beofinninsj of existence, and if so then there must have been a time when he was not. In other words he must have been created by the Father, and so could have been God in name only or by adoption, and not in nature and essence. If on the other hand he really were God, then there must be two Gods, and so on. And the same kind of reasoning applied equally to the Holy Ghost. 452 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. And yet in spite of the fact that Scripture, the tradition of the Fathers, and human reason itself were all arrayed on the side of the Arian heresy, so deep was the necessity if the Scheme of Salvation were not to perish, that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost should be one God and not three, and that the Son and Holy Ghost should be of one substance and one with the Father, should be co-equal and co-eternal with Him, that the heresy had to be put down and refuted at all hazards. Now it was to Athanasius that the Church was indebted for this service ; and it must be confessed that he did it with an originality, penetration, and acuteness that left nothing to be desired, and with a fulness and completeness of thought and arcjument which have left all the succeeding Fathers but pensioners on his bounty. We have now to see how this was done. We may begin by frankly admitting that the Arian arguments when applied to the ordinary Avorld of Time and Space are irrefragable. A son being born after his father cannot be co-equal in age with him, nor among a people to whom the Koman Law of the absolute power of a father over his children was an axiom of thought, can he be co-equal in power and authority with him. But Athanasius pointed out that Time and Space themselves are but creations of God, having their beginning with the creation of the world ; and are not, therefore, co-eternal with Him. A logic of Time and Space therefore is only applicable to questions involving the relation of the Son to the world of Time and Space which he created ; but not at all to questions involving the relation of the Son to the Father who by the hypothesis exists in an Ever-present Eternity beyond the realm of Time and Space. So that instead of figuring Existence as the Arians did, as liaving a beginning in Time with the Father, and going on in Time to the creation of the world, Athanasius figured it as an eternal A^ou; — tapering off" at the creation of the world into the little drawn-out tail as it Avere of Time and Space in whicli we now dwell. He argues THE TRINITY. 453 nccordingly that to all existences lying before this point of creation the logic of Eternity alone is applicable ; and only to tliose existing after it the logic of Time and Space, that is to say the logic of the ordinary human understanding. Now tlie relation of the Father to the Son, lying as it does before this point, is a relation of Eternity, and is to be determined by the logic of Eternity, and not bv that of Time. Athanasius accordingly taking the Arian doctrine of the relation of the Son to the Father as that of posterior to anterior in Time, and eliminating the element of Time as illegitimate, got instead a relation of co-eternity. Again, taking the Arian doctrine of the separation of the Son from the Father in Space as a ray is t?eparated in place from its source, and eliminating the element of Space, he got from it a relation of co-inherence ; that is to say a relation in Avhicli the Son is in the Fatlier and the Father in the Son — a relation ^vliich to ordinary logic is as incomprehensible as a box which at one and the same time is inside another and yet outside of it ! And now observe that as superiority in point of dignity or authority is a matter quite independent of Time and Space, tlie Church has always been able without contradiction to uphold the primacy of the Father while admitting the equality and sameness in nature of the Son — a j)osition expressed by Hilary in the paradox that " the Father is the greater without the Son being les.s," and explained by Gregory Nazianzen as follows : — That the Father was both equal to and greater than the Son, greater in reference to His being the initiator and cause, but equal as to His nature. In this way then Athanasius defended the unity, co-eternity, co-equality, and co-inherence of tlie Father, Son, and Spirit against all attacks from Scripture, Tradition, and the laws of ordinary human thought ; and so prevented Christianity from becoming disintegrated by the degradation of the Son to a creature, or by a return to a modified Polytheism. But in stationing the Son at the point between the eternal Now of the Father on the one side, and the World of Time 454 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. and Space on the other, Athanasins was able to account as well for those passages in Scripture which were adduced in support of the Arian heresy. For while that side or aspect of the Son Avhich is turned towards the Father explains his real nature, viz., his unity, co-equality and co-eternity with the Father ; the side or aspect turned to the World of Time and Space accounts for what Scripture says of him in his relations with the World. It explains all those instances of grace and con- descension on the part of the Son, in which he appears less than he is in his real nature ; — indeed without this very condescension of his in framing the world, we should not, as Newman says, have been here to be instructed in the mystery of the Godhead. It accounts for his appearance in the form of an angel to the patriarchs of the Old Testament. It accounts for the numerous passages quoted by the Arians to show that he was a creature born in Time, as for example when, in Proverbs viii. 22, it is said that " God created him in the beginning of his ways for his works ; " or when Paul, in Romans viii. 29, says he was the '* First-born among many brethren ; " or again, in Colossians i. 15, Avhere he calls him the " First-born of creation ; " or again, in Revelation iii. 14, where he is called the " Befjinnino- of the crention of God," and so on ; in all such passages it will be observed he is not called the first-born of God but the first- born of creation. AVhen he is spoken of in relation to God it is always as the Only-begotten. By this distinction Ijctween what the Son was in his essential nature and what he was in relation to the world of Time, Athanasius completely outflanked his opponents, and placed the mystery of the Trinity on a basis which, so far as Christian thought is concerned, it securely occupies to this day. He establislied the doctrine of the unity, co-eternity and co-equality of the Father, Son, and Spirit against the apparent sense at least of Scripture, the traditions of the Fathers, and even the logic of human reason itself ; against 8abellianism and Patripassianism, which would have reduced THE TRINITY. 455 the Son and the Spirit to the merely temporary manifestations or masks behind which the same God the Father appeared ; and against the Arianism which would have made of the Trinity a polytheism of three separate Gods, of whom the Father alone would he real and the other two decjraded to the rank of mere creatures. The full godhead of the Son having been settled by Athanasius, it was inevitable almost that controversy should next centre on the question of his Manhood ; and this naturally turned on the difficulty of conceiving how the Divine and human could exist side by side in one personality without some sacrifice either of the full divinity or of the full manhood. The full divinity having been conceded, doubt was accordingly next thrown on his complete manhood ; and ApoUinaris of Laodicea broke ground on this issue by boldly declaring that although Christ had a human body and passions he had no human mind or will, — that principle being supplied him by the Logos of God Himself. But as it was necessary if the scheme of Ecdemption was to be efficacious that Christ should be full and complete man as well as full and complete God, this emasculated conception of ApoUinaris was condemned as heresy by the Council of Constantinople, 381, A.D. The attempt to make the human and the Divine in Christ dove- tail more harmoniously by paring away parts of his humanity, having failed, there was nothing left but to determine how the full divinity and full humanity could conceivably be bound up in a single personality. And in this only two alternatives weic open for heresy. Either tlie two natures could be kept so distinct that sufficient inter[)cnetration to keep them parts of one single personality was not possible, or else the two natiu-es could be so confounded as to lose all that was distinctive in either. The first was the Xestorian heresy, and among other things it asserted that although Mary was the mother of Christ she was the mother not of the God in Christ but onlv of the 456 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. human part of his nature. In the same way while admitting that it was Christ who suffered and died and was buried and rose again, it held that as God was impassible and incapable of suffering, it could only be the human part of Christ that underwent these experiences. And in this it was supported by John li. 19, where the temple of his body is distinguished from him who should raise it up. Then again, while admitting that worship was due to Christ, it held that it was only to the God in him and not to the man. In this way by keeping the Divine and human in Christ so far apart that like oil and water they could not interpenetrate, it made it impossible for the ' Scheme of Salvation ' in which Christ died for man to have any efficacy. It was accordingly condemned as a heresy at the Council of Ephesus, 431 A.D. Nestorius having failed, by keeping the two natures in Christ 80 far apart that it was impossible to unite them for any object in which both were needed, Eutyches next attempted to solve the problem by combining the two so intimately that, as in a chemical compound, although the different elements were there in full, they formed a compound nature different from either. To this compound nature each and every act of Christ was referred. But in taking up this jiosition Eutyches practically admitted that the human nature which Christ came to redeem was different from his own, and so made the scheme of re- demption of no effect. Accordingly this too had to be condemned as heresy at the Council of Chalcedon 451 A.D. The only position left to occupy was the one on Avhich this Council put the seal of orthodoxy. The dual nature of Christ as settled by this Council may be compared to electricity which, itself one, exists equally in two independent and opposite poles. In this Council it was declared that " one and the same Son and Lord Jesus Christ is to be acknowledged as being perfect in his God- head and perfect in his humanity ; truly God and truly man with a natural soul and body ; of like essence with the Father as to his Godhead, and of like essence with us as to manhood; THE TRINITY. 451 in all things like us, sin excepted ; begotten of the Father from all eternity as to his Godhead, and of Mary the mother of God in these last days for us and for our salvation, as to his man- hood ; recognized as one Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten ; of two natures, unconfounded, unchanged, undivided, inseparable, the distinction of natures not all done away by the union, but rather the peculiarity of each nature preserved and combined into one substance, not separated or divided into two persons, l3ut One Son, Only-begotten God, One Word, the Lord Jesus ■Christ, as the prophets before taught concerning him, so he the Lord Jesus Christ hath tauoht us and the creed of the Fathers hath transmitted to us." And so the first four General Councils, viz., of Nice, 'Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon having placed beyond the reach of attack the great doctrines of the Trinity, and of the full Divinity and full humanity of the person of Christ; the Scheme of Salvation which carried in its bosom the precious freicjht of Christian Movalitv which was the condition of entrance ■on the joys of that salvation, and was the great end the World- Spirit had at heart, was at last secure ; — and with it the Intellectual Develo]>mcnt of Antiquity practically reaches its •close. Such minor modifications of Christian doi>;ma as were made by Augustine and succeeding Fathers will, in so far as they are necessary to connect Catholicism with the Keformation and the rise of Modern Thought, receive attention in the next volume of this History. In the meantime a chapter or two exhibiting in rough outline the insutficiency of the successive codes of Pagan morality to advance Civilization, as Avell as the impossibility of their liolding the field in the presence of the new and higher morality of Christianity, is still necessary if Ave -would fully realize that Christianity in taking over all that was true in Pagan j)hilosophy, took over also all that was good in its morality, at the same time that it raised Morality itself to a ihigher plane. I CHAPTER XIII. PAGAN MORALITY. "I N the Immediately preceding chapters we have traced from stage to stage the changes which were necessary to be made in the original deposit left by Jesus to his disciples before the Gospel scheme of Redemption was secure against attack from within and from without. These changes we traced in strict connexion with their immediate natural causes and with the intellectual and moral necessities of the place and hour which called them forth, until at last they were all merged in the fully developed doctrine of the Trinity. But before the task which we have set before us is finished, it is necessary that we should also briefly trace the evolution of Pagan Morality, account for some of its anomalies, and indicate some of the considerations which made it inevitable that in one or all of its forms it should at last be swallowed up in Christianity. And that this may be presented with the greater clearness, it may be well to gather up into a compact and orderly sequence some of those general principles which lie scattered here and there in the course of this History. In a general way then we saw to begin with that the great end which the Genius of the World — call it Providence, Fate, or what you will — has at heart in Civilization; is the establish- ment of higher and higher codes of morality and of social relations among men. These codes we saw, too, were laid PAGAN MORALITY, 459 down like oreolnijlcal strata in the most re