GIFT OF 
 JANE Ko FATHER 
 
r'l 
 
RULING IDEAS IN EARLY AGES 
 
RULING IDEAS 
 IN EARLY AGES 
 
 AND THEIR RELATION TO 
 
 OLD TESTAMENT FAITH 
 
 LECTURES DELIVERED TO 
 GRADUATES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD 
 
 BY 
 
 J. B. MOZLEY, D.D. 
 
 REGIUS PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY, AND CANON OF CHRIST CHURCH 
 
 gorft 
 
 E. P. BUTTON AND COMPANY 
 
 MDCCCLXXVII 
 
II 
 
 7 
 
 TO 
 
 THE RIGHT HONOURABLE 
 
 LORD BLACHFORD, 
 
 IN MEMORY OF COLLEGE DAYS, 
 
 WHEN HE FIRST LEARNT TO ESTIMATE 
 
 HIGH GIFTS OF MIND AND HEART, 
 
 THIS VOLUME 
 
 IS INSCRIBED 
 BY HIS AFFECTIONATE FRIEND, 
 
 THE AUTHOR. 
 
 CHRIST CHURCH, Nov. 23, 1876. 
 
AD VERTISEMENT. 
 
 THE following course of ten Lectures was delivered to 
 Graduates mostly engaged in tuition in Michaelmas 
 and Lent terms, 1874-1875. 
 
 The Lecture on St. Augustine's controversy with 
 the Manichseans is one of a previous course, but is 
 added here as bearing closely upon the main subject 
 of the present volume. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 ABRAHAM. 
 
 Abraham the introducer of a new and pure religion Early paganism 
 could not conceive the worship of God The character of Abraham 
 as a man of independent thought The conception of one God 
 brought with it the question of the Divine justice Abraham 
 lived in the future His prophetic look singled out by our Lord 
 Vestiges of prophecy among the heathen : the Sibyl Physical 
 side of prophecy : Bacon Difference in the treatment of prophecy 
 by paganism and true religion Abraham's qualifications for 
 founding a true religion Abraham the father and also the apostle 
 of his nation Looking forward, he sees his own greatness as a 
 founder A posthumous name not a Gospel motive The Gospel 
 the tidings of a real immortality .... Pages 1-30 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 SACRIFICE OF ISAAC. 
 
 Usual answer to objectors on the summary mode of dealing with human 
 life in Old Testament Bishop Butler Certain Divine commands 
 once proved by miracles would not be proved by them now 
 Rights of human life part of the moral progress of mankind One 
 remarkable want in the ancient mind : the idea of the individu- 
 ality of man The slave, the wife, the son, all property of another 
 Oriental law Spartan law Roman law Prevalence of human 
 sacrifices in ancient religions These defective ideas traceable in 
 Patriarchal Jewish minds No opposing argument to a miracle in 
 
xii Contents. 
 
 Abraham's mind Abraham sacrifices a life which he thought his 
 own God suits His commands to the age Self-surrender of the 
 act Out of an inferior state of ideas an act of sublime self- 
 sacrifice was extracted The rudeness of an age admits of exalted 
 acts built on it Every period of the world contributes a special 
 moral beauty , Pages 31-63 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 HUMAN SACRIFICES. 
 
 Theory of one school that Abraham's sacrifice was after the pattern of 
 the day Scripture account plainly against this idea The sacri- 
 fice of Isaac not an offering for sin but a trial of faith No sin 
 to be atoned for mentioned Abraham believed that the victim 
 would be restored to life Argument that this would take away 
 the merit, answered The act designed as a type of the Great 
 Propitiation the Brazen Serpent The heathen recognised the 
 principle of sacrifice Summary of this and preceding Lecture 
 
 Pages 64-82 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 EXTERMINATING WARS. 
 
 The right of God to the life of nations the same as to the life of indi- 
 viduals Argument of objectors Miracles Samaritan village 
 Punishment of children for sins of fathers Oriental practice of 
 this mode of retribution Justice sometimes becomes a passion 
 All passion tends to the unreasonable, and makes objects for 
 itself Livy Aristotle Blood composes identity in Oriental 
 justice Israelites shared the general feeling The command to 
 destroy whole nations did not offend their ideas of justice 
 Distinction in the mode of holding the principle No resistance 
 to it in the moral sense in early ages Modern society is pene- 
 trated by a sense of individuality . . . .ffcgfcr 83-103 
 
Contents. xiii 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 
 VISITATION OF THE SINS OF FATHERS 
 UPON CHILDREN. 
 
 The task of separating the permanent from the temporary parts of the 
 l aw The Sermon on the Mount St. Paul only recognises the 
 perfect law What the Deity admits because of the hardness of 
 men's hearts Commands given in judicial anger Balaam The 
 laws of marriage, divorce, retaliation Second Commandment 
 In the old dispensation children suffered judicially We do not 
 now understand the Second Commandment as judicial but didactic 
 So understood before the end of Jewish dispensation Ezekiel 
 Bishop Taylor Bishop Sanderson Double aspect of extra- 
 ordinary Divine commands Korah, Dathan, and Abiram ; Achan, 
 Saul, etc. Our interpretation of these acts differs from the contem- 
 porary one Pages 104-125 
 
 LECTURE VI. 
 JAEL. 
 
 In what light would an enthusiastic mind of that day view the 
 Israelitish invasion? Sight of a whole nation worshipping God 
 Ancient pagan world believed truth to belong to the few Civil con- 
 stitution of Israel contrary to that of all heathen nations Israel 
 a theocracy The Exodus The promulgation of the Law The 
 entrance into Canaan Extraordinary fact of a woman rousing her 
 countrymen to war St. Augustine's supposition : Jael must have 
 known the state of affairs Destruction of the inhabitants primary 
 condition of conquest This condition only suspended Extracts 
 from Dr. Stanley The Judges not civil but military rulers Office 
 of Judge Too commonly imagined that Jael was apart from the 
 religious influences of the time More probably one with Israel 
 in faith The Kenezites Jehonadab Jael's partizanship Who 
 Sisera was His probable character and importance Jael's 
 history a fragment Pages 126-152 
 
xiv Contents. 
 
 LECTURE VII. 
 
 CONNECTION OF JAEL'S ACT WITH THE 
 MORALITY OF HER AGE. 
 
 The command on which Jael acted not one in the full sense of com- 
 mands to Christians The treachery of her act St. Paul's posi- 
 tion on the duty of truth-speaking When the bonds of charity 
 are broken, does this affect the duty of truth ? The argument of 
 the murderer Essential for a perfect defence of Jael that the 
 command on which she acted should be without reserve This a 
 command in accommodation Great omission of that day, idea 
 of human individuality Duke of Wellington's character of the 
 Hindus Does the defence of Jael's act imply approbation of the 
 whole of Scripture ? Deborah judged according to the standard 
 of her own day Jael's a grand act, on the principle, Love your 
 friend and hate your enemy Different position of lying in 
 civilisation and barbarism The creed of Love your friend and 
 hate your enemy fostered subtle mixtures of character Esprit de 
 corps We are apt to suppose rude ages simple What civilisation 
 has done for truth and plain dealing . . Pages 153-179 
 
 LECTURE VIII. 
 LAW OF RETALIATION. 
 
 Biblical critics do not make allowance for a progressive revelation 
 Legislation must be legislation for the present moment 
 Principle of accommodation Law of retaliation Dean Alford on 
 Matthew v. 38 : Thou shalt love thy neighbour and hate thine 
 enemy Effect of this law in creating esprit de corps Tacitus on 
 the Jewish temper The enemy not always a heathen to the Jew 
 Saul, Ahithophel Enemy in the Gospel Case where the enemy 
 was also enemy of God The damnatory Psalms Pages 180-200 
 
Contents. xv 
 
 LECTURE IX. 
 RETALIATION : LAW OF GOEL. 
 
 The law of Goel Michaelis Sanctioned by Moses Nothing optional 
 in this law Mistake of commentators on the passion of revenge 
 The task imposed by the law of Goel Men not always faithful 
 to rights of the dead Rude ages not without moderate tactics 
 Fines for murder Hindus Germans Death for death the only 
 way to meet murder Reference to Lecture V. Law of Goel not 
 an inhuman idea to that age Acts of modern enthusiasts 
 An imperfect idea may be moral at the root Principle of accom- 
 modation St. Augustine God may command in judgment 
 Opinions of commentators : Calvin ; Theodoret ; Tertullian ; 
 Chrysostom Objector's mode of treating imperfect morality 
 Early struggles of the great principle of justice Power at work in 
 the Jewish dispensation .... Pages 201-221 
 
 LECTURE X. 
 
 THE END THE TEST OF A PROGRESSIVE 
 REVELATION. 
 
 Answers to objectors to the foregoing argument A progressive 
 revelation may make use of imperfect moral standard It looked 
 forward An inward mind in the system taught ex cathedrd The 
 Prophets The end shows the design of the system While 
 accommodating itself to defective ideas it was eradicating them 
 No system of philosophy taught the rights of man The Bible 
 the charter of man's rights Ancient empire founded on the 
 insignificance of man The vast body of philosophy and poetry 
 formed by the Bible Pascal Great body of infidel literature 
 founded on same idea Shelley The communion of man with 
 God affected the relation of man with man The law thus con- 
 tained the secret of his elevation History shows the law to have 
 been above the nation The nation was terrified into a formal 
 
xvi Contents. 
 
 obedience The enforcement of law the task of one dispensation, 
 its fruits of another A progressive revelation must be judged by 
 its end Higher minds outgrew the law of their dispensation 
 Other nations stopped short In the Jewish nation alone the law 
 acted as a guide The great prophetic order The objector asks 
 why should Divine Kevelation be subject to conditions'? The 
 human will: its capacity of resistance The whole question 
 belongs to the fundamental difficulty of reconciling God's power 
 with man's free will Miracles Temporary morals only a 
 scaffolding Pages 222-253 
 
 LAST LECTURE. 
 THE MANICH^ANS AND THE JEWISH FATHERS. 
 
 St. Augustine as a controversialist His qualifications His first con- 
 troversy was with the Manichseans Language of Manichseanism 
 Hume taken with the theory Extracts from Hume John 
 Stuart Mill on his father's sympathy with dualism Zoroaster 
 and the Magi Manichaeanism differed from the ordinary type of 
 Oriental religions Aimed at being a universal religion Professed 
 to incorporate certain doctrines of Christianity into its system 
 Acknowledged no true Incarnation Objections of Manichseans 
 to Old Testament history It held the family life of the Patriarchs 
 in contempt, and endeavoured to substitute the Magi as forefathers 
 instead of the Old Testament Saints Faustus' language towards 
 them Answer of St. Augustine to these objections He acknow- 
 ledges an imperfect morality in the Old Testament ages This 
 does not affect his estimate of the Patriarchs' high sanctity 
 Fundamental unity between Patriarchs and Apostles 
 
 Pages 254-275 
 
 APPENDIX ...... Pages 
 
LECTURE I. 
 
 ABRAHAM. 
 
 Patriarch Abraham comes before us in Scrip- 
 -*- ture under the following main aspects : 
 
 1. He comes before us as the introducer of a new 
 and pure religious creed and worship new, I say, for 
 though the doctrine of one God was part of the prime- 
 val revelation, it had become much corrupted before 
 Abraham's time. " Your fathers," said Joshua to the 
 Israelites, "dwelt on the other side of the flood (i.e., 
 the Euphrates) in old time, even Terah, the father of 
 Abraham, and the father of Nachor : and they served 
 other gods" 1 (Note 1). The migration, then, from Chal- 
 daea was a religious one the migration of a family 
 which had cast off the gods of its country, adopted the 
 worship of one God, and sought a new home where it 
 might conduct this worship freely. And though the 
 " call " of Abraham is mentioned in Genesis 2 as sub- 
 sequent to, in St. Stephen's statement 3 as prior to, 
 the journey from Chaldaea, the whole voice of sacred 
 history declares Abraham to have been, under Divine 
 inspiration, the leader of that whole movement which 
 thus set up the worship of the true God in the place 
 of idols, and separated his family from the corrupt 
 religion of the world. " Put away," says Joshua, 
 
 1 Josh. xxiv. 2. 2 Gen. xii. 1. 3 Acts vii. 2, 3. 
 
 B 
 
2 Abraham. 
 
 " the gods which your fathers served on the other side 
 the flood;"' and "I took your father Abraham from 
 the other side the flood." 1 
 
 Open idolatry then was the religion of the genera- 
 tion in which Abraham was born ; he was brought up 
 and educated under it, it was in possession of the 
 ground, and it pressed upon him with all the power 
 of association and authority. But at a certain time 
 of life Abraham comes before us as having rejected 
 this creed and worship, having thrown off the chains 
 of custom, and released himself from the thraldom of 
 early associations : as holding the great doctrine of 
 one God, whom he worships by means of a spiritual 
 conception only, without the aid of figure or symbol. 
 He comes before us as the re-introducer into the world 
 of the great normal idea of worship ; that idea which, 
 descending through the Jewish and Christian dispensa- 
 tions in succession, is the basis of the religion of the 
 whole modern civilised world the worship of God. 
 All ancient religion, as distinguished from the primitive, 
 laboured under the total inability of even conceiving 
 the idea of the worship of God. It split and went to 
 pieces upon that rock ; acknowledging in a speculative 
 sense one God, but not applying worship to Him. The 
 local, the limited, the finite, was as such an object of 
 worship ; the Infinite as such was not : the one was 
 personal, the other impersonal ; man stood in re- 
 lation to the one, he could not place himself in 
 relation to the other. We discover in the Patriarch 
 whom God extricated from the self-imposed dilemma 
 
 1 Josh., xxiv. 14. 
 
Abraham. 3 
 
 of all ancient religion, and who was enabled to cast off 
 the yoke of custom and embrace new truth, the 
 strength of a true rational nature, as well as the 
 devotion of a reformer of religious worship. A Divine 
 revelation does not dispense with a certain character 
 and certain qualities of mind in the person who is the 
 instrument of it. A man who throws off the chains of 
 authority and association must be a man of extra- 
 ordinary independence of mind, and strength of mind, 
 although he does so in obedience to a Divine revelation; 
 because no miracle, no sign or wonder which accom- 
 panies a revelation, can by its simple stroke force human 
 nature from the innate hold of custom, and the ad- 
 hesion to, and fear of, established opinion ; can enable 
 it to confront the frowns of men, and take up truth 
 opposed to general prejudice, except there is in the 
 man himself, who is the recipient of the revelation, a 
 certain strength of mind and independence which 
 concurs with the Divine intention. It is the Divine 
 method and law that man should co-operate with God ; 
 and that God should act by means of men who are fit- 
 ting instruments ; and this law implies that those who 
 are God's instruments possess real character of their own 
 in correspondence with their mission. The mission to 
 set up or propagate new truth required in Abraham's 
 day, in the natural character of him who had to 
 execute it, something of the nature of what we call a 
 religious reformer in modern times. The recipient of 
 a new revelation must have self-reliance, otherwise 
 he will not believe that he has received it ; he will 
 not be sure of it against the force of current opinions, 
 
4 Abraham. 
 
 and men telling him on every side that he is mis- 
 taken. 
 
 Upon this principle then, that a Divine mission 
 requires the proper man, we discern in Abraham the 
 type which in modern language we call that of the 
 man of thought, upon whom some deep truth has 
 fastened with irresistible power, and whose mind 
 dwells and feeds upon the conviction of it. The 
 truth in the case of Abraham was the conception of 
 one God. And we may observe this great thought 
 was accompanied in his mind, as it has been in all 
 minds which have been profoundly convinced of it, 
 by another, which naturally attaches to it. We may 
 recognise in Abraham's colloquy with God over the 
 impending fate of Sodom, something like the appear- 
 ance of that great question which has always been 
 connected with the doctrine of the Unity of God 
 the question of the Divine justice. The doctrine of 
 the Unity of God raises the question of His justice 
 for this reason, that one God, who is both good 
 and omnipotent, being assumed we immediately 
 think, Why should He who is omnipotent permit 
 that which He who is in His own nature supremely 
 good, cannot desire, that is evil ? The thought, it 
 is true, does not come out in any regular or full form 
 in this mysterious colloquy ; and yet it hovers over 
 it; there are hints and forecastings of this great 
 question, which is destined to trouble the human 
 .intellect, and to try faith, and to absorb meditation, 
 as long as the world lasts. A shadow passes over, 
 the air stirs slightly, and there is just that fragment 
 
Abraham. 5 
 
 of thought and questioning, which would be in place 
 as the first dawn of a great controversy. " That be 
 far from thee," " that the righteous should be as the 
 wicked : " " shall not the Judge of all the earth do 
 right ? " l The Book of Job has been assigned a much 
 later date than the received one, by some, on the 
 ground that the deep vein of thought and sentiment 
 in it, the perception of the difficulty relating to the 
 Divine justice, belongs to a later, more philosophical 
 age of mankind, than that primitive one, to an age of 
 speculation. But it must be considered that this 
 question arises immediately upon the adoption of the 
 belief in one Supreme Being : so that, as soon as ever 
 the belief in the unity of God is obtained, the 
 question of His justice arises with it. "We need not, 
 therefore, on this sole account alter the date of the 
 Book of Job, when even in the rudiments of thought 
 which rise up in the colloquy over Sodom, we may 
 see the beginnings of that expression of the deep 
 sentiment of justice which the Book of Job gives 
 with such fulness ; and may recognise the germ of 
 that question which still continues to perplex the 
 human mind, and to agitate the atmosphere of 
 human poetry and philosophy. 
 
 2. Abraham comes before us as a person who 
 lives in the future, whose mind is cast forward, 
 beyond the immediate foreground of his own day, 
 upon a very remote epoch in the history of the world, 
 and fixed upon a remarkable event in the most distant 
 horizon of time, the nature of which is vague and 
 
 1 Gen. xviii. 25. 
 
6 Abraham. 
 
 dimly known to him, but which is charged with 
 momentous consequences, involving a change in the 
 whole state of the world. The revelation is made to 
 him, " In thee shall all families of the earth be 
 blessed ; " he looks onward perpetually to the accom- 
 plishment of this prediction. He has the idea in his 
 mind of the world's progress, of a movement in the 
 present order of things towards some great end and 
 consummation. This is a remarkable state of mind. 
 Ordinary men do not live in the future, and have 
 very little idea that things will ever be different 
 from what they are in their own day. The actual 
 state of the world around them is the type of all 
 existence in their eyes, and they cannot conceive 
 another mould or form of things, or even imagine 
 that there ever can be another; they are crea- 
 tures of present time, nor do they ever entertain 
 distinctly the idea of the future existence of the 
 world at all. It is therefore a fact to arrest us, even 
 if this was all we had a man in a primitive age of 
 the world, while he is standing upon the very threshold 
 of time, having distinctly before his eyes the future 
 existence of the world, and an improved condition of 
 it. In the mind of Abraham, though the nature of 
 the future is dim, the fact itself of a great future in 
 store for the world is "a clear conception ; he does not 
 regard things as stationary, as always going to be 
 what they are, but as in a state of progress ; he has 
 the vision of a great change before him which is 
 as yet in the extreme distance, but which, when it 
 does come, will be a conspicuous benefit to the human 
 
A braham. 7 
 
 race, a blessing in which all the families of the earth 
 will share. 
 
 This was a conception as foreign to an ordinary 
 mind of Abraham's day, as it would be to such a mind 
 now. Because his future is to us a known past, we 
 might be apt to imagine that the conception would 
 come as a matter of course ; and that people of that 
 early age of the world knew by an instinct that it 
 was an early age, and the predecessor of a later one. 
 But there was just as much difficulty in realising a 
 future of the world then, as there is now. The present 
 of that day made the same impression upon the genera- 
 tion of that day, that to-day's present does upon men 
 of to-day ; it was as much a boundary of the world's 
 horizon, and stood as much upon the very edge of 
 time, as to-day stands. We observe therefore some- 
 thing very extraordinary, and something entirely 
 opposed to the common habit of the human mind, in 
 the Patriarch Abraham's fixed look into futurity, 
 directed towards an indefinitely distant era of the 
 world. Our Lord Himself has singled out this 
 prophetic look of Abraham as something unex- 
 ampled in clearness, certainty, and far-reaching extent. 
 " Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day ; and he 
 saw it, and was glad." l This was a revelation made to 
 him indeed ; but he is equal to the revelation, he em- 
 braces it and concurs in his whole power of mind with it. 
 
 This is the first thing indeed we observe in con- 
 nection with the subject of early prophecy. It is the 
 preliminary and general condition of mind in the pro- 
 
 1 John viii. 56. 
 
8 Abraham. 
 
 phetical person which arrests us ; that he has the 
 future before him, that he thinks of the world's future, 
 and realises that it has a future, and brings home to 
 himself the unrolling powers of time. This fastening 
 of the mind upon the future, to whatever extent and 
 in whatever persons it existed in those very early ages 
 of the world to which the dawn of prophecy belongs, is 
 a most striking and remarkable feature of those ages ; 
 and we know that it existed even under paganism. 
 
 Upon the shores of the Mediterranean, in the 
 region where the great Roman poet meditated and 
 himself listened to the prophetical strain, stands the 
 traditional cave of the Cumsean Sibyl, the repre- 
 sentative of ancient prophecy, as it existed and held 
 its ground, not under the Judaic dispensation, but 
 parallel with it, and mounting to a common source. 
 It is difficult to speak of the Sibylline verses, corrupted 
 as they were soon after the Christian era, so that the 
 mass of the collection is obviously and glaringly 
 spurious. There is a primitive residuum however, the 
 style of which reveals a native source ; and the simple 
 prediction for which Virgil testifies is enough to show 
 the mind of the prophetess, not only with respect to the 
 subject of prophecy, but with respect to that general 
 grasp of the fact of a world's future, and that look 
 that travels forward and ranges over the distant 
 realms of time, which I have just mentioned. There 
 is the Sibyl upon her watch-tower, with her eye 
 carried onward to a distant horizon, which she but 
 dimly descries, but which is marked to her prophetic 
 eye with great events. But what an extraordinary 
 
Abraham. 9 
 
 state of mind is this to belong to any human being in 
 the earliest and most primeval era of paganism ! That 
 any man or woman should take the trouble then to 
 think of what would happen to the world a thousand 
 years off ! Were there not plenty of important things 
 to attend to then, without going into the future ? 
 Was there not the routine of nature and the custom 
 of society ? And did not every year and every day 
 bring its present life and its pressing business, its im- 
 mediate interests, then as now? The sun rose and 
 set, the seasons alternated; men ploughed in the 
 spring and gathered in the autumn, and social life ran 
 its round, and kings and states carried on their affairs, 
 and wars and festivals, famine and plenty, grief and 
 joy, made up the chequered life of man, the vicissi- 
 tudes of which seemed quite enough to occupy him. 
 Why should one person go beyond this present scene, 
 leap over generations, and think of the world as it 
 would be after ages had passed away ? What an iso- 
 lated eccentric journey for thought 1 What a dream 
 to take up and absorb the mind ! How strange an 
 image it presents to us yet this is the aspect in which 
 the Sibyl comes before us. In the crowded and 
 familiar scene of a then living and bustling paganism, 
 she is the devotee to the world's hereafter ; consecrated 
 to that idea and prospect, she gazes upon the last shore 
 of time ; and her sacred brow is lifted up above the 
 throng of common objects and concerns, that her eye 
 may rest upon a mysterious distance and an unknown 
 page of the future history of mankind ! It is strange, 
 amid the scattered fragments which constituted human 
 
io Abraham. 
 
 society then, to see even the recognition by one person's 
 mind of a common humanity a humanity that had a 
 career to run and an end to fulfil ; to see the great 
 problem and riddle of man's existence acknowledged, 
 and a solution expected, as the curtain which hung 
 over the Divine scheme folded up and disclosed 
 the final upshot of it. Amid the idolatry and cor- 
 ruptions of paganism, the reverence that was felt for 
 the Sibyl is a curious and beautiful remnant of the 
 early piety of the, world, for which we are hardly pre- 
 pared, and which comes across us with a surprise 
 which perplexes us. Is this really paganism that is 
 speaking ? It cannot be. It is early prophecy which 
 is still holding its ground on human nature, and in 
 popular thought, as a sentiment ; obtaining from 
 paganism a sacred rank for the Sibyl a rank that 
 has been continued by the Church. The Church has in- 
 corporated the holy prophetess of paganism in the root 
 of the Christian body, and given her a place in the 
 prophetical order by the side of the patriarchs and pro- 
 phets of old. She joins in the holy procession, which 
 begins with Adam, Seth, and Enoch, and ends with 
 the last Christian saint, martyr, and confessor : she is 
 acknowledged in the Church's hymns ; and the coun- 
 tenance which the painter has given her, symbolical 
 of her solemn gift, appears in the Christian gallery, 
 window, and pictured roof. 
 
 But the prophetic element in human nature has its 
 development also on the physical side. The modern 
 world's conception of its own future only pictures 
 indeed the continuation of a present movement, and 
 
Abraham. 1 1 
 
 does not cross the border of mystery ; yet it is an 
 instance of the prophetic vein in human nature. To 
 turn to Bacon's vision of the coming day : the Novum 
 Organum awakens us like a knock at the door ; it 
 is the first bell that rings and gathers the whole peal, 
 it is from first to last an announcement. It is coming, 
 the great manifestation of nature ; it is not come yet, 
 but it will be here soon ; it has been long coming, 
 and we have waited for it, now it is all but come. 
 " All the systems of philosophy hitherto have been 
 only so many plays, only creations of fictitious and 
 imaginary worlds ;" there have been "long periods of 
 ages," and only some few observations. Intellect has 
 not forwarded but impeded discovery, and " every- 
 thing has been abandoned to the mists of tradition, 
 the whirl and confusion of argument, or the waves and 
 mazes of chance/' One man has invoked his own 
 spirit, another has called in logic ; " the true path has 
 not only been deserted but intercepted and blocked 
 up, and experience has not only been neglected but 
 rejected with disgust." . . . "We cannot, therefore, 
 wonder that no magnificent discoveries worthy of 
 mankind have been brought to light, while men are 
 satisfied and delighted with such scanty and puerile 
 tasks." 1 
 
 All is vague and arbitrary, all is groping in the 
 dark ; the human mind is always pressing forward in 
 one direction, but it is unfit for transition. But there 
 is going to be something, and it is this awakening 
 and unfolding of a fresh morning which is the herald's 
 
 1 Novum Organum, Book I. 
 
12 Abraham. 
 
 call in the Novum Organum. There is the sensation of 
 being just on the borders of a great disclosure, while 
 as yet all at this moment sleeps ; of a new reign, of a 
 world just going to break forth into life. This consti- 
 tutes the characteristic note, the prophetic current, of 
 the Novum Organum ; we are shut out just at present, 
 nothing is seen ; but it is all announcement, all expecta- 
 tion, all the stir of something coming, all the sound of 
 trumpets, all the preparation for an era, all the break- 
 ing of a day. Bacon is seen in his principal aspect 
 as a prophet, he lives just on the edge of an age of 
 marvels, close upon it, still not in it, but foreseeing 
 it ; he lives in a future ; the precursor is gone forward 
 out of his own age. He lives not amidst particulars, 
 but only in a vision of general discovery. All will have 
 the suddenness, the brightness, the inexplicableness 
 of magic, though he foretells it and knows it is coming. 
 Bacon insists upon the chance incident to discovery, 
 how completely it will baulk all people who think 
 they have the road to it, who go upon premisses, 
 and see their way to conclusions. " Had any one 
 meditated on balistic machines and battering-rams as 
 they were used by the ancients, whatever application 
 he might have exerted, and though he might have con- 
 sumed a whole life in the pursuit, yet would he never 
 have hit upon the invention of flaming engines acting 
 by means of gunpowder ; nor would any person who 
 had made woollen manufactures and cotton the subject 
 of his observation and reflection have ever discovered 
 thereby the nature of the silkworm or of silk/' 1 ... "If 
 
 1 Novum Organum, Book II. 
 
Abraham. 13 
 
 before the discovery of the compass any one had said 
 that an instrument had been invented by which the 
 quarters and points in the heavens could be exactly 
 taken and distinguished ; men would have entered into 
 disquisitions on the refinement of astronomical instru- 
 ments, . . . but that a mere mineral or metallic 
 substance should yet in its motion agree with that 
 of such bodies would have appeared absolutely in- 
 credible." 1 
 
 Thus do the great discoveries flash forth like magic 
 in Bacon's future, not as they were concerned with 
 causes at all wild conceptions, offsprings of chance, 
 born amid the incongruous and heterogeneous. A man 
 cannot set about making them ; each " comes not by 
 any gradual improvement and extension of the arts, 
 but merely by chance." 2 How then does Bacon 
 prophesy " a vast mass of inventions," an age of dis- 
 coveries, an " instauration," a fulfilment of hopes, the 
 new light of axioms, the advancement of the sciences, 
 the interpretation of Nature, and the reign of man ? 
 How does he prophesy a harvest of discoveries and a 
 manifestation of Nature? Because he saw that though 
 each discovery by itself may be a chance, when a great 
 many men are attending to one subject, and people 
 are set upon nature as an object of attention, the 
 chances of discovery in connection with this subject 
 must increase, and there must be a multiplication of 
 this possibility. He saw that the investigation of 
 Nature was rising in men's minds ; that men were 
 experimenting, and were beginning to attend to facts 
 
 1 Novum Organum, Book L 2 Book II. 
 
14 Abraham. 
 
 and real physical objects. Hence there arose that 
 conclusion which constituted his prophecy. His 
 mind was in acute sympathy with the growing mind 
 of the world, his pulse moved with the growing beat 
 of human thought and curiosity, though then but 
 faint : he saw the immense difference in the mode of 
 studying natural science which was inaugurated by 
 this rising taste for facts, this putting aside of the 
 idols of the human mind for the ideas of the Divine 
 mind ; that is to say, " certain idle fictions of the 
 imagination for the real stamp and impression of 
 created objects, as they are found in nature." 1 He 
 saw a mere " handful of phenomena collected into a 
 natural history. " But foreseeing this, he foresaw a world 
 of discovery ; for " if we had but any one who could 
 actually answer our interrogations of nature, the in- 
 vention of all causes and sciences would be the labour 
 of but a few years." 2 And even an approximation to 
 this would be a beginning. The quickness with which 
 Bacon caught up a hint thus made itself a prophecy. 
 He felt himself just on the borders of a new world, in 
 the midst of a stir of mind which came before an 
 age of marvels, and in the Novum Organum he lives 
 in this new world, in the era of the great manifesta- 
 tion. He lives a prophetic life, scattering oracles and 
 pregnant sayings, and welcoming the light of the ap- 
 proaching day. 
 
 But to go back. There is a wonderful life and 
 spirit, spring and joyousness, in early prophecy 
 which immediately strikes us ; as well as a large- 
 
 1 Novum Organum, Book I. 2 Ibid. 
 
Abraham. 15 
 
 ness of scope and a ubiquity in the tongue of prophecy 
 itself. In a sense the whole earth prophesies; the 
 fount of prophecy comes up to the surface, there, here, 
 and everywhere, where one least expects ; it does not 
 go in one fixed channel and course, but rises up in 
 different openings and clefts which it makes for itself 
 all the world over. It has a free and lively action, 
 and wide play. One common character pervades the 
 various announcements of early prophecy, whether 
 they meet us in the formal and regular channel of 
 the family of Abraham, or over the wide regions 
 of paganism, in east or west ; and that is the dis- 
 closure of a great state of happiness and a blessing 
 to come upon this present earth, under a personal 
 restorer and regenerator of God's own choosing. Of 
 the Patriarchal prophecy and of the Sibylline prophecy 
 it is alike characteristic, that the blessing or the 
 state of [restoration which is predicted belongs to 
 this earth, and that this earth is the appointed scene 
 of it. The fundamental Jewish prophecy which runs 
 through Scripture and comes down from Abraham to 
 Isaiah has respect to this earth as the locality of it. 
 The language is, "all nations," "the earth/' "the 
 land," " the isles," " the mountains." The earth shall 
 be full of the knowledge of the Lord ; " they shall 
 inherit the land for ever ; " " they shall not hurt nor 
 destroy in all my holy mountain." The prophetic 
 scene of a regenerated, a purified, and a happy earth, 
 is also the vision of the Sibyl : 
 
 Kat Tore 8' eeye/3e6 /focri/^i'ov ets 
 
 CTT dv0pw7rovs, aytov vofjLov OTTTTOT 
 
1 6 Abraham. 
 
 Evcr/?cri, rots Tracrif vTrecrxcro ycuav 
 
 Kcu Koa/xov, /xaKapwv re TrvXas, /cat x<W-ara 
 
 Kat vow dtfavaroi/, awonov tvcfrpocrvvrjv er. 
 
 8' K yanys XtySavov KCU' Swpa TT/JOS OIKOVS 
 eov. 1 
 
 The form and mould of the prediction the beati- 
 fication of this earth, as distinct from an invisible 
 world of happiness singularly fits in with the sim- 
 plicity and primitive mind of early prophecy : with 
 that first uprising of the prophetical spirit in the 
 heart of man, in the infancy and newness of God's 
 gift to man, when he could not yet distinguish the 
 visible world from the invisible. The look forward 
 to a happy earth, where all would be innocence and 
 peace, to another paradise and golden age, was the 
 bright anticipation of childhood, when prophecy, itself 
 true and sent by God, was yet accommodated to the 
 vivid sympathies of the world's infancy with what 
 was tangible or visible. It was to that age a picture 
 of bliss, which no purely spiritual world could be, 
 and which imparted a sense of delight and vivid 
 hope. 
 
 But though a great and fundamental prophecy 
 mounts up to one common source, and belongs alike 
 to Jewish and Pagan dispensations, the difference is 
 enormous in the way in which prophecy is treated, 
 and in the account to which it is turned, in the 
 regular channel, and in the irregular. Upon the 
 wild and uncultivated pagan ground prophecy re- 
 ceived no systematic attention, and had no regular 
 
 1 Sibyll. iii. 766. 
 
Abraham. 17 
 
 home, no fitting receptacle in which to lodge. The 
 tradition of the Sibyl points indeed to the existence 
 of prophetic minds in the pagan world, which had in 
 dim vision before them some great future change in 
 the order of things here ; but nothing came of this 
 prophetic gleam; it founded nothing, it erected no 
 institutions, no framework, no body, no Church; 
 it passed away and wandered into space, and 
 only returned in desultory and dreamy sounds 
 which interested but did not rouse the mind. Pro- 
 phecy was a sweet but broken strain, whose notes 
 floated upon the air, only to be scattered immediately 
 by some rough wind; and a transient and fitful 
 music only entranced the ear, to die away in feeble 
 cadences and fragments. Prophecy was like one of 
 those thoughts which just come into the mind and 
 vanish; and we cannot catch it again, though we 
 seem to be just upon the track of it, and the shadow 
 hovers about us. Or it was like some early memory 
 or association, which has visited us for a moment, and 
 has gone away instantly and cannot be recalled. 
 The man who saw his natural face in a glass, and 
 went away and forgot what manner of man he was, 
 was haunted indeed by the vague image of somebody 
 who had been reflected in the mirror; but had not 
 got that clear likeness of himself which could make 
 him know himself; could warn, caution, instruct, and 
 guard. Prophecy thus under paganism never grew 
 into a practical and directing power; and even the 
 great Eoman poet, captivated as he was by its ancient 
 
 utterance, and the beauty of its promise, yet could do 
 
 c 
 
1 8 Abraham. 
 
 no more with it than convert it into a court compli- 
 ment, and connect its romantic associations with the 
 prospects of the new-born heir of the Pollios. But 
 as soon as prophecy found a receptacle in the chosen 
 race, it grew strong, it became an architect and 
 builder, it raised institutions, it enacted ordinances. 
 In Abraham it founded a family, in Moses it framed 
 a law, in David it erected a kingdom. The Jewish 
 people from the first gave prophecy a fixed home, and 
 the nation became the regular and guarded deposi- 
 tory for the sacred gift. The Jewish Church was the 
 fort of prophecy, maintaining and keeping up the 
 inspired expectation, protecting it from outside blasts, 
 and surrounding it with institutions and schools ; so 
 that, preserved as a directing influence among them, it 
 prepared a practical reception for the Messiah ; and 
 founded that body of thought in the nation which 
 welcomed Him who fulfilled the promise when He 
 came, and in that welcome founded the Christian 
 Church. Prophecy had thus the most striking prac- 
 tical result, and proved itself an instrument of real 
 efficiency and power. 
 
 In Abraham himself we see the foundation of that 
 strong external structure, that law, that system, and 
 that discipline, which was to act as the depository of 
 the prophetic promise ; we see it in the fact that he 
 founded a family, and at the same time bound that 
 family by rules, precepts, and regulations which 
 enabled it to preserve and hand down the true faith. 
 It is worth observing that Scripture does not only 
 assign to Abraham the office of a Patriarch or pro- 
 
Abraham. 19 
 
 genitor of a family, but attributes to him remarkable 
 qualifications for establishing a religion and securing 
 its continuance in that family. It gives him a cha- 
 racter somewhat akin to that of an ancient lawgiver, 
 representing him as laying down rules and imparting 
 a particular mould and type to his family, providing 
 for its future instruction and worship, and treating it 
 not merely as a family but as an institution; just as 
 the old legislator laid down a plan, a method, and a 
 code for the new State. " Shall I hide from Abraham 
 that thing which I do ; seeing that Abraham shall 
 surely become a great and mighty nation ? " " For I 
 know him that he will command his children and his 
 household after him, and they shall keep the way of 
 the Lord to do justice and judgment, that the Lord 
 may bring upon Abraham that which He hath spoken 
 of him." l We ought not, certainly, to strain or exag- 
 gerate the sense of any passage in Scripture ; and yet, 
 when we consider how much is often contained in a 
 short compass in Scripture, and in how simple a way 
 Scripture expresses very important events and trans- 
 actions, it hardly appears too bold to say that this 
 text is a description of more than the head of a family 
 that it represents the founder of a religious community, 
 whose future adherence to the true faith he was 
 anxious to secure by proper regulations. 
 
 And here we have the peculiar and special cha- 
 racteristic which distinguishes Abraham as a believer, 
 from other believers in the true God who appear to 
 have existed then in the world. Abraham was not, 
 
 Gen. xviii. 17, 18, 19, 
 
2O Abraham. 
 
 it would appear, so absolutely solitary in his creed in 
 the world at that time, as that there were literally 
 none beside himself and his family who held the same 
 belief in one supreme God. One such believer we are 
 told of, and him a person of exalted station, one of the 
 kings of the very country in which Abraham sojourned 
 Melchizedek, king of Salem and " priest of the most 
 high God," who received tithes from Abraham, and 
 who blessed Abraham and said, " Blessed be Abram 
 of the most high God, possessor of heaven and earth." 1 
 In this priestly office and this blessing is contained 
 undoubtedly a creed, and the true creed, and Melchi- 
 zedek is throughout adopted by Scripture as a true 
 believer. And if he was, his very office would indicate 
 that there were others beside himself who believed in 
 the same supreme God, implying as it does an altar, 
 sacrifice, and public worship. And if here, then else- 
 where, believers in the true God may have existed in 
 the world, and perhaps each of them may have had his 
 own group around him. Such, perhaps, in a later age, 
 was the situation of Jethro; and even, great as was his 
 fall from this eminence, such may have been the 
 position of the prophet Balaam. And in an earlier 
 age this scattering of true belief amid the religious 
 corruption of the world was the more probable, from 
 the very circumstance that that corruption had not 
 then had such time to grow and consolidate itself. 
 
 There were, therefore, probably contemporary with 
 Abraham, holy men in different parts, who held the 
 same belief, and were more or less divided from the 
 
 1 Gen. xiv. 18, 19, 
 
Abraham. 21 
 
 surrounding mass. But these men, if there were such, 
 would not appear to have possessed the characteristics 
 which marked the great Patriarch, and fitted him to 
 be so singular and special an instrument in the 
 hands of God for establishing the true faith in the 
 world. Excepting from remark the mysterious per- 
 sonage whose sudden appearance upon the stage of 
 sacred history has created such perplexity and awe, 
 and whose typical aspect so predominates over his 
 historical ; excepting him, and speaking of these 
 holders of the true belief as a class, one would suppose 
 that they were good and holy men doubtless, but that 
 they were content to believe what was true themselves, 
 without much concern for the world at large, or for 
 the future, and without providing for the security and 
 establishment of the truth. They were men probably 
 who had no thought beyond their own day, who lived 
 in amity with surrounding idolatry though differing 
 from it, made no great protest, and stood upon an 
 ordinary neighbourly footing with the world. Such 
 quiet good men are respected, but they do not root the 
 truth in the world ; what they believe is apt to die 
 away with them, and indeed they expect it do so; they 
 have no great confidence in the power of truth, they 
 assume that error is the normal condition of mankind, 
 and think it vain to struggle with it, they leave men 
 alone, and are satisfied with saving their own souls. 
 Such men have their own place and use, and do their 
 own work in their day, but they are not made to be 
 instruments in the hands of God for instituting a new 
 dispensation and founding a church. Abraham was 
 
22 Abraham. 
 
 cast in a different mould. He has the future of the 
 world before his mind; he looks upon " all the nations 
 of the earth " in connection with the true faith ; which 
 he contemplates as going to take deep root, to spread, 
 and to gain the allegiance of mankind ; for the blessing 
 which they are to receive through him must involve 
 their reception of his belief and hope. 
 
 Such is the man whom the Bible puts before us in 
 Abraham. The Patriarch appears in the page of Scrip- 
 ture as although invested with the warlike pomp 
 and state of a chieftain of that age a solitary; a 
 solitary in his creed; a solitary in the extreme and 
 dim remoteness of the scene and object upon which his 
 mind rests. As a believer he has cast off the popular 
 religion and is a witness against it ; as a prince he is 
 a, wanderer without alliances in a strange land; and 
 his only compensation is that he is enabled to live in 
 thought out of the present scene and circumstances, 
 and to repose upon futurity. We are brought here 
 for the first time in contact with the majesty, the 
 strength, and the splendour of prophecy in the re- 
 ligion of the chosen race. There is nothing in the 
 history of the character, the sentiment, the aspirations 
 of nations, which is equal to, which can for a moment 
 be compared with, this mighty impulse and current 
 of faith in the Jewish community. Other nations had 
 their prophetic traditions, their own oracular voices 
 borne along the air, which pointed the way to con- 
 quest and empire ; but the objects to which these 
 national vaticinations looked were petty and local, or 
 at any rate the vulgar prizes of territorial ambitions : 
 
Abraham. 23 
 
 Jewish prophecy had a totally different goal. What 
 have we in any heathen nation's early forecast of 
 victory and success at all equal in force, in boldness, 
 in grandeur of scope, to that look into futurity given 
 to one, who, standing upon the earth, in the very 
 morning of time, before history had begun, and when 
 as yet no people of Israel, no family of Israel, no 
 seed of Israel, were in existence, aged and child- 
 less, grasped the whole world as his inheritance, and 
 saw all the earth engrafted upon his own stock by 
 conversion to his own faith ? What Koman antici- 
 pation can compare not only in sublimity but even in 
 extent and largeness with this ? Yet there is the 
 prophecy before us, supported by the whole his- 
 tory and tradition of a nation. Nor could it be 
 otherwise than gratuitous for even a sceptic, how- 
 ever he may reject the inspiration, to deny that 
 this prophecy existed, that it was of the nature here 
 described, and that it dates from this primitive era. 
 Abraham in that early dawn of history, with poly- 
 theism and idolatry all around him, saw his own creed 
 triumphant in the world ; he predicted its triumph, 
 and the prediction has as a matter of fact come true. 
 It is triumphant. The creed of Abraham has become 
 the creed of the civilised world. The Patriarch's creed 
 has been victorious over the idolatry of the human 
 race, and grown from a deposit in the breast of one 
 man into a universal religion. It is this force which 
 is characteristic of Jewish prophecy ; there may be 
 true prophecy elsewhere in the world, but it is 
 weak, it is broken, and its utterance dies away upon 
 
24 Abraham. 
 
 the ear, and is scattered to the winds ; in the Jewish 
 channel it is strong, compact, and consistent ; it has 
 a fixed and confident hold upon the future, a grasp of 
 forecast, and a practical evergazing assurance ; it pro- 
 vided from the first for its own transmission, created 
 laws and institutions, and made a prophetical nation. 
 The question may be asked, Why did not Abraham 
 preach the true faith, and convert the nations around 
 him ? but the truth is that the time had not come for 
 that form of apostleship. The missionary belongs 
 essentially to a body of believers, out of which he is 
 sent, and upon which he rests as his support and stay 
 in the background, throughout his labours, however 
 far they carry him from home; as a general rests 
 upon his base of operations in war. But the body 
 of the faithful, or the Church, had not been formed 
 in the Patriarchal age, and the formation of it took 
 many ages. Abraham belonged to no Church outside 
 of himself ; he was himself the Church, which at that 
 stage of the Divine dispensation resided in an indi- 
 vidual and a solitary. In the order of Providence the 
 Patriarch precedes the Apostle. The mode of prosely- 
 tising proper to a beginning of things is the founda- 
 tion of a nation : the nation once made is a church, 
 and acts upon the world by becoming the background 
 of individual exertions. The Apostle was backed by 
 " the true Israel," but the Patriarch himself did not 
 belong to a body, but was himself the germ of that 
 body. The early and Patriarchal thus singularly con- 
 trasts with the later and Evangelical form of apostleship. 
 The evangelical Apostle, or disseminator of the true 
 
Abraham. 25 
 
 faith in the world, is a missionary and preacher : the 
 Patriarch had that office also to fulfil to the faith, but 
 he fulfilled it by founding a family and a law : and 
 that which the later Apostle proclaimed by word of 
 mouth to all the world, he handed down to a line of 
 posterity. In being the progenitor of a nation, he 
 was also the transmitter of a creed. The descent of 
 blood is the descent of faith too : father teaching son, 
 and each succeeding generation imbibing the truth 
 from its predecessor. The Patriarch then, as the fore- 
 father of a great nation, was also the apostle of that 
 nation. His greatness was not that of an ancestor 
 only, glorying in his posterity, but also that of a 
 teacher impressing his own type upon a school. 
 
 With the strong foresight of a great future for the 
 world, we note in the Patriarch the foresight too of 
 his own posthumous greatness. A chieftain only of an 
 average station, and barely admitted to a level with 
 the petty monarchs around him, he has only to 
 throw his eye forward into time, and he sees himself 
 in his true rank and position. He sees a representa- 
 tion and impersonation of himself in a mighty nation 
 of which he is the founder; he is prospectively the 
 head of this nation ; it looks back to him through all 
 ages as the man to whom it first owes its existence, 
 the original architect of the fabric, the root of the 
 magnificent tree which spreads its branches so wide. 
 He lives in this nation, he reigns in its continuance 
 and growth, and its greatness is his greatness. He 
 may not raise his head high at present then, and the 
 kings of the country may hold themselves above him ; 
 
26 Abraham. 
 
 but he knows that his day will come, and that he 
 leaves behind him a seed of power which will fill the 
 earth, and cast all contemporary rule into the shade. 
 " A father of many nations have I made thee, and 
 kings shall come out of thee." Nor will this nation 
 be a single power only; it will be the nucleus in 
 some sense of an universal power, and "all the 
 families of the earth " will gather around it. He 
 sees predestined for him, and inscribed on the roll of 
 Providence, a name which will literally be everlasting 
 and universal. Before the great Patriarch in his soli- 
 tary wanderings, a sojourner and a pilgrim, moving 
 his tents from place to place in a strange land, 
 a boundless prospect arose, which we cannot reduce 
 to any geographical measurement. It is true, the 
 known world of that day was a small one compared 
 with ours ; the populated earth of the Patriarch had 
 a circumference of cloud and darkness, and was 
 bounded by a terra incognita where no traveller's 
 foot had ever trod ; but the magnitude of an idea in 
 the mind of man must not be measured by the 
 material extent and number of that which raises it. 
 How petty in actual geographical size were the States 
 of ancient Greece,; yet the wars of those States 
 excited in the Greek all the sense of grandeur and of 
 triumph which the most gigantic European contest 
 has done in modern nations ; and the breast of an 
 Athenian or Spartan statesman or soldier swelled with 
 as strong an emotion when a victory was gained in a 
 battle where neither of the armies equalled a modern 
 regiment, as a modern feels when one half of Europe 
 
Abraham. 27 
 
 conquers the other in the field. So little can we tie the 
 force and largeness of ideas in the human mind, to 
 the actual proportions of the material facts which 
 serve as the occasion of them. This mountain which 
 towers to heaven before our eyes does not produce the 
 sense of height and grandeur which impresses us, in 
 exact proportion to the number of perpendicular feet ; 
 the imagination of the spectator gives it height, as 
 sure as there is enough material altitude to stimulate 
 it ; and no member of the Alpine range or the chain 
 of the Andes could look higher than it does. 
 
 There never was a day since there were nations 
 upon the earth, when " all the nations of the earth " 
 did not present an overwhelming image to the human 
 mind. That " all " was a vast inconceivable " all ; " it 
 was that which no man could describe or calculate ; 
 it was countless number, limitless space. The whole 
 -the world was an infinity; no thought could 
 embrace the fact or do more than put a symbol or 
 counter for it. " Look now toward heaven, and tell 
 the stars, if thou be able to number them : and He 
 said unto him, So shall thy seed be." * The Patriarch 
 saw that his work would live the work he had done 
 in the world. So, to take another kind of work of a 
 life, has a great poet prophesied the immortality of 
 his work. 
 
 But though a great posthumous name is certainly ap- 
 pealed to in the Divine communications to the Patriarch, 
 and though it is certainly intended that that grand pro- 
 spect should nerve him to his work " I will make 
 
 1 Gen. xv. 5. 
 
28 Abraham. 
 
 thy name great " this is still a motive which suits an 
 earlier dispensation better than a later one. The 
 future actual existence of himself, where it is defi- 
 nitely and distinctly grasped, must throw into the 
 shade the existence of his name. His name is not 
 himself ; his name is only a reflection thrown off from 
 himself. Himself, and what happens to himself, must 
 be the important consideration to himself. His real 
 immortality lies in the perpetuity of himself, not in 
 that of his name, which cannot do him the slightest 
 good where he does not exist, if he will not then 
 exist. The question what is to become of the shadow 
 of himself left in this world must pale in interest, 
 in proportion as his own real future existence is 
 embraced. The motive of a posthumous reputation, 
 then, is not a Gospel motive, because the Gospel 
 is the tidings of real immortality, and that is its 
 special appeal to man ; whereas the desire for posthu- 
 mous fame has nothing to do with a real immor- 
 tality. A man who has no notion but that his 
 existence totally ends at death, can still derive 
 pleasure from the anticipation of his fame after 
 death; and can enjoy now the foresight of a fact, 
 which fact itself he will not exist then to enjoy, be- 
 cause that future fact is a proof of present success. 
 It is indeed simply blind confusion, an hallucination 
 of the reason, to mix up these two absolutely distinct 
 desires; to identify the immortality of a name with 
 the immortality of a person ; yet a debasing stupor 
 and disorder of the intellect does prevail in this 
 respect. Men, under the notion of a name, throw 
 
Abraham. 29 
 
 forward a false earthly existence beyond the grave, 
 which satisfies them ; they imagine themselves now 
 enjoying this posthumous name then when it is 
 posthumous ; or, in other words, conceive themselves 
 as dead and alive at the same time. Cannot reason 
 break this iron yoke of illusion ? She can if she is 
 asked to do so, but they do not ask her, and would 
 rather their sleep was not broken or their mist dispelled. 
 But though the desire for posthumous fame is not 
 a motive of Gospel source, it is one of those motives of 
 nature which the Gospel does not forbid in its proper 
 place. The Gospel is not at war with a natural instinct 
 of the heart : it only condemns a gross misconception 
 about posthumous greatness the confounding it with a 
 real future life the selfish and unnatural dream of men 
 who grasp at it as if they were really going to enjoy 
 it, and to enjoy it when it is posthumous. 1 But let 
 this blind confusion about it be cleared, and let the 
 thing stand for what it is and nothing more; and 
 Christianity does not forbid a satisfaction being de- 
 rived from the anticipation of it. The accomplisher 
 of a great work has a legitimate pleasure in that work, 
 in himself being the doer of it, and in the knowledge 
 of that circumstance by others. And why should not 
 
 i " Sed nescio quomodo, animus erigens se, posteritatem semper ita 
 prospiciebat, quasi, cum excessisset e vita, turn denique victurus esset." 
 Cicero, De Senectute, xxiii. 82. 
 
 " Sed cum illi essent in civitate terrena, quibus propositus erat 
 omnium pro ilia officiorum finis, incolumitas ejus, et regnum non in cselo 
 sed in terra ; non in vita seterna, sed in decessione morientium et suc- 
 cessione moriturorum : quid aliud amarent quam gloriam, qua volebant 
 etiam post mortem tanquam vivere in ore laudantium ? " Aug. De Givit. 
 Dei, lib. v. 14. 
 
3O Abraham* 
 
 posterity be among those others ? But a religious man, 
 if lie foresees this posthumous name, sees also a chasm 
 which separates this name from himself, and with- 
 draws it from him as a selfish prize. A shadow rests 
 upon it which precludes vulgar pride and self-con- 
 gratulation. The Patriarch saw himself emerge out of 
 a whole contemporary world after death ; but such an 
 ascent, which stands in contrast with present depres- 
 sion, is, although an elevating and inspiriting reflec- 
 tion, a mortifying and chastening one as well; the 
 good is not grasped, is not fastened on, is not enjoyed 
 tangibly; it is a vision, a prophecy, an immaterial 
 form of greatness, the shadow of a substance which 
 has never been possessed, the symbol of a deprivation, 
 and a memento of mortality. 
 
LECTURE II. 
 
 THE SACRIFICE OF ISAAC. 
 
 TT7HEN objections are raised against various actions 
 and courses of action represented as done and 
 carried on by Divine command in the Old Testament, 
 which involved a summary mode of dealing with 
 human life, the answer is made, that God is the Lord 
 of life, the right to which ceases as soon as evidence 
 exists of a Divine command to deprive men of it. " If 
 it were commanded," says Butler, " to cultivate the 
 principles, and act from the spirit of treachery, in- 
 gratitude, cruelty ; the command would not alter the 
 nature of the case, or the action, in any of these in- 
 stances. But it is quite otherwise in precepts which 
 require only the doing an external action; for instance, 
 taking away the property or life of another. For 
 men have no right to either life or property but 
 what arises solely from the grant of God. When this 
 grant is revoked, they cease to have any right at all 
 in either : and when this revocation is made known, 
 as surely it is possible it may be, it must cease to 
 be unjust to deprive them of either." 1 
 
 This defence then is undoubtedly, as a general and 
 abstract statement, true and complete ; nor is there 
 
 1 Analogy, part ii. chap. iii. 
 
32 The Sacrifice of Isaac. 
 
 anything wanting to it, or that need be added to it, as 
 an abstract position. It is unquestionable that if a 
 command of God to kill even an innocent person is 
 made known to us, we have not only the right, but 
 are under the strictest moral obligation to kill that 
 person. But though a true and perfect defence in the 
 abstract, it leaves out one important point which ought 
 to be supplied before the general defensive statement 
 is applied to a particular case the point, viz., how 
 the Divine command to perform such an action is 
 made known to the person to whom it is asserted 
 in Scripture to be made known. That is a question 
 which it is essential to answer before the individual can 
 be pronounced to have been justified in performing the 
 act. Undoubtedly the right of man to live ceases as 
 soon as ever evidence arises of a Divine command 
 to deprive him of it ; but when does such evidence 
 arise ? 
 
 The answer then which is given to this question is 
 that the evidence arose by means of a miraculous mani- 
 festation through which the Will of God was declared, 
 that these actions should be done. And this is a true 
 and correct answer. But it still has to be accounted 
 for, how a miracle at that day was the evidence which 
 it was of such a Divine command. Supposing at the 
 present day, and under the present dispensation, a 
 miracle were wrought in evidence of an alleged com- 
 mand of God to any man to kill an innocent son, 
 would such a miracle be regarded as sufficient evidence 
 of such a command ? It cannot with any truth be 
 asserted that it would. The Christian Church would 
 
The Sacrifice of Isaac. 33 
 
 obviously condemn the act, and would refuse to 
 pronounce a miracle to be sufficient justification of it. 
 
 The question of the tightness or wrongness of this 
 class of actions belongs indeed to the great religious 
 question of the warranting power of miracles, and the 
 conditions of miraculous evidence. 
 
 When we go then to the Scripture doctrine of 
 miracles and of the evidence rising from miracles, we 
 find, in the first place, that the general rule laid down 
 is, that miracles are evidence of the Divine will ; and 
 that a command which has the warrant of a miracle 
 is to be regarded as coming 'from God. This is the 
 law relating to this subject which Scripture both 
 expresses in words, and assumes and supposes in its 
 historical account of the courses of events, and of 
 Divine Providence. But when we enter further into 
 the teaching of Scripture on this subject, we discover 
 that, together with this general rule respecting miracles, 
 there is a collateral principle inculcated ; viz., that a 
 miracle may be permitted by God for the purpose of 
 trial. Where, then, the authority of a miracle contra- 
 dicts any clear knowledge we have of the Divine will, 
 any instructions from antecedent sources, this is the 
 interpretation of it which Scripture enjoins upon us. 
 We are warned that the miracle does not in such 
 cases bear its primary and more natural interpretation 
 as an evidence of the Divine will, but the secondary 
 interpretation of it as a trial of moral strength in resist- 
 ing that apparent evidence, of the moment and from 
 without, in favour of a more real evidence of His will 
 
 which we have from antecedent sources or from within. 
 
 D 
 
34 Tke Sacrifice of Isaac. 
 
 Thus it is laid down in the Old Testament that a miracle 
 cannot authorise an act of idolatry ; and in the New Tes- 
 tament that a miracle cannot authorise the acceptance of 
 any doctrine manifestly opposed to the Gospel revela- 
 tion. In such cases we are plainly told that the purpose 
 of the miracle is not evidence but trial ; that it is in- 
 tended to test our faith ; to prove us, whether we give 
 way to the more tangible and external kind of appeal 
 against a deep inward persuasion of a moral and reli- 
 gious kind, or whether we adhere loyally to the inner 
 law in spite of the outer pretension of authority. A 
 miracle is thus not represented in Scripture as absolutely 
 and of itself evidence of a Divine command : rather it is 
 expressly represented as not being. We find that it lies 
 under conditions ; that it is limited by our own know- 
 ledge gained from other and prior sources of the Divine 
 will ; that it is checked by the internal evidence of 
 moral and religious truths, whether principles of belief, 
 or rules of conduct, which, either express revelation, 
 or God's natural enlightening Providence has imparted 
 to us. The Scriptural check, e.g., would be the same 
 against a miracle on the side of idolatry, whether we 
 supposed the unity of God to have been arrived at by 
 natural reason or by special revelation. The rule of 
 Scripture in substance is that no great moral or reli- 
 gious principle or law of conduct of which we are 
 practically, upon general antecedent grounds, certain, 
 can be upset even by a real miracle ; but that when the 
 two come into collision as evidence, the miracle must 
 give way and the moral conviction stand ; that no 
 miracle, in short, can outweigh a plain duty ; and that 
 
The Sacrifice of Isaac. 3 5 
 
 a real miracle might be wrought, and yet it would be 
 wrong to do the act which the miracle enjoined. 
 
 If, then, a certain class of Divine commands which 
 were proved by miracles in one age of mankind could 
 not be proved by the same evidence now, this must 
 arise in consequence of some difference in the con- 
 ceptions of mankind in former ages and in our own, 
 in consequence of which such commands were suitable 
 to an earlier period of the world and not to a later, 
 and were adapted for proof by miracles then, and are 
 not adapted for that mode of proof now. If, e.y., a 
 miracle was in a former age sufficient evidence of a 
 Divine command to destroy life, and now it is not, it 
 must be that we are now possessed with a principle 
 in such strong disagreement with homicide, that the 
 alternative of the miracle being only permitted as a 
 trial necessarily becomes more reasonable now than 
 that of its being proof of a command ; whereas this 
 principle did not exist in equal force and strength in 
 the mind of a former age, and therefore the miracle 
 was taken in its more obvious meaning as proof of a 
 Divine commandment. It must be, in short, that the 
 command was accommodated to the age in which it was 
 given, and was therefore adapted to be, proved by a 
 miracle ; whereas now such a command would be in 
 opposition to a higher law and general enlightenment, 
 that would resist the authority of the miracle : which 
 mode of proof would consequently be unfitted for it. 
 
 To kill another, even an innocent man, is so far 
 indeed from being itself contrary to morality, that 
 nothing can be more certain than if it were known 
 
36 The Sacrifice of Isaac. 
 
 that God ordered us to take away the life of an 
 innocent man, it would be strictly obligatory upon us 
 to do so. But though this is undoubtedly true in 
 speculation and as a supposition, yet in practice the 
 rights of human life are so strongly felt now, they are 
 so intimate a part of the moral progress of mankind, 
 and the responsibility of violating them is so tre- 
 mendous, that no miracle could practically act as 
 sufficient evidence to warrant the infraction of them, 
 and the destruction of the life of an innocent person. 
 Because a miracle is, by the express law of Scripture, 
 always subject to the possibility that it may be sent 
 for our trial in resisting, instead of our faith in obeying 
 it. But if there is any case in the world in which 
 this condition would operate, it is in the case of a 
 supposed miraculous command to take away the life 
 of an innocent man. Although therefore in theory 
 the Divine command to kill him, supposed to be 
 known, would be strictly obligatory, nor would the 
 innocence of the man be any contradiction to it, yet 
 in practice the difficulty is so great of its becoming 
 known, that such a command would be virtually 
 nugatory ; a miracle could be the only evidence of it, 
 and that, by the law of Scripture, has been disabled 
 to act as evidence. The act of killing another, as being 
 simply an external act, is not, indeed, in any contra- 
 diction whatever to a right state of the affections, but 
 the act itself does not the less require justification ; a 
 Divine command alone can be that justification ; and 
 no evidence under the circumstances can be given of 
 a Divine command. 
 
The Sacrifice of Isaac. 37 
 
 \ 
 What was the difference then in the conceptions of 
 
 mankind in a former age, compared with the present, 
 which renders a miracle evidence of Divine command 
 to kill then, whereas it could not be such evidence now ? 
 When we examine the ancient mind all the world 
 over, one very remarkable want is apparent in it, viz. 
 a true idea of the individuality of man ; an ade- 
 quate conception of him as an independent person, 
 a substantial being in himself, whose life and existence 
 was his own. Man always figures as an appendage to 
 somebody the subject to the monarch, the son to 
 the father, the wife to the husband, the slave to the 
 master. He is the function or circumstance of some- 
 body else. The slave was a piece of property KTrj^a 
 fyAJruxov, and the old Hindu law divided " cattle into 
 bipeds and quadrupeds." The laws of Manu insert 
 the persons of the wife and the son in the person of 
 the head of the family, as if they were absorbed and 
 incorporated in it, just as the several members are 
 absorbed and embraced in the unity of the body. 
 " A man is perfect when he consists of himself, his 
 wife, and his son." 1 Their property belongs to the 
 man, because "they belong to him," 2 upon which 
 ground he could sell or give away his son for a slave. 
 Stories from the Brahmanas show that an Aryan 
 father had power of life and death over a son. 3 
 Oriental civil law formally recognised the judicial 
 principle of extending the parent's guilt and punish- 
 ment to the children, which it could have done only 
 
 1 Sir W. Jones, vol. viii. p. 8. * Ibid., p. 398. 
 
 3 Max Miiller's History of Sanscrit Literature, p. 408. 
 
3 8 The Sacrifice of Isaac. 
 
 under a defective idea of the child's individuality, 
 treating the child as a mere appendage of the father. 
 In a public execution the criminal's whole family was 
 punished by the same judicial sword which inflicted 
 death upon himself : nor was this done upon the 
 ground of any special command from an avenging 
 deity, which indeed was not needed for it, but only 
 as an exercise of the simple right of civil justice a 
 right not indeed always acted upon, but still rooted 
 in law, and ready for use whenever the civil authority 
 thought fit to fall back upon it. 
 
 We see, indeed, both in the political institutions 
 and superstitions of antiquity, regulations and practices 
 which obviously imply, as the necessary condition of 
 their existence, a totally different idea of human indi- 
 viduality, and of human rights, from that with which 
 modern society and Christian society is animated. 
 "We find that this State and that that State had what 
 appear to us most extraordinary, most eccentric and 
 anomalous laws, in the sphere of human rights ; radi- 
 cally, as it seems to us, clashing with those rights. 
 We are at first disposed to lay the blame entirely 
 upon the particular states and lawgivers. But when 
 we see one state after another involved in the charge, 
 it gradually becomes clear to us, that though par- 
 ticular states may have got out of an acknowledged 
 principle stronger and rougher consequences and 
 worked it to a harsher issue than others did, there 
 must have been some universal defective conception 
 of human rights in those ages, to have made these 
 particular laws and customs of certain states pos- 
 
The Sacrifice of Isaac. 39 
 
 sible. A lawgiver cannot act against the universal 
 opinion of mankind in his day; if he institutes 
 any particular infringement of human rights, there 
 must be a premiss for that infringement in a uni- 
 versal defective conception of mankind at that day. 
 Thus the law of Lycurgus for the destruction of 
 weakly infants in Sparta at the very birth, would 
 have been impossible had there not been all over the 
 world then a very different conception of the right of 
 the human being with respect to his own life than 
 what exists now. With us the rights of man com- 
 mence with his very birth; and an infant an hour old 
 has an independent right and property in his own life, 
 which the whole world cannot take away from him. 
 Had that been the received idea in the age of 
 Lycurgus, he could not have founded this Spartan 
 rule ; but it was not. Mankind had not embraced as 
 yet the true notion of human individuality ; man was 
 an appendage to some man or some body. That the 
 infant was treated as the pure property of the state 
 in Sparta, was a result which rose upon an universal 
 defective assumption regarding man in that stage of 
 human progress ; it was a harsh and cruel use of that 
 assumption, but it could not have arisen without that 
 assumption as its condition. 
 
 This great defect of conception was indeed deeply 
 fixed in the Eoman law. As a code for the regula- 
 tion of property, the Eoman law commands our 
 admiration; its assumptions, its distinctions, its 
 fictions, are of the highest legal merit ; its whole 
 structure was based upon nature and common sense, 
 
40 The Sacrifice of Isaac. 
 
 and it carried into the most intricate details and 
 applications an instinctive standard of equity, of 
 which it never lost sight. The contrast therefore is 
 all the greater when from the regulation of property 
 we turn to its dealings with persons. In the former 
 we have an anticipation of modern civilisation, and 
 we feel ourselves amid modern ideas, and in the 
 atmosphere of our own courts. In the latter we are 
 consigned to barbarism again. The criminal law of 
 Eome took low ground in its estimate of a large class 
 of crimes, which it treated as civil wrongs only ; but 
 its great blot was the domestic code. The son was 
 the property of the father, without rights, without 
 substantial being, in the eye of Eoman law. The 
 father had the power of life and death over him ; was 
 the proprietor of all the wealth he acquired. The 
 wife, again, was the property of her husband, an owner- 
 ship of which the moral result was most disastrous. 
 The Eoman ladies, as the arts and refinements of life 
 advanced, disdained the harsh yoke of true matrimony, 
 not only did the sacramental ceremony of the con- 
 farreatio fall almost entirely into disuse, but even the 
 stricter civil marriage, the conventio,wa,$ neglected; and 
 in its place was substituted a contract which left either 
 party the liberty to dissolve the connection at will, out 
 of which arose the matrimonial picture of Juvenal 
 
 Fiunt octo mariti 
 Quinque per autumnos. 1 
 
 The same defective idea of human individuality 
 and the rights of life is shown in a very different 
 
 1 Satire vi. 228. 
 
The Sacrifice of Isaac. 41 
 
 fact, which has a horrible prominence in the history 
 of ancient religions, viz. the prevalence of human 
 sacrifice. It is impossible to suppose that any super- 
 stition, however strong, could have so trampled upon 
 the natural right of life, as the custom of human 
 sacrifice did, had there been at the time that idea of 
 the natural right of life existing in the human mind ; 
 that is to say, if that idea had existed in any definite 
 shape. The very selfishness of man, and the very 
 instinct of self-preservation, would in that case have 
 made him stand up for his own life, against the claims 
 of a monstrous and cruel power. If we suppose such 
 a strict and accurate sense of the right of the indi- 
 vidual to his own life as we have now^, no superstition 
 however ferocious could possibly have had force enough 
 to withstand that sense, and sacrifice individuals 
 wholesale. There could not therefore have been then 
 that strict sense of the right and property of the in- 
 dividual in his own life that there is now ; and the 
 institution of human sacrifice thus implied as the 
 condition of its own establishment the defective idea 
 of the rights of the individual man. 
 
 With these facts before us, we may understand 
 how deeply fixed in the mind of ancient society was 
 the idea of one man belonging to another ; how long a 
 time it must have required to uproot that idea, and 
 how in truth nothing but a new religion could do it. 
 Even Eome, with all her later material civilisation, 
 could never completely embrace the notion, which lies 
 at the bottom of all modern law and religion, that 
 every man is himself, an individual being with an in- 
 
42 The Sacrifice of Isaac. 
 
 dependent existence of his own and independent rights. 
 The^s naturale of the individual is indeed so self- 
 evident now, that we can hardly conceive society with- 
 out it ; and we are apt to suppose that it must have 
 been equally self-evident to any human being, in any 
 age, who had the simple exercise of his reason. But 
 all history shows that, so far from this idea having been 
 always obvious to the human understanding, it has on 
 the contrary been the slow and gradual growth of ages. 
 Nor perhaps is the consideration valueless, that in the 
 early stages of society, before civil government was 
 formed, and before man had become a trained and dis- 
 ciplined being, as in a degree he is now, some strong 
 idea such as that which is contained in saying You 
 belong to another, you are the property of another, 
 may have been necessary to control and keep in bounds 
 the native insolence and wild pride, the obstinacy, the 
 fierceness, the animal caprice, the rage, the spite, the 
 passion of the human creature. When man was rude 
 and government was weak, there was wanted for the 
 control of man some idea which could fasten upon 
 him and overcome him, and be in the stead of govern- 
 ment and civilisation. Such an idea was this one. 
 The nature that can be coerced by nothing else can 
 be tamed by an idea. Instil from his earliest infancy 
 into man the idea that he belongs to another, is the 
 property of another, let everything around proceed 
 upon this idea, let there be nothing to interfere with 
 it or rouse suspicions in his mind to the contrary, and 
 he will yield entirely to that idea. He will take his 
 own deprivation of right, the necessity of his own 
 
The Sacrifice of Isaac. 43 
 
 subservience to another, as a matter of course. And 
 that idea of himself will keep him in order. He will 
 grow up with the impression that he has not the right 
 of ownership in himself; in his passions, any more 
 than he has in his work. He will thus be coerced from 
 within himself, but not by himself; i.e., not by an 
 active faculty of self-command, but by the passive re- 
 ception of an instilled notion which he has admitted 
 into his own mind, and which has fastened upon him 
 so strongly that he cannot shake it off. 
 
 Do we not feel that we are apt to think of ourselves 
 as others think of us ? and that not by a rational act 
 of judgment but a mere passive yielding to an im- 
 pression from without. Let people around us think 
 poorly of us, and we think poorly of ourselves, at least 
 it requires an effort not to do so ; the opposition to 
 surrounding influence taxes our self-reliance. Hence 
 it is that, as an ordinary rule, it is not good for a man 
 either to live with or even see much of another who 
 habitually depreciates him ; such intercourse tends to 
 lower his spirit. For though a man's self-reliance 
 ought to be tested, it ought to be tested fairly, it ought 
 not to have a constant weight thrown upon it. 
 
 To return then to the Old Testament facts, we 
 may observe that the same defective idea of human 
 individuality, and the right and property of the in- 
 dividual in his own life, which prevailed in early ages 
 generally, is traceable even in the Patriarchal and 
 Jewish mind. It would indeed be expecting too much 
 from a rude nation under slow training for higher 
 truth, that they should not partake of the general 
 
44 The Sacrifice of Isaac. 
 
 notions of the world at that time regarding the 
 natural rights of man. This latter is in truth, though 
 its root is in our moral nature, an idea of the civil or 
 political order, and therefore it is not an idea of which 
 a purely religious dispensation, Patriarchal or Jewish, 
 guaranteed the present communication. It is an idea 
 which is part of the civilisation of mankind, and we 
 might as well expect at once civilisation in the early 
 stages of human society, as expect this idea of the true 
 individuality of man in those stages. We do not in- 
 deed, in identifying it with civilisation, disconnect it 
 with morals : civilisation has its moral side in those 
 ideas w^hich relate to the rights of man, which belong 
 to the realm of justice, and the development of which 
 is a development and manifestation of justice. Still, 
 though it is the moral side of civilisation to which 
 those ideas belong, they are a part of civilisation : 
 they are political ideas. They come under the political 
 head ; they appertain to mankind in their aspect of a 
 community as a subject of social order; they con- 
 cern man in society, and in relation to his brother 
 man. They are therefore political ideas, and belong- 
 to the growth of civilisation. It cannot therefore be 
 any reflection upon Patriarchal life and ethics to say 
 that in that early age they were defective in ideas of 
 that order. Nor is there any reason why we should 
 impose upon ourselves the supposition that the ages 
 of the Patriarchs, or the age of Moses, Joshua, or even 
 David, had the same exact sense of the natural right 
 of the individual man that the world now, after ages 
 of Divine schooling, has attained , for this would be to 
 
The Sacrifice of Isaac. 45 
 
 be guilty of antedating the effect to the cause, and to 
 expect beforehand that very standard which was to 
 follow after or from the course of the Divine dis- 
 pensations ; that very estimate and point of view 
 in the beginning of the Divine education which was 
 to be the end and the result of it. That man was 
 made in the image of God was indeed the original 
 truth which contained the independent and true indi- 
 viduality of the being; but this germinal truth wanted 
 development, and Patriarchal life was antecedent to 
 that development. 
 
 It is not unworthy of notice that the degree of 
 the jus naturale of the individual with reference to 
 his own life, and his own property in it, is not even 
 yet an entirely settled question in the world; that 
 upon the primary article of the right to deprive man 
 of life, men are not even yet agreed ; and while the 
 generality maintain the justice of taking it away in 
 self-defence, or for the punishment of crime, a con- 
 siderable minority deny the right of civil justice to 
 interfere with human life ; and one sect maintains 
 the absolute inviolability of human life. If the 
 question then of the degree of the individual's right 
 and property in life is not even yet decided, and 
 considerable uncertainty still attaches to it, this 
 may help us to understand in what obscurity the 
 whole question of the right of life might lie in the 
 earliest ages of the world, when law was first emerg- 
 ing out of a state of nature, and before the rights of 
 the ruler had undergone any scrutiny : and to under- 
 stand too how this obscurity could exist even in the 
 
46 The Sacrifice of Isaac. 
 
 Patriarchal mind, without any reflection upon it, 
 simply by reason of the age of the world to which it 
 belonged. Human power is a limited idea in modern 
 society, how far its rights extend with respect to the 
 individual : but then human power was an unlimited 
 idea, without definite boundary or check ; what it 
 could do or what it could not do to the individual 
 was all in confusion ; and in the haze which rested 
 upon this whole subject, one idea was dominant, 
 viz. that one man belonged to another, and was an 
 appendage to another, the son to the father, the 
 servant to the master, and the like. The principle 
 of the inviolability of human life was indeed always 
 admitted in a degree, but it was the degree of the 
 inviolability upon which the morality of particular in- 
 terferences with life, and the sufficiency of particular 
 reasons for that interference, hinged. 
 
 It must be remembered that this conception of 
 man, as the property of and the appendage to another, 
 is not one which involves any cruelty, any harsh- 
 ness. A father may regard his son as being, as a 
 matter of right, his property ; and yet this very son 
 may be to him his dearest treasure, and the loss of 
 him may be the bitterest grief. The idea does not 
 interfere with the tenderest inward relations of a 
 father to him. When Eeuben says, " Slay my two 
 sons, if I bring him not to thee" 1 the speech 
 
 1 Gen. xlii. 37. "Among the Jews, as among most nations of an- 
 tiquity, the parental power was absolutely despotic, even to life and 
 death. The Mosaic Jaw, however, enacted that a guilty son could not 
 be punished with death, except by the judicial sentence of the commu- 
 nity." Milman's History of the Jews, vol. i. p. 22. 
 
The Sacrifice of Isaac. 47 
 
 certainly shows that the father of the Patriarchal 
 age regarded the son as belonging to him, as being 
 in a way his property, so that as a matter of right 
 his life was lawfully at his disposal. But it does not 
 show want of paternal affection, or that he made the 
 offer in any other spirit than that of self-sacrifice ; as 
 a surrender just of the very article of property which 
 was dearest to him, when the preservation of the 
 whole community was at stake ; and a hostage and 
 pledge for the safety of Jacob's beloved son seemed to 
 be wanted in the severe extremity. The idea of 
 property is in no contradiction at all to love ; human 
 love regards the being ; and the rights with respect to 
 the being do not alter the being. This is a question 
 of what you can do to another : his own value to you, 
 dearness to you, is another thing. The life may be 
 worth anything to you ; but the jus the particular 
 right, your power over it, is a distinct idea. It 
 might be said in some despotisms, the power only 
 heightens the love ; because the absolute dependence 
 of another would be an actual claim upon affec- 
 tion, and his being at your mercy would give him at 
 once an acceptableness in your sight. 
 
 Undoubtedly the defective conception of human 
 individuality was an opening for cruelty and oppres- 
 sion, and the greatest practical enormities ; but it 
 does not in itself involve them. As proofs of the 
 existence of this universal defective conception in 
 ancient society, I referred above to Sparta, Eome, and 
 the prevalence of human sacrifices. But though this 
 original defect of conception was a condition of the 
 
48 The Sacrifice of Isaac? 
 
 rise of these inhuman codes and this ferocious 
 practice, and though they could not have arisen 
 without it, this is not to say that the mere defect of 
 conception itself amounted to inhumanity, or that it 
 necessarily produced inhumanity. It was in itself a 
 neutral intellectual defect. And though the savage 
 character of some communities founded cruel and 
 oppressive practices upon it, there is no reason why it 
 may not have existed in other communities and in 
 the Jewish, without such results, and with the tone of 
 society not brutalised and made cruel by it. 
 
 With this defective idea, then, of human indi- 
 viduality, with this way of regarding one man as 
 belonging to another man, established in the ancient 
 mind and in the Patriarchal mind generally, we come 
 to the act of the great Patriarch. In the present 
 age, with the principle of human individuality and 
 right now developed and become the law of our con- 
 duct to man, an interference on our part with the life 
 of the human independent being, supposed to be inno- 
 cent, is so utterly incongruous, that a miracle on the 
 side of such an act would necessarily be interpreted by 
 us as a trial of faith, and not as evidence of a Divine 
 command. But in the Patriarch's age there was not 
 that moral-political conception of man which consti- 
 tutes this counterbalance to the miracle, and therefore 
 he gave the miracle that interpretation which was the 
 more obvious one, and which was in fact intended by 
 God, of evidence of a Divine command. In his case 
 there was the miracle, but there was not the weight in 
 the opposite scale the evidence within which conflicted 
 
The Sacrifice of Isaac. 49 
 
 with the evidence without. There was not that idea, 
 which it belonged to the subsequent Divine education 
 to develop in the world the principle that a man is 
 an independent individual being, in distinction to his 
 being the appendage of another man. We are struck 
 immediately in the Scripture account of the sacrifice of 
 Isaac with the habitual sense of ownership as distinct 
 from conferred momentary command, with the entire 
 absence of all struggle in the mind of the Patriarch ; 
 how he simply regards his son as a treasure of his 
 own which he has to give up, a treasure which is 
 dearer to him than any other earthly thing, and which 
 it is the greatest trial of his life to part with, but which 
 is still his own, belonging to him and appropriate to 
 him to surrender. This is the impression which the 
 whole of the scene itself raises. Indeed, if any one 
 imagines that the idea of property in the human being 
 could be incompatible with the greatest tenderness of 
 affection, such an unreasonable notion must vanish 
 with the solemn and beautiful account in Scripture. 
 The tenderness of affection for the son, in the very act 
 of surrendering him as his property, is prominent in 
 this picture. But still he is the property ; the ancient 
 idea of the son as belonging to the father pervades 
 the whole account. It is as his own property that he 
 surrenders and sacrifices the son. No description of 
 this wonderful transaction could have more clearly 
 exhibited how entirely consistent the sense of property 
 in the individual is with the value, the preciousness, of 
 that individual. If there really were any one who 
 
 E 
 
50 The Sacrifice of Isaac. 
 
 could suppose that a man's interest and delight in 
 something that belonged to him was less because it 
 belonged to him ; that his property was less dear to 
 him because it was his property ; such an extraordi- 
 nary inference would certainly be wholly confuted by 
 this passage of Bible history. If any one could really 
 think that the transcendent greatness of the sacrifice 
 and the surrender, would be in the least affected by 
 the circumstance that what a man was called upon to 
 surrender was a treasure of his own, something which 
 belonged to him, something which was part of himself, 
 such a mistake must be corrected by this description. 
 The son in this representation belongs to the father ; 
 and when we come to examine and authenticate that 
 impression we find it is what the whole history of the 
 ancient mind verifies. The father, according to the 
 ideas of the age, regarded the son as his own, in such a 
 sense as made the sacrifice a sacrifice of what belonged 
 to the father, and which was appropriate to the father 
 to surrender. But at the present day the man belongs 
 to himself and not to another ; his life is his own ; and 
 to sacrifice that life is to sacrifice what is the property 
 of that man and of no other, to give up that which is 
 not yours to give. The great Patriarch was thus a 
 natural subject of a Divine command to sacrifice his 
 son ; because, in consequence of the earlier ideas 
 then prevailing, nothing interposed between his own 
 convictions and the authority of the miracle; but 
 a miracle to do such an act would be utterly incon- 
 gruous at the present day, when no external evidence 
 to sacrifice another's life could possibly outweigh 
 
The Sacrifice of Isaac. 5 1 
 
 the strong internal convictions which forbid the inter- 
 ference with it. 
 
 The general conclusion is, that according to the 
 very conditions of miraculous evidence laid down in 
 Scripture, civilisation must in some cases affect the 
 relevancy of miracles as evidence of Divine commands. 
 Abstractedly the Lord of human life can command 
 the destruction of that life ; but the question before 
 us is a question not of abstract propositions only, but 
 of what there is evidence of; and civilisation affects 
 the question of evidence; affects it upon the principles 
 of Scripture itself. The Scripture law of miraculous 
 evidence qualifies and checks that evidence by the 
 rival force of inward moral grounds and principles. 
 The unity of God was no sooner established than 
 miracles were nugatory in favour of idolatry ; and the 
 truths of the Gospel were no sooner established than 
 miracles became nugatory in favour of another gospel. 
 And this Scriptural principle of counteraction to 
 miraculous evidence must apply as well to any other 
 moral grounds and principles of which we feel certain, 
 and which have established themselves in our moral 
 standard. But civilisation does create such grounds 
 and principles in our minds, because civilisation is not 
 entirely a material movement but is also a moral 
 movement moral in regard to some principles of 
 human right and practice. In the moral progress of 
 mankind in the later ages of the world, the intense 
 conviction has sprung up of certain truths respecting 
 man, and certain principles of right and justice in 
 regard to man ; and these principles within us become 
 
52 The Sacrifice of Isaac. 
 
 counter-evidence to the authority of miracles, when 
 those profess to command acts which are in an opposite 
 direction. In those cases, therefore, the growth of 
 civilisation affects the authority of miracles and the 
 argument from miracles. For the more certain we 
 become of any truth regarding God or man, the more 
 are we out of the power of being convinced by a 
 miracle which would lead in a contrary direction to 
 that truth. In this way the progress of mankind 
 must gradually exclude certain homicidal acts, as 
 subjects of Divine command, upon miraculous evidence. 
 The Scripture philosophy of miracles enforces a fresh 
 modification of the doctrine of miraculous evidence, 
 upon fresh moral convictions arising. Before the 
 ideas of natural right were developed, homicidal Divine 
 command was capable of miraculous evidence; but 
 suppose these ideas developed, then the inward anta- 
 gonism to the acts is so strong that they cannot be 
 surmounted by anything miraculous that is only out- 
 wardi and the alternative becomes unavoidable, that 
 the miracle is for the other purpose mentioned in 
 Scripture, viz. the trial of faith, and not the support 
 of a command. 
 
 But in this state of the case, in which the miracu- 
 lous evidence of a certain class of Divine commands is 
 necessarily neutralised, it becomes impossible to sup- 
 pose that there will be the Divine commands ; and 
 therefore what has been said amounts to this, that God 
 adapts His commands to different ages. It is unreason- 
 able to suppose that God would now work miracles in 
 cases in which His own educating providence has 
 
The Sacrifice of Isaac. 53 
 
 neutralised them as evidence of His commands : 
 that is to say, He would not now give the com- 
 mand. But that He would not give such commands 
 now, is not to say that He might not give them in a 
 former age, when such commands had an appropriate 
 and natural mode of proof; viz. by miracles that is, 
 by the full evidence which miracles had, before that 
 evidence was modified by the ideas which His own 
 educatory providence has since instilled. God adapts 
 His employment of miracles to the state of evidence ; 
 which, upon the Scriptural rule, differs with man's dif- 
 ferent states of enlightenment ; and with the evidence 
 for the commands, necessarily also withdraws the com- 
 mands ; and thus we come, as to the ultimate position, 
 to the rule of Divine wisdom, that God suits His com- 
 mands to the age ; and gives or withholds them accord- 
 ing as man is a natural recipient of them. 
 
 It will indeed be denied by some that such miracles 
 to command such acts ever really took place ; and it 
 will be said that these were simply actions of the age, 
 inspired, both on their good and their bad side, by the 
 spirit of the age in which they were done. But such 
 a question as this, however necessary to meet in 
 its proper place, is not one which appertains to the 
 particular section of Old Testament inquiry now under 
 discussion. In examining the morality of the Old 
 Testament, we must take the actions of the Old 
 Testament history as they are there given ; we are not 
 concerned with other actions, or, what is the same 
 thing, with the actions as otherwise described. An 
 objector to Scripture history may consider himself 
 
54 The Sacrifice of Isaac. 
 
 necessitated by his own ideas to make a fundamental 
 difference in the account of these classes of actions as 
 given in Scripture ; he may not believe in miracles, 
 and, in accordance with this belief, he may refuse to 
 hold that these classes of actions were ever commanded 
 by miracles. But we are not concerned upon the 
 point now under discussion with such a conjectural 
 speculation as this, which would assign a different 
 basis to the actions of the Old Testament. 
 
 Upon the question of the morality of the Old Tes- 
 tament, we must assume the actions of the Old Testa- 
 ment as they stand ; for the moral standard of the Old 
 Testament cannot be responsible for any other. The 
 Bible cannot be made responsible for actions which are 
 not contained in it, for other actions than those which 
 it describes ; for actions grounded upon different 
 motives and different reasons and premisses. 
 
 In the case of the homicidal class of actions, the 
 evidence of a Divine command constitutes, in the Old 
 Testament, the very ground of their justification ; this 
 special authorisation is no superfluity, but the absolute 
 need of the transaction, without which it is unwarrant- 
 able and indefensible. The defective idea of the indi- 
 vidual's right, inherent in the age, was indeed the 
 condition of the acceptance of the miraculous evidence 
 of the command when given ; but it did not authorise 
 the act of itself, without the command. It was the 
 Divine command, then, which made, according to the 
 standard of the Old Testament, the distinction between 
 the patriarchal acts in violation of human life, and the 
 heathen ones, which were in violation of the same 
 
The Sacrifice of Isaac. 5 5 
 
 principle; and we may add as well, between some 
 Jewish homicidal acts and others. No one could pos- 
 sibly compare the ground upon which the sacrifice of 
 Isaac stands in the Old Testament, with the ground 
 upon which Jephthah's sacrifice of his daughter stands. 
 The latter is mentioned as a simple fact, without the 
 shadow of an approval ; because indeed it was, like the 
 heathen acts of that kind, unauthorised. The former 
 is extolled as the very model of faith and self-surrender. 
 The punishment of the children on account of the 
 father's crime was prohibited in the Jewish code, and 
 was, as a matter of human law, condemned. 1 It was 
 the special Divine command which alone was regarded 
 as authorising it in the Old Testament. 
 
 But it will be said, perhaps, Can we suppose God 
 taking advantage of an actually inferior state of ideas 
 in the world, in order to give a particular command, 
 which He would not give in an age of higher and 
 more mature ideas ? Can we suppose Him working a 
 miracle for it then, because, in an inferior state of 
 ideas on moral subjects, a miracle could not be in 
 conflict with internal evidence ? It may be replied 
 that such a discriminating proceeding would doubt- 
 less be an instance of accommodation ; but why not 
 of wise accommodation ? It seems to belong suitably 
 to the Divine Governor of the world to extract out of 
 every state of mankind the highest and most noble 
 acts to which the special conceptions of the age can 
 give rise, and direct those earlier ideas and modes of 
 thinking toward such great moral achievements 
 
 1 Deut. xxiv. 16. 
 
56 The Sacrifice of Isaac. 
 
 as are able to be founded upon them. If there is 
 a progress in ideas, why should not one stage as well 
 as another, a former stage as well as a later, a ruder 
 as well as a more enlightened, express itself according 
 to its own model, and present to God the various 
 developments in act, of the same fundamentally 
 virtuous will ? Let man show forth all the good that 
 he is capable of, in the mode and manner in which he 
 is capable of it. If in earlier ages he was unshackled 
 by the later ideas of the individual's right and property 
 in life, and if it so happened that a very wonderful 
 and extraordinary self-sacrifice could be drawn out of 
 this very want in the age, why should not the human 
 mind be directed in the way of that sacrifice, and that 
 great religious self-surrender be extracted from it by 
 a Divine command ? 
 
 Such an act was the sacrifice of Isaac, and such 
 was the state of ideas which preceded it as the 
 conditions of the act. The self-sacrifice in the act is 
 obvious from the history. It was, in the first place, 
 neither more nor less than to all appearance total 
 ruin the downfall of every hope, and the collapse of 
 a life. To an ordinary man of business even, if he 
 has any spirit, the breakdown of a life's work is a 
 dreadful thought ; because he wants to feel and it is 
 a legitimate want that he has done something, and 
 that he has been somebody. But the Patriarch had 
 through life felt himself the minister and instrument 
 of a great Divine design with respect to mankind : 
 he had lived with a gigantic prospect before him, 
 with an immense expanding blessing, which was one 
 
The Sacrifice of Isaac. 57 
 
 day to include all nations and be the restoration of 
 the world. This vast plan then, his part in which 
 had been the work of his life, and had filled his mind 
 with immeasurable hopes, as it had been sown in 
 his son, would perish with his son. Then all was 
 over, and his life had come to nothing. This is one 
 side of the act of self-sacrifice, but it is not all ; for 
 the child himself, he upon whom such a promise 
 hung, such boundless hope, such a vast calculation, 
 and who was loved all the more with a father's love 
 because he was the harbinger of the prophet's great- 
 ness, the symbol of life's purpose answered ; he was 
 to be surrendered too. Such was the act of the 
 sacrifice of Isaac. But it required the particular state 
 of ideas in the world at that time, and the defective 
 state of ideas respecting the right of the individual 
 man, for this great act to be brought out. Without 
 those ideas it could not have been the subject of 
 Divine command, having evidence that it was a 
 Divine command ; a miracle would not be evidence to 
 us that God bade a father kill an innocent son : if it 
 was, as it was, evidence to Abraham, it was because 
 that clear idea of the individual right, which involved 
 the inviolability of life, did not exist in his age as it 
 does in ours ; it was because the Patriarch of that day 
 had the political ideas of his day, of one person 
 belonging to another, and the son being the append- 
 age of the father. It was out of an inferior state of 
 ideas in regard to human right, out of a lower 
 political sense, that an act of romantic and sublime 
 self-sacrifice was extracted ; and the very want in the 
 
58 The Sacrifice of Isaac. 
 
 age was used as a means of developing the religion 
 of the man. And this was a step which it was suit- 
 able for the Governor of the world to take ; because it 
 enlarged the amount of human virtue, it made even 
 the shortcomings of the time subservient to the per- 
 fection of the individual ; and it brought out a great 
 religious act which was to be a lesson and a type to 
 all ages. 
 
 It must be observed that great acts are a decided 
 part of the providential plan for the education of 
 mankind. The peculiar and superior force of acts in 
 this direction, as compared with general character, is 
 gained upon a principle which is very intelligible. A 
 great act gathers up and brings to a focus the whole 
 habit and general character of the man. The act is 
 dramatic, while the man's habit or character is didactic 
 only; and what is more, there is a limitation in 
 character which there is not in an act. There is a 
 boundlessness in an act. It is not a divided, balanced 
 thing, but is like an immense spring or leap. The 
 whole of the man is in it, and at one great stroke is 
 revealed. A great act has thus a place in time ; it is 
 like a great poem, a great law, a great battle, any 
 great event ; it is a movement ; it is a type which 
 fructifies and reproduces itself. Single acts are trea- 
 sures. They are like new ideas in people's minds. 
 There is something in them which moulds, which lifts 
 up to another level, and gives an impulse to human 
 nature. If we examine any one of those signal acts 
 which are historical, we shall find that they could none 
 of them have been done but for some one great idea 
 
The Sacrifice of Isaac. 59 
 
 with which the person was possessed, and to which he 
 had attached himself. Thus, if we examine the act of 
 Titus Manlius in executing his son, after crowning him 
 victor, in justice to the violated majesty of Eoman 
 law, there must have been in his mind a kind of 
 boundless idea of Eome, of what Eome was ; that it 
 was greater than any conceivable form of greatness, 
 and transcended all imaginable empire. Eome was 
 to him the impersonation of supreme order, uncon- 
 querable will, indestructible power. Eome was eternal 
 He then who disobeyed Eome must die ; even the 
 youthful victor in the first flush of triumph; and 
 while the father's heart leapt with pride, the Eoman 
 general must be inflexible. Thus the famous heathen's 
 self-sacrifice rested upon a boundless idea of the state 
 to which he belonged, and the power to which he owed 
 allegiance. 
 
 In the mind of the Patriarch in the place of a great 
 power of earth must be substituted the boundless idea 
 of an invisible Power ; where in the heathen father's 
 mind Eome stood, there was God. The Lord of this 
 universe has the right to all we have, and everything 
 must be surrendered to Him upon demand. But upon 
 an Almighty Being rose boundless hope too the 
 vastness of conception which Scripture specially attri- 
 butes to Abraham. Hope in the ordinary type, is 
 partly sight ; when light has begun to dawn, and the 
 first signs of restoration and renewal appear. Hope 
 is the first sight we catch of returning good, that first 
 gleam of it which heralds and represents the end. 
 But hope which is seen is not hope. It is hope while 
 
60 The Sacrifice of Isaac. 
 
 all is dark around us, while as yet there is no visible 
 link between us and the end, that exhibits the prin- 
 ciple in its greatness and in its true energy. And this 
 hope must rest upon that ultimate Power at the very 
 root of things which can reverse every catastrophe and 
 rectify all mistakes. To hold on to this root is hope 
 withdrawn into its last fastness ; and, without aid from 
 any sight, grasping with an iron force the rock itself, 
 the foundation of Sovereign Will upon which the uni- 
 verse stands, and saying to itself, " The whole may 
 shake, if this foundation remaineth sure." This was 
 the infinite hope of Abraham. Doubtless while he 
 lifted up the knife to slay his son, the sun was turned 
 to darkness to him, the stars left their places, and 
 earth and heaven vanished from his sight ; to the eye 
 of sense all was gone that life had built up, and the 
 promise had come actually to an end for evermore; 
 but to the friend of God all was still as certain as 
 ever, all absolutely sure and fixed ; the end, the 
 promise, nay even the son of the promise, even 
 he in the fire of the burnt-offering was not gone, 
 because that was near and close at hand which could 
 restore ; the great Power which could reverse every- 
 thing. A voice within said, All this can be undone, 
 and can pass away like a dream of the night ; and 
 the heir was safe in the strong hope of him who 
 " accounted that God was able to raise him, up even 
 from the dead." 
 
 Do you say then that such an act could not be 
 done now ? That is all the more reason why it should 
 have been done ; why it should have been done when 
 
The Sacrifice of Isaac. 6 1 
 
 it could be done ; when the state of evidence admitted 
 of it ; when the primitive standard of human rights 
 gave the son to be the property of the father, to be 
 surrendered by him, upon a call, as his own treasure. 
 That idea, that very defective idea of the age, it was, 
 which rendered possible the very point of the act, the 
 unsurpassable pang of it, the self-inflicted martyrdom 
 of human affection, the death of the son in will, by the 
 father's hand. That idea of the age therefore was 
 used to produce that special fruit which it was adapted 
 to produce ; the particular great spiritual act of which 
 it supplied the possibility, and which was the most 
 splendid flower of this stock. If the idea of the age 
 was rude, the act was not the less spiritual which it 
 enabled to be done ; because the idea of the age only 
 founded the proprietary right of the father, the spirit- 
 uality of the act lay in the surrender of the son. The 
 surrender itself was of the highest Gospel type, as 
 being the offering up of the deepest treasure of a man's 
 heart ; that which gave him the sharpest agony to part 
 with. And, indeed, we may observe that however 
 rude was the state of ideas which enabled the act to 
 be done, the act itself has been the appropriated lesson 
 not so much of earlier ages as of later, not so much of 
 Jewish times as of Christian : the moral did not come 
 out so clearly in Jewish history ; it reserved itself till 
 Judaism had passed away and given place to the 
 Gospel; and though an act of earliest time had its 
 main instructive strength in latest. The distinction 
 then is most important, and should be always kept in 
 
62 The Sacrifice of Isaac. 
 
 mind, between that state of ideas which enables an act 
 to be done and the act itself. Those were doubtless 
 primitive and rude ideas as to the rights of the indi- 
 vidual and the inviolability of life, which made the 
 Divine command to slay an innocent son credible, and 
 a miracle sufficient proof of it ; but the spirituality of 
 the surrender was not in the least affected by that 
 circumstance. The fjOos of the act, the faith, the 
 trust, the resignation, were the same. The act is 
 wholly distinct from the evidence of the obligation 
 to it; the evidence was affected by the age; an 
 eternal and spiritual type distinguished the act. 
 
 Thus, far from any lowering effect attaching to the 
 principle that God makes use of the ruder conditions 
 of the human mind, and accommodates His commands 
 to different ages, on the contrary, this principle has 
 produced the highest result. The rudeness of the age 
 admits of having the most exalted acts built upon 
 it, and acts which last as exemplars through future 
 ages of enlightenment. This principle does not permit 
 the earlier conditions of human thought to lie fallow 
 and barren, but extracts out of every state of the 
 human mind its proper effort, and makes the best of 
 every age in keeping with its fundamental ideas. 
 Every period of the world contributes the special 
 expression of moral beauty and greatness of which it 
 admits ; and that magnificent and extraordinary act 
 of romantic morals which cannot be obtained from a 
 higher state of civilisation is extracted from a lower. 
 Never again, indeed, while the world lasts, can that 
 
The Sacrifice of Isaac. 63 
 
 act be done within the Church of God : but that it has 
 been done is the wealth of the Church and of man- 
 kind ; and is the fruit of the spiritual policy of that 
 Great Being who has educated the world, and who 
 has worked to the highest advantage every stage in 
 the moral progress of mankind. 
 
LECTURE III. 
 
 HUMAN SACRIFICES. 
 
 T DEVOTED one Lecture to the general character 
 -*~ and situation of Abraham ; because when we have 
 to judge upon one very remarkable act of a man, it 
 is an advantage to have the man himself before us. 
 An explanation popular with one school, of the act of 
 the sacrifice of Isaac, is, that it was simply one of the 
 class of human sacrifices which were common at that 
 day, and especially among the Canaanitish races ; that 
 Abraham was seized with an enthusiasm of that 
 sanguinary type which propitiated God by human 
 victims ; and that he made Isaac the victim. It does 
 not appear to me that such a solution is at all necessary, 
 but that, on the contrary, it clashes with the whole 
 history of Abraham, and the whole colour of his life 
 and character; while at the same time it degrades 
 and calumniates the Patriarch. That the Patriarch 
 of that day should not meet the miraculous evidence 
 of a Divine command to slay an innocent son, by the 
 same counter internal evidence that we should oppose 
 to it now, and that he was unable to feel this inward 
 impediment, on account of the defective moral and 
 political conceptions of that day, the inadequate 
 sense of human individuality and human rights, is an 
 
Human Sacrifices. 65 
 
 explanation which does not lower the Patriarch in our 
 eyes ; because it only charges him with ideas which 
 belonged to that age of the world, and were necessary 
 in that stage of human progress. This explanation 
 acknowledges a Divine command, and that the act 
 was done in obedience to a Divine command ; and it 
 only requires that the command was accommodated 
 to an earlier state of ideas regarding the human 
 being and his rights. But to attribute to Abraham 
 such a defective state of ideas on this subject is a 
 totally different thing from implicating him in a 
 gross and cruel superstition which sacrificed its 
 thousands upon inhuman altars as a propitiation to 
 sanguinary idols. 
 
 To represent him only as without a certain class 
 of ideas relating to humanity, which had not yet 
 arisen in the world, is a completely different thing 
 from regarding him as implicated in a horrible and 
 vile usage, which was a lapse and a fall from the 
 antecedent religion of the world ; from making him a 
 follower and disciple of the Canaanites. 
 
 In comparing, then, these two explanations with 
 reference to the internal evidences of Scripture bearing 
 upon them, and their agreement with the facts of Abra- 
 ham's life and character, I must observe first, that the 
 whole portrait which Scripture gives us of Abraham, 
 and which formed the subject of the first Lecture, is 
 altogether in opposition to such a solution of the sacri- 
 fice of Isaac as would make it a copy of the human 
 sacrifices of the Canaanites. It is indeed doubtful 
 whether the introduction of human sacrifices into the 
 
 F 
 
66 Human Sacrifices. 
 
 worship of these people was so early as to be contem- 
 poraneous with Abraham. This is a disputed point. 
 Some able historical critics have arrived at a contrary 
 conclusion, and the terms on which Abraham stood 
 with the Canaanites and their chiefs would serve to 
 show that the worship of the Canaanites of his day 
 was a less advanced form of idolatry than that which 
 prevailed in a later age. He is told that his descend- 
 ants, and not himself, shall possess the land, because 
 "the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full;" 1 and 
 certainly, if we compare the aspect in which the 
 Canaanites present themselves to the eyes of Moses, 
 the character which he gives them, and the detestation 
 with which he regards them, with the apparent rela- 
 tions of Abraham to the same people, we cannot but 
 see a marked difference in the earlier and later feeling, 
 such as would imply that these religious corruptions 
 had not grown to such a height in Abraham's age. 
 But even granting that the Canaanites offered human 
 sacrifices in Abraham's time, the whole facts of the 
 case, as recorded in Scripture, contradict the supposi- 
 tion that the sacrifice of Isaac was put into the 
 Patriarch's mind by the sight of the superstitious 
 worship of those idolatrous races. The whole charac- 
 ter of Abraham is in limine opposed to such a notion 
 as that of his borrowing from the Canaanites in reli- 
 gion. For suppose a man of lofty independence of 
 mind, who had cast off the traditions of his own 
 country, rejected human authority, discarded idols, 
 and embraced the true rational conception of a God, 
 
 1 Gen. xv. 16. 
 
Human Sacrifices. 67 
 
 to whom lie appropriated a spiritual worship, adoring 
 Him under no material form but in His own in- 
 visible essence ; supposing him standing alone in his 
 day in maintaining this pure worship, but casting his 
 eye forward upon a distant era in the world's future, 
 when that worship should become universal and gain 
 "all the families of the earth ;" suppose a man of this 
 remarkable type, this enlightenment and perception 
 of deep truth, surrounded by the slaves of a grovel- 
 ling superstition, enjoining cruel and inhuman rites; 
 would it be the natural tendency of such a man to 
 accept the lead of that low religion, to borrow from its 
 worst rites, and allow them to dictate a great and 
 critical act of his religious life to him ? Such an idea 
 would not enter into his mind. Such a man would 
 look down with a vast sense of superiority upon so 
 degraded a form of religion, and would pass sentence 
 on it as a judge ; but would not dream of the attitude 
 towards it of a learner, imitating its inhuman prac- 
 tices, and permitting them to originate an act of 
 worship for him. The very thought of bowing to 
 such an authority would be degradation and con- 
 tamination to him. 
 
 But the plain narrative of Scripture forbids such 
 a supposition as this, because it represents the act of 
 sacrifice as commanded expressly by God nor only 
 as commanded by God, but as praised by God. 
 Scripture extols it indeed as an act of the sublimest 
 devotion and faith, and exhibits it as the ground of 
 an additional and overflowing renewal of the Divine 
 promise to the Patriarch, which is confirmed by an 
 
68 Human Sacrifices. 
 
 oath and is vouchsafed to him not as the reward of 
 any former action or actions, but specially and singly 
 on account of this action ; " Because thou hast done 
 this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine 
 only son, I have sworn that in blessing I will bless 
 thee." 1 Such an account of this action is plainly in- 
 consistent with its having been done in imitation of 
 the gross and cruel superstitions of Canaanites, and 
 excludes that rationale of it altogether. 
 
 It has indeed been observed that God's moving a 
 man to do some action is not, in the language of 
 Scripture, inconsistent with the motion being also at 
 the same time a temptation of Satan ; and the case is 
 pointed to of the two different phrases about the sin 
 of David in numbering the people, used respectively 
 in the Book of Samuel 2 and the Book of Chronicles ; 3 
 in the first of which books God is said to have moved 
 David to do this act, and in the latter Satan is said to 
 have moved him. But though it may be admitted 
 that there is nothing in God moving a man to do 
 something, regarded as a phrase, inconsistent with 
 Satan moving him also, this remark is totally irrele- 
 vant in a case in which God not only moves a man to 
 do an act, but also praises that act when done. It 
 may be true that Satan may move a man whom God 
 in a certain sense moves too, moves in the sense of 
 permitting Satan or his own lusts to move him ; and 
 in this sense God moved David to number Israel, 
 while the same motive was also a temptation of Satan. 
 But it is impossible that Satan should move a man 
 
 1 Gen. xxii. 16. 2 2 Sam. xxiv. 1. 3 1 Chron. xxi. 1. 
 
Human Sacrifices. 69 
 
 to do an act which God moves him to, and which 
 God also praises after it is done. The latter is the 
 turning point which decides definitively in the pre- 
 sent case that Satan did not move Abraham, because 
 the act of Abraham being commended by God, was 
 good ; and it is impossible that Satan should move a 
 man to do a good act. In the case of Balaam it 
 may be observed that God moved in a sense. He 
 told Balaam " to rise up and go with the men." But 
 the context shows that was only a direction given 
 to Balaam upon the assumption that he chose to 
 follow his own will; for God's anger was kindled 
 because he went. In the case of Balaam, therefore, 
 God's moving was quite consistent with Satan's mov- 
 ing. But had the act of Balaam been praised by 
 God instead of calling down the Divine censure, no 
 motion from Satan could have been compatible with 
 the Divine motion. 
 
 But when; from the moral character of Abraham, 
 we turn to the actual plan of his life and trial, we 
 find still stronger evidence against the hypothesis of 
 a copy of the human sacrifices of the Canaan it es ; 
 because we find that this hypothesis is at variance 
 with the whole plan and purpose of the life-trial of 
 Abraham, that that trial implies in its whole con- 
 struction a totally different object and purpose for 
 the sacrifice of Isaac than that which this hypothesis 
 requires. 
 
 It is of the very essence of a propitiatory sacri- 
 fice that the offerer should contemplate the total loss 
 of the precious victim which he surrenders into the 
 
7O Human Sacrifices. 
 
 hands of offended deity. 1 The sacrifice is made as a 
 self-inflicted punishment ; its very object is the part- 
 ing with a treasure, the final surrender of something 
 dear and valuable which belongs to him. There has 
 been sin, and sin must be atoned for by a voluntary 
 act of self-deprivation. In a word, the purpose of 
 propitiatory sacrifice is penal. And this is histori- 
 cally the character of human sacrifices ; they are 
 propitiatory ; they ,are designed to appease the anger 
 of an offended deity, by a father's loss of a son or 
 daughter, whom he sacrifices. Thus the angry 
 divinities of Greece, who detained the fleet at Aulis, 
 were supposed to be pacified by Agamemnon's loss of 
 Iphigenia ; and Mesha, king of Moab, sacrificed his son 
 to Chemosh, upon the idea that he should gratify 
 Chemosh by the total loss of his son, which he volun- 
 tarily imposed on himself. But the whole plan and 
 purpose of the trial of Abraham excludes the contem- 
 plation on Abraham's part of the total* loss of Isaac, 
 the heir of the promise, and requires that he should 
 look forward to the miraculous restorati'on of his son 
 after death; imposing on him indeed in this confident 
 expectation a piercing trial of his faith, but not an 
 
 1 I am speaking here of the propitiatory sacrifice, according to the 
 human notion of it, according to what it has always meant as a part of 
 human worship, and an act of man himself offering up something in 
 atonement for his sins. The same condition, however, attached to the 
 mystery of the real Propitiatory Sacrifice, only with that qualification 
 which was necessary to fulfil the Divine plan. For although our Lord 
 ever foresaw His own Eesurrection as immediately succeeding His death, 
 He did not rise again for the purpose of continuing His life upon earth, 
 which life He had sacrificed, but only to give evidence of the reality 
 of His propitiation, and for other purposes. 
 
H^lman Sacrifices. 71 
 
 absolute and perpetual loss of his son. This is the 
 interpretation which the New Testament puts upon 
 the act of Abraham : " Abraham, when he was tried, 
 offered up Isaac : and he that had received the pro- 
 mises offered up his only begotten son, of whom it 
 was said, That in Isaac shall thy seed be called: 
 accounting that God was able to raise him up, even 
 from the dead ; from whence also he received him in 
 a figure." * 
 
 We observe that the whole life of Abraham turns 
 upon one great trial the trial, viz., of his faith in the 
 Divine promise to him of a son to be the seed of a 
 whole nation, and by being the seed of a whole nation 
 be the channel of a great future blessing to the whole 
 world. This is what he has to believe. But at first 
 he has not got a son. The trial therefore of his faith 
 is to believe that he shall have one ; and this part of 
 his trial lasts a long time, and the Patriarch's faith 
 gives way under it twice. The first occasion is, when, 
 in despair of a real heir, he substitutes his steward 
 Eliezer as an adopted one. He becomes conscious 
 that this is only a makeshift and an expedient of 
 his own, gives up the arrangement, supplicates God 
 for a real heir, is promised a real heir, and believes 
 that promise. "And Abram said, Lord God, what 
 wilt thou give me, seeing I go childless, and the 
 steward of my house is this Eliezer of Damascus? 
 Behold, to me thou hast given no seed : and, lo, one 
 born in my house is mine heir. 2 And the word of 
 the Lord came unto him, saying, This shall not be 
 
 1 Heb. xi. 17-19. 2 Gen. xv. 2, 3, 4, 6. 
 
72 Human Sacrifices. 
 
 thine heir ; but he that shall come forth out of thine 
 own bowels shall be thine heir. And he believed in 
 the Lord ; and He counted it to him for righteousness." 
 The second occasion on which the Patriarch's faith 
 gives way is, when, at the suggestion of Sarah herself, 
 he sets up another substitute for a true heir, in the 
 person of a real son, but a son by a representative 
 wife Hagar, whom Sarah appoints in her own place. 
 This divergence from the straight course of faith lasts 
 some years, though the true belief in the gift of a real 
 heir some day, is never wholly suppressed ; and the 
 confidence in the heirship of Ishmael never appears to 
 exceed a kind of despondent wish that he might be 
 accepted as the heir in case none other came. " Oh, 
 that Ishmael might live before thee!" Again, how- 
 ever, the promise of a true heir is renewed ; twice 
 renewed. Abraham, after a short tumult of doubt in 
 his mind, believes absolutely, while Sarah is rebuked for 
 her unbelief; and then the son is born. This is the 
 final triumph of faith in Abraham, in the matter of the 
 birth of a son. For a long time belief has been mixed 
 with doubt, or been broken by intervals of doubt ; but 
 at last, just when this event is most improbable, nay, 
 humanly speaking impossible, at the very acme of its 
 trial faith conquers. 
 
 Such then being the preceding course of trial 
 in Abraham's life, Scripture informs us that the 
 command to sacrifice Isaac was but a carrying out of 
 the same plan of probation; only that whereas, 
 before the birth of the heir, the birth was the subject 
 of the trial of his faith, now it is the preservation of 
 
Human Sacrifices. 73 
 
 the heir born ; that under the most desperate circum- 
 stances, despite even of complete apparent impossi- 
 bilities, even in the extreme case of the actual natural 
 death of that son, God would so contrive as to secure 
 his continuance, to be the seed of the future nation 
 and channel of the future blessing. 
 
 The trial in the sacrifice of Isaac is, whether 
 Abraham would believe that God could raise him up 
 to life again ; and the merit of Abraham in that 
 sacrifice is the merit of rising to this belief. His 
 trial hitherto had been to believe that Isaac would, 
 under such great apparent improbabilities and against 
 the order of nature, be born; his trial now was, 
 while contemplating his sacrifice, to believe that, 
 under such great apparent improbabilities and against 
 the order of nature, he should survive. But the one 
 trial was a continuation of and carrying on of the 
 other. The probation of Abraham is upon one plan 
 and method, and one part corresponds to and follows 
 up another. A cloud of mystery encompassed the 
 gift of the heir ; it first rested upon his birth ; and 
 when that mystery was cleared up, the same cloud 
 reappeared and rested upon his continuance in life. 
 The great Power which so long delayed the gift now 
 demands the surrender of it. The trial of the Patri- 
 arch is, that he has to pierce through the cloud in 
 either case, and that faith must foresee, as in the 
 first instance a birth, so in the second instance a 
 restoration. 
 
 Scripture then has given us an explanation of the 
 act of Abraham in offering up Isaac ; has told us 
 
74 Human Sacrifices. 
 
 what the act was, i.e., what it was in the mind of 
 the agent ; its scope and meaning, the peculiarity of 
 the expectation upon which it was based; and we 
 collect with certainty from this Scriptural account of 
 the act that it was not a propitiatory sacrifice. It is 
 wanting in all the essentials of such a sacrifice. The 
 object of it was not loss or punishment, but a certain 
 extraordinary manifestation of faith which is thereby 
 elicited from him, faith in the continuance of the 
 life of Isaac, against the laws of nature, to be the 
 heir and transmitter of the promise. 1 No sin in- 
 deed of Abraham's is mentioned for which he has to 
 atone, and so the notion of a propitiatory sacrifice is 
 gratuitous ; but there is also abundant positive evi- 
 dence of another and a different purpose in the sacri- 
 fice; a purpose which actually conflicted with the 
 idea of a propitiatory sacrifice ; for the idea of the 
 total loss of the thing offered is essential to a pro- 
 pitiatory sacrifice ; but it was essential to the trial of 
 faith in this case that the thing offered should not be 
 looked upon as totally lost, but, on the contrary, as 
 about to be restored. It is the only merit of Abraham 
 in the performance of this act, that he believes that 
 the victim will survive it. As the heir of the promise 
 
 1 Heb. xi. 17-19. There is an allusion to the same explanation 
 
 of Abraham's sacrifice in Rom. iv. 16, and seq " The faith of 
 
 Abraham ; who is the father of us all," because that (xarsi/am ou) he 
 believed God " who quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which 
 be not as though they were." We may observe that the passage as a 
 whole is a parallel to the passage in Hebrews, connecting as it does the 
 birth of Isaac with the same kind of trial of faith as that which the 
 passage in Hebrews connects with the sacrifice of Isaac. See Note 2. 
 
Human Sacrifices. 75 
 
 and the guaranteed link between the Patriarch and 
 the future nation and blessing, the Divine word is 
 pledged for the continuance of Isaac's life upon earth. 
 Abraham relies upon this word. But in the very act 
 of thus relying upon it, he does not surrender Isaac 
 for good, he does not contemplate his final loss, he 
 does not look forward to a permanent parting with 
 him. He expects the restoration of the victim. His 
 act, then, is entirely deficient in those characteristics 
 which are necessary to the idea of a propitiatory 
 sacrifice. 1 He contemplates an issue which negatives 
 
 1 " The faith of Abraham was to pass through a more trying ordeal. 
 He is suddenly commanded to cut off that life on which all the splen- 
 did promises of the Almighty seemed to depend. He obeys, and sets 
 forth with his unsuspecting child to offer the fatal sacrifice on Mount 
 Moriah. The immolation of human sacrifices, particularly of the most 
 precious, the favourite, the first-born child, appears as a common usage 
 among many early nations, more especially the tribes by which Abraham 
 was surrounded. It was the distinguishing rite among the worshippers 
 of Moloch ; at a later period of the Jewish history it was practised by 
 a king of Moab ; it was undoubtedly derived by the Carthaginians from 
 their Phoenician ancestors on the shores of Syria. The offering of Isaac 
 bears no resemblance, either in its nature, or what may be termed its 
 moral purport, to these horrid rites. Where it was an ordinary usage, 
 as in the worship of Moloch, it was in unison with the character of the 
 religion, and of the deity. It was the last act of a dark and sanguinary 
 superstition, which rose by regular gradation to this complete triumph 
 over human nature. The god who was propitiated by these offerings, 
 had been satiated with more cheap and vulgar victims ; he had been 
 glutted to the full with human suffering and with human blood. In 
 general it was the final mark of the subjugation of the national mind 
 to an inhuman and domineering priesthood. But the Hebrew religion, 
 held human sacrifices in abhorrence ; the God of the Abrahamitic family, 
 uniformly beneficent, imposed no duties which entailed human suffer- 
 ing, demanded no offerings which were repugnant to the better feelings 
 of our nature. Where, on the other hand, these filial sacrifices were of 
 rare and extraordinary occurrence, they were either to expiate some 
 
76 Human Sacrifices. 
 
 it as such a sacrifice : and it is his merit, and it belongs 
 to the very nature of his probation in this matter, that 
 he should do so. 
 
 It may be objected, perhaps, that this account of 
 the transaction does not allow that which appears to 
 be an essential feature of the sacrifice on Mount 
 Moriah, the real surrender on Abraham's part of the 
 object of his deepest affections. It may be said that 
 this sacrifice was undoubtedly an act of mortification 
 and the surrender of a treasure, and that, as such, it 
 has been regarded in all ages as the type of the self- 
 denying and self-sacrificing life ; but that if Abraham 
 all along looked, and looked with confidence, to the 
 recovery of his treasure, there was no true surrender 
 and no sacrifice in this act. It would, however, be a 
 great mistake to say that, because there was the con- 
 templation of a recovery here, there was therefore no 
 act of surrender or sacrifice. It must be considered, 
 if Abraham resigns the possession of his son by cut- 
 ting asunder the common bond of life, that that is a 
 true resignation of him. Death is an undeniable test 
 of the act of surrender. If the Patriarch looked be- 
 yond death, to a recovery, that did not negative the 
 surrender which ipso facto had taken place in death. 
 
 dreadful guilt, to avert the imminent vengeance of the offended deity, 
 or to extort his blessing on some important enterprise. But the offer- 
 ing of Isaac was neither piacular nor propitiatory. ... It was a simple 
 act of unhesitating obedience to the Divine command ; the last proof 
 of perfect reliance on the certain accomplishment of the Divine pro- 
 mises. Isaac, so miraculously bestowed, could be as miraculously 
 restored ; Abraham, such is the comment of the Christian Apostle, 
 believed that God could even raise him up from the dead" Milman's 
 History of the Jews, vol. i. p. 20. 
 
Human Sacrifices. 77 
 
 Such a yielding up was losing sight of him, seeing him 
 vanish from time, from visible nature ; it was parting 
 with him, according to physical law, for ever. Had the 
 father clutched the prize of a son, and once got, had 
 refused to part with him out of his sight, that would 
 have been the denial of surrender ; but the Patriarch in 
 this act committed him resignedly into God's hands, 
 and trusted him beyond the borders of the material 
 world into an invisible keeping. He contemplated 
 without shrinking an awful chasm in the earthly life 
 of the heir ; he saw him for a moment swallowed up 
 in the abyss, and only to be restored to him by a 
 mysterious hand. But this was an act of true self- 
 sacrifice, and involved a true surrender of a dear 
 possession. 
 
 The explanation, then, of the act of the sacrifice of 
 Isaac by supposing it to be a copy of the human 
 sacrifices of the Canaanites, breaks down at every 
 step. It fails first by being in total disagreement 
 with the character and mind of Abraham ; it fails 
 next by being in absolute discord with the whole plan 
 and purpose of the life-trial of Abraham. There is 
 nothing in the account given of the act in the 
 slightest degree to connect it with such a worship 
 and such a motive. The human sacrifices of the 
 ancient world were in atonement for public crimes, 
 and were offered up in great national emergencies, 
 when war or pestilence threatened the very existence 
 of the people, and there was a cry for a great 
 deliverance. They were at any rate propitiatory, and 
 supposed bloodshed, or sacrilege, or some heinous 
 
78 Human Sacrifices. 
 
 crime, as the occasion of them. But here there is no 
 crime mentioned for which propitiation is wanted. 
 On the other hand, the trial upon which the life of 
 the Patriarch turns is clear and conspicuous ; and 
 that demands a sacrifice which is not propitiatory, 
 but which is simply a trial of faith. A sceptic will 
 have his own explanation to give of a life turning 
 upon such a trial ; but even he, if he takes the account 
 as it stands, must admit that it is wholly opposed to 
 the idea of the Patriarch's surrender of his son as a 
 propitiatory sacrifice : that the Patriarch's act stands 
 upon other ground, and that the motives and the 
 prospects in the case have nothing in common with 
 those which originate a propitiatory human sacri- 
 fice. He will attribute the Patriarch's faith in the 
 restoration of Isaac from the dead, to a visionary and 
 wild fanaticism ; but even he will not dispute, as an 
 historical truth, that Abraham was perfectly capable 
 of looking forward to such a solution of the difficulty, 
 of believing in such a miracle : that his eye could over- 
 leap the dark chasm, and see his son standing safe on 
 the other side of it ; and that he was of such a mind 
 and spirit as that he could unhesitatingly believe 
 that the heir of the promise would issue alive out of 
 the very jaws of death. This state of mind may be 
 amazing to him a transformation and revolutionis- 
 ing of human nature ; but that it has existed in men 
 the most absolute infidel cannot doubt. The whole 
 religion of the Bible is, from beginning to end, 
 historically founded upon this absolute faith in an 
 absolutely omnipotent God. But such a belief, in 
 
Human Sacrifices. 79 
 
 the mind of the Patriarch, in a certain restoration of 
 Isaac, if we contemplate it only as a physiological 
 fact, excludes wholly the intention of a propitiatory 
 sacrifice, i.e., a human sacrifice in the ordinary meaning 
 of that term, and separates the motive and design of 
 it altogether from that religious basis. 
 
 Such is the preponderance of evidence against 
 the interpretation of a human sacrifice, drawn from 
 the whole life of Abraham, its order, course, 
 character, and plan ; the whole internal evidence of 
 the narrative is a protest against such a construction ; 
 while, on the side of that interpretation, there is only 
 one fact, viz. that there were such sacrifices in the 
 ancient world. 
 
 But while the sacrifice of Abraham was in itself, 
 and as a commanded action, a trial of the Patriarch's 
 faith and not a propitiatory act, it was yet designed 
 that it should at the same time be a type and figure of 
 the great Propitiation. 1 For it is not essential to a 
 type that it should be a complete resemblance and 
 copy of that event of which it is the type, and should 
 in all respects follow the pattern of the antetype. In 
 the sacrifice of Abraham and in the sacrifice on the 
 
 i " Of all the Prophetic Types, says Mr. Davison, this one, in the 
 commanded sacrifice of Isaac, appears to be among the most significant. 
 It stands at the head of the dispensation of Eevealed Keligion, as reduced 
 into Covenant with the people of God in the person of their Founder and 
 Progenitor. Being thus displayed, as it is, in the history of the Father 
 of the Faithful, it seems to be wrought into the foundations of Faith. 
 In the surrender to Sacrifice of a beloved son, the Patriarchal Church 
 begins with an adumbration of the Christian reality." Inquiry into 
 Primitive Sacrifice. Davison's Remains, p. 150. 
 
80 Human Sacrifices. 
 
 Cross the difference of scope and design in regard to 
 atonement leaves still a common external ground of 
 surrender ; and the outward action or representation 
 contained in the former, of a father offering up his 
 only son upon the altar of wood, fulfils all the outward 
 requirements of a type. The lifting up of the serpent 
 in the wilderness was not propitiatory, but there was 
 in it and the propitiatory sacrifice on the Cross the 
 common principle of restoration proceeding from a 
 certain action, such action being first apprehended by 
 faith ; and the outward representation contained in 
 the lifting up of the serpent had the outward likeness 
 required for a type. 
 
 But it may be asked Was it simply a curious * 
 coincidence that the surrounding nations offered up 
 human sacrifices, and that Abraham offered up a 
 human sacrifice ? The answer is that the external 
 resemblance is not fortuitous, but that the two are 
 really connected by the common principle of sacrifice 
 or surrender. First, the heathen recognised the prin- 
 ciple of sacrifice in general, or the giving up of 
 something precious, as a mark of devotion to the 
 deity ; and this principle is common to the heathen 
 and to the Jewish and Patriarchal sacrifices in 
 general. Secondly, human sacrifices were a mon- 
 strous and extravagant expression, but still an ex- 
 pression, of this principle. They proceeded upon the 
 assumption that human life was the most valuable of 
 all things, and especially that a child was the most 
 precious possession of a father, from which it appeared 
 to follow that such a sacrifice was in place in extra- 
 
Human Sacrifices. 81 
 
 ordinary emergencies. This principle of self-sacrifice 
 then, and in the very form of the sacrifice of a son, is 
 common to the heathen human sacrifices and to 
 Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac. But when one common 
 element has been admitted, the difference is such as 
 to completely separate the two from each other as 
 religious acts ; the one being only a trial of faith, the 
 other the propitiation of an angry divinity. 
 
 Such are the two hypotheses which have occu- 
 pied our attention with regard to the act of the 
 sacrifice of Isaac. There is the explanation of the 
 act, as an act of taking away the life of another, which 
 was given in the last Lecture, and there is the explana- 
 tion of it as a human sacrifice, in agreement with the 
 cruel superstitious custom of the day, in heathen 
 countries. The explanation which was given in the 
 last Lecture was, that the conceptions of the day, with 
 respect to one man as being the property of another, 
 the subject of the monarch, the son of the father, 
 authorised the act in obedience to a miracle, inas- 
 much as, with such conceptions of human rights and 
 human individuality, there was no counter internal 
 evidence against the act to counterbalance the miracle 
 in command of it. This explanation makes no differ- 
 ence in the personal character or prophetic rank of 
 Abraham ; and only supposes in him the ideas of the 
 age in which he lived, of the political order ; such as 
 affect the independent rights and situation of the 
 individual man. It only does not suppose in Abraham 
 a modern estimate and a modern standard of those 
 rights, such as in the Patriarch of that age would have 
 
 G 
 
82 Human Sacrifices. 
 
 been an anachronism. But the hypothesis of the act 
 being a human sacrifice in the ordinary sense, and a 
 copy of the human sacrifices of the Canaanites, mis- 
 represents and libels the Patriarch ; degrades him into 
 a follower and disciple of an idolatrous and abandoned 
 race, and attributes to him the contamination of a 
 sympathy with their sanguinary altars, and the folly 
 of having been caught by the snare of a pagan super- 
 stition. Such an hypothesis is in the plainest contra- 
 diction to his whole life and the whole scope of his 
 trial. 
 
LECTURE IV. 
 
 EXTERMINATING WARS. 
 
 rPHE argument of this Lecture is in substance the 
 same as that of the second Lecture, only applied 
 to Divine commands for the destruction of nations and 
 masses of men, instead of to a Divine command for 
 taking away the life of a single person. The exter- 
 minating wars of the Israelites also, involving as they 
 did the slaughter of whole populations, men, women, 
 and children, on account of the sin of the nation, in- 
 volved the principle of punishing one man for the sin 
 of another ; they were instances both of punishing 
 infants on account of their fathers' sins, posterity on 
 account of forefathers' sins, and some adults on 
 account of other adults. The command of Moses 
 respecting the Canaanitish nations was, " Thou shalt 
 save alive nothing that breatheth j" 1 and Joshua 
 strictly fulfilled this order. He smote all the cities 
 " with the edge of the sword, and utterly destroyed all 
 the souls that were therein; he left none remaining/' 2 
 And the Divine command, through the mouth of 
 Samuel, respecting Amalek was, " Slay both man and 
 woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and 
 ass." 3 The judicial destruction of whole families was 
 a smaller instance of the same principle. Such acts 
 
 i Dent. 22. 16. 2 Josh. x. 39. 3 1 Sam. xv. 3. 
 
84 Exterminating Wars. 
 
 done in obedience to a Divine command are strongly 
 urged by unbelievers as objections against Old Testa- 
 ment morality. It is replied that God is the author 
 of life and death, and that He has the right at any 
 time to deprive any number of His creatures of life, 
 whether by the natural instrumentality of pestilence 
 or famine, or by the express employment of man as 
 his instrument of destruction. And this as an abstract 
 defence is unquestionably true ; nor can it be denied 
 that as soon as a Divine command to exterminate 
 a whole people becomes known to another people, 
 they have not only the right, but are under the 
 strictest obligation to execute such a command. 
 
 But there is this great distinction between God 
 destroying human lives by natural means, and using 
 man as his executioner of a command for that pur- 
 pose viz., that whereas natural means are the un- 
 conscious executors of the Divine wish, man as a 
 reasonable being, with understanding and will, is 
 bound, in the first place, to ascertain that it is the 
 Divine wish before he executes it. In what way, then, 
 is a Divine command for the destruction of a whole 
 nation, innocent and guilty alike, made known to the 
 destroying nation ? By the evidence of miracles it is 
 replied, and replied with truth ; but some distinction is 
 still wanted in dealing with this subject. For in the 
 present day would a miracle be sufficient authority to 
 us to do acts such as those which were done upon the 
 true authority of miracles under the older dispensation ? 
 Would miracles be a warrant to us now to destroy 
 a whole nation, putting to death men, women, and 
 
Exterminating Wars. 85 
 
 children ; or to deprive a whole family of life on 
 account of some sinful act committed by the father ? 
 It will be acknowledged that they would not be ; we 
 should feel it impossible that God would really 
 command us to do such acts as these now, what- 
 ever commands He may have given in former ages ; 
 and we should put aside the authority of such 
 miracles, as designed, even if they were real, to test 
 our faith, not to make us do the acts in question. For 
 a miracle is not represented in Scripture as absolute 
 evidence of a command from God ; rather it is ex- 
 pressly represented as not being. As evidence it lies 
 under checks and conditions, in the absence of the 
 fulfilment of which it is not evidence, but trial. And 
 in this light, in which it is thus directly contemplated 
 in the Bible, we should regard a miracle now, which 
 professed to be the warrant of a Divine command to 
 perform acts of ^discriminating punishment, and 
 wholesale slaughter of the innocent and guilty alike. 
 
 But if miraculous evidence was properly proof to 
 the Israelites of a Divine command to exterminate 
 certain nations, but would not be sufficient proof of 
 such a command to us now, that must be occasioned 
 by some difference of conceptions in a former age and 
 in the present, in consequence of which such a com- 
 mand was adapted for proof by miracles in a former 
 age, and is not adapted for that proof now ; was not 
 an incongruous or incredible command to the people 
 to whom it was given, but would be to us. 
 
 One explanation, then, that will be given of this 
 difference will be that the Gospel law is a law of love, 
 
86 Exterminating Wars. 
 
 and that acts of vengeance and destruction which 
 were appropriate in retribution of sin in a less ad- 
 vanced age, and were the natural expression of hostility 
 to evil in that age, are wholly out of place under a 
 dispensation which enjoins as its leading precepts 
 charity and resignation, and, instead of resisting evil, 
 the bearing all things and the enduring all things. 
 When a Samaritan village would not receive our Lord, 
 His disciples, James and John, when they saw this, 
 said, " Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come 
 down from heaven, and consume them, even as Elias 
 did ? " That was the spirit of the old law. But our 
 Lord replied that they were now to be of another 
 spirit. " He turned and rebuked them, and said, Ye 
 know not what manner of spirit ye are of; for the 
 Son of man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to 
 save them." 1 
 
 But though this is a most important distinction in 
 the standard of Judaism and of Christianity, it is not 
 the whole of the distinction between them ; for we 
 plainly see that the acts to which we refer, the 
 destruction of whole nations, children included, for 
 the sins of the adult portion, and the infliction of 
 death upon whole families for the personal sins of their 
 heads, are not only contrary to the law of love, but 
 contrary also to our idea of justice. When we com- 
 pare the Gospel era with the condition of the human 
 mind antecedent to it, we find that there has been not 
 only a revelation of the principle of love, but that there 
 has been also a revelation of the idea of justice too ; 
 
 1 Luke ix. 54, 55, 56. 
 
Exterminating Wars. 87 
 
 that that idea has been developed, sharpened, and 
 defined in the human mind ; so that the idea of justice 
 would be now an absolute bar to the execution of 
 certain proceedings, against which it did not act as 
 such an absolute barrier in a former age of the world. 
 The defective sense of justice, then, in those early 
 ages, arose from the defective sense of individuality. 
 The idea of justice could not be complete or exact 
 before the idea of man was, for justice implies a proper 
 estimate of the being about whom it relates, and with 
 whom it deals. But the idea of man, the conception of 
 human individuality, that each man is an independent 
 being in himself, was only imperfectly embraced in 
 those ages. Man was regarded as an appendage to 
 man, to some person or some body, and therefore the 
 idea of man being defective, the idea of justice was 
 defective too. Hence arose, then, those monstrous 
 forms of civil justice in the East, in which the wife 
 and the children were included in the same punish- 
 ment with the criminal himself, as being part of him. 
 The idea was not always acted upon, nor did it form 
 part, as far as one can judge, of the common routine of 
 justice ; indeed it would have caused the depopulation 
 of countries if it had ; but it was always at hand to be 
 brought into use if wanted. The punishment of chil- 
 dren for the sins of the fathers was, we may say, 
 incorporated into the civil justice of the East, and was 
 part of its traditional civil code : it was not an every- 
 day process in the courts, but the principle of it existed 
 in the law, and was resorted to on special occasions, 
 when a great impression had to be made. Not that 
 
Exterminating Wars. 
 
 the offences which, were selected for the examples of 
 this mode of retribution were chosen upon any prin- 
 ciple, for they seem to have followed the caprice of the 
 monarch. But they were such as, according to this 
 irregular standard, were heinous crimes ; and the ap- 
 plication of this extreme penalty seems to have carried 
 the authority and weight of law, and to have been 
 recognised by custom and popular opinion, and not 
 to have been a simply arbitrary and tyrannical act 
 of the monarch. Such was the character of Nebu- 
 chadnezzar's sentence upon all the blasphemers of the 
 true God, to whom he had, after the miraculous sal- 
 vation of the three servants of God, pronounced his 
 adhesion ; the sentence, viz., that all such persons 
 should " be cut in pieces, and their houses made a 
 dunghill;" 1 i.e., that their families should perish with 
 them. Nor, when Darius punished the malignant 
 accusers of Daniel with the very death intended for 
 the accused, and included their wives and children in it, 
 does he appear to have done anything more than what 
 the Oriental code of justice fully sanctioned. It was 
 the sentence of a monarch who especially respected 
 law and legal tradition, and did not make his own wil] 
 his rule ; a monarch who had evidently a strong sense 
 of justice in his nature, a sympathy with the oppressed 
 and ill used, a respect for holy men, a pious and devout 
 temper. Nor are these two cases evidently more than 
 samples of a general and established method of punish- 
 ment, though it was not an ordinary but an extra- 
 ordinary act of civil justice, regarded perhaps somewhat 
 
 1 Daniel ill 29. 
 
Exterminating Wars. 89 
 
 in the same light in which our forefathers regarded 
 attainder. 
 
 These were the fruits of the idea that one man 
 belonged to another, was part of another. The human 
 appurtenances of the man were nobodies in themselves, 
 they had no individual existence of their own, their 
 punishment was a shadow as it affected them, be- 
 cause their own nonentity neutralised it ; the person 
 punished was the hateful criminal himself, who was 
 destroyed in his children. The guarantee was given 
 in this extended form of justice that no part of him 
 escaped. Justice got the whole of him. The victim 
 in himself, and in all his members, was crushed and 
 extinguished. In the age's blindness and confusion oi 
 ideas, people did not really seem to know where the 
 exact personality of the criminal was, and where it was 
 to be got hold of; whether, in the locality of himself, 
 was himself only, or some other person or persons also 
 as well. They could not hit the exact mark to their 
 own satisfaction, so they got into their grasp both the 
 man himself and every one connected with him, to 
 make sure. If they did this, if they collected about 
 the criminal everything that belonged to him wives, 
 children, grandchildren, dependants, servants, house- 
 hold, the whole growth of human life about him, and 
 destroyed it all, they were certain that they punished 
 him, and the whole of him. The total of the individual 
 was there, and justice was consummated. 
 
 But, again, this defective idea of human individu- 
 ality had another result besides that which affected the 
 personality of man ; it had an effect upon the sense 
 
QO Exterminating Wars. 
 
 of justice itself, as a feeling of nature ; it let loose 
 exaggerated and extravagantly developed justice as a 
 passion, an affection, and an emotion of the mind. 
 
 We are accustomed to represent Justice as neutral 
 and impartial, holding the scales. It is so in the de- 
 partment of evidence, because a criminal is not a 
 criminal till he is proved to be one. But guilt once 
 proved, and standing in its own colours before us, 
 justice takes a side; she is a partisan and a foe; she 
 becomes retributive justice, and desires the punishment 
 of guilt. Justice then becomes an appetite and a pas- 
 sion, and not a discriminating principle only. We see 
 this in the natural and eager interest which the crowd 
 takes in the solemn proceedings of our courts, in the 
 relish with which they contemplate the judge in his 
 chair of state ; confiding in him as the guardian of 
 innocence and avenger of guilt; and the satisfac- 
 tion with which the final sentence upon crime is re- 
 ceived, resembles the satisfaction of some bodily want 
 hunger, or thirst, or desire for repose. The hold 
 which religion has upon mankind is due in large 
 measure to the justice of religion. She promises one 
 day to fulfil the vision, and realise the dream in every 
 simple mind, of a general setting to rights, when every- 
 body will have his due. It is evident that justice is a 
 craving of our nature, and rests in the punishment of 
 the guilty as an end desirable in itself. It is appeased 
 when it attains this object, and feels a tormenting void 
 when it fails of it. 
 
 But justice, as an appetite and a passion, is subject 
 to the same extravagances and excesses to which 
 
Exterminating Wars. 91 
 
 passion in general is subject. There is in all passion 
 an innate tendency to the unreasonable, which breaks 
 out under peculiar excitements. Even what we call 
 sentiment has elements of treason in its way of 
 fastening upon things ; habits, which are reasonable 
 indeed so far as they are human, but on the other 
 hand cannot be reconciled with pure reason. What, 
 e.g., is the whole internal influence of association but a 
 kind of unreasonableness ? "We are more than usually 
 affected by a particular event on the recurring day of 
 the year. But why ? What has happened ? The earth 
 has rolled so many times upon its axis. And what has 
 that to do with the event ? Nothing. We visit the 
 place where some great man was born, or died, or 
 where he did some notable act. Here Caesar landed, 
 here Hannibal fought, here Becket died, here Charles V. 
 retired, here Shakespeare was born. But what has 
 place to do with the significance of the act or the 
 suffering, the birth or the death ? Nothing. A man 
 must be born somewhere, and die somewhere, and act 
 in some place or other. These are accidents which do 
 not touch the substance of these events. Are we any 
 nearer the person or his act because we stand on the 
 spot where he did it ? No : the person and the place 
 are divided by an infinite interval from each other ; 
 yet we treasure these local connections, and feel our- 
 selves placed in a kind of vicinity to an historical per- 
 sonage by entering the house where he was born. 
 
 If quiet sentiment or feeling then has constitu- 
 tional elements of imreason in it, what must be the 
 case with strong passion ? It is a known characteristic 
 
92 Exterminating Wars. 
 
 of passion that it makes objects for itself; that when 
 natural objects are not at hand on which to expend 
 itself, it vents itself upon others which it creates for 
 the occasion. This is a well-known effect in the case 
 of anger ; a passionate man, when something has 
 vexed him, stamps upon the ground, or tears the note 
 which contains the bad news into shreds, or kicks 
 away a stone at his feet, as if he would hurt something 
 or other, even in semblance ; anything does for an 
 object. " The soul being agitated and discomposed," 
 says Montaigne, " is lost in itself if it has not some- 
 thing to encounter, and therefore always requires an 
 object to aim at and keep it employed. The soul in 
 the exercise of its passions rather deceives itself by 
 creating a false and fantastical subject, even contrary 
 to its own belief, than not to have something to work 
 upon. After this manner brute beasts spend their fury 
 upon the stone or weapon that has hurt them, and are 
 ready to tear themselves to pieces for the injury they 
 have received from another. "What causes of the mis- 
 fortunes that befall us do we not ourselves invent ? 
 The hair which you tear off by handfuls, and that 
 bosom which you smite with so much indignation and 
 cruelty, are no way guilty of the unlucky stroke 
 which has killed your dear brother : quarrel with 
 something else. Livy, speaking of the Eoman army 
 in Spain, says that for the loss of two brothers, the great 
 captains Flere omnes repent e, et off ensure capita; 
 all wept and beat their foreheads : but this is a com- 
 mon practice. And the philosopher Bion said plea- 
 santly of the king who plucked off the hair of his 
 
Exterminating Wars. 93 
 
 head for sorrow, ' Does this man think that baldness 
 is a remedy for grief ? ' Who has not seen gamesters 
 bite and gnaw their cards, and swallow the dice, in 
 revenge for the loss of their money ? Xerxes lashed 
 the sea, and wrote a challenge to Mount Athos ! 
 Cyrus set a whole army several days at work to 
 revenge himself on the river Gnidus for the fright it 
 had put him in when he was passing over it ; and 
 Caligula demolished a very beautiful palace, for the 
 confinement his mother had there." x 
 
 We see this spirit exhibited in the funereal cere- 
 monies of ancient times, and the tributes paid to the 
 memory of the dead. These became in time indeed 
 formalities and grand shows, matters of family or 
 regal pride rather than the heart, yet they had their 
 origin in real feeling. One can imagine indeed how 
 an imperious will that had never yet been thwarted, 
 and ruled its own world with an absolute sway, would 
 feel upon the sudden loss of a beloved favourite 
 wife, sister, or friend, that had been all in all to it ; 
 when for the first time it encountered an impassable 
 barrier, and longed for the irrecoverable. This sense 
 of void in the sufferer's mind must be relieved in 
 some way : he cannot acquiesce in impotence, he must 
 struggle ; he must reach forward somewhere to supply 
 the room of what is gone ; he must do something in 
 order to hide from himself that he can do nothing. 
 He vents himself then in a vast expenditure of bar- 
 barous and irrelevant action ; he sacrifices attendants 
 
 1 Montaigne's Essays " How the soul discharges itself on false 
 objects," etc., etc. 
 
94 Exterminating Wars. 
 
 and followers at the funeral pile ; others are unworthy 
 of life when the loved one has departed ; and life is 
 the most valuable thing, and therefore a fit treasure 
 to throw away, and send, as it were, after the dead. 
 Such a death is to him many deaths; it ought to cause 
 other deaths ; it ought not to be single and stand 
 alone. He encloses one death then in a thousand ; 
 he loads the earth with some gigantic sepulchral 
 fabric to express the largeness of his loss. He thus 
 grasps with outstretched hand after some object to 
 fill the vacuum within ; he beats the air, and his 
 baulked desire goes off into an immense waste of 
 energy, which pleases him because it is waste ; it is 
 expressive on that very account ; his grief indulges in 
 all useless things, in vast margins, in excesses, in 
 superfluities, and costly emptiness. \^ 
 
 Love, grief, and passion, in general being thus 
 liable to excesses, justice, as an appetite and passion, 
 is liable to the same. It tends under excitement to 
 make objects for itself. And so Oriental justice did. 
 It went out into margins, excesses, superfluous sur- 
 plusses of retribution ; other lives went to this ap- 
 petite over or above that of the criminal, and justice 
 used human beings as a material of expression, as one 
 would employ a look, a gesture, a motion ; it killed a 
 thousand men merely as a mode of tearing the hair, 
 and beating the breast. It refused to be curtailed 
 and checked, or to stop with the criminal himself ; it 
 went into a crowd of extras and appendages. It was 
 this ancient notion of justice that came out on great 
 occasions ; it was then poor work to punish only one 
 
Exterminating Wars. 95 
 
 man ; this grand appetite must have more food, more 
 material ; there was something excessive in the very 
 nature of justice, which passed beyond the person of 
 the criminal and claimed all his family and house ; it 
 was essentially an overflowing thing, refusing to be 
 fixed by the boundary of its immediate object, and 
 pressing onwards by its own force and intensity to 
 others beyond. -Connection by blood with the guilty 
 agent was enough to reflect his crime ; the passion 
 was too hotly engaged in the pursuit to distinguish 
 the nature of the association, and retribution became 
 extermination. "Wild justice thus, like an over- 
 wrought passion, made objects for itself. Had a 
 designing set of courtiers conspired foully against 
 Daniel ? Let no member of the guilty men escape ; 
 throw them and their wives and children to the lions. 
 Has wicked Haman plotted the massacre of the Jews ? 
 It is not enough that Haman himself should hang on 
 a gallows fifty cubits high ; let his ten sons hang with 
 him. Justice was anger, and gave itself all the liber- 
 ties and privileges of the angry man ; the angry man 
 of the stage, whose idea is that his passion to be real 
 and honest, thorough and true, should blunder, should 
 make mistakes, and hit the wrong man. 
 
 Aristotle discusses the passion of anger with his 
 own characteristic shrewdness and acuteness, and with 
 as much of the humorist as of the philosopher. He 
 is indulgent to its mistakes, and tender to its excesses, 
 treating the affection somewhat as a comic writer 
 would treat the character of an honest quick-tempered 
 man in a play. Anger with him is the man in the 
 
g6 Exterminating Wars. 
 
 farce, who is always making blunders, and mistaking 
 one thing for another, but in a way which provokes a 
 smile rather than indignation. The affection has in 
 his view an intrinsic proneness to misunderstanding 
 and misconception, which he pardons, though the in- 
 stances which he gives are those which we would 
 not so easily condone. "The intemperance of anger," he 
 says, " is not so bad as that of the appetites ; for anger 
 appears to hear reason, but to mistake it, like a too 
 quick servant, who, before he has heard out what is 
 said, runs off, and then makes a mistake in his errand; 
 or as a dog barks at a knock before he knows whether 
 it is a friend's. So anger, in consequence of the heat 
 and quickness of its nature, hearing but not hearing 
 what is said, goes off to revenge itself; for anger 
 reasons that this being an insult or a slight, it must 
 punish the man; whereas appetite rushes by mere 
 instinct to enjoyment. So that anger follows reason 
 in a way, whereas appetite does not ; the one is in a 
 sort of way conquered by reason, the other by its own 
 lust. And, moreover, anger is more constitutional than 
 lust, as one thought who apologised for striking his 
 father ; for, says he, this man struck his father, and 
 he his, and this boy here pointing to him, will strike 
 me when he is grown up ; for it is our nature crvy- 
 yez>es yap 'Y^M.V : and one who was dragged by his son 
 up to the door of the house, bid him stop there ; for 
 that he himself had dragged his father so far, but not 
 farther." l If we extricate the philosophy of this pass- 
 age from the humour of it, we obtain a truth which 
 
 1 Ethics, 1. vii. c. 6. 
 
Exterminating Wars. 97 
 
 bears upon the present subject. Aristotle looks upon, 
 anger as following an apparent law of reason in its 
 errors and excesses, which seems to itself only its 
 necessary action. Justice, also, as being anger at 
 crime, puts its excesses in the same reasonable point 
 of view to itself ; it follows the temper of the general 
 passion of anger. Justice simply acting as a passion 
 goes beyond its mark, carries punishment beyond the 
 guilty person, hits right and left, and brings in a 
 crowd that had nothing to do with the crime, under 
 the scope of the sentence ; justice simply as anger 
 votes blood to be crime, and implicates a whole family 
 in the act of its head ; it becomes a systematic blun- 
 derer and mistake-maker, making out one man to be 
 another, and all upon a kind of plan and a show of 
 reason to itself, by which it determines that blood 
 composes a sort of identity, and makes a family one 
 person : an idea which has as its immediate fruit 
 wholesale judicial slaughter. 
 
 But what enabled Oriental justice to run out into 
 these extravagances as an appetite and passion, was 
 the defective sense, to begin with, of human indi- 
 viduality. If you have the perfect idea of human 
 individuality that every man stands on his own 
 footing, and is a separate person from anybody else, 
 justice may be a strong passion and enthusiasm, it 
 may desire all these margins, but it cannot have 
 them ; it is under checks and conditions ; it cannot 
 make objects for itself, but must take those which are 
 made for it ; it cannot pass beyond the real criminal. 
 
 It cannot slaughter a multitude of people merely as a 
 
 H 
 
98 Exterminating Wars. 
 
 grand piece of extravagance, a substitution for oratory, 
 a broad margin and surplus of emotion, and a mode 
 of tearing the hair and beating the breast. If, there- 
 fore, justice as a passion did go out into these excesses, 
 it was because the accurate idea of human individu- 
 ality was then wanting ; because the idea of man was 
 not truly understood. That extravagant and mon- 
 strous form of civil justice, then the inclusion of the 
 children in the punishment of the father was occa- 
 sioned by this defective idea, coupled with the circum- 
 stance that the defect gave scope for the excesses of 
 justice, regarded as an appetite and passion of our 
 nature. The spirit which produced this wild justice 
 was not a wicked, a murderous, or a cruel spirit ; it 
 was not delight in the infliction of pain ; it was not 
 objectless love of destruction ; it was the undisciplined 
 passion of justice working without the perception of 
 the limit which man's individuality imposed upon it. 
 It aimed loosely and confusedly at a high, a good, and 
 a necessary object the punishment of crime. 
 
 This idea of justice, then, which penetrated the 
 ancient and especially the Oriental mind, was evi- 
 dently also the idea of the Israelitish people in its 
 earlier history. What reason, indeed, is there why 
 the Jewish nation upon such a point, not connected 
 with the peculiar object of their revelation, should 
 not partake of the defective notions of the rest of the 
 world at that time ; why the defective idea of human 
 individuality, and the judicial standard which sprang 
 from that root, should not extend to the minds of the 
 sacred people ; producing exterminating wars and 
 
Exterminating Wars. 99 
 
 wholesale judicial punishments ? When the Divine 
 command was given to destroy a whole nation, on 
 account of the wickedness of the great mass in it, and 
 a whole family on account of the sin of the head, these 
 were in fact judicial proceedings natural to the 
 Jewish mind, and in accordance with a received 
 standard of justice. Justice, by means of this release 
 from the idea of individuality and man's rights, was 
 set at liberty to act as a passion ; to punish wholesale, 
 to slaughter whole nations for the sins of many of the 
 nation, to extirpate and destroy, upon the mere 
 ground of connection by blood. The idolatries and 
 abominations of the Canaanites invited vengeance, 
 and vengeance did not confine itself to accurate 
 justice ; it expanded into the extravagances of the 
 unchecked passion of justice, moral in its hatred of 
 evil, but without clearness, and blind and dim in its 
 notion of persons. 
 
 But there is this great distinction between the 
 principle of punishment for the father's sins as it was 
 held by the Jewish people, and the same principle as 
 it was held in the pagan and general Oriental world 
 viz., that in the latter the judicial principle figures as 
 a part of civil ]aw, coming into operation whenever a 
 sufficiently important occasion arises. The Persian 
 monarch flings the families of the false accusers into 
 the lions' den, along with the criminals themselves, as 
 a judicial act of his own, and belonging of right to a 
 regal tribunal of justice. But in Israel the principle 
 did not exist as a part of regular law, but only as a 
 special and extraordinary supplement to law, when God 
 
ioo Exterminating Wars. 
 
 himself commanded it. The Jewish law forbade magis- 
 trates to punish the children for the fathers' sins. " The 
 fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither 
 shall the children be put to death for the fathers ; every 
 man shall be put to death for his own sin." 1 The punish- 
 ment, then, of the family for the sin of the head was 
 among the Jews extra-legal, and stood upon a religious 
 ground as the dictation of a special revelation. But 
 though the Jewish mind was in a higher state than the 
 ordinary Eastern mind on this subject, as the very fact 
 of confining this species of justice to Divine command, 
 and excluding it from a human court and ordinary 
 law, shows, this retributive principle had still a place 
 in the Jewish mind as an extraordinary mode of 
 justice, which a special command might rouse from 
 a dormant state into action in a particular case. It 
 had a suspended operation, checked by a peculiar 
 religious condition. It met the Divine command half- 
 way, no prepossession being felt against such a shape 
 of justice as an extraordinary one ; and it had a con- 
 stant incipient action in the system, though it was 
 powerless unless it was taken up by a special revela- 
 tion of the Divine will. Such was the divided and 
 modified hold of this ruder form of justice upon the 
 Jewish mind ; not so strong as its hold upon the 
 Eastern world generally, in which that form of justice 
 was a part of regular law, but still enough so to give 
 such justice a popular naturalness, and remove all 
 unfittingness when there was external evidence of a 
 Divine command to execute it ; and when it came 
 
 1 Deut. xxiv. 16. 
 
Exterminating Wars. , 101 
 
 before them as a grand and majestic act of Him who 
 ordereth all things according to His own sovereign will. 
 And this supplies an answer to a question which 
 is asked with respect to the need of miraculous inter- 
 position for the sanction of this extraordinary species 
 of justice. It is said that in ages in which this was 
 the state of ideas, that is to say, when one man was 
 in the mind of the age an appendage of another, and 
 was identified with a parent or ruler in crime, it followed 
 by natural reason that he should be identified with him 
 in punishment; and that one of these extraordinary 
 cases would be wholesale family, and the other whole- 
 sale national destruction. What need, therefore, to the 
 Jews, it is asked, of any special Divine command, and 
 with it of miraculous evidence, to warrant such acts, 
 when this idea of justice existed to begin with in their 
 minds as a natural idea ? What impediment was there 
 to their acting upon this idea, without waiting for the 
 special authorisation ? Why require the sanction of 
 a miracle for these acts, if the popularly received idea 
 of justice of itself allowed and sanctioned them ? But 
 an idea may be held, and yet, with reference to such a 
 question as this, everything may depend upon the mode 
 and measure in which it is held. Among the Jews 
 what was that mode and measure ? That is simply 
 an historical question. As a matter of fact, in the 
 Jewish mind this peculiar principle of justice existed 
 in a modified and limited form ; ready to be put in 
 execution upon a special Divine call, but not before. 
 We have not to examine the state of mind logically, 
 but to take the fact. As a matter of fact it was a 
 
IO2 Exterminating Wars. 
 
 special authorisation which, put in force this justice 
 in the case of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, the family 
 of Achan, the family of Saul, as well as in the larger 
 case of the extermination of the Canaanites : an 
 authorisation through a miracle at the time, or 
 through an inspired leader. The principle, held in- 
 definitely elsewhere in the early ages of the world, 
 was held with this distinction by the Jew. But such 
 a Divine sanction implied miraculous evidence to sup- 
 port it. And thus it was an essential characteristic 
 of this extraordinary justice under the old dispensa- 
 tion, that it was executed under such miraculous 
 warrant ; this was a fundamental feature of it, which 
 entered into the system, and furnished a moral con- 
 dition of it. 
 
 But with whatever condition this idea of justice 
 was held in the Jewish mind, when we have the fact 
 that it was held, we have the reason why the Divine 
 commands, of which we have been speaking, were 
 adapted to man as the agent for their execution then, 
 and are not adapted now ; and were capable of proof 
 by the evidence of miracles then, and are not capable 
 now ; viz., that the imperfect idea of justice which 
 then existed in the human mind opposed no resistance to 
 them on the moral side. Suppose a Divine command, 
 professing to come to us now upon the evidence of a 
 miracle, that we were to kill one man on account of 
 the crime of another man, a family of children on 
 account of the sin of their father, all the infants of a 
 nation on account of the wickedness of a nation as 
 a whole ; it is plain that, in the first place, we should 
 
Exterminating Wars. 103 
 
 be divided in our minds between two contradictory 
 evidences, the evidence of the miracle that such a 
 command came from God, and the evidence of our sense 
 of justice that it could not. And is it not also suffi- 
 ciently plain, in the next place, that according to the 
 Bible's own test of the validity of miraculous evidence, 
 such evidence could not be valid proof of a command 
 having come from God when in opposition to our. 
 moral sense ? But then these commands had no 
 resistance from the moral sense ; they did not look 
 unnatural to the ancient Jew, they were not foreign 
 to his standard ; they excited no surprise or perplexity ; 
 they appealed to a genuine but rough idea of justice, 
 which existed when the longing for retribution upon 
 crime in the human mind was not checked by the 
 strict sense of human individuality. Such commands 
 were therefore adapted then to miraculous proof; 
 because such proof, then meeting nothing counter 
 to it in the human conscience, possessed its natural 
 weight not counterbalanced or neutralised. Man in 
 the first ages was identified with some individual or 
 body external to him, was implicated in its crimes, 
 and exposed to their punishment ; whereas now human 
 individuality is understood, and society is penetrated 
 with the true conception of each man as an inde- 
 pendent being, with an existence and rights of his 
 own. 
 
LECTURE V. 
 
 VISITATION OF THE SINS OF THE 
 FATHERS UPON THE CHILDREN. 
 
 T1THEN in a later age we have to separate one part 
 * * of the Jewish Law from another, the permanent 
 part from the temporary part, the accommodation to 
 imperfect morality from the moral truths ; we have 
 to argue and to lay down some position on the subject 
 which includes the consequence we want. But in 
 the actual dispensation of the law ; and when one part 
 was separating from another by an actual change and 
 development, no argument was needed on the subject. 
 The Law naturally and of itself slipped off its incon- 
 gruous matter ; all that was not perfectly holy, pure, 
 and righteous, did not, ipso facto, belong to the Law, it 
 was rejected as something that came from another 
 stock ; and if it had been confounded hitherto with 
 the Law, it was time that the partition should be made, 
 and the difference of the two materials revealed. Our 
 Lord, e.g., was not prevented by His Divine nature 
 from arguing and showing forth truth by a logical 
 process ; as when He argued for the resurrection of the 
 dead from that which was spoken by God saying, " I 
 
Visitation of the Sins of Fathers. 105 
 
 am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and 
 the God of Jacob : God is not the God of the dead 
 but of the living/' 1 But in the Sermon on the 
 Mount, which is the great trial of the Law, the 
 examination which tests the purity of its different pre- 
 cepts and rules, there is no argument ; but the alien 
 parts drop off of themselves, and leave the residuum 
 pure. The Law tests itself. Does the enlightened con- 
 science condemn anything it allows or commands ? By 
 the simple condemnation of conscience it ceases to 
 belong to the Law : it goes. " Ye have heard that it 
 hath been said of old time." All these precepts were 
 the litera scripta of the Law ; they are there in black 
 and white ; statute law, as good as ever was impressed 
 on any code. But it all goes, from the original assump- 
 tion which overrules every particular statute, that 
 now nothing but what is perfect is allowed in morals. 
 " Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which 
 is in heaven is perfect." If there is anything which 
 is a falling short, which goes a certain way but not 
 the whole way as in the imperfect law of marriage, 
 in the imperfect law of love, in a law of retaliation- 
 it is assumed that the essence of the Law is not all this, 
 and that, on the other hand, what is perfect is the 
 Law. We know nothing henceforth but this perfect 
 Law commanding in the conscience. 
 
 So of St. Paul. It is remarkable that with all the 
 imperfections, the crudities, the coarse legislation which 
 is stamped upon the Law, the Law never figures in 
 St. Paul's moral estimate except as perfect. "The 
 
 1 Matt. xxii. 32. 
 
io6 Visitation of the Sins of 
 
 Law is holy ; and the commandment holy, and just, 
 and good." How is this ? except that ipso facto the 
 Law parts with everything that is imperfect. Nothing 
 that is not holy can be part of the Law. It is an 
 axiom which settles everything. We hear nothing now 
 of the exceptions taken in the Sermon on the Mount 
 against the fallings short, defects, and inequalities of the 
 Mosaic legislation; but that is because these have 
 already been eliminated ; and because, on that very 
 account, the pure residuum is constituted the Law, and 
 everything that is imperfect has ipso facto dropped 
 off from it. The Law, then, which is recognised by St. 
 Paul is the perfect law only. He knows of nothing 
 else. An imperfect law is an absurdity. The Law 
 entered that offence might abound ; not to let men off, 
 and show that they were not sinners because they had 
 a very easy rule given them. It was absolutely neces- 
 sary, then, that the Law must be pure and perfect. 
 But how was such a law got, but by the old Law 
 casting its skin, and coming out in a new and perfect 
 character as the Law of God, aspiring to the full 
 spiritual morality? It is to be observed that the only 
 dispute which engages attention in St. Paul is no dis- 
 pute respecting the morality of the Law, as if it was 
 doubted whether that morality were quite correct, and 
 were not clouded by mistakes and lowered by blemishes 
 and blots, but it is a question only whether that Law 
 can be fulfilled, whether the human conscience is able 
 to satisfy it. The moral demands of the Law are in- 
 satiable, we cannot mount up to this height, Alps on 
 
 1 Romans vii. 12. 
 
the Fathers upon the Children. 107 
 
 Alps arise, and we are involved in an inextricable 
 labyrinth wherever we turn; duties and obligations 
 beset us with impossible claims, which cannot be 
 resisted, and yet cannot be cleared. This is the diffi- 
 culty, then, in the doctrinal scheme of St. Paul ; but he 
 does not think that the Law has blotches and stains ; 
 there is no apprehension in St. Paul's mind that the 
 Law is not good enough : the Law is spiritual, but I 
 am carnal ; for the good that I would I do not, but the 
 evil that I would not that I do ; the Law is perfect, 
 but we do not fulfil it. The mistake St. Paul fights 
 against is not obedience to a carnal law so full of 
 gross imperfections ; but that of assuming that we do 
 and can obey a law so essentially insatiable in its 
 moral claims, and which exceeds and baffles the con- 
 science ; that we can obey a law so spiritual. 
 
 We have then here the quick and summary 
 process by which, in the actual emergency, the Law 
 clears itself viz., by casting out spontaneously 
 the objectionable matter, and taking the high ground 
 that whatever is not self-evidently holy and good 
 does not belong to the Law. We frame long argu- 
 ments to defend the Law of God from the injustice of 
 punishing children for the sins of their fathers, but if 
 we believe the Sermon on the Mount it is all done with 
 one word viz. that punishing children for the fathers' 
 sake cannot belong to the Law of God, because it is 
 unjust. The Law of God vindicates itself, and its de- 
 fence is self-acting. Thus the argument is the simplest 
 possible, and its effect is complete. > The Law comes to 
 us, in the first instance, under the most heinous charges; 
 
io8 Visitation of the Sins of 
 
 that it enjoins hatred, retaliation, infringements of 
 the marriage law, and the like ; but all these drop off 
 from it in a moment upon the principle of the Sermon 
 on the Mount. The instant that it is perceived that 
 these are wrong things, these things are seen not to be 
 in the Law. The true law of God disowns them ; they are 
 only in it because of the hardness of men's hearts ; i.e., 
 they are there because they are in the human heart; the 
 true site of the evil is in man. And so the punish- 
 ment of one man for the sin of another is, ipso facto, 
 rejected by the law of justice. Eetaliation is also 
 rejected by the law of love. Both are therefore, ipso 
 facto, cast out of the law of God. This is all of it 
 a spontaneous operation; it is a self-acting vindication. 
 The Law of God clears itself by one act ; and from 
 being a law charged with gross injustice and pollution, 
 stands forth in the light of a perfect law. The Law is 
 holy; and the commandment is holy, and just, and good. 
 This is the answer that St. Paul gives to the charge 
 that the Law has commanded wrong practices, and 
 placed itself in the wrong ; the answer that it has not 
 done so because it is the Law of God. 
 
 What the Deity admits into his Law externally, 
 because the hardness of men's hearts obliges it, and 
 what He admits into it because it is His will, are 
 things absolutely different. Commands are not of 
 Divine obligation simply because they are externally 
 commands : we, e.g., see commands in Scripture which 
 plainly disclaim the Divine source. Thus the com- 
 mand to Balaam : which is plainly to say As you 
 want to go, go ; I will not prevent you from taking 
 
the Fathers upon the Children. 109 
 
 the course you are bent upon ; you have set your 
 mind upon going with the princes ; take your own way. 
 So the command of our Lord to Judas : That thou 
 doest do quickly. He was commanded now to do the 
 act, but it was his own act which he was commanded 
 to do. There is a class of commands which, in human 
 transactions, come under the head of irony, and sig- 
 nify Now you have been so long a time wanting to 
 do this, and applying the force of your own will to 
 the attainment of this purpose, now then I will join 
 you, I will add my will to yours. I tell you to do it. 
 Do it, and take the consequences of it. The command 
 is half command and half threat. Had the recipients 
 of it the slightest idea of the danger which really re- 
 sides in such an order, they would dread it more than 
 the strongest and most forcible resistance ; but instead 
 of this they catch at it, value it as if it were just the 
 very liberty that they have longed for ; and swallow 
 the destructive, and justly destructive, permission. 
 The Scripture principle thus was laid down that God 
 commanded according to the state of mind of the per- 
 son ; commanded even wickedness ironically, when the 
 state of a man's mind was wicked and obstinate in sin. 
 Is he determined on a covetous self-aggrandising career? 
 bid him go with the princes of Moab. Is he eager for 
 the reward of blood ? tell him to get it quickly. Does 
 he want to be hardened as Pharaoh did ? harden him. 
 But a distinction must be drawn between this 
 class of commands given in judicial anger, com- 
 mands to do wicked and corrupt acts, and com- 
 mands to do acts of rude goodness consonant to 
 
no Visitation of the Sins of 
 
 the imperfect morality of the times. Such com- 
 mands as these are not given in anger, but only in 
 condescension to the weakness and ignorance of man, 
 who cannot rise all at once to the high moral stand- 
 ard. But such commands to do imperfect moral acts 
 have still to be explained, when, in a later age and 
 with the holiness and justice of the Divine Law fully 
 developed, the rough incipient stages of the Divine 
 dealings with man come into discussion, and are 
 scrutinised from a lofty moral standard. It is this 
 that constitutes the great subject of Scripture criti- 
 cism, and upon which the apologetics of Scripture 
 itself centre. The apologetics of the Sermon on the 
 Mount, and the apologetics of St. Paul's Epistles, relate 
 to the defective element in Scripture, and lay down, 
 with respect to it, that the Law of God is clear from 
 the responsibility of it, because the Law of God never 
 did enjoin it ; i.e., what was really the Law of God. 
 The real Law of God was all good : the evil was the 
 condition of the human mind. The human mind only 
 admitted good to a certain extent. It was faulty 
 in the measure of that admission of good, but the 
 good itself was not the worse ; and the Law of God 
 itself was cleared. 
 
 We see then that the imperfect parts of the Law 
 slipped off naturally from the old stock, as the Law 
 entered into an age of higher morals ; the parts relat- 
 ing to marriage, divorce, enmity, retaliation, had been 
 identified with the Law in the earlier ages, but con- 
 science rejected them as conscience advanced; and 
 when conscience rejected them, the Law also itself cast 
 
the Fathers upon the Children. 1 1 1 
 
 them off. And this was especially the case in the instance 
 of the law of punishment of children for the sins of 
 the fathers, laid down in the Second Commandment. 
 The Second Commandment was explained in such a 
 way as that the punishment of children for the sins 
 of the fathers was wholly relieved from the literal 
 sense of punishment, and became the infliction of evil 
 and pain for another reason than that of punishment. 
 And this change was by a natural transition in the 
 ideas of the age. The Law threw off its old Mosaic 
 character. The idea, i.e., of children being guilty of 
 their fathers' sins was rejected, and consequently of 
 punishment implying in its true sense guilt. With the 
 idea of guilt that of punishment was also dropped; 
 and this idea in the Second Commandment, understood 
 in its first and natural sense, left the Gospel code by 
 an inevitable separation, in virtue of the perfection 
 of the Gospel not being able to bear with it. 
 
 But it will be well to explain the mode in which one 
 interpretation of the Second Commandment has slid 
 into another, and to elucidate the change which has 
 come over it more fully and accurately. 
 
 I have been discussing throughout these Lectures 
 the Old Testament fact of the Divine punishment of 
 children for the sins of their fathers; and I have 
 treated the fact as an accommodation to a rude and 
 barbarous, but in its foundation moral, sense of justice 
 of the day. But now the question may be asked Do 
 we not admit a law of God's natural providence as 
 going on now, and as being part of the moral govern- 
 ment of the world, which we call Visiting the sins of 
 
ii2 Visitation of the Sins of 
 
 the fathers upon the children? and admit it not 
 only as a law accommodated to a moral standard of 
 an earlier time, but as of force now and always in the 
 world ? Undoubtedly we do. But this law of Pro- 
 vidence is not to be confounded, as a line of Divine 
 action, with the extraordinary modes of proceeding to 
 which we have been referring. "When we speak of 
 the punishment of children for the sins of the fathers, 
 as a law of Providence now going on in the world, we 
 give a judicial name to a course of proceeding which is 
 not in reality judicial ; we employ a phrase for conveni- 
 ence sake, not intending it to be understood literally, 
 as if the children incurred the guilt of the fathers' sin, 
 and were punished judicially for it. The infliction of 
 evil is not in itself punishment ; it is only punishment 
 when it is inflicted upon men on account of sin. The 
 destructions of which we have been speaking were 
 judicial, because they were expressly inflicted on 
 account of sin ; those who would not otherwise have 
 died were put to death for sin that of another person ; 
 the sin of another person was the declared and published 
 reason for the infliction of death upon them. But the 
 link which connects the sin of the father with the in- 
 jured condition of the children under the law of provi- 
 dence, is not a judicial but a physical one. The one is 
 the occasion of the other ; but the child is not made to 
 suffer by the Author of nature upon the ground that 
 his father was a bad man, and that justice requires 
 the punishment of the son for that fact. The tie 
 which unites the wickedness of the one with the 
 suffering of the other, is the tie of material cause and 
 
the Fathers upon the Children. 113 
 
 effect. The law of natural providence, then, which we 
 call the visitation of the sins of the fathers upon the 
 children requires no moral defence, because it is not a 
 judicial but only a physical process ; the children are 
 not punished on account of their fathers' sins, but only 
 suffer, through the physical medium of those sins, that 
 temporal loss which God has a right to inflict upon 
 them through any other medium, without any crimes 
 of their fathers at all. But the case is different when, 
 from the course of God's natural providence, we turn 
 to those cases in the Old Testament in which the 
 express force, scope, and reason of judicial punish- 
 ment is given for the destruction of whole families ; 
 in which that destruction does not take place through 
 the physical medium of those crimes, but by a 
 positive sentence of God, inflicted by reason of and 
 upon the ground of the fathers' sin. Nor are the 
 instances adduced of visitation of the fathers' sins 
 upon the children under the law of natural providence, 
 precedents to justify real vicarious punishments, as 
 those instances in Scripture are. The two are not 
 parallel cases ; a natural cause is no precedent for a 
 moral one, a sequence of nature is no parallel for a 
 penalty of justice. Nor, when we examine the mean- 
 ing in which the phrase the punishment of the 
 children for the sins of their fathers is used in poetry, 
 in literature, in conversation, when allusion is made 
 to this law of providence, do we find that the popular 
 meaning and acceptation of the phrase implies any- 
 thing judicial. Nobody means to say that the children 
 
 are guilty of the sins of their fathers, and therefore 
 
 I 
 
1 14 Visitation of the Sins of 
 
 punished for them, which alone would be a judicial 
 infliction. The phrase is used in a liberal sense, viz., 
 that the sins of the fathers are the occasion of mis- 
 fortune to the children ; not in the literal sense that 
 misfortune is merited by the children on account of 
 those sins. 
 
 Let us take the cases which are appealed to as 
 illustrations of this law ; they are such as the follow- 
 ing. A man by a course of sensual dissipation ruins 
 his bodily health, and transmits a feeble and sickly 
 constitution to his children. A man by a course of 
 reckless extravagance crumbles away his estate, and 
 bequeaths poverty and straitened circumstances to 
 his children. A man by a course of criminal acts, 
 which not only cover him with infamy but perhaps 
 lead eventually to civil punishment and even to 
 capital punishment, transmits a degraded name to his 
 children. A man, from simple carelessness, indolence, 
 and selfish absorption in his own pleasures, neglects 
 the education of his children, and thus transmits the 
 signal misfortune of ignorance, and often, what is 
 worse than ignorance, a low and coarse standard of 
 morals to his children. But is there anything in the 
 literal sense judicial, in the mode in which the sin 
 and the inherited punishment are connected together 
 in these cases? That is to say, are the children in 
 any of these cases punished as deserving such punish- 
 ment because their father was a bad man ? That is 
 not the idea entertained. The connection between the 
 father's sin and the children's punishment is not a 
 moral connection in any of these cases, nor one imply- 
 
the Fathers upon the Children. 115 
 
 ing moral responsibility ; it is a simply physical link 
 which unites the wickedness of the one with the suffer- 
 ing of the other. The case is that the father by his 
 vices produces a certain material condition of affairs, 
 and that condition of affairs existing, the children have 
 the disadvantage of it. If the father have squandered 
 his estate, the children do not inherit it ; the tie which 
 unites these two facts together is the tie of cause and 
 effect simply, not the tie of a providential justice 
 inflicting the loss upon the children because they deserve 
 it. Every event has a cause, and the misfortunes 
 which happen to us are all caused by something. The 
 cause of our poverty may be either a father's profusion 
 or a neighbour's fraud, and the cause of our bad health 
 may be either an unfortunate accident or an inherited 
 disease ; we no more merit the inherited disease than 
 we do the accident, or the inherited poverty than the 
 fraudulently caused one. 
 
 But when the visitation of the sins of the fathers 
 upon the children is interpreted in the sense of Old 
 Testament history, we see that it is not in the sense in 
 which the phrase is used when it figures as a law of 
 natural providence, and when it is employed in the 
 cases which have been just referred to. We see that 
 there, i.e., when it applies to the execution of the 
 extraordinary sentences in the Old Testament, it is 
 not by a mere physical medium that the punishment 
 is inflicted, but by a distinctly judicial medium. A 
 crime was committed by Achan, and for the crime 
 which Achan committed the family are punished by 
 death. That is to say, the family are treated as guilty 
 
1 1 6 Visitation of the Sins of 
 
 of the father's sin, and this is the sense in which the 
 punishment of the children for the sins of the fathers 
 is understood and accepted in the instance of Achan's 
 children. Had Achan been smitten with disease, and 
 had all that had taken place with respect to the chil- 
 dren been, that they had caught the complaint by 
 infection and died of it, the result could not possibly 
 have been represented as a punishment, except in the 
 sense of an evil which had happened to them through 
 the physical medium of the father's sin. The father's 
 death by disease had been a judicial infliction upon 
 him indeed, but the death of the children would 
 have been the physical consequence of his death. 
 It would not itself have been a judicial punish- 
 ment, because it would have taken place just the same 
 if the fatal disease of the father had arisen from 
 any other reason, without any sin to deserve it, and 
 simply as an occurrence of nature. The disease of the 
 father would have been simply the physical cause of 
 the disease of the children, not a moral cause ; not 
 the reason of their deserving the infliction of it as a 
 punishment. But the punishment of the children did 
 not take place in this way. It was a fresh judicial act 
 of the Almighty in addition to the act of the punish- 
 ment of the guilty man. The family, as distinct from 
 the consequence of physical law, were punished upon 
 the ground of their being implicated in his sin, which 
 is a moral ground, a ground of desert. 
 
 But this is a totally different Divine act and Divine 
 mode of procedure from that which takes place under 
 the head of visiting the sins of the fathers in the 
 
the Fathers upon the Children. 1 1 7 
 
 course of God's natural providence. The physical 
 medium of suffering by which the same punishment 
 which is morally the punishment of the father is mate- 
 rially, and by way of physical cause and effect, the 
 punishment of the son, which is real punishment in 
 the first step, and is not real punishment in the next, 
 this goes on every day, goes on now, and is a received 
 and immediate law of God's natural providence. But 
 that a child should be punished as guilty of an impli- 
 cation in the father's crime, is a conception which does 
 not belong to the present age of the world, and which 
 is in complete contradiction to that idea of human 
 individuality which has established itself in the human 
 mind. 
 
 But because the law of Providence which we call 
 visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children is not 
 properly judicial, has it no moral purpose ? It has a 
 signal one. "When we look upon the course of things 
 in this world, the scene before us is at first all haze 
 and confusion, and for a long time we see only an 
 entangled growth and vast chaos of events, telling, 
 some one way, some another, and therefore forming an 
 inexplicable whole, perplexing us with the difficulty 
 of extracting any one lesson, drawing any one law, and 
 anticipating any one issue from it. The mass is full 
 of internal discord and contention, which baffles inter- 
 pretation. But by and by, as we look steadily and 
 patiently upon this scene of complication, a faint dawn 
 of interpretative light arises ; the events point in cer- 
 tain directions, and fall into certain main tracks of 
 design. Laws begin to appear ; and though these laws 
 
1 1 8 Visitation of the Sins of 
 
 themselves by no means perfectly harmonise, but in 
 their present operation present an appearance of going 
 different ways ; still they extricate the scene from the 
 thick obscurity which lay upon it. First, there is the 
 law that on the whole the dispensation favours the 
 good as regards happiness and satisfaction in life. This 
 is a law which is obscured by many false lights, and 
 many specious counter facts, but a law which, as our 
 observation deepens, more and more disengages itself 
 from misinterpreting and distracting considerations, 
 and comes clearly out. Another law is the chastise- 
 ment of the good. Another law is the didactic design 
 of the dispensation, that events are so ordered as to 
 furnish striking lessons, and to impress deeply upon 
 us moral and religious truths, "When thy judgments 
 are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn 
 righteousness." The course of things in this world is a 
 great teacher, and the experience of life, when events 
 are looked at in their designed light, is a great spirit- 
 ualiser of the mind. And, among the modes of teach- 
 ing, one is the sight of the ruinous effect of men's sins 
 upon the condition of their families and posterity. 
 The sin is thus held up to the world with a mark upon 
 it, it is made to fasten on men's eyes, and it is kept 
 up in recollection when otherwise it might be for- 
 gotten. Providence, if we may use the expression, 
 cannot afford to dispense with the ordinary weapons of 
 instruction which chain the attention of mankind to 
 the consequences of sin ; thus putting the stamp of evil 
 upon it, exhibiting it to the world in a fearful and for- 
 midable light, and converting it into a lasting spectacle 
 
the Fathers upon the Children. 119 
 
 of disaster and sadness before men's eyes. That the 
 sins of one generation do issue in pain and loss to 
 another is observed ; and it makes, and is designed to 
 make, a certain moral impression upon us. The fact 
 that sin continues in its effects long after the act itself, 
 is didactic, and creates a deep image in men's minds. 
 
 We have thus a double aspect of the law of the 
 Second Commandment, according as we take it in the 
 sense of the extraordinary Old Testament visitations 
 of the sins of individuals upon families and nations, 
 which we have discussed j or according as we take it 
 in the sense of the law of God's natural providence, so 
 called. If we take it in the sense of these extraordi- 
 nary facts, we understand it then as a law by which 
 God punishes children judicially and as guilty of the 
 father's sins. If we take it in the latter sense of 
 God's natural providence, we do not understand the 
 law as judicial but as didactic. The law of the Second 
 Commandment is promulgated now in our churches as 
 an existing part of the government of God : not as an 
 obsolete part, gone with the ideas of former days, but 
 as a present law, working under the present and 
 Christian dispensation. And we speak of national 
 judgments, and of punishments of whole populations, 
 as existing modes of Divine action and as what take 
 place now. But this is in the sense in which we 
 understand the law when working as a part of God's 
 natural providence ; that is to say, in a didactic 
 sense. We do not suppose that the law is judicial, 
 as punishing the good part of these populations 
 judicially for the sins of the bad, and as guilty of 
 
I2O Visitation of the Sins of 
 
 those sins; but only meaning that in these signal 
 calamities the order of nature is made subservient to 
 moral purpose. It is evident, indeed, that the law of 
 the Second Commandment was relieved of its judicial 
 sense even while under the Jewish dispensation and 
 before the close of the Old Testament period. For 
 Ezekiel understood the Second Commandment in a 
 sense different from the judicial punishment of one 
 man for the sins of another, which he expressly de- 
 nounces as derogatory to Divine justice. 1 The in- 
 terpretation of an earlier age doubtless did not 
 distinguish the didactic and judicial senses of the 
 law of the Second Commandment, but a clearer light 
 dawned in the page of later prophecy. It was seen 
 that every man must take upon himself his own indi- 
 vidual acts and deserts, and that justice required that 
 he should be punished for his own sins only. The 
 idea of the true individuality of man stands out with 
 conspicuous strength in the teaching of Ezekiel. 
 Dim and confused in the first ages, the notion of 
 desert, partly resting on the individual, partly clogged 
 with the irrelevant associations of blood relationships 
 and neighbourhood, struck an uncertain ambiguous 
 note in man's conscience. But as the law of Sinai 
 worked in men's minds, it gradually developed the 
 deeper parts of his moral nature ; and the individu- 
 ality, of the human being came out in its true form 
 and with its moral consequences. The law of the 
 Second Commandment proves to be a law of God's 
 natural providence, but no judicial law. God, in the 
 
 1 Ezekiel xviii. 2. 
 
the Fathers upon the Children. 121 
 
 Second Commandment, declares that " He visits the 
 sins of the fathers upon the children, unto the third 
 and fourth generation ; " but we do not understand 
 this as meaning that He visits those sins upon them 
 as being guilty of them. "We recite this command- 
 ment in our churches now, but we take it in a sense 
 which satisfies the terms of it, viz., the physical conse- 
 quences ; which, while they do not prove desert, still 
 answer important didactic purposes. In interpreting 
 this Second Commandment, the instances which divines 
 give as parallel cases to it are not judicial cases of 
 punishment, but instances out of the course of God's 
 natural providence, cases of mere physical suffering 
 caused by physical laws. " The posterity of a traitor," 
 says Bishop Taylor, " are made beggars and dishonour- 
 able, his escutcheon is reversed, his arms of honour are 
 extinguished, the nobleness of his ancestors is forgotten. 
 .... While men by the characters of infamy are 
 taught to call that family accursed which had so base 
 a father." 1 . (Note 3.) " There is no question," says 
 Bishop Sanderson, " de facto, but so it is : the sins of 
 the fathers are visited upon the children. ... As 
 diseases and infirmities of the body, so, commonly the 
 abilities and dispositions and tempers of the mind and 
 affections become hereditary, and, as we say, run in 
 
 a blood But that the children are punished 
 
 for the fathers' sins, or indefinitely any one man for 
 the sins of any other man, it ought to be imputed to 
 those sins of the fathers or others, not as to the 
 causes properly deserving them, but only as occasion- 
 
 1 Sermon on the Entail of Curses cut off. 
 
122 Visitation of the Sins of 
 
 ing those punishments. " * Theological writers who de- 
 fend the law of the Second Commandment thus appeal 
 to an existing course of providence as itself affording 
 instances of such a law ; but the instances to which 
 they appeal are not instances of judicial infliction, 
 and do not therefore come up to the justification 
 of the Second Commandment in that sense. The 
 appeal, therefore, to such non-judicial instances in 
 justification of the Second Commandment implies that 
 the Second Commandment is not taken in a judicial 
 sense. The law of visitation of sins in the Second 
 Commandment is regarded as sufficiently fulfilled if 
 God does so connect sin with misery for any wise end 
 any purpose which is instructive, though not im- 
 plying anything judicial ; or that God visits the chil- 
 dren in this case as being guilty of the fathers' sins. 
 
 Indeed one cannot doubt that the whole class of 
 extraordinary punishments of nations and families for 
 the crimes of individuals, in the Old Testament, which 
 has been discussed in these Lectures, had a didactic 
 object in view, as well as a barbarous and eccentric 
 judicial object. Those strange and monstrous forms 
 of civil justice which were incorporated in the regular 
 practice of the Eastern courts, and in extraordinary 
 instances in the Jewish, were a sort of actual wild 
 justice ; in the first instance designed as a magnifying 
 and expansion of the really guilty person, but beyond 
 this aiming at a rough sort of instruction, at marking 
 certain crimes by way of warning, and terrifying 
 the people from the commission of them. It was a 
 
 1 Third Serm. ad Populum. 
 
the Fathers upon the Children. 123 
 
 method of teaching, by means of spectacles and scenes 
 of horror, and the multiplication of the disastrous 
 effects of crime. It aimed at producing an over- 
 whelming impression, a stunning blow and shock to 
 subdue the crowd. And, much more than a mere 
 outbreak of civil justice and the monarch's will often 
 a mere barbarous and capricious outbreak did the 
 divinely commanded scenes of destruction serve a 
 didactic object. They impressed upon the minds of 
 an obdurate people the heinousness of particular sins ; 
 they inspired terror, and compelled them to think 
 with awe of the offended majesty of God. 
 
 And thus we have a double aspect of that extra- 
 ordinary class of Divine commands which have been 
 considered in these Lectures, according as we regard 
 them as abnormal and irregular manifestations of 
 justice, or as rough modes of instructing a barbarous 
 people. Both designs were doubtless united in the 
 main basis upon which these anomalous proceed- 
 ings stood, and in the great motive and idea which 
 originated them. They were rude and extrava- 
 gant forms of justice, but they had also, like the 
 natural law of visitation of fathers' sins in the course 
 of Divine providence, a didactic design; only the 
 disastrous consequences of these sins upon the families 
 of the offenders were produced by a special Divine 
 command instead of by the course of nature. Didac- 
 tically it was the same whether the wickedness of a 
 father transmitted a shortened life to the child by a 
 natural law or by a positive command. Either case 
 was an instance of the right of the Almighty to in- 
 
124 Visitation of the Sins of 
 
 struct by means of terrible events and by the deaths of 
 His creatures. As the destruction of human life upon 
 the largest scale is God's every-day act, without an 
 apparent reason, so it is perfectly consistent that it 
 should be His act for a reason, the object, viz., of 
 moral teaching and impression. The extermination 
 of the Canaanites, and the destruction of the families 
 of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, of Achan, and of Saul, 
 were great lessons, and lessons which the great Master 
 could give by the simple exercise of His rights as the 
 Lord of human life. 
 
 These two aspects, then, of this extraordinary 
 class of Divine acts give us the temporary and 
 accommodated side of the Divine action, which can- 
 not be defended but as an accommodation to the con- 
 ceptions of the day; and, that side of the Divine 
 action which is permanent and which is continued 
 now in the ordinary course of Divine providence. 
 The judicial aspect of these Divine acts was tem- 
 porary and accommodated only, because it was impos- 
 sible really that God should punish children on ac- 
 count of their fathers' sins, and as being guilty of 
 them, therefore the punishment could not have been, 
 even at the time of this commandment, in fact judicial 
 or retributive. But doubtless, among the Israelitish 
 people, to the popular understanding at the time, 
 these visitations were judicial acts of the Deity. Our 
 interpretation of these Divine acts would thus differ 
 from the contemporary one ; and they are defended 
 now upon a different ground from that upon which 
 they were originally accepted. They were accepted 
 
the Fathers upon the Children. 125 
 
 at the time as judicial by the enthusiastic but rude 
 judicial sense of that time ; but to us, who have 
 advanced upon that idea of justice, and in whose 
 eyes the right of the individual is sacred, these acts of 
 God can only be, in their judicial light, accommodated 
 acts; not real acts expressive of the Divine justice, 
 but only adapted to the popular idea of justice of that 
 day. 
 
 They were real acts, and expressed the real mind 
 of the Deity, only as acts of instruction. While the 
 judicial side was an accommodation, the didactic 
 ground on which they stood was an actual and a real 
 one, and this has continued to be a visible part of 
 Divine providence. God cannot punish a man for the 
 reason of another's sin ; but it is open to God to 
 inflict death upon his creatures, without a reason, if it 
 so pleases Him ; and of course for a reason, if it be a 
 good one; in order to strike wholesome terror, in 
 order to keep a standing memento, in order to associate 
 sin with a spectacle of horror and destruction. This 
 is the double aspect of the law of the Second Com- 
 mandment : to us a law of didactic providence ; but 
 judicial to an earlier age, which really confused indi- 
 vidualities, and identified children with their parents. 
 A clearer light began to dawn on the page of later 
 prophecy, and when Ezekiel proclaimed a more perfect 
 idea of the Divine justice, as checked by the inherent 
 limits of human individuality and responsibility, the 
 whole of the judicial interpretation of the Second 
 Commandment became necessarily obsolete. 
 
LECTURE VI. 
 
 JAEL. 
 
 TN what light would the Israelitish nation present 
 -"- itself to an ardent and enthusiastic mind in one of 
 the neighbouring communities a mind keenly alive to 
 the horrible atrocities and corruptions of the religion 
 of the old races, and knowing that the Israelitish in- 
 vader came to displace them, and plant his own stock 
 in their stead ? That there had been one such person in 
 this situation, and that person, like Jael, a woman, 
 we know ; Eahab, " who perished not with them that 
 believed not," because she had " faith," and saw that 
 it was God's will that a pure religion should cast out 
 the false ones, and the holy people supplant the old 
 corrupt nations. In what light then would the Jew- 
 ish people appear to a mind of this type ? In the 
 first place, a whole people worshipping the one invisible 
 God, under no form, but in His own pure essence, 
 would without doubt be, as compared with the sur- 
 rounding idolatries, an inexpressibly sublime sight. 
 Even one true worshipper in such a situation would 
 be most remarkable ; such was Abraham : but a nation 
 worshipping the one Universal Spirit would be a 
 marvellous and overwhelming contrast. It would 
 indeed be difficult for us now to form an adequate 
 conception of the way in which the simple absence of 
 
Jael. 12 7 
 
 idols in the religion of a nation, amid a whole sur- 
 rounding world of idolatry, would strike such a mind ; 
 the omission would be more speaking than any sign ; 
 it would rouse the imagination more than the grandest 
 spectacle. An idol in truth conceals the Deity, the 
 absence of it would reveal Him; a wall would be broken 
 down and veil removed which separated man from 
 his Maker : Who would be first apprehended when 
 He ceased to be seen, and would sit enthroned in His 
 very invisibility when the image was gone. There 
 would be, when the earthly god had disappeared, for 
 the very first time to human thought really a God in 
 heaven. The idol is a deadening thing, it assimilates 
 the worshipper to itself, and converts him into a block 
 of wood or stone ; materialises his conceptions ; clogs 
 up his sense ; but when the idol is gone he is a living 
 man again, and again discerns a God. A whole 
 nation worshipping the true God, and worshipping 
 Him under no material form, would be thus a most 
 awakening spectacle to a person of a deep religious 
 spirit in another community, before whose eyes the 
 sight was brought ; arresting the attention, and 
 revealing heaven and earth to him in a light in which 
 he had never before seen them, but similar to that in 
 which they stood in the Psalmist's words : " Con- 
 founded be all they that worship carved images, and 
 that delight in vain gods ; worship Him, all ye gods. 
 Clouds and darkness are round about Him, righteous- 
 ness and judgment are the habitation of His seat. 
 worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness, let the 
 whole earth stand in awe of Him.' 7 
 
128 Joel. 
 
 Such a nation, again, would present itself to the 
 mind of a person of this temper almost in the aspect of 
 a nation of priests. The ancient pagan world laboured 
 from first to last under the inveterate prejudice that, 
 whatever enlightenment individuals here and there 
 might attain to, the mass must be in the dark, that 
 truth was the privilege of the few, and that error and 
 superstition were the natural inheritance of the vulgar : 
 but here was a whole nation in possession of the most 
 sublime esoteric truth ; a nation worshipping in the 
 light of day that one Supreme Being who was only 
 known to the hierophant and the philosopher among 
 the heathen, and was not worshipped even when 
 known. Such a people, then, would naturally appear 
 to a kindred spirit in another community in the light 
 of a sacred people, a nation of priests, with whom that 
 truth was public property which was with the heathen 
 the secret of the initiated class. " All thy children 
 shall be taught of the Lord/' 1 " Open ye the gates, that 
 the righteous nation which keepeth the truth may 
 enter in." 2 The actual history of the Israelites was 
 indeed a great falling short of the model ; still this was 
 the creed and worship of the nation. And therefore 
 Balaam had stood gazing on in involuntary ecstasy 
 of admiration and awe upon that nation, and had said, 
 " From the top of the rocks I see him, and from the hills 
 I behold him : lo, the people shall dwell alone, and shall 
 not be reckoned among the nations." 3 Nor even was 
 the creed of the crowd, however fluctuating with the 
 tide of popular caprice and shaken by sudden fancies, 
 
 1 Isaiah liv. 13. 2 xxvi. 2. 3 Numb, xxiii. 9. 
 
Jael. 129 
 
 a dead creed. On the contrary, it inspired the people 
 with courage, it filled them with the certainty of 
 victory, and with the sense of complete superiority to 
 their enemies. " Thou shalt not be affrighted at them : 
 for the Lord thy God is among you, a mighty God 
 and terrible." J 
 
 Let us suppose again such a kindred spirit 
 in another community looking on; and the civil 
 constitution of Israel presents itself to him in a 
 remarkable and lofty light, as well as its religious 
 worship. The nations of the surrounding heathen 
 world had no corporate life, and seemed only to exist 
 for the sake of swelling the pride and feeding the 
 rapacity of the fierce monarchs at their head. The 
 people had no rights, and were only used as the tools 
 of rapine and conquest ; which issued again in the fall 
 of the pettier princes to aggrandise some stronger 
 one. " Threescore and ten kings," said Adoni-bezek, 
 "having their thumbs and their great toes cut off, 
 gathered their meat under my table." ' Jabin 3 had an 
 extent of warlike equipment which implied the whole- 
 sale robbery and oppression even of his own subjects. 
 Nations thus existed in order to raise up some horrible 
 embodiment of barbarous pride, and exalt some one 
 man above his fellows, to delight in the mere savage 
 exercise of power. But Israel, as a civil community, 
 presented a very different sight. It was, in the first 
 place, without that type of pride, the Eastern king. 
 No barbarous court, with its tyranny, cruelties, and 
 coarse pomp and show, impersonated the nation, 
 
 *es i. 7. 
 K 
 
 Deut. vii. 21. 2 Judges i. 7. 3 Ibid. iv. 3. 
 
130 Joel. 
 
 representing it in its very worst aspect. The govern- 
 ment was a declared theocracy, exalting God and 
 keeping down man. And it may be added that even 
 in later times, when a king had appeared in Israel, he 
 was still a king under a theocracy, 1 which latter was 
 only modified by the kingly office, and still continued 
 by the mouth of prophecy to direct it : he was not a 
 king upon the barbarous model. Israel thus appeared 
 in the light of a free community, which existed for the 
 good of all its members ; this was a striking contrast 
 to every other national constitution in the world. And 
 its laws spoke in the same direction. Though defec- 
 tive upon a modern Christian standard, they main- 
 tained justice and human rights. They involved the 
 great principle of public good as the end and object 
 of the state, in distinction from human greatness and 
 power. 
 
 The whole career, again, of the nation, and the 
 striking events connected with it, would tend to im- 
 press that kindred spirit whom we have been supposing 
 to look on db extra, with a strong idea of the high 
 destiny of such a people. The Exodus was a great 
 religious migration, undertaken by the nation in order 
 to release itself from a religious as well as earthly 
 servitude. Both chains were fast tightening about it ; 
 the religion could not have free exercise under such a 
 yoke, that room and action which was essential to 
 its life, and without which it only existed as a sup- 
 pressed tradition, tending to die out ; that necessary 
 
 1 Warburton's Divine Legation, Book v. sect. iii. Davison on Pro- 
 phecy, p. 202, ed. 1845. 
 
Jael. 1 3 1 
 
 field for itself which was claimed in the Divine com- 
 mand to Pharaoh : " Let my people go, that they may 
 serve me in the wilderness/' 1 The wandering in the 
 wilderness was a period of religious trial, when the 
 privations of a hard life were so great as almost to 
 break down the spirit of the people, and tempt them 
 even to a return to Egypt. But the trial, though with 
 many intervening lapses, being borne, the nation was 
 exhibited in a still higher light. The Eevelation of the 
 Law again, made in the wonderful way so suitable to 
 that stage of probation, was an event which laid the 
 foundation of the nation deep ; gave its religion the 
 fixity of a formal institution, moulded it for futurity, 
 and stamped its destiny the more plainly on its fore- 
 head. The march out of the wilderness, through 
 opposing nations into Canaan, manifested the courage 
 of faith, and the inspiration with which Israel fought 
 when he felt the presence of God. The entrance into 
 Canaan, with the ark of the covenant going before 
 and heading the procession of the tribes, was a solemn 
 seizure of the country in the name of God. It was 
 the inauguration of a religious invasion, a holy war. 
 " Ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their 
 images, and cut down their groves, and burn their 
 graven images with fire." 2 Thenceforth Israel fought 
 not against man only, but against idolatry, and for the 
 true religion. 
 
 Let us imagine, then, all these aspects of the Jewish 
 people present to the person whom we have been 
 supposing ; together, moreover, with the knowledge that 
 
 1 Exod. vii. 16. 2 Deut. vii. 5. 
 
Joel. 
 
 this people professed to be the receptacle of a special 
 Divine promise, which gave them an inalienable right 
 to the land of Canaan. And let Jael be this person. 
 The war then for this was only a later stage of the 
 war of invasion is raging between the invader and 
 the idolatrous and infamous Canaanite. She believes 
 that Israel represents the cause of truth and righteous- 
 ness in the world, and that the Canaanite represents 
 the cause of evil. She believes that the Canaanitish 
 rule is a curse, a scandal which cries aloud for removal; 
 and that it is the design of an avenging and a com- 
 passionate Providence that this plague should be ex- 
 tinguished. And now, it would appear, is the very 
 time that God has chosen for the execution of this 
 purpose. For what is the situation of affairs ? A 
 Divine command has come to Deborah to make war 
 upon Jabin and the Canaanites. So extraordinary a 
 fact as a woman rising up to rouse the spirit of 
 Israel to a war, and calling together an army to 
 fight the Canaanites, must show the intention of Pro- 
 vidence ; and that she had a mission for this object. 
 Under this belief that a Divine decree had gone 
 forth for the destruction of Sisera and his army 
 a whole Israelitish army had collected, the land had 
 been stirred from one end to the other, the peace- 
 ful pursuits of the population had been abandoned for 
 war, preparations had been made, a military leader 
 to assist the prophetess had also been appointed, 
 and a battle had been fought. The Divine command 
 then could be no secret ; it had been the warrant for 
 raising an army ; and had had a public result. Why 
 
Joel 133 
 
 then should not Jael have known of it, and believed 
 it ? And if so, did not the knowledge of it, and belief 
 in it, put her under the same obligation under which 
 it put the Israelites, to obey and execute it ? That 
 this command was limited to the Israelites, and was 
 not a warrant to any one who knew of and believed in 
 it, would be a gratuitous assumption. Jael knew that 
 God had crowned the courageous effort of Israel 
 with success, a great battle had been won ; and now 
 the flying Canaanite leader is brought by an apparent 
 chance into her very tent ; he is in her power, and she 
 can " bruise the head" of the corrupt race, and destroy 
 the Canaanites in their chief. She immediately pro- 
 nounces it to be an opportunity put in her way by 
 Providence, that Providence which plainly designed 
 that this sacred race should possess the land in the place 
 of the old stock. She kills Sisera as an enemy of God. 
 Let us go a little further back, and place before 
 ourselves the general situation of the Israelites in 
 the promised land at this time. The extirpation of 
 the old Canaanitish stock was the original and funda- 
 mental law of the whole settlement of Israel in Canaan. 
 This had been interrupted and delayed, but it still 
 continued to be the law of settlement ; and the con- 
 sequence was that any war which broke out with the 
 Canaanitish people still continuing in the- country, 
 became immediately by this traditionary law a war of 
 extermination. Even wars of self-defence became by this 
 necessary interpretation wars of religious extermina- 
 tion. 1 As soon as any war arose against a nation within 
 
 1 Exod. xxiii. 31 ; Dent. vii. 16. 
 
134 Joel. 
 
 the borders of the promised land, "instead of accepting 
 them as subjects by treaty," says Michaelis, " or even 
 taking them for slaves .... the natural consequence 
 of a war carried on by a sovereign for the sake of acquir- 
 ing new subjects, .... the destruction of the inhabit- 
 ants was the primary condition of conquest." 1 "To 
 the Canaanites no terms were to be offered : their cities 
 were not even summoned to surrender : no capitula- 
 tion was to be granted (for this is the meaning of the 
 Hebrew word to make a covenant], but they were 
 to be destroyed by the sword ; so that these illegal 
 possessors of Palestine, to save their lives and move- 
 ables, had no alternative left, but to abandon the 
 country before the Israelites approached." 2 
 
 The complete execution indeed of this fundamental 
 law was long suspended. Though it was now more 
 than a century since the entrance under Joshua, the 
 country was very imperfectly occupied, and the old 
 inhabitants were still in possession of some of the most 
 important portions. It was as yet only a mixed and 
 divided occupation. " The conquest was over," says 
 Dr. Stanley, "but the upheaving of the conquered 
 population still continued. The ancient inhabitants, 
 like the Saxons under the Normans, still retained their 
 hold on large tracts and on important positions through- 
 out the country." 3 This delay in the execution of the 
 fundamental law of Israel's settlement in Canaan had 
 been indeed designed by God the reason given being, 
 "lest," in the too sudden extermination of the old in- 
 
 1 Michaelis' Commentaries on the Laws of Moses, Book. ii. Art. 28. 
 2 Ibid. Art. 62, 3 Lectures on the Jewish Church, p. 287. 
 
JaeL 135 
 
 habitants, "the beasts of the field increase upon them;" 1 
 but it had also been prolonged beyond its due time by 
 the sin of the people, "in making leagues with the 
 inhabitants of the land/' 2 in voluntarily coming 
 to terms with the old races, and treating the Canaanites, 
 upon whom a Divine curse had been laid, upon the 
 footing of ordinary nations with whom they might 
 live on friendly terms. They were to keep them at 
 arm's length : it was not fitting that the destined de- 
 stroyer should be living on social terms with the doomed 
 people, and the executer of Divine justice be, in the 
 interim, friends with the criminal. He was to be 
 faithful to the solemnity of his mission, and not to 
 trifle with it. 3 But this rule had been neglected, and 
 the punishment had been a postponement of the full 
 occupation of the land. The execution, however, of 
 the fundamental law of extirpation was only sus- 
 pended all this time; the original command made 
 allowance for delay : 4 this whole period was only one 
 prolonged invasion. 
 
 This posture of things gave a particular character 
 to the Israelitish wars of independence, of which the 
 war of Deborah against Jabin, king of Canaan, was 
 one. These were in fact wars of aggression and exter- 
 mination as well as of self-defence. As soon as any 
 war arose against a nation within the borders of the 
 promised land though it might be a war of resistance 
 to begin with, and to shake off some tyrant's yoke- 
 once begun and going on, it was a war of extermi- 
 
 1 Exod. xxiii. 29, 30 ; Deut. vii. 22. 2 Judges ii. 1, 2, 3. 
 
 3 Exod. xxiii. 21 ; Judges ii. 1, 2, 3. 4 Deut. vii. 22, 23, 24. 
 
136 , Joel. 
 
 nation, proceeding upon the fundamental law of the 
 Canaanitish settlement, which was the law of exter- 
 mination. The people must be dispossessed some time, 
 and now was the time : now that a war had broken 
 out ; this was the direction which Israel was bound 
 to give to the war. He might have upon his bor- 
 ders for years a Canaanite kingdom, too formidable 
 to attack; but if this power attacked him, and 
 still more, if the attack was successful, and the 
 galling and intolerable servitude which followed it 
 compelled him to rebel in that case Israel being 
 precipitated by events into a death struggle with a 
 people whom he had been expressly commanded to 
 destroy, now was the time when he was distinctly 
 placed under an obligation to execute this command, 
 and to destroy this people. Indeed the tyranny of 
 the Canaanites, and their success at times in dragging 
 Israel under their yoke, became in this way the means 
 by which he was roused to the ultimate conquest of 
 the country. Had he been let alone, he might have 
 rested ; and after the first irruption was over, the 
 newcomer might have fallen back into quiet habits; 
 but he was goaded to conquest by oppression and 
 subjugation, and in rebellion against tyranny he 
 became the executer of the original law of extir- 
 pation. 
 
 To return to the particular war with which we are 
 now concerned. " The Lord," it is said, " sold the chil- 
 dren of Israel into the hand of Jabin, king of Canaan." 
 The kingdom of Jabin is here called " Canaan " in a 
 local sense, which is probably, however, connected 
 
Joel. 137 
 
 with some early supremacy of this particular northern 
 kingdom over the whole of Canaan in the large sense. 
 "It was a tradition," says Dr. Stanley, " floating in the 
 Gentile world, that, at the time of the irruption of 
 Israel, the Canaanites were under the dominion of a 
 single king. This is inconsistent with the number of 
 chiefs who appear in the Book of Joshua. But there 
 was one such, who appears in the final struggle, in 
 conformity with the Phoenician version of the event. 
 High up in the north was the fortress of Hazor ; 
 and in early times the king who reigned there had 
 been regarded as the head of the others. He bore the 
 hereditary name of Jabin or ' the Wise/ and his title 
 indicated his supremacy over the whole country. . . . 
 It was under his auspices [the writer is speaking of 
 Joshua's invasion] that the final gathering of the 
 Canaanite race came to pass. Eound him were 
 assembled the heads of all the tribes who had not yet 
 fallen under Joshua's sword." 1 The northern kingdom 
 of " Canaan" kept up still in Deborah's time some 
 of its early suzerainty, and was able to enlist the 
 services of various minor kings in the present con- 
 test. " The kings came and fought, then fought 
 the kings of Canaan in Taanach by the waters of 
 Megiddo." 2 
 
 The kingdom of Jabin, then, or the northern king- 
 dom of " Canaan," was within the confines of the 
 promised land ; and the territories which composed it 
 had been appropriated, at the partition under Joshua, 
 to the tribes of Zebulun and Naphtali. The capital, 
 
 1 Lectures on the Jewish Church, p. 258. 2 Judges v. 19. 
 
138 Joel. 
 
 Hazor, was within the limits of Naphtali. 1 But 
 neither of these tribes had ejected the old inhabitants. 
 " Zebulun, we are told in the first chapter of Judges, 
 did not drive out the inhabitants of Kitron, etc., but 
 the Canaanites . . . dwelt among them. . . . Neither 
 did Naphtali drive out the inhabitants of Beth-shemesh, 
 . . . but he dwelt among the Canaanites/' 2 The 
 kingdom of " Canaan," indeed, as we have seen, had 
 signally recovered itself after the blow of Joshua's 
 victory; had regained even part of its original 
 supremacy, and, reversing the position of things, had 
 subjugated Israel. 
 
 The war against Jabin, king of Canaan, then, when 
 it had once arisen, was, according to the original terms 
 of the Israelitish invasion and the very law of Israel's 
 settlement in Canaan, a war of extermination as well 
 as of independence. The Divine command for the 
 destruction of the Canaanites was still in full force, 
 only awaiting proper and suitable occasions for the 
 execution of it. This was such an occasion. The war 
 once begun and raging, had an extirpating direction 
 given to it by the force of that statute. Jabin's king- 
 dom occupied space which was wanted, which was 
 part of the Israelitish map, which had been already 
 assigned, in the distribution, to particular tribes. It 
 must therefore be overthrown, and the ground cleared 
 for Israelitish possession. Later in history indeed, when 
 the Israelitish dominion had been established, and the 
 Divine purpose answered, this command to extirpate 
 may have received a qualification such as justified 
 
 1 Joshua xix. 36. 2 Judges i. 30, 33. 
 
Joel. 139 
 
 the toleration of the Jebusites as residents in the 
 country, when Jerusalem was taken by David; 
 but at the time of the war with Jabin, Israel was 
 struggling for his very existence in the country, 
 and the Divine decree of destruction had as much 
 political necessity on its side as in the days of 
 Joshua. 
 
 The war with Jabin then had been undertaken at the 
 express command of God, given on that occasion, and 
 under the direction of an inspired person Deborah the 
 prophetess who "judged Israel at that time." To a 
 cursory glance the "judges" of Israel might look like 
 civil rulers raised up from time to time to govern and 
 administer justice in a period of anarchy, when no 
 settled government existed in the country. But this 
 would not be a true view of the judge's office. Israel 
 was not without a settled government all this time. 
 There was a code of law, and there were constituted 
 authorities ; there was what may be called a civil con- 
 stitution, which was working all this time, even in 
 the intervals between the judges; so that the civil 
 government of the people did not depend on them. 
 Michaelis constructs out of the Scripture materials a 
 sketch of what this polity was ; to which he adds the 
 following statement : " It will now," he says, " be 
 easily conceivable how the Israelitish state might have 
 subsisted, not only without a king, but even, occasionally, 
 without that magistrate who was denominated a judge, 
 although we read of no supreme council of the nation. 
 Every tribe had always its own chief magistrate ; 
 subordinate to whom, again, were the heads of families 
 
140 Jael. 
 
 and if there was no general ruler of the whole people, 
 there were yet twelve lesser commonwealths, who, in 
 certain cases, united together, and whose general conven- 
 tion would take measures for their common interest." 1 
 The civil government of the Israelites being thus pro- 
 vided for by this polity, the Judge when he rose up 
 was an extraordinary officer to meet some great 
 emergency from without, and to rescue Israel from 
 foreign foes. Such were Othniel, Ehud, Shamgar, 
 Gideon, Jephthah, Samson. Deborah indeed " dwelt 
 under the palm tree between Eamah and Bethel: and 
 the children of Israel came up to her for judgment ;" 2 
 but her chief mission was evidently military, to save 
 Israel from subjugation by Jabin. She was raised up 
 in a time of civil disorder ; but in fact a judge was 
 a military functionary rather than a civil one. The 
 appearance of a Judge was thus of itself a war 
 portent, heralding a great national call to arms. 
 And in the present case the commission given to 
 the Judge and executed by the people was not 
 only to resist and repel, but to " destroy." " I 
 will deliver Sisera with his chariots and his mul- 
 titude into thine hand." " The hand of the chil- 
 dren of Israel prospered, and prevailed against Jabin 
 the king of Canaan, until they had destroyed Jabin, 
 king of Canaan." It was the language of the 
 original invasion. Moses had predicted a pause and 
 a delay in the conquest, but also a repetition of the 
 work of destruction after that delay. " Thou mayest 
 
 1 Commentaries on Laws of Moses, Book ii. Art. 46. 
 2 Judges iv. 5. 
 
Jael. 141 
 
 not consume them at once MI - but still " The Lord thy 
 God shall deliver them unto thee, and shall destroy 
 them with a mighty destruction. And he shall deliver 
 their kings into thine hand, and thou shalt destroy 
 their name from under heaven." 2 
 
 Now, then, to revert to the original question. We 
 cannot but assume as the most natural supposition, 
 that Jael is well acquainted with the general state of 
 the case, i.e., that a Divine command has gone forth 
 for the destruction of Sisera and his host. In that 
 case she has as much right to kill Sisera as Deborah 
 herself has to do so ; she is as much even under an 
 obligation to do so as Deborah herself. She is obvi- 
 ously acting, to begin with, under the impulse of that 
 enthusiastic movement, whatever it was, which has 
 taken possession of the Israelites, and of which Deborah 
 is the head. As women there is a common type in 
 her and in Deborah. It is a mark of a great 
 national revolution and climax of feeling when women 
 go out of their way to fight and take part in deeds of 
 violence like men. Jael and Deborah were both in 
 this current, though in very unequal situations, the 
 one as leader of the war, the other only as performing 
 one strong act in it. Still they are obviously carried 
 away by one common enthusiasm, and have apparently 
 one common access to the Divine commands with 
 respect to the Canaanites. One woman inoculates the 
 other with a common patriotism and a common 
 enmity. We meet in Scripture with other outside 
 witnesses to the call of the Jewish people to occupy 
 
 1 Deut. vii- 22. 2 Deut. vii 23, 24. 
 
142 Jael. 
 
 Canaan, and dispossess the old inhabitants. Eahab 
 was such a witness ; she recognised the right of the 
 invaders to the country. Why ? Because she believed 
 in the Divine promise to the chosen people. Jethro 
 was such a witness, Balaam was such a witness, Caleb 
 was such a witness. This was outside faith. Jael 
 then believed in the Divine promise to the Jewish 
 people, upon which its right to Canaan and to extir- 
 pate its population was founded. 
 
 It is too commonly assumed, in comments upon 
 the act of Jael, that Jael herself was altogether 
 removed from the religious influences and motives 
 of this extraordinary occasion ; that she was an 
 isolated person in this whole transaction, and that 
 she killed Sisera on a sudden impulse simply, with- 
 out any participation in the Israelitish belief and 
 mission. But this is certainly contrary to the whole 
 look of the transaction, which is all the other way. 
 There is an extraordinary stir, the land is moved, and 
 a large part of Israel, near where Jael resides, is 
 roused and in arms. The occasion of this stir is the 
 Divine command. Sisera, routed in battle, flies from 
 the Israelitish spears into Jael's tent, and the rest 
 follows. Jael, after the deed, comes out to meet the 
 Israelitish general, who is in pursuit of Sisera, and 
 tells him that she has forestalled him. Deborah 
 praises her deed. The whole look of things is that 
 Jael is one with Israel throughout, that she acts upon 
 the impulse which has roused Israel. Deborah extols 
 her just as if she were a sister in the faith. 
 
 And we must take into account here that Jael was 
 
Joel. 143 
 
 not a Canaan itish woman. Had she been, indeed, she 
 might still have believed in the mission of the chosen 
 people, as Eahab did (Note 4) , and have been an Israelite 
 in faith. But Jael was of the family of the Kenites a 
 family founded by Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses, 
 connected by affinity with Israel, followers of the Israel- 
 itish migration, and moreover, hereditary worshippers 
 of the true God. She was of the same stock with one 
 who, in a later age, came to meet Jehu as he drove in 
 his chariot to Samaria to fulfil his purpose of destroy- 
 ing the worshippers of Baal. "Relighted on Jehona- 
 dab the son of Eechab coming to meet him : and he 
 saluted him, and said to him, Is thine heart right, 
 as my heart is with thy heart ? And Jehonadab 
 answered, It is. If it be, give me thine hand. And 
 he gave him his hand ; and he took him up to him 
 into the chariot." 1 A later Kenite thus superin- 
 tended a slaughter of Israelitish idolaters, not accom- 
 plished without some deception, as an earlier Kenite 
 had also, not without the same tactics, slain the leader 
 of the idolatrous Canaanites. Jael was thus by birth 
 an Israelite in faith and worship. Her tribe had, as 
 some commentators suppose, the position of prose- 
 lytes, worshipping according to the Mosaic Law, and 
 only differing from Israel in not having a title to the 
 promised land, which was confined to the blood of 
 Abraham. They were, at any rate, true worshippers 
 of the one God. It is true that the Kenites as a 
 body, kept aloof from this war, and were at peace 
 with Jabin ; but why may not Jael have been a be- 
 
 1 2 Kings x. 15. 
 
144 Joel. 
 
 liever in heart in Deborah's mission among her own 
 people, and in their eyes an enthusiast ? Would 
 Deborah have acknowledged the right of a house thus 
 connected with Israel to make an engagement of its 
 own with a public enemy, and to dictate an abstinence 
 from perfect partisanship with Israel to Jael ? Was it 
 at all of the character of the Divine dispensation under 
 which Deborah and Jael both lived to allow of such 
 an inference ? It is indeed the great blot upon her 
 act, according to any modern standard of international 
 relations, that her tent was, by the agreement of 
 her own tribe and her husband at its head, estab- 
 lished as a rightful shelter for Sisera ; and that Sisera 
 could not but have supposed that he was protected 
 against such a snare as was spread for him on that 
 occasion. But there can be no doubt that the dis- 
 pensation of that day completely overrode any scruple 
 of international law. Scripture itself challenges the 
 validity of the objection by the bold admission that 
 " there was peace between Jabin the king of Hazor 
 and the house' of Heber the Kenite." An express 
 command of God supersedes any human arrangement 
 or contract. And Jael's religion is a matter be- 
 tween God and her own heart, with which she does 
 not mean state law to interfere. It is an early case 
 of religious independence of mind. 
 
 It ought to be noted lastly, in forming our esti- 
 mate of Jael's act, who the person she put to death 
 was. He was not a common Canaanite, but the 
 Canaanitish general and leader, especially the mark 
 of the Divine wrath ; and against whom principally, 
 
Jael. 145 
 
 as the representative of the Canaanitish power, the 
 thunderbolt was aimed and the decree of destruc- 
 tion sent forth " I will deliver him into thine 
 hand." He was not even an ordinary Canaanitish 
 leader. There is evidently something extraordinary 
 about this man Sisera. It must strike any reader as 
 remarkable that we hear nothing about Jabin person- 
 ally in this war. He takes no part, he does not ap- 
 pear on the scene, and is a cypher ; while the man who 
 does all and wields the whole force of the Canaanitish 
 kingdom is, as far as appearance goes, a private person, 
 who has risen to extraordinary power and to the head 
 of the army. Jabin is a nullity ; Jabin's general is 
 everything. This is an unusual spectacle in primitive 
 times. In the wars of the Old Testament, and indeed 
 of all early history, the king always heads his own 
 army. Chederlaomar and the kings with him lead their 
 own armies ; the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah and 
 their allies lead theirs ; the four kings who unite 
 against Joshua lead theirs. Pharaoh himself pursues 
 the Israelites to the Ked Sea. Much later in sacred 
 history the kings of Israel and Judah always head 
 their own armies. The kings of Syria, Assyria, and 
 Babylon, do the same. David had his "captain of 
 the host " under him, and entrusted some wars prac- 
 tically to him. Joab was sent against Eabbah ;* and 
 Joab, Abishai, and Ittai were sent to suppress Absa- 
 lom's rebellion. But custom still enforced the pre- 
 sence of the king at the head of his troops sooner or 
 later in the expedition. David was summoned to 
 
 1 2 Sam. xi. 1. 
 L 
 
146 Joel. 
 
 Kabbah before it was taken; and only the pressing and 
 affectionate dissuasion of his subjects induced him to 
 depart from custom and stay away from the expedi- 
 tion against Absalom, when he had said "I will 
 surely go forth with you myself." 1 Sennacherib, 
 though he sent officers in advance " with a great host" 
 to Jerusalem to threaten the city, headed the expedi- 
 tion against it. 2 
 
 In the Homeric age the king always leads his 
 own army. In later ages, when war became more 
 of a scieuce, the office of general sometimes devolved 
 upon the great professional soldier, and was de- 
 tached from the monarch, but the king is his own 
 general always in times long posterior to the days of 
 the Judges. When, then, in the war with Jabin all 
 primitive rule is broken, and a general who is not the 
 king heads the army; when Jabin is in the background 
 and Sisera is the great man, it is natural to suppose 
 that such a general was no common man ; that we have 
 in him a person of commanding mind, who has risen 
 by the force of his character to the head of affairs, and 
 contrived to collect all the Canaanitish spirit and all 
 the strength and the resources of the Canaanitish 
 kingdom around him. Such men do rise up in diffi- 
 cult times, and become the representatives and the 
 impersonations of the race or nation which they head. 
 The very settlement of Israel as a conqueror in Pales- 
 tine placed, of itself, the Canaanitish remainder in 
 imminent danger ; the invader had one object before 
 him, which rested in his belief upon a Divine promise, 
 
 1 2 Sam. xviii. 2. 2 2 Kings xix. 36. 
 
Joel. 147 
 
 the same which had inspired the first invasion. He 
 would evidently drive out the Canaanite, if the Ca- 
 naanite did not crush him. The kingdom of Jabin, in 
 fighting for the conquest of Israel, fought for its own 
 existence, and such a juncture is apt to call up a great 
 and leading mind to the head. Sisera would thus be, 
 by no unnatural interpretation of the facts before us, 
 the very life and soul of the Canaanitish kingdom; and 
 if his whole army perished and he escaped, " the snake 
 was scotched, not killed." A great man has recovered 
 himself many a time after complete defeat, and after 
 losing one army raised another. You are not safe 
 while such a foe is alive, and the one mind which 
 animates, inspirits, and directs a nation which is your 
 deadly enemy, is left to it. But if Sisera was such a 
 ruling spirit and the prime mover of the w^ar, the 
 Divine decree of destruction, which had gone forth 
 against the Canaanitish host generally, applied with a 
 hundredfold strength to him : and Jael, if she believed 
 in that decree, would think that this, if any, was a case 
 in which it should be executed. Was the inferior mass 
 to be slaughtered, and was the arch-enemy to escape ? 
 If Sisera was the great man on the Canaanitish side, 
 this consideration heightens the enormous responsi- 
 bility which the sudden appearance of Sisera at Jael's 
 tent door throws upon her. Shall she not at once 
 complete the rescue of Israel by killing Sisera ? Or 
 shall she give way to a scruple and save him ? In 
 this case she sends Sisera back to his own country to 
 take again the part of leader of the Canaanites, and 
 collect chariots and horsemen for another invasion. 
 
148 Jael. 
 
 He has another chance given him. It is impossible to 
 tell what a great man may do if he has this other chance 
 given him. She must be either treacherous to Israel, 
 then, or treacherous to Sisera ; she must act the friendly 
 part to Israel, and consummate the rescue which has 
 begun, by the death of the great enemy; or by spar- 
 ing him reserve a contest for another day, with 
 perhaps a different result. It would be difficult to 
 conceive that Jael's feelings, after sending Sisera back 
 again to Hazor to construct another war of invasion, 
 would not have been the consciousness that she had 
 been guilty of a great piece of treachery to a sacred 
 cause, and a sacred nation. This was the only alter- 
 native which was open to Jael, and it would seem to 
 have come upon her all at once, and with a short time 
 to decide it. Sisera himself, by simply appearing on 
 the scene and presenting himself to Jael, placed her in 
 an enormous difficulty ; for either she must give up 
 Israel by taking part with its great enemy, or give up 
 him. She decides that the real rescue of Israel 
 requires the death of Sisera. St. Augustine's sup- 
 position, that Jael had a special revelation made 
 to her, upon which she acted when she slew Sisera, 
 is a gratuitous one. But it is not at all necessary 
 to resort to such a conjecture in order to put Jael 
 in the situation of an authorised executer of a Divine 
 command. 
 
 This, then, is the explanation of the act of Jael, 
 viz., that it was done in obedience to a Divine com- 
 mand, not communicated specially to her, but which 
 had been made public, and acted upon by the 
 
JaeL 149 
 
 Israelites, and of which she would have the same evi- 
 dence that they had. For Israel could not be the only 
 authorised executer of such a command. The know- 
 bdge of it would in itself confer the authority, nay, 
 lay the obligation, to put it into effect. It is most 
 important, with reference to objectors, to remark 
 upon the history of Jael's act that this account is 
 evidently a fragment. By a fragment I mean that it 
 is an incomplete statement of the transaction to which 
 it relates ; and wants filling up in order to make it a 
 whole and complete account. The story as thus given 
 does not explain itself, because no reason and motive are 
 assigned to the act, so that that which is necessary to 
 the understanding of any human action whatever, 
 and still more of so extraordinary an act as this, has 
 to be supplied. We are told nothing of the mind of 
 the agent in this very brief statement, which is intro- 
 duced with the greatest abruptness, without any intro- 
 duction, and without any reflection upon it afterwards. 
 It is not, however, sufficiently observed generally that 
 the account of Jael's act is thus incomplete. People 
 accept the short abrupt statement as if it were a whole. 
 A man suddenly enters her tent ; she welcomes him 
 and feeds him ; he falls asleep, and she kills him. 
 It is supposed that he was an enemy, but how and 
 in what sense is not said. Here is a gap. 
 
 The great error in the treatment of the act of 
 Jael has been looking at it without the consideration 
 of this gap, and apart from all those surrounding 
 circumstances which so evidently affix the character 
 and the motive to the act, and give it its true inter- 
 
1 50 Jael. 
 
 pretation. There is a whole extraordinary and ex- 
 ceptional state of things existing at the time, and a 
 peculiar law is in course of execution against the 
 Canaanites. Jael's act does not stand by itself, 
 but has relation to this whole state of things. It 
 takes place in the thick of it, and is part of the 
 whole action which rises up under a peculiar, pressing 
 dispensation. If that whole action is right, and if the 
 exterminating war is justified by the Divine com- 
 mand, Jael's act comes under the general head of this 
 war and this justification. It is done under the im- 
 pulse of the whole movement, and under the sanction 
 of the general anathema which allowed no rights to 
 the Canaanites, and treated nothing as due to an out- 
 lawed race. It was done in execution of the exter- 
 minating sentence applying to the nation, nor can it 
 be convicted as wrong if the rest of the war was right. 
 It must be noted, however, with respect to such 
 an act as Jael's, that no explanation can do away 
 with those repulsive features of it which result from 
 its collision with ordinary rules of conduct. If the 
 latter are overridden legitimately, they still are over- 
 ridden; if certain natural feelings are justifiably 
 violated, the violation still remains : though the act 
 be under the circumstances defensible, this discord 
 continues. Nor does this consequence go, even if 
 the reason be satisfied ; but, though the deed be in- 
 spired by the sublimest faith and zeal, still clings to 
 it ; so that even with admiration is mingled a partial 
 repugnance, owing to the mere circumstance of some- 
 thing in our nature having to give way. It is evident 
 
Joel. 151 
 
 that some place must be allowed in morality for acts 
 of this kind ; when we see how many different rela- 
 tions we stand in, one of which may come into colli- 
 sion with another. Justice must thus sometimes 
 supersede family affection and friendship ; yet the 
 opposition of principles, both so sacred, cannot issue 
 in a pleasing act ; though we may admire the moral 
 strength of will to which has yielded the affection, 
 whatever it was, which ought to have yielded. The 
 ancient world had its great actions of this type, which 
 were handed down as exemplars ; such was that of 
 Brutus condemning his own sons to death for conspir- 
 ing against their country, 1 and the consul Manlius' 
 execution of his own son fresh from the victorious 
 single combat, the engagement in which was a breach 
 of military discipline. Scripture contains many acts 
 in which a Divine command is fulfilled at the cost of 
 natural feeling. When Zebah and Zalmunna say to 
 Gideon, " Eise thou and fall upon us ; for as the man is, 
 so is his strength," 2 the magnanimity of the captive 
 princes seems to be a motive for sparing them ; and 
 when Agag had once felt that " the bitterness of death " 
 was past, the justice which hewed him in pieces 
 before the Lord jars with natural clemency. It is 
 quite as easy to suppose as not, that Jael had to over- 
 come, by a great effort, a strong, warm, and generous 
 feeling to a guest, in executing an imperious task of 
 
 1 Infelix ! Utcumque ferent ea facta minores ; 
 Vincet amor patriae, laudumqiie immensa cupido. 
 
 Virg. <&n., vi. 823. 
 2 Judges viii. 21. 
 
152 Joel. 
 
 faith. No explanation of an act can undo the actuai 
 composition of it, or remove an opposition of this kind 
 within it ; though the substance of an act is separable 
 from the shock to the feelings. But though the act 
 is repugnant to the feelings, the character of the 
 agent is rescued when the act is done upon justifying 
 grounds. 
 
 But a funereal strain alternates with the hostile 
 triumph of Deborah, as she comes to the closing 
 scene of Sisera. Mingling with the description of her 
 treachery, the courtesies of Jael's tent to the Canaanite 
 general wear the aspect of the last honours to the 
 great. Deborah's idea is that of the great man's 
 falling in the midst of the high deference paid him. 
 If it was right that Jael should kill him, because his 
 path crossed the awful scope of a Divine sentence, still 
 such attentions, so long as he was alive, were in place ; 
 they marked him, though an enemy, still as foremost 
 and as leader. We see the mournful contrast between 
 life and death, which all poetry has lingered over. 
 Greatness, as struck down at one blow, in the 
 midst of its honours, and the tribute paid to it, pro- 
 duces a passing emotion of sympathy even in the 
 mind of the Jewish prophetess, while her main 
 thoughts follow her country's rescue : and the mighty 
 foe is laid low in that grand solemnity of verse, and 
 in that sad picture of death, in which a high com- 
 passion speaks <c At her feet he bowed, he fell, he 
 lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell; where he 
 bowed, there he fell down dead." 
 
LECTURE VII. 
 
 CONNECTION OF JAEL'S ACT WITH 
 
 THE MORALITY OF HER AGE. 
 
 v* 
 
 FT was shown in the last Lecture that Jael's act was 
 in obedience to a Divine command ; though that 
 command was not given separately and particularly to 
 her; in obedience to the command by which the 
 present war had been undertaken against the Canaan- 
 ites ; which war, when it was once undertaken, became 
 ipso facto a war of extermination, and joined that whole 
 stream of hostile impulse which had begun the original 
 invasion of the promised land. It was shown that, 
 according to the natural interpretation of the sacred 
 narrative, Jael must have known of the Divine com- 
 mand by which the present war was undertaken, and 
 must have known of the nature and scope of the war. 
 But such a scope and design in a war undertaken by 
 Divine command, involved the duty of all who exe- 
 cuted the Divine plan in the war, to take their part 
 individually in the work of destruction, and to be pre- 
 pared to kill the enemy wherever an opportunity was 
 offered. And Sisera upon the present occasion speci- 
 ally gave Jael this opportunity. 
 
 Had then this general command to destroy the 
 Canaanites, which included Sisera, been a command 
 
154 Connection of Jael's Act 
 
 in the full and ordinary sense in which that expression 
 is used, in the sense in which such a phrase is under- 
 stood when it is said a Christian is commanded by 
 God to do this or that ; had this been the case, it 
 might have been said that that command carried with 
 it the full justification of the homicide : and it might 
 have been said also that the act of treachery had the 
 same justification, inasmuch as the Divine command 
 could only have been executed by means of dissimula- 
 tion. It might have been said that the circumstances 
 under which the act was done took it entirely out of 
 the ordinary estimate of such an act; because the 
 person to whom it was done had been struck out of 
 the roll of living humanity by an act of God; he 
 had been proscribed as an outlaw, to whom the com- 
 mon offices of humanity, including that of continuing 
 his life, were not due ; he was one of a race against 
 which utter extermination had been proclaimed ; and 
 he had been especially singled out for denunciation. 
 But what were the obligations of Jael as regards such 
 a person ? Jael was under an obligation to kill him, 
 and if so what obligation was she under to speak the 
 truth to him ? 
 
 It must be seen that such a defence as this would 
 profess to be a full and complete defence of Jael ; and 
 that it would profess to acquit her wholly of anything 
 laid to her charge ; and to make it a fit and suitable 
 act even for a Christian to do ; everything would have 
 been explained which was an obstruction to the per- 
 fect moral recognition of the act ; and nothing would 
 profess to have been wanting to a complete justifica- 
 
with the Morality of her Age. 155 
 
 tion. It is true the treachery is what has chiefly at- 
 tracted attention to the act of Jael : and had the same 
 act of homicide been done under different circumstances, 
 had she, e.g., killed Sisera as "a certain woman" 1 
 on the top of a tower killed Abimelech, by cast- 
 ing a piece of a millstone upon his head, nothing 
 would have been said ; but it is her treachery 
 which has occasioned the great denunciation of her 
 act. But this defence professes to be a complete 
 justification of the deceit as well as of the homicide, 
 upon the supposition of a command of God to kill 
 Sisera. 
 
 St. Paul's position appears to be that the duty of 
 truth-speaking is an offshoot of the ordinary relations 
 of man to man, and that it is a consequence of men 
 being members one of another. The ground for the 
 duty is the relation of charity in which we stand to 
 each other, of the unity, moral and social, by which 
 we are connected with each other. " Speak every 
 man truth with his neighbour : for we are members 
 one of another/' '" Deceit is a barrier between one man 
 and another, and is therefore contrary to union and 
 membership. The duty of speaking the truth thus 
 takes its place under the general head of charity ; of 
 good and considerate treatment of others. Truth- 
 speaking is not a universal isolated obligation 
 which we are under ; a law to say truth under all 
 circumstances, and in whatever relations we stand 
 to the other party ; but it supposes certain relations, 
 viz., the ordinary relations of man with man, the 
 
 1 Judges ix. 53. 2 Eph. iv, 25. 
 
1 56 Connection of Joel's Act 
 
 natural terms of fellowship with man, that we are 
 bound to perform all the offices of humanity to him, 
 and to behave to him as a brother. When we speak 
 of the certain and obvious obligation to sincerity, 
 these are the relations which we suppose ; and St. 
 Paul places the duty of veracity upon its proper basis, 
 and gives the law of truth its proper position in the 
 frame and system of morals, when he assigns the duty 
 of truth-speaking this large and deep source, this in- 
 telligible connection, and this inclusive rationale. 
 
 It appears to follow, then, that when these ordinary 
 relations to a man cease, when the natural terms of 
 fellowship with him are dissolved, and so far as they 
 are dissolved, the duty of speaking truth to him no 
 longer exists. The relations being at an end from which 
 the duty of veracity proceeds, the duty goes with 
 them ; and the moral character of an untruth alters 
 with the fundamental ground on which we stand 
 toward the man. 
 
 Thus, with a murderer engaged in the act, it 
 must be said we are not on natural terms of fel- 
 lowship ; the ordinary relations of man to man are 
 suspended. Supposing him to ask information of us, 
 then, in pursuit of his object, it is no duty to abstain 
 from deceiving him. Speak the truth, for we are 
 neighbours one of another. But such a man is not a 
 neighbour and not a brother, he is deprived therefore 
 of no right by deception. A man has evidently the 
 right to take away the murderer's life, when it is neces- 
 sary to do so, in order to save another life. But it is 
 absurd to say that a man has a right to kill him 
 
with the Morality of her Age. 157 
 
 in order to protect another life, and that he has not 
 a right to deceive him for the same purpose. A 
 release, then, from the ordinary obligation to truth - 
 speaking has been attributed to situations in which 
 the contrary is necessary in order to save the life of 
 another from the hands of a murderer. But it must 
 seem that in any other case in which a man ceases 
 to be a fellow, and is thus out of membership and 
 union with you, he is naturally deprived of the 
 same right to truth-speaking : where, e.g., the relations 
 of humanity are dissolved ; the great relation of man 
 to man, that of keeping him alive, or being desirous 
 of doing so. 
 
 A mere executioner may be regarded as a simple 
 tool or weapon, but, in the case of Jael, here is a 
 person who is more than this, who is bound by her will 
 to seek the man's life, and take measures, if she can, 
 to secure her end. This is plainly an unnatural relation 
 of one man toward another man. But does not the 
 right of truth-speaking presuppose the natural relations 
 of humanity ? It is not easy to conceive a more total 
 contradiction to the natural relations between one man 
 and another man than the duty of killing that other 
 man. When you are so completely released, then, from 
 the law of charity as that it has become your duty to 
 aim at the death of another, are you still bound to 
 openness and sincerity in your mode of seeking it ? 
 The duty of sincerity is so plainly connected with the 
 law of human fellowship, that to say that upon the 
 dissolution of that law no consequence at all could 
 follow to that duty, would be a strange assertion. The 
 
158 Connection of Jael's Act 
 
 duty of truthfulness cannot co-exist with, the duty of 
 killing. The abnormal position with respect to life is 
 thus disturbing to the regular position with regard to 
 truth; if so important a modification of his generalrights 
 has taken place as that his right to life no longer exists, 
 it is difficult to say what change may not have ensued 
 in his right to truthfulness. Our duty to our neigh- 
 bour is one whole ; if our neighbour has forfeited no 
 right, he has a claim upon that whole ; but if he has 
 forfeited the right to one part, it is difficult to say 
 how that one part may not have affected another 
 part. If one social relation has given way, we can- 
 not say that another may not have been undermined 
 by it. 
 
 Upon this general argument a defence of Jael has 
 been attempted by some commentators which aims at 
 being a complete justification of her under the circum- 
 stances; as though she might have done the act in every 
 detail, being a Christian, i.e., that the act is perfectly 
 moral throughout. But we must see that the foundation 
 gives way for such a defence as this. It is essential for 
 such a perfectly-justifying defence, inasmuch as the 
 whole of it rests upon the foundation of a Divine com- 
 mand to kill, in the first instance, that that command 
 should have been without reserve, and that it should be 
 capable of being fallen back upon as a true command 
 of God, with the same perfect reliance with which we 
 fall back upon a command of the Gospel. But it is evi- 
 dent that this command was made with a reserve, and 
 that it is a command in a different sense from that of any 
 command given under the Gospel. A Divine com- 
 
with the Morality of her Age. 159 
 
 mand to undertake a war of extermination could 
 only, to begin with, necessarily have been a command 
 by condescension to the defective state of man's moral 
 perceptions in that age. It was impossible, as has 
 been said in the foregoing Lectures, that people could 
 have acknowledged a Divine command to make war 
 in such a manner as this, unless they were themselves 
 at the time under defective and erroneous moral con- 
 ceptions. Thus a command with a reserve, in 
 accommodation to man's ignorance or infirmity, is 
 not really a command of God, because what it 
 starts from is the evil in man, and not the perfect 
 good in the Divine will. Jael having accepted a dis- 
 pensation of accommodation to evil, has not the ground 
 for availing herself of a perfectly-justifying defence, 
 and such a defence is wasted upon her position. 
 Another explanation suits her, which does not profess 
 to be full justification, but which does give her the 
 shelter of a particular dispensation. 
 
 The great omission, as we have seen, in the mind 
 of that age was the omission of the idea of human 
 individuality. When children were destroyed on ac- 
 count of the sin of the father, and nations were 
 destroyed on account of the sins of certain portions of 
 them : when, in fact, human sin was treated en masse, 
 and not as a question relating to the individual only 
 such' defective and unsound ideas of mankind on 
 human individuality became an immediate cause of the 
 rude and barbarous acts of that day. There are two 
 characteristics of Jael's act : there is the destruc- 
 tion of life; and there is the treachery. It is her 
 
160 Connection of J ael' s Act 
 
 treachery and dissimulation, as has been said, which 
 have produced the great denunciation of her act. But 
 the omission of the idea of human individuality takes 
 away at bottom equally the right to life and the 
 right to truth. It is upon the stand of his own in- 
 dividuality that man claims both life and truth. He 
 has a right to his life being respected by others, and 
 he has a right to truth at the hands of others, because 
 he is himself a man. He takes his stand upon himself. 
 Immediately he is regarded as an appendage to 
 another whether that other be an individual, a family, 
 or a nation he loses the intrinsic rights of man 
 whether to life or truth. A loose notion of life and 
 a loose notion of truth naturally go together ; a dim 
 conception of the property and a defective idea of the 
 duty. 
 
 When the Duke of Wellington first went over 
 to India he made the remark that the Hindus 
 laboured under two great defects in their moral cha- 
 racter that they did not care for life, and they did not 
 care for truth. 1 The putting the two together was a 
 just piece of criticism, and showed that the comment 
 was made upon a basis of true philosophy. There 
 must be a due sense of the right of life in a man, 
 a sense of his individuality, a sense of the existence 
 of the personal being, in himself and upon his own 
 account, before his right to truth can be made out. 
 Truth-speaking is only a part of the general duty of 
 doing to others as we would be done by ; the right to 
 it ceases with the general rights of man : it ceases 
 
 1 Wellington's Supplementary Despatches, vol. i. p. 1C. 
 
with the Morality of her Age. 1 6 1 
 
 with the fundamental relations of man to man, with 
 the necessary claims which are inherent in man as 
 fellow with man. A man must first have a right to 
 his own existence, and then he may have a right to 
 something further ; but before everything else he 
 must be treated as an individual being. But the 
 early dispensation under which man was living then, 
 did not treat him as such, because it appended 
 him to something which was not himself, in the in- 
 fliction of punishment and on the question of life. 
 There must have been inadequate ideas of the indivi- 
 duality of man and of the rights of human life before a 
 dispensation could have been received which enforced 
 wars of extermination wars which would now be 
 contrary to morality, for the reason that eur ideas on 
 the subject of human individuality and the rights of 
 life are completely changed, and that we have been 
 enlightened on these subjects upon which the early ages 
 of mankind were in the dark. But when man was 
 not treated as a person, as an individual being, when 
 he had not the right to life, he had not the right to 
 truth-speaking either. What is the meaning of being- 
 obliged to speak truth to one who is not a person ; 
 obliged to speak truth to one who is not a substance ; 
 and who is not a being ? He must be something sub- 
 stantial and must be something in himself, to whom 
 truth must be spoken. A man who has not the right 
 to his own existence, has lost the right to have truth 
 spoken to him also. Deborah acted then from prin- 
 ciples of reason, when she gathered from the right to 
 destroy life, the right to disguise truth too, when she 
 
 M 
 
1 62 Connection of J ael' s Act 
 
 passed her imprimatur upon both the characteristics of 
 Jael's act ; when she looked upon Sisera as an outlaw, 
 and a man without rights to truth, as soon as ever it 
 was clear he had no right to his own life. The dispen- 
 sation justified in the violation of life, the violation of 
 truth ; the violation of life was the violation of truth ; 
 justice and truth were the same thing : if Sisera was 
 killed because being a Canaanite he had not the right 
 to life, it was a much lighter thing to say that being 
 a Canaanite he had not a right to have truth spoken 
 to him. 
 
 Does the historical defence, then, of Jael's act, in 
 the last Lecture, imply that it meets with the approba- 
 tion of Scripture generally, and that it was a good act 
 according to the principles laid down in Scripture as 
 a whole ? The only part of Scripture, which at all 
 witnesses upon this point, and commits Scripture, 
 according to any standard, to an approbation of the act 
 of Jael, is Deborah's praise of the act. The narrative 
 itself only records the fact, and expresses no opinion of 
 Scripture upon it. But Deborah's praise is clear and 
 decided, and she declares that Jael " is blessed above 
 women" on account of this act. Deborah was an 
 inspired prophetess, and her approval of the act is 
 identical with the approval of Scripture. 
 
 But what is the moral standard which Deborah 
 acknowledges when she praises the act of Jael, and 
 according to what standard is her praise given ? It is 
 evident that this makes all the difference in the nature 
 of the praise, and upon the question whether it was 
 praise in the fullest sense or not. This praise is obviously 
 
with the Morality of her Age. 163 
 
 given, then, according to the standard of the time, as 
 involved in the dispensation of the time, publicly 
 received in the Israelitish body of that day as a reli- 
 gious community. This was the only standard which 
 was known to Deborah ; and it was impossible that she 
 should give her praise upon any other. It is sometimes 
 vaguely supposed that when an act is praised in Scrip- 
 ture, it receives the praise of Scripture as a whole, and 
 must therefore be an act absolutely good and correct, 
 and equal to bearing the strictest examination in a 
 court of morals under any dispensation, and in any age 
 of the world. But to suppose this, is to suppose a 
 totally different structure of Scripture and revelation 
 from the real one ; it is totally to overlook the very 
 principles which our Lord assumes in his Sermon on the 
 Mount. The revelation which is made in Scripture is 
 made up of different dispensations ; and different suc- 
 cessive manifestations of God's will and character. The 
 only dispensation which was known to Deborah was the 
 dispensation under which she lived, the dispensation 
 under which the Israelites established themselves in 
 Canaan. But this dispensation was in no disagreement 
 whatever with the estimate of the act of Jael as a 
 virtuous and a right act. It was a dispensation which 
 supposed a defective state of moral ideas in the people, 
 and which required for its own reception an erroneous 
 standard of morals. The praise therefore bestowed under 
 that dispensation upon a particular act, did not imply 
 moral correctness, according to a universal standard, in 
 that act ; did not satisfy the Bible as a whole, because 
 it satisfied a part of the Bible. Deborah represented the 
 
164 Connection of Jael's Act 
 
 dispensation of the time, and Jael satisfied the dispen- 
 sation of the time. Deborah's praise, therefore, was 
 worthily given ; but it did not imply its being given 
 according to a universal standard. 
 
 And this consideration decides the sense of De- 
 borah's praise of the treachery, as well as the homicide. 
 Deborah contemplates both the treachery and the 
 homicide, and it does not stop her praise, " She 
 brought forth butter in a lordly dish. She put her 
 hand to the nail, and her right hand to the hammer." 
 This was praise of the act in its twofold character of 
 dissimulation and destruction. It was obviously not 
 the idea of Deborah that there was anything wrong in 
 either; the whole act counts as a noble manifesta- 
 tion of religious zeal. But the truth is, that the dis- 
 pensation of the time tolerated both ; it tolerated both 
 and it justified both, by virtue of that one single omis- 
 sion which was made at the foundation of the dispen- 
 sation ; viz., the omission of the idea of human indi- 
 viduality. The dispensation was compelled to accom- 
 modate itself to the omission of this primary idea, 
 because it was compelled to take man as he was ; and 
 he had not yet, in this stage of his growth, attained 
 to this full idea. I say that Deborah, in pronouncing 
 the act of Jael good, pronounced it to be good ac- 
 cording to a particular dispensation. "Whether an act 
 is good or not in itself and universally, is a question of 
 moral philosophy ; but whether it is good according to 
 a particular dispensation is not a question of moral 
 philosophy but a question of simple history. It is 
 simply to say, Was this act considered as a fact to 
 
with the Morality of her Age. 165 
 
 be good by persons competent to estimate it who 
 lived under that dispensation ? And upon that 
 question is not Deborah as good a witness as we can 
 find ? Who is judge of what was a good act under 
 that dispensation if Deborah is not ? The act, by 
 being praised by Deborah, proved itself to be a good 
 act according to that standard ; an act of morality, 
 according to her own dispensation. She was by position 
 a judge ; and to be praised by her was equivalent to 
 saying it was good according to that dispensation. 
 
 But though a good act according to a dispensation, 
 an act of faith, an act of love to Israel, a Christian 
 could not have done it, for the simple reason that he 
 could not have accepted that dispensation by the autho- 
 rity of which it was done, by virtue of which Sisera be- 
 came an outlaw, deprived of the right to life. No Divine 
 command to destroy Sisera, apart from all reasons of 
 human law, could have been acknowledged by a Chris- 
 tian ; and therefore, inasmuch as the act could only 
 be justifiable on the supposition of a Divine command 
 to do it, a Christian is necessarily without evidence of 
 the only justifying reason which could exist in the 
 case. Christians have indeed sometimes acted upon 
 Old Testament precedents, to which they have given 
 their own application, but the use of such precedents 
 at all has been wholly condemned by the Christian 
 Church. Such acts as that of Jacob Clement and 
 Eavaillac have had sentence passed on them as being 
 simply immoral acts, and unable to be taken out of 
 the catalogue of murders. Doubtless such acts under 
 an early dispensation were very different acts, and 
 
1 66 Connection of Jaefs Act 
 
 hold a very different moral rank ; but when revived 
 under a Christian light, they appear only as horrible 
 and false ; as lapses from a perfect dispensation to an 
 imperfect, and from a dispensation of knowledge and 
 light to one of ignorance and darkness. 
 
 But -though it could not have been done by a 
 Christian, it is not too much to say that the act of 
 Jael was a grand though extreme specimen of that 
 type of act which is produced by the proverb, Love 
 your friend and hate your enemy. The act has 
 everything to do both with a friend and an enemy. 
 Sisera is an enemy in the deepest sense, as being an 
 enemy of the adopted people of God. Here, then, 
 Jael was only an enemy. But turn from the attitude 
 of Jael toward the enemy, and you see immediately 
 the friend. In her resolute rescue of Israel from the 
 hand of the great Canaanite, in her summary suppres- 
 sion of what would have been the seed of another 
 invasion the return of Sisera to Hazor to renew his 
 plots and hostilities, here is the friend. People have 
 generally only Sisera before them in contemplating 
 this act; but Israel ought to be the principal object. 
 The enemy ought not to occupy our minds, without 
 the friend, and the feelings toward the friend, 
 coming in to give the act its explanation, and invest 
 it with its main motive. The act at first sight appears 
 a solitary act, and the agent appears devoted only to 
 her one dreadful work; but we have only to look 
 around, and we see enthusiastic devotion to the 
 Israelitish body ; whose rescue from the enemy is evi- 
 dently the great stimulus to the act. While showing 
 
with the Morality of her Age. 167 
 
 the ferocity and dissimulation considered due to an 
 enemy, it gratifies a lofty partizanship for the people 
 of God, and unbounded fervour for a cause. It is an 
 act with all the warmth and public affection in it, 
 which a public person gives to a great cause, who 
 is determined that that cause shall not lose at 
 all in his hands. Israel shall suffer no longer from 
 fear of the enemy. The act thoroughly adopted 
 the great precept of the older dispensation, 1 and hers 
 was obviously just the character that carried out the 
 precept to the utmost. The older dispensation 
 divided the world in two, as regards moral relations 
 toward them, and presented two objects, one which 
 naturally called for injury, and the other for love. 
 So coupled together are the friend and the enemy, 
 that even in the perpetration of the most violent 
 deeds upon the enemy, one sees on the other side the 
 overflowing friend. It is a real double side of a man; 
 he really hates on one side and really loves on the 
 other. That is the operation of the dispensation : it 
 is real feeling both ways. The law does not admit of 
 neutrality and ambiguity ; still less does it admit of 
 enmity only : it is a law of enmity and love both. It 
 does not allow of the affectionate side of a man being 
 chilled, or of a man's heart being nipped and blighted 
 by hostile and malicious thought, which is a common 
 effect of carrying out hostile feelings ; it supposes 
 with enmity, love ; the two sets of feelings are really 
 in full play toward their respective proper objects. 
 In Jael's act we see both the enemy toward whom, 
 
 1 Matt. v. 43. 
 
1 68 Connection of Jael's Act 
 
 and friend for whom it is done. Both are implanted 
 in the act, and the ardent rescue is as conspicuous as 
 the dreadful death. Deborah's thanksgiving reveals 
 on the enemy's side irretrievable ruin, and on Israel's 
 the completeness of triumph. / 
 
 With respect alike to the charge of homicide and 
 treachery, Jael must be taken in connection with the 
 facts of her day. What she thought upon the right 
 to life, and what she thought upon the right to truth, 
 was only a consequence of the fundamental want in 
 the ideas of the age the idea of man, in which his 
 attributes and his rights were alike contained. We 
 find her enthusiastically joining in a war of extirpa- 
 tion, which is a plain violation of the rights of life in 
 the individual; and this primary want of respect for 
 man is the necessary foundation of the subordinate 
 want of respect for truth. But the faults of the age 
 leave in the act the faith of the individual; the frater- 
 nisation with the good, the acknowledgment of pro- 
 phecy, the look forward to the future. It would be 
 useless to frame for Jael's conduct a rationale, which 
 would present it to us as satisfying a later and a 
 Christian standard of morality. We find another 
 standard at that time in occupation of the world, and 
 marking the dominion of the unenlightened mind. 
 But it should never be forgotten that this act was an 
 act of true religious zeal done in defence of religion, 
 and for the preservation of a Divine dispensation in 
 the world, against idolatry, polytheism, and corrup- 
 tion of morals. 
 
 Not that the true idea of man was entirely want- 
 
with the Morality of her Age. 169 
 
 ing in the age of the older dispensation, far from it ; 
 and still less that the offshoots of it were wholly want- 
 ing, the respect for life and the respect for truth. 
 The idea of man as a personal and individual being is 
 contained in the first chapter of Genesis, in the very 
 account of the creation of man. That man was made 
 in the image of God anticipates the whole develop- 
 ment of man as an individual being, with his attri- 
 butes, his rights, and his prospects. Truth was 
 enforced in the ninth commandment. There were two 
 opposing principles in the old dispensation ; there was 
 the idea of man as ,a mere appendage to something 
 without him, some body or some individual with 
 which he was identified in guilt and in punishment, and 
 in which his personality was absorbed, so that he was 
 killed if the other being was guilty ; and, struggling 
 with this idea of man, as a reflection or an appendage 
 to something else, there was the other idea of him as a 
 substantial being who had his existence in himself, and 
 whose life was his own property, and could only be lost 
 by his own act. The last of these two ideas must 
 have existed from the first, in order to be developed 
 so fully as it ultimately was : to be the seed of a great 
 future, it must have had a place all along ; but still it 
 was the seed at first rather than the mature idea. 
 One estimate of man conflicted with another: one 
 which deprived him of fundamental rights and of 
 justice, with one which announced that he was made 
 in the image of God. The latter had the strength of 
 reason on its side, and as a matter of course gained the 
 victory over a temporary principle. 
 
1 70 Connection of Jael's Act 
 
 The general aim of the foregoing observations has 
 been to show that the act of Jael arose out of the dis- 
 pensation, that it represents the dispensation, and that 
 it does not represent the individual only. Did the act 
 represent the individual only, it would have been 
 a great mistake in Deborah to put the prophetical 
 imprimatur upon it, and incorporate it in the Scrip- 
 ture of the old dispensation. But it was not the act 
 of an individual only ; it was an act which repre- 
 sented a dispensation. That dispensation starts with 
 the sanction of a class of actions which could not 
 be done by an enlightened people with full and 
 mature moral perceptions. There was therefore no 
 reason why its sanction should not be given to an act 
 like that of Jael. The dispensation did not respect 
 the rights of man to life ; it was no more then, than an 
 agreement with such a foundation that it should not 
 respect the rights of man to truth ; and that, when a 
 great enemy of the sacred nation lost one right, he lost 
 the other too. Both rights were in fact lost in the 
 one omission of the primary idea of individuality, 
 which deprived man of the standing ground upon 
 which the two important claims were built. That the 
 act did represent the dispensation is shown in truth 
 by the mere fact of the praise of Deborah having been 
 bestowed upon it ; for a good act, according to the 
 standard of a particular dispensation, is a simple mat- 
 ter for historical evidence; and is shown in the fact of 
 competent persons, under the dispensation, acknow- 
 ledging and publishing its merits. 
 
 Let us compare an early dispensation with early 
 
with the Morality of her Age. 171 
 
 states of society in respect to these clouds upon them. 
 We know it is one great point of comparison between 
 civilisation and barbarism, the mode in which they 
 respectively treat human life ; and it may be added 
 that another point of comparison is the mode in which 
 they respectively treat truth. In civilisation the 
 theory itself imposes respect for life and respect for 
 truth both ; but it can hardly be said to do so with 
 respect to either in barbarism. . One conspicuous point 
 of comparison between civilisation and barbarism lies in 
 the different position of lying : it reflects disgrace, theo- 
 retically and according to the system under the one, but 
 hardly under the other. A rude and mixed standard 
 marks the dominion of the uncivilised mind. There 
 was a great deal of generosity in the mind of that 
 day, an enthusiasm for nation, family, and tribe, and 
 a devotion to old custom and law. But this poetical 
 framework of things also admitted of strong special 
 shapes of treachery and deceit, and of these rising into 
 great prominence, and assuming a place among the 
 characteristics of the age and nation. Wherever the 
 creed of Love thy friend and hate thine enemy, in short, 
 is the established creed, deceit and treachery become 
 a strong popular mode of action. The system of clan- 
 ship especially represented this old maxim. People 
 were faithful and loyal to their own tribe, and sacrificed 
 themselves for it. What stories have come down to 
 us of undying affection, of indomitable courage and 
 fidelity, of enthusiastic adventure ! But with the 
 friend there was the enemy. It might be supposed that 
 two perpetual foes would sometimes have thought for a 
 
T 7 2 Connection of Jael's Act 
 
 moment about what it was which made them so ; why- 
 it was that they must always be fighting : the rationale 
 of national animosity must sometimes have puzzled 
 them ; what it was that made hatred an original neces- 
 sity for each : but in truth such investigation was 
 entirely out of their way; they had never known 
 themselves other than enemies ; enmity therefore was 
 to them a law of nature. 
 
 Such was the doctrine of an enemy, and it was 
 the infallible effect of the doctrine to produce deceit. 
 In rude ages "the enemy" was a character which 
 emerged ; one of the actual dramatis personce of 
 the scene to whom the popular belief attached 
 that it was lawful to lie to him, and that he had 
 ceased to be our neighbour or our brother; that 
 fellowship was over, and that with the ground of 
 communion and fellowship the duty of veracity had 
 ceased. That duty being only the expression of the 
 fact that we are members one of another, men had 
 no right to it when they were natural enemies. The 
 enemy was one who was out of the pale of charity, and 
 with whom injurious relations were natural. But if in- 
 jurious relations were natural, untruthful relations were 
 natural also (Note 5). It is thus that in early rude ages, 
 and in the periods of tribe or clan, where the sword takes 
 so prominent a part, deceit takes an equally prominent 
 part. The one law is made to flow in thought logically 
 from the other. The sword takes away life ; he has no 
 right to truth-speaking who has no right to life. The 
 period of combat, violence, and open carnage, thus 
 becomes specially a period of trick, stratagem, and 
 
with the Morality of her Age. 1 73 
 
 falsehood too. As the " enemy" was the natural 
 object of violence, he was the natural victim of a lie ; 
 and rude forms of society fostered a remarkable and 
 subtle mixture of character. You would have ex- 
 pected, at first view, that the qualities which this 
 period and kind of life would have fostered, would 
 have been the open and daring ones, and these 
 exclusively or chiefly; that they would have raised 
 the test of physical courage and daring, and would 
 have encouraged with these open robbery, violence, and 
 aggression ; but that they would not have given their 
 countenance to treachery, dissimulation, and underhand 
 dealings. But on looking into the modes of acting and 
 the pervading models of rude times, we find an over- 
 whelming quantity of fraud and deceit. They impose 
 upon one another, fabricate intricate plots, and con- 
 struct subtle measures ; stratagem and conspiracy 
 constituting their prominent course of action. They 
 adopt what is necessary. They find that deceit is neces- 
 sary for them, in order to produce anything formidable, 
 to gather things to a head, and bring any move of the 
 tribe, or of a party, to its proper strength ; to collect 
 resources in such a shape as to secure success. 
 Although, therefore, on the one side they have the 
 roughness of defiance, impulse, and impetuosity, on 
 the other, their whole line of conduct is underhand. 
 The daring temper is quite consistent with the deceit- 
 ful. They must do what is effectual, and underground 
 work is effectual. Men dissimulate in order to strike 
 a great blow when it is wanted ; and treacherous con- 
 
1 74 Connection of J act's Act 
 
 cealment tells at last. Eude times, on the same 
 principle on which they use force, use deceit. 
 
 But the man being true to his clan and to his 
 neighbour, treachery became a special and local quality, 
 and was prevented from entering completely into the 
 general character by virtue of its confinement to " the 
 enemy. " A man was false in a hostile relation ; but 
 only see him as a neighbour, and he was true. 
 
 But not only this, the principle once admitted 
 of loving friends and hating enemies, the two kinds 
 of action, true and false, become a natural alterna- 
 tion. They are so hearty in both that they never 
 think of those to whom they are false without thinking 
 of those to whom they are true. As a piece of treachery 
 is played on one side, an image meets them from the 
 other side of bright and spotless fidelity. They know 
 they do everything for their friends, go through 
 any sacrifice. Their very treachery, -then, looks 
 different according to its company. Lying is the 
 natural dealing with the enemy, as truth is the natural 
 dealing with the friend. There is therefore nothing to 
 apologise for in lying ; he only gets it who deserves it, 
 and to whom it is natural conduct. A lie accompanies 
 truth as the shadow the substance. 
 
 The creed of Love your friend and hate your enemy 
 thus produced, as its natural consequence, falsehood. 
 The circumstances of the world, indeed, produce various 
 modifications and shades of the character of the 
 " enemy." He is not always a person who aims at 
 life, and must be met by an equal blow ; he is only 
 one who exists in some injurious relation to you. But 
 
with the Morality of her Age. 175 
 
 in proportion as a natural law of hostility exists under 
 any form, so a natural law of untruthfulness follows as 
 a consequence. Thus in the old-fashioned school of 
 former days, when the schoolmaster figured in the 
 boyish imagination as a natural enemy, he was also 
 the natural recipient of a falsehood. It was a different 
 thing to tell a lie to the master and to tell a lie to any 
 one else. The constitutional enmity which attached to 
 his position, whereby he was the chastiser of faults and 
 persecutor of indolence, was held also a justification 
 of exceptional morals in the boy. The character of an 
 enemy and the shield of an untruth against him went 
 together ; and when the hostile fiction was adopted, 
 this result, upon a question of truth, was its natural 
 consequence. But deceit toward a master was a 
 local species of deceit. It did not enter into the 
 general character, but was consistent with truth and 
 openness to others. It followed a traditional casuistry, 
 which confined itself to the school, and was cast off 
 when the school was exchanged for general society 
 and life. 
 
 Some sort of lying is, then, we find, attached 
 to esprit de corps wherever it is excessive or un- 
 disciplined. It comes before us as a social thing. 
 Men who carry on a piece of deceit together are bound 
 and united together by it ; if there is a tradition, a sen- 
 timent, an association of blood or tribe connected with 
 it, a religious cause involved in it, they are the more 
 bound by it (Note 6). A lie is a sort of Eoman sacra- 
 mentum by which men devote themselves to a cause. 
 They thereby enter into an engagement which commits 
 
1 76 Connection of Jael's Act 
 
 them to an extraordinary interest in a common object. 
 A lie is regarded as a romantic offering to a party or 
 cause. When it is made corporately and in common, by 
 a number, it inspires them with the sense of a common 
 sacrifice. Thus conspiracies are eminently social, and 
 act as bonds of union ; though these contracted unions 
 break up, and are apt to turn to enmities. The com- 
 mon form of lying is then selfish and solitary ; but 
 another form of it is corporate and sympathetic. It 
 witnesses to a strong attachment to a body. The clan 
 and the tribe feel themselves consecrated by patriotic 
 treachery achieved for their sake, and the public spirit of 
 that age takes up deceit which studies effectiveness and 
 aims vigorously at results. They see in deceit a power 
 which gathers together resources, and brings combina- 
 tion to a head. The cause grows by the individual 
 sacrifice, and the lie flatters the esprit de corps, and 
 connects itself with sympathy for country and public 
 ends. 
 
 When from these facts, connected with deceit and 
 its place in the morals of mankind in the rude eras of 
 secular history, we go to the act of Jael, the root of 
 esprit de corps is not conspicuous at first ; no crowd is 
 near her to carry off the act as a popular one done for 
 a whole nation or cause. She does it by herself. It 
 is a solitary act. But it is plain, when we go into the 
 circumstances, that this solitary act is done as really 
 in defence of a whole people, is as complete a sacrifice 
 of herself to the Israelitish cause, and to a sacred party 
 spirit, as if it had been done with all Israel by. The 
 act is upon the type of the deceit of early ages, it is 
 
with the Morality of her Age. 1 77 
 
 public-spirited, and strongly sympathetic. She has the 
 whole religious cause and movement before her eyes. 
 She is in intimate relations with Deborah and the 
 leaders of Israel, and she knows she is conferring an 
 enormous and incalculable benefit on the cause of Israel. 
 The very lie which she tells for that cause, so far from 
 being a solitary and unsocial act, has in it the most 
 intense spirit of public life, and impersonates the whole 
 animus of public partizanship. 
 
 Eemarks such as these would naturally involve, 
 did we follow them up, a general comparison of 
 barbarism and civilisation, especially upon the subject 
 of truthfulness and that class of virtues. We are in 
 the first place apt to suppose that a rude age is as a 
 matter of course a simple one ; we imagine greater 
 transparency and sincerity. But do facts agree ? If 
 there is anything with which human nature shows an 
 early acquaintance, it is with the fact that on the sub- 
 ject of truth the faculty of speech is absolutely 
 neutral, and ready to accommodate itself perfectly 
 to either side. The whole apparatus of language fits 
 in with a lie, and is entirely at its service ; it is as 
 ready an instrument for the use of falsehood as of 
 truth. This is one of the first observations of experi- 
 ence. A lie is an instrument, a means to an end, and 
 it possesses in an extraordinary degree the virtue of 
 an instrument great facility of appliance. A lie is in 
 its very nature perfectly easy. It is produced by the 
 simple powers of speech. The powers of speech are 
 
 not in themselves allied specially to, nor have any 
 
 N 
 
178 Connection of Jael's Act 
 
 bias to, truth; the tongue obeys the will in either 
 direction. If a person wishes to say what is not true, 
 he can say it with absolute promptness. The state 
 of things in the early ages shows a mind that made 
 the largest use of such a liberty as this, and what 
 followed from such an option being left to human 
 discretion. (Note 7.) 
 
 The great principle in man which opposed lying 
 was the idea of the individuality of man. His per- 
 sonality made him worthy of truth; but the 
 general progress of man aided in that improvement. 
 Doubtless civilisation has in it all that pampers 
 human nature, that brings out his appetites and aims, 
 and furnishes a rich feast; and whatever tempts 
 human nature and makes it wish strongly, tempts 
 it to lie only regarding lying as means to an end, a 
 mode of getting things it wants to get. But civilisa- 
 tion has much in it which is coercive of lying, and 
 inducive to truth. It develops industry ; people begin 
 to recognise that labour is profitable ; stated wages 
 are an enlightening ; regular avenues push aside 
 irregular; respectable motives, honourable stimulus, 
 and plain truth, compose a formidable phalanx. The 
 system of trade, with its direct modes of return, makes 
 everything understood, and shows off plain dealing at 
 an advantage. The wheels and machinery of civilisa- 
 tion advance reputation as an inducement, and by 
 bringing it within reach of all, give it new influence 
 as a motive of action. Although, then, it is with a 
 mixture, it aids the great law of truth and the 
 
with the Morality of her Age. 1 79 
 
 true idea of man. Distant views out of our range 
 have an enchantment, and appeal to a poetical look ; 
 but we see the vast amount of real power which 
 civilisation throws on the side of honesty and plain 
 dealing. 
 
LECTURE VIII. 
 
 THE LAW OF RETALIATION. 
 
 TF one had to describe shortly the defect of recent 
 criticism upon the Old Testament, one would 
 say that it did not make allowance for the necessities 
 of a progressive revelation. The Jewish dispensation 
 was a progressive revelation, i.e., it did not promul- 
 gate at once what was absolutely true in religion or 
 morals, but prepared people for it. But it was not 
 only a progressive revelation which had its end and 
 scope in the distant future, it was a progressive 
 revelation which had also to legislate for the im-, 
 mediate present. That was a remarkable combina- 
 tion ; it involved a peculiar relation of the Divine 
 Instructor and Educator to His pupil ; and it was the 
 nucleus of the whole complex character of the old 
 dispensation. That dispensation acted for an end; 
 but legislation for the present was essential to its 
 very object with reference to that end ; essential to 
 the very object of ultimate enlightenment. Could 
 mere teaching have accomplished this end a sort of 
 standing lecture on sublime morals, while the people 
 in all other respects were left to themselves ? In 
 that case legislation would not have been wanted ; 
 but it is evident that mere teaching would not have 
 
The Law of Retaliation. 1 8 1 
 
 done. It would have flown over their heads to the 
 last, without the nation ever becoming so far en- 
 lightened as to understand it. No ; the people must 
 be brought under the regular influence of a legislative 
 code. This had alone a training and a moulding 
 purpose. But legislation must be legislation for the 
 present moment, and legislation in particulars, follow- 
 ing all into their homes, and penetrating into their 
 life. A people under Divine guidance for a future 
 end must be placed under laws which operate now. 
 
 But such legislation legislation under such con- 
 ditions as these involves immediately the principle 
 of accommodation, on the part of the Perfect Legis- 
 lator, to an existing imperfect moral standard in 
 those for whom He legislates ; because there is an 
 interval between the superior and directing mind of 
 the dispensation, and those who are the subjects of 
 the dispensation, which can only be bridged over 
 by such a Divine policy. The principle of accommo- 
 dation, then, is necessary ; but what and how much 
 is it which is involved in a principle of accommoda- 
 tion? This is a question which will require some 
 consideration. 
 
 There is plainly, then, in the first place, a per- 
 mission involved in the principle of accommodation 
 a Divine permission of an imperfect morality. 
 God permits certain classes of actions which He 
 would not permit in Christians ; and it must be 
 noted that He permits them in a very different sense 
 from that in which He permits moral evil, as simply 
 allowing it to take place in the world. Those who 
 
1 8 2 The L aw of Ret a liation. 
 
 do these actions are in favour with. Him, are in cove- 
 nant with Him, they are separated from all the nations 
 of the earth to be His peculiar people, or holy nation. 
 He accepts their sacrifices, answers their prayers, and 
 has pleasure in their services. 
 
 So far we have got, as involved in the principle 
 of accommodation; i.e., to permission. But in truth, 
 when we examine it in actual working, we find that 
 the principle of accommodation cannot stop at per- 
 mission. "When a Divine dispensation takes up a 
 rude and primitive people, it takes them up not only 
 with a certain standard of what is allowable and may 
 be done established among them, but also with certain 
 strong ideas of what is right and ought to be done ; 
 certain vigorous notions of duty and of obligations, 
 which exist indeed mixed with imperfections and 
 extravagance in their mind, but which really involve 
 moral principle, and which obviously constitute the 
 goodness of the individual and society in that early 
 stage of history. "What is to be done then with these 
 classes of actions ? Is the Divine Lawgiver, the 
 Divine standing Head and Euler of the society, only 
 to say of these actions I permit them. That would 
 be simply to relax a people's whole sense of moral obli- 
 gation ; it would be to release them from inaccurately 
 and coarsely conceived high duties, before there was 
 time for the growth of a correcter conception of them ; 
 and so their adoption into covenant by God would be 
 a moral disadvantage to them instead of an improve- 
 ment. It is not competent therefore to the Divine 
 Legislator to use simply permissive language of these 
 
The L aw of Ret alia tion. 183 
 
 popularly conceived duties ; He must command them. 
 He is bound to keep up the moral sense of the people 
 to its present height, when He undertakes to raise it 
 ultimately higher ; He cannot alter therefore the shall 
 of these duties into may ; He cannot say, You may 
 do these duties if you like, I will allow you to do 
 them ; that is not the language of a Lawgiver who 
 has undertaken to keep up the existing moral obli- 
 gations in a people. To discontinue these duties as 
 injunctions, and exclude them from the express 
 countenance and approval of the dispensation, would 
 be to suppress at the very root the whole purpose of 
 the dispensation. For how can it properly fulfil its 
 object of correcting and improving the moral standard 
 of men, unless it first maintains in obligation the 
 standard which already exists ? This is all it has to 
 build upon. It must take the basis which is given to 
 it ; adopt the high and noble action of mankind, with 
 its extravagance, roughness, and irregularity ; and 
 must first command and enjoin it, in the shape in 
 which it stands, if it is ever to effect an improvement 
 in it. Those rudely delineated conceptions of duty, 
 which it intends ultimately to purify and raise, it 
 must first impose. To take away from a Divine dis- 
 pensation the right of thus dealing with imperfect 
 materials, would in fact be to exclude the Divine 
 Being from the government and direction of the world 
 for any purpose of changing it for the better ; for how 
 can He act upon the hearts and understandings of 
 men, how can He instruct and inform them, how can 
 He regulate and elevate their moral estimate, except 
 
184 The Law of Retaliation. 
 
 through the medium of those moral ideas which then, 
 at the time, exist in them ; which must therefore be 
 sustained in authority, in their defective phase, if they 
 are ever to be raised to a more perfect one ? To shut 
 the Deity out of this sphere of imperfect perception 
 and action, and to forbid Him to command upon this 
 level, is to take man out of His jurisdiction as a being 
 to be improved, and throw back human nature upon 
 itself. And thus the office, once assumed by God, of 
 legislating for a rude and primitive people with a 
 view to their ultimate moral improvement, that office 
 involves in its very nature both Divine permissions 
 and Divine commands to do actions of imperfect 
 morality. 
 
 1. Take, e.g., the law of retaliation an eye for an 
 eye, and a tooth for a tooth. It would be doing in- 
 justice to this law to regard it as simply legalising the 
 right of private revenge ; it embodies a principle of 
 public justice, carried out in that form which justice 
 has sometimes taken in early ages ; viz., that a wanton 
 assailant who inflicts an injury on the person of an- 
 other should be punished by suffering a like hurt 
 himself. This was doubtless an ancient consuetudinary 
 law which was engrafted from a general Eastern stock 
 upon the Mosaic code ; and it was a law which, before 
 legal courts penetrated into the recesses of society, 
 was dispensed and executed by the wronged individual 
 himself; who was charged with the double office of 
 protecting society and defending himself; and who in 
 one and the same act avenged himself and vindicated 
 the rights of the community too. Eetaliation then, in 
 
The L aw of Retaliation. 185 
 
 this instance, was stimulated by the spirit of justice ; 
 for an injured man is not precluded from entertaining 
 a public sense of justice in his indignation at that 
 outrage which has affected himself. And therefore 
 this rule of retaliation in the Mosaic Law is not to be 
 interpreted as simply permissory ; it has the nature of 
 a precept and an injunction ; a command to the persons 
 to whom it was given to exert the right of punishing 
 those who had wantonly harmed them, and making 
 them smart for their insolence and brutality. It is a 
 mistake to suppose that the only treatment which 
 men want under open injuries, is checking and hold- 
 ing back from an excess of retaliation ; undoubtedly, 
 regarding man under one aspect it is ; but there is a 
 side of man's nature on which he is just as much a 
 coward as he is a thirster for revenge on the other. 
 Let us place ourselves in the age. There is, observable 
 in many, a hanging back from doing justice evefi to 
 themselves, under such circumstances ; they are 
 afraid of their injurer, and think that they may 
 perhaps get yet worse from him than they have got ; 
 they see in his punishment only an incentive to an- 
 other outrage, and conclude that the matter may as 
 well rest where it is. A violent man who makes 
 himself an object of terror in his neighbourhood, thus 
 gains an impunity for his acts, not from the for- 
 bearance but from the timidity of his victims. The 
 precept in the Mosaic Law is opposed to this want of 
 courage, and urges retaliation upon men as a duty 
 due to justice. It imposes conditions indeed upon 
 retaliation ; and whereas the injured person is inclined, 
 
1 86 The Law of Retaliation. 
 
 when lie once begins the work of vengeance, to carry 
 it on beyond all bounds, and to overstep altogether 
 the measure of the original injury, the law confines 
 him to an equal harm. 1 Still the law enjoins retalia- 
 
 1 The law of retaliation, which is to be found in the Hindu code, is 
 framed in an entirely different spirit from that of Scripture. The idea 
 of justice, which is an essential part of the Jewish law, is violated in 
 the Hindu, as will be seen from the following extract from Professor 
 Monier Williams' Indian Wisdom : " The three most conspicuous 
 features of his (Manu's) penal laws are exactly those which mark the 
 earliest forms of criminal legislation, viz., severity, inconsistency, and 
 a belief in the supposed justice of the lex talionis, the latter leading to 
 punishments which, in later times, would be considered unjustifiably 
 disproportionate to the offences committed, and sometimes barbarously 
 cruel. Thus : 
 
 "With whatever member of the body a low-born man may injure a 
 superior, that very member of his must be mutilated. 
 
 " A once-born man insulting twice-born men with abusive language must 
 have his tongue cut out. 
 
 " Should he mention their name and caste with insulting expressions (as 
 1 Hallo ! there, Yaj iia datta ' vilest of Brahmans), a red-hot iron spike, ten 
 fingers long, is to be thrust into his mouth. 
 
 "Should he, through arrogance, attempt to instruct a Brahman in his 
 duty (saying, You ought to do so and so), the king is to have boiling oil 
 poured into his mouth and ears. 
 
 "Thieves are to have their hands cut off, and then to be impaled on a 
 sharp stake. 
 
 " A goldsmith detected in committing frauds is to have his body cut in 
 pieces with a razor. 
 
 " It will be observed that a graduated scale is prescribed, according 
 to the rank of the offender, and the class to which he belongs. 
 Thus : 
 
 " A king must never kill a Brahman, though he may be found guilty of all 
 possible crimes ; let him expel him from the kingdom unharmed in body, and 
 intact in all his property. There is no greater injustice on earth than the 
 killing of a Brahman. The king therefore must not harbour a thought about 
 putting him to death. 
 
 " A Kshatriya insulting a Brahman must be fined one hundred panas ; a 
 Vaisya doing the same must pay one hundred and fifty or two hundred 
 panas ; a Sudra doing the same must receive corporal punishment." P. 273. 
 
The Law of Retaliation. 187 
 
 tion, and does not only permit it. " Thine eye shall 
 not pity ; but life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth 
 for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot." 1 And our 
 Lord mentions retaliation among the injunctions of 
 the Law, for He is speaking throughout this chapter 
 the fifth of St. Matthew of rules and precepts, 
 and not permissions. The law of retaliation was 
 indeed a public law; and so far as the judge took 
 the vengeance out of the hands of the individual, 
 so far it became a judicial punishment simply; and 
 the law alone is responsive for the penalty and 
 not the individual. " But that such was the public 
 enactment of the Mosaic Law," says Dean Alford, 
 " implied a private spirit of retaliation, which should 
 seek such redress*; for the example (eye for eye, etc.) 
 evidently refers to private as well as public retribu- 
 tion." 2 But this very private spirit of retaliation 
 was at the same time enjoined in the Law, and not 
 only permitted ; was enjoined as being an imperfect 
 form of proper retribution and justice. 
 
 The demand, however, of an eye for an eye, and a 
 tooth for a tooth, was the fruit of a very imperfect 
 moral standard, and our Lord passes sentence on it 
 accordingly, as a rule made obsolete by the rise of a 
 higher law ; and therefore this is an instance in which 
 we see the Almighty, in the Mosaic Law, not only 
 allowing but enjoining and commending an act 
 of imperfect morality. The Divine Legislator takes 
 up the idea of justice which belongs to the age, 
 and sustains it in authority, i.e., lays it down as a 
 
 1 Dent. xix. 21. 2 Greek Test., note on Matt. v. 
 
1 88 The Law of Retaliation. 
 
 precept, until the mind of the people is equal to a 
 higher law. 
 
 2. Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine 
 enemy. The latter part of this precept Thou shalt 
 hate thine enemy nowhere occurs in so many words 
 in the Mosaic Law ; the whole precept, however, as it 
 stands, undoubtedly represents, and is a summary of, 
 the sense of the Law ; nor is there any occasion, as 
 some commentators do, to distinguish the object of 
 our Lord's prefix " Ye have heard that it hath been 
 said," as it applies to the first part of this precept, 
 and as it applies to the second ; to refer it to the Law 
 in the case of " Love thy neighbour," and to the tradi- 
 tions of the scribes in the case of " Hate thine enemy." 
 All the other precepts which our Lord takes as in- 
 stances of an inferior morality which the Gospel puts 
 aside, are precepts out of the law, and there is no 
 reason to distinguish this particular one from the rest 
 with respect to its source. "Thou shalt love thy 
 neighbour, and hate thine enemy," is the same form of 
 expression as " Ye shall be perfect." 
 
 This precept applies, in the first place, to the neigh- 
 bour and the enemy in a public and national sense ; 
 the neighbour was the Israelite, the enemy was he who 
 was not the Israelite, the Moabite, the Edomite, the 
 Ammonite, the Philistine. 1 This is a definition of a 
 neighbour and an enemy which belongs especially to 
 an early stage of society, before smaller nations and 
 tribes were collected under large monarchies, and the 
 different materials welded together by a central power, 
 
 1 Ps. Ixxxiii. 6, 7, 9, 10. 
 
The Law of Retaliation. 189 
 
 and penetrated by the force of a higher common 
 sovereignty, bringing them into a political union under 
 one head. The precept implies a primitive state of 
 mutual animosity, and frequent wars ; the necessary 
 accompaniment of the fact that the nations were close 
 to one another, and yet two ; and in this state of 
 things the Israelites are to love Israelites, and to hate 
 Moabites, Edomites, Ammonites, and Philistines. 
 Simply looking upon this precept, then, in its working 
 upon national feeling, we see that it is addressed to an 
 early age of the world; but that, together with the 
 accommodation which there is in it to the division of 
 that age, it also tends to strengthen and compact the 
 union of that age. In that early stage of human pro- 
 gress, what there was of union in different quarters 
 was powerfully developed and built up by contrast 
 the particular state or nation being made to feel unity 
 by the opposition of separation ; its own concord by 
 the mark of its division from those around it. This 
 keen sensation of disunion with others not only pre- 
 vented its own union from splitting up, but actually 
 promoted and increased it ; the inward forces of the 
 state were the more amalgamated and gathered up, 
 and all its elements brought into closer agreement. 
 In a word, this precept was, in a national sense, the 
 inculcation of an esprit de corps, which was the very 
 bond of and incentive to union in the early ages, and 
 that upon which the world depended for its advance 
 to more regular and wider grounds of union. "We see 
 now traces of the same character in the social sphere, 
 in those who combine the virtues and the defects of 
 
The Law of Retaliation. 
 
 earlier times, and are the most generous friends, and 
 at the same time, as we say, good haters. This pre- 
 cept was therefore an accommodation to an imperfect 
 morality. Taking the early esprit de corps as a whole, 
 with its unity and its division, it engendered a prin- 
 cipal of national union, the best of which the age was 
 capable. And when we add that to the Jew the 
 foreigner was also a heathen and a stranger to the 
 Covenant, the precept assumes not a national but a 
 religious character, and becomes a direction to the 
 people, in the only popular form which the spirit of 
 the age allowed, to stand by their religion, and keep 
 up the strong sense of their superiority as being God's 
 people; and of the hatefulness of the religion of the 
 heathen. The Jew undoubtedly exceeded the force of 
 the precept in the actual relation in which he put him- 
 self toward the rest of mankind, and in the temper 
 which he brought himself to " in that hatred of the 
 human race, and enmity to all the rest of the world," 
 which Tacitus, in the well-known passage notices, and 
 which he describes the Jews as combining " with com- 
 passion toward each other." 1 There was an obstinate 
 virulence and morbid moroseness in the actual temper 
 of the Jews, contracted by habit and education, and 
 the artificial creation of their schools, for which the 
 precept is not responsible; but the precept itself 
 still inculcated that generous form of enmity to out- 
 siders which was the natural accompaniment in early 
 times of love of your own body. 
 
 1 " Apud ipsos fides obstinata misericordia in promptu sed adversus 
 omnes alios hostile odium." Tac. Hist. v. 5, 2. 
 
The Law of Retaliation. 191 
 
 But the enemy is not always in Scripture a 
 foreigner, a heathen, or one out of the Covenant. 
 Any one who reads Scripture will be struck with the 
 definite mention of the enemy as an individual. 
 Your enemy is what may be called a character in 
 Scripture ; he has a regular place ; there are exhorta- 
 tions given respecting him, and he is a known subject 
 of treatment. He is a persecutor, a foe to religion ; 
 but a personal enemy too, who seeks after your soul 
 to destroy it ; he is full of cunning, deceit, and fraud ; 
 under his tongue is ungodliness and vanity ; he is in- 
 spired with hatred, and cunning, and these are directed 
 against a personal object. Saul was the enemy of 
 David, but so far from being a foreigner and a 
 heathen, he was a Jewish king, and his own father- 
 in-law. Doeg and Ahithophel, against whom David 
 utters strong imprecations in the Psalms, were per- 
 sonal enemies of the deepest type ; wily and malignant 
 plotters, bent on undermining David in the kingdom, 
 and seeking his life. It is impossible that a mere 
 foreigner or heathen, as such, should be the object 
 of the feelings sometimes described in the Old 
 Testament toward an " enemy ; " after all, foreigners 
 and heathen, as such, are not real persons at all ; they 
 are mere representative persons, mere abstractions; 
 they must be real persons, who are hated in that sense 
 in which hatred of an enemy is sometimes understood 
 and delineated in Scripture. 1 
 
 1 The Law is pervaded by great rules and precepts, which form its 
 leading principles. Ketaliation is one leading view of the Law ; that 
 pain and adversity are the test of the Divine displeasure, prosperity and 
 
192 The Law of Retaliation. 
 
 It must be observed indeed that the " enemy " 
 continues to have his place in the Gospel; though 
 a distinct set of maxims and a different mode of 
 treatment are applied to him. He is a recognised 
 person, however, there ; and even the substitution 
 of " love " for " hatred " toward him, still treats 
 him as an existing personage, and a definite per- 
 sonage, who is known to another and whom his 
 object is conscious of. This personage, under a later 
 system, does not exert the violence and the force 
 which he did in the Jewish ; he does not seek a man's 
 life. If his character is to be summarily described, he 
 is a determined ill-wisher ; his heart is radically 
 affected hostilely toward another; the whole spring 
 of his wishes is turned against him ; he wishes him 
 ill-success, failure, disappointment. It is this evil- 
 wishing which constitutes mainly an enemy ; of course 
 he may do actual harm ; but an habitual evil wish is 
 in itself an injury to another, an injury to his peace 
 which he has to surmount. Malice, however, does not 
 stand alone in a man. It produces meanness. A man 
 
 happiness the mark of God's good will is another leading view. But 
 this is compatible with single texts and isolated precepts on a different 
 principle ; and Scripture, when it gives the main place in it to one 
 rule, may occasionally anticipate the higher Gospel standard. Thus, 
 the Law reveals the rule of justice as one of retaliation ; and at the 
 same time Job says (chap. xxxi. 29)," If I rejoiced at the destruc- 
 tion of him that hated me, or lifted up myself when evil found him : 
 neither have I suffered my mouth to sin by wishing a curse to his 
 soul." 
 
 Thus, the Law reveals the rule of God's infliction of pain or punish- 
 ment as proceeding from His anger, and the prosperity of man as being 
 the expression of His love ; and at the same time Scripture says (Prov., 
 iii. 12), " For whom the Lord loveth He correcteth." 
 
The L aw of Retaliation. 193 
 
 finds he cannot gratify it by open ways, and he is 
 forced upon underhand and secret ones. Thus he 
 slides in part into the character of the Jewish " enemy/' 
 though a milder form of the character. The Gospel, 
 I say, recognises an habitual enmity, of which the 
 object is an individual. One would suppose, from 
 the way in which some men talk, that there were no 
 such thing now as hating persons, or that it were con- 
 fined to a rude class in society ; that it was a barbarous 
 and obsolete temper; and that now only principles 
 were hated, and persons only in their abstract character 
 as representing sets of principles. There could not be 
 a greater mistake, and the Gospel takes notice of the 
 rude fact of personal enmity as a real thing ; i.e., of a 
 state of feeling in a man towards another, which springs 
 in him, in the first instance, toward the person. The 
 individual is the goal and terminus of the feeling. 
 For this there are selfish, or proud, or jealous reasons ; 
 but it is often very mysterious how this feeling toward 
 another arises. "We talk of animal nature in respect 
 of sensuality, but it would almost seem as if there were 
 such a thing as animal nature in respect of irrational 
 causeless malignity ; a hostile spirit to this or that 
 person, which is not accounted for in any cause which 
 appeals to a strictly rational nature ; and, however 
 concealed under the usual refinements of civilisation, 
 that such a state of mind were a shooting up of an 
 old low and wild instinct not amenable to reason; 
 an irrational part of the man which acts antago- 
 nistically, and is excited without anything properly 
 to account for it ; so much does the effect outrun any 
 
194 The Law of Retaliation. 
 
 intelligible motive which the facts of the case can 
 supply. Among schoolboys, whose natures act with a 
 rough openness, an animal propensity to hatred may 
 be observed, and one boy singles out another for per- 
 sistent bullying without any assignable cause. Among 
 men such a source of enmity will be disguised, but it 
 exists in their case, and they too act from subtle and 
 secret irrational magnetism of enmity toward particular 
 persons, though this of course does not excuse it. For 
 persons to fall back upon a lower and base nature, is a 
 vileness; reason should raise them above it. True 
 reason is loving. It says to itself, Why should I hate 
 this man ? what reason is there ? True reason is kind, 
 humane ; but there is a carnal abyss in man which is 
 not under law, out of which the hostile mind comes, 
 that, if it have not got an object, makes one. It is 
 quite mysterious, sometimes, the way in which an 
 " enemy " rises up in a circle ; the first overt sign is 
 far from the first commencement of him ; he has had 
 a secret growth before. Sometimes the subtlest and 
 keenest form of enmity springs out of a previous friend- 
 ship, which only disclosed and extracted the con- 
 trarieties in the persons' characters too accurately, and 
 made them know each other too well. 
 
 But, however we may explain him, an enemy is a 
 grave thing ; some one who has singled another out 
 for evil wishes; Scripture speaks of him therefore 
 always with gravity, as if it were a serious thought 
 to any one; while the "enemy" is made to stand 
 out a defined personage, and Scripture lays its 
 finger on him. We value our friends' good wishes, 
 
The Law of Retaliation. 195 
 
 indeed, more than anything they really do for us ; 
 they are the most precious part of them; the ill- 
 wisher, therefore, is the most opposite to nature, and 
 stands out as an evil prodigy. He does in substance 
 what the "enemy" in Scripture does, who is repre- 
 sented as cursing; for cursing is in substance evil- 
 wishing, and it is, as such, invested with so dark a 
 character in Scripture. There is, indeed, if one thinks 
 of it, something dreadful in people wishing, keenly, as 
 a punishment, out of malice to another, what in the 
 Divine dispensation of chastenings is designed as his 
 blessing. Nor is there anything so immovable, after 
 it has once got a certain hold of the mind, as a personal 
 enmity ; nothing lessens it ; the person himself who 
 is the object of it may change ever so much, it makes 
 no difference ; the feeling has once attached itself to 
 him that person and there it clings. There is an 
 obstinate depreciation which is just the same. Nor 
 do any outward civilities and forms of kindness on 
 the part of the entertainer of the feeling himself at all 
 affect it ; it goes untouched through them all. We 
 naturally at first connect contingency with persons, 
 and stability with principles ; yet a man will change 
 what he calls his principles half a dozen times in his 
 life ; yet hardly ever change a personal enmity. His 
 lower nature is more fixed than his higher intellectual 
 nature. 
 
 A man's enemy was all this under the old law, but 
 he was more, in proportion to the less restraint which 
 a less spiritual system threw upon him. Under the 
 Gospel, as the highest spiritual law, the enemy can 
 
196 The Law of Retaliation. 
 
 not profess Ms enmity, and so is compelled to hide it 
 in the corner of his heart, where it takes the form of ill 
 wishes, and permanent ill wishes ; but still is obliged, 
 by the spiritual nature of the law which the man pro- 
 fesses, to abstain from active demonstration. This is 
 indeed often a worse state of the individual man than 
 his state under the Law ; because it is of the nature of 
 hatred, as of other evil, to become intenser under con- 
 cealment ; and when a man is forced by the height of 
 the system he outwardly owns to fall back upon 
 hypocrisy, he not only acts as a hypocrite in conceal- 
 ing his bad state of mind, but his state of mind be- 
 comes worse by being concealed. The passion of enmity 
 becomes deeper and stronger. And doubtless this 
 peculiar result of Christianity, where it drives evil 
 deeper into a man's heart instead of freeing him from 
 the yoke, and roots it instead of extracting, is antici- 
 pated in that remarkable text, where the evil spirit is 
 described as restored in all the greater power after his 
 downfall " Then he saith, I will return into my house 
 from whence I came out ; and when he is come, he 
 findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then goeth 
 he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more 
 wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell 
 there : and the last state of that man is worse than 
 the first" (Matt. xii. 44). But under the old law a 
 man's enemy of course stood in more than the posi- 
 tion of an ill-wisher to him ; he was emphatically a 
 dangerous man, and was ready any day to do him 
 real mischief, and indeed he might even take away 
 his life. 
 
The Law of Retaliation. 197 
 
 With respect, then, to this more private type 
 of enemy, the rule of the old law Thou shalt love 
 thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy was conceived 
 in the general spirit of the law of retaliation ; and 
 the "enemy" came under the action of that general 
 law ; he was only an habitual foe, instead of one for 
 the occasion : and the precept to hate your enemy, 
 was, like that of retaliation, in its spirit judicial ; though 
 it aimed at justice through a personal medium, i.e., 
 through the redress of your own wrongs. It was the 
 justice of an earlier age of society, when the scope 
 of the individual and that of the state were not so 
 clearly distinguished ; and a high form of personal 
 vengeance mingled with the principle of public justice 
 so intimately, that they could not be wholly sepa- 
 rated; for it must be always remembered that the 
 precept assumes that the enemy is in the wrong and 
 that you are in the right. To a certain extent, then, 
 it was right that these bad natures that infested 
 society, and, by fastening upon individuals who lived 
 under their plots and menaces, were really the foes 
 of the community, should be met by the courage of 
 those whom they harassed and troubled; and not 
 only a permission but a command to the sufferer to 
 retaliate upon them was wanted. Because, as we 
 have said, it is by no means true to say universally 
 that men did not want a command to defend them- 
 selves, but would do it unprompted; and that only 
 a check upon retribution was needed. Many of the 
 quieter sort, who stood in fear of bold and unscrupu- 
 lous men, might shrink from provoking even by just 
 
198 The Law of Retaliation. 
 
 acts of retaliation further animosity, and would re- 
 quire an injunction to retaliate, rather than a restraint 
 upon their retribution. On the other hand, it is 
 evident that a precept which did not accurately dis- 
 tinguish between a public enemy and a private, and 
 allowed resentment to act only upon a vague, though 
 honest impression of its own right and justice, was 
 a precept of imperfect morality ; and such retaliation 
 was constantly exposed to error, passion, and excess. 
 The Divine Legislator therefore in this instance took 
 up the justice of the age, that which was the highest 
 and most genuine and effective form of it at the time ; 
 and inserted it as a rule and precept in His own code 
 for the Jewish nation. 
 
 The precept, however, Thou shalt love thy 
 neighbour, and hate thine enemy, had a still deeper 
 signification, and involved a more inward and sacred 
 class of feelings, when the " enemy " was specially 
 identified with the enemy of God a man opposed to 
 the spread of the Kingdom of God upon earth. In 
 the case of David, inasmuch as his public and personal 
 foes are the same men ; and those who wish him ill 
 also wish ill to Zion, and are set against the establish- 
 ment of a religious kingdom of Israel, his personal 
 enemies are thus identified with God's enemies ; and 
 this combination produces the powerful and awful 
 damnatory expressions which we meet with in the 
 Psalms. The precept, when its terms are taken with 
 this religious light thrown upon them, is simply to 
 say Thou shalt love the good and hate the bad. 
 But such a precept, though it bears a good Gospel 
 
The Law of Retaliation. 199 
 
 sense, was not understood exactly in the same way 
 under the Law, in which it is under the Gospel. Under 
 the old dispensation, when a saint of God obeyed this 
 command, and hated his enemy in the sense of the 
 enemy of God, the bad man who has taken his side 
 against God's kingdom, he understood that injunction 
 in the sense of wishing his enemy from the very depth 
 of his heart the deprivation of all worldly good. The 
 old Law was a system of temporal rewards and punish- 
 ments. Under it, therefore, the sunshine of prosperity 
 was identified with God's favour ; and it was an in- 
 congruity and an impiety, a frightful reversal of rule 
 and order, though it could not be denied that it did 
 occasionally happen, that the wicked should enjoy 
 the light of God's countenance, as this life's happi- 
 ness seemed to be. It was confusion ; it was a dread- 
 ful contradiction and discord. The saint of the old 
 Law, therefore, cursed the enemy of God ; and that 
 was the way in which David understood and acted on 
 the precept to hate his enemy. For the righteous, 
 then, was sprung up a light, a joyful gladness for 
 such as were true-hearted ; they ate, and were satis- 
 fied ; they sang praises unto the Lord, and lacked 
 nothing. But as to the enemy of God, David prayed 
 chat he might wander upon the face of the earth an 
 outlaw and an outcast. He called down upon him 
 all the pains, and every ignominy, that can afflict a 
 man. Let cursing happen unto him, let blessing be 
 far from him ; may he be condemned in the court, and 
 may Satan be his judge ; may he lose all that he has, 
 his prayer be rejected, the extortioner grind him, and 
 
2OO The Law of Retaliation. 
 
 the stranger supplant him ; let misery be unto him 
 as the cloak that he hath upon him, and as the girdle 
 that he is girded withal ; let his life be cut short, and 
 his name perish. The imprecation extended to the 
 posterity, that they should be vagabonds and beggars, 
 desolate, homeless, and fatherless, and no man even 
 to pity them. Hatred of the enemy of God thus 
 filled the full and terrible measure of the old Law ; it 
 was conceived in the spirit of the anomalous and 
 romantic justice of the older religious type, which 
 combined temporal punishment of sin with the in- 
 clusion of the children in the guilt of sin ; which 
 overwhelmed the whole family in one collective 
 destruction with its head ; and in the sentence upon 
 crime did not distinguish personality. But the new 
 code changed all. Christian hatred of the enemy of 
 God both discarded the test of temporal punishment, 
 and distinguished personality. The bad man might 
 be prosperous in this world, and his children were not 
 involved in his guilt. He only was guilty and de- 
 served punishment ; and that punishment was the act 
 of God's future justice, and belonged to the eternal 
 world. The Christian could not pray for his tem- 
 poral misfortune and misery. 
 
LECTURE IX. 
 
 RETALIATION : LAW OF GOEL. 
 
 TN treating the law of retaliation I have reserved for 
 separate consideration the case of the Avenger of 
 Blood, under the Law of Goel, as the most conspicuous 
 example of the retaliation enjoined in the Mosaic code. 
 Here is an instance of an unwritten law of the East 
 which was incorporated in the Mosaic dispensation : 
 as the new conditions which were annexed to it, and 
 by which it was partially modified, show. The act of 
 the Goel (Note 8), therefore, was in its radical motive 
 an act of genuine and serious justice, it was an act of 
 high religious retribution, and piety to the dead ; it 
 was therefore at the root a moral act ; at the same time 
 it was an act of imperfect morality, because this un- 
 written law plainly obliged the avenger of blood to 
 pursue and kill without full knowledge of the facts of 
 the case ; which in many cases, in the absence of all 
 public forms of justice and regular courts, he could 
 not possibly learn. " No such investigation is ever 
 thought of by the blood-avenger," says Michaelis, 1 
 " before he sets out on his pursuit, nor has he indeed 
 any opportunity of making it, because those who are 
 suspected will not present themselves before his tribunal 
 
 1 Commentaries on the Laws of Moses, Book iii. Art. 133. 
 
2O2 Retaliation : Law of Goel. 
 
 to abide a trial of their guilt or innocence. He must 
 therefore follow mere report, or what those to whom 
 he gives credit tell him ; and this, too, he does under 
 the influence of passion/' So very loose, so indis- 
 criminating, and so wild, was the justice of the law of 
 Goel. If a man killed another by accident, or if he 
 killed him even in self-defence, the law allowed for 
 neither of these reasons for the homicide ; but gave the 
 blood-avenger the full right to his life, could he dis- 
 cover and overtake him, the same that he would have 
 had to that of a deliberate murderer : a right which 
 he was obliged to exercise by the law of Goel itself, 
 and by the popular code of honour which enforced 
 the law ; which was so stringent and imperious that 
 no man could leave his relation unavenged without 
 indelible disgrace. 
 
 Such being the rule of Goel, this consuetudinal law 
 or command was adopted by the Divine Lawgiver at 
 the institution of the Mosaic code, and incorporated 
 into the judicial or criminal law of the Jewish nation. 
 The command of old legal custom was continued and 
 maintained by the sanction of the Mosaic Law ; and 
 the people of God in obeying the rule of Goel obeyed a 
 rule which they received from the same authority from 
 which they received the rest of their law ; an autho- 
 rity, indeed, which had not founded the rule, but had, 
 upon finding it, adopted it. Those who killed another 
 either accidentally or in self-defence, had indeed a 
 right to the permanent shelter of the cities of refuge, 
 to which the wilful murderer had not ; but up to the 
 gates of the legal sanctuary the avenger had full 
 
Retaliation : Law of Goel. 203 
 
 rights under the Jewish law over both, both wilful 
 murderer and killer by accident and he was as much 
 bound to claim those rights, within the limits to which 
 they were subjected under a restrained law of Goel, 
 as he would have been to exercise them under an 
 unrestricted law. A check was placed by Moses 
 upon the operation of the old consuetudinary law ; but 
 before it reached that check the law was as imperative 
 as ever, and the avenger of blood was under a full 
 command to pursue the manslayer, and if he caught 
 him to take his life. There was nothing optional in 
 the course marked out for the avenger of blood under 
 the Jewish Law ; the pursuit, with its issue, should it 
 be fatal or not, was prescribed and enjoined upon 
 him ; and the Mosaic Law in incorporating the law of 
 Goel deprived it of none of its stringency within the 
 limits within which it acted. To have inserted the 
 rule of Goel as an optional one indeed in the Mosaic 
 code, which people might observe if they pleased, 
 but which was not obligatory upon them, would 
 be an impossible step for us to suppose the Divine 
 Lawgiver to have taken; its very incorporation 
 in the Jewish Law is a guarantee for the sense in 
 which it is incorporated, viz. not as a permission, but 
 as a command. What it was lawful for the avenger 
 of blood to do, that he must do. The law of Goel, 
 then, as adopted into the Mosaic Law, is an instance 
 of a Divine command enjoining and enforcing acts of 
 imperfect justice and morality, in those early times, 
 as distinguished from merely permitting them or con- 
 niving at them. It was an instance in which God 
 
204 Retaliation : Law of Goel. 
 
 acted through the medium of the moral standard of 
 the age, gave commands accommodated to that 
 medium, and imposed as obligatory upon people 
 proceedings characterised by that imperfect morality. 
 Many critics on the Old Testament morality would 
 indeed set down the law of Goel as almost entirely in- 
 spired by bloodthirsty vengeance ; and they have a 
 notion of the voracious relish of revenge as being able 
 to account for anything in the way of trouble, peril, or 
 difficulty, which is undertaken in the case of this law ; 
 that it is a motive which requires no addition, and 
 which entirely extinguishes, and makes people not 
 reckon and hardly perceive, any combination of labour 
 and pain which they have to surmount in satisfying 
 it. This would be their whole notion of the law of 
 Goel, and they would dismiss it with this round de- 
 scription of it. Now this may be the case in some 
 kinds of revenge, in such as are strictly personal, when, 
 e.g., the individual writhes under the sting of some 
 studied insult, or some violent wrong which has been 
 inflicted upon himself. But I apprehend that it makes 
 a considerable difference in the impetuosity of ven- 
 geance whether it is for a wrong that has happened to a 
 man's self, or for a wrong that has happened to another 
 person. To revenge another person's wrong is a very 
 different thing from revenging your own. To be in a 
 high state of indignation about what has happened to 
 another person, and to feel the extremity of torture 
 and disquiet until you have avenged him. is, at any 
 rate, a condition of mind in advance upon the ordinary 
 motive of revenge. In the present case the wrong has 
 
Retaliation : Law of Goel. 205 
 
 happened to another person. Another person has been 
 killed by somebody. But to go off in pursuit of some- 
 body in consequence, to commit yourself to a long- 
 search after somebody, over rivers, across deserts, 
 through forests, marshes, morasses, and quagmires, up 
 mountains and steeps, down perilous descents, by 
 edges of precipices, under burning suns, with chance 
 scraps of food, and without any certain prognostica- 
 tions of the issue, whether it may not be worse for the 
 pursuer than for the pursued, this would hardly be 
 reckoned generally a convenient, desirable, and grati- 
 fying piece of business to execute. It was a consider- 
 able task to impose upon a man. Under any circum- 
 stances the pursuit would be a good deal of trouble ; 
 it involves breaking away from his family, his busi- 
 ness, the satisfying routine of the day, the settled 
 duties and comforts of his ordinary life. But it is for 
 one near of kin ; and does not that consideration 
 inspire the keenest ardour against wrong, and kindle 
 the most burning appetite for revenge? "Would it 
 not wholly suppress and annihilate every counter 
 wish, and every selfish hesitation ? But do relations 
 invariably impress their memories upon their sur- 
 vivors with that powerful sweetness which makes all 
 labours in defence and vindication of them, rewards, 
 and all weariness delight ? The law of Goel does not 
 discriminate in this respect. The nearest of kin must 
 avenge the near of kin. He may have been a very 
 distant relation, and he may have been by no means 
 one who had acquired the key to his affections ; but 
 the law is rigid, is imperative ; he cannot hang back ; 
 
206 Retaliation : Law of GoeL 
 
 to stay behind and let the criminal make good his 
 escape, is irrecoverable infamy and degradation, to the 
 nearest of kin. He must start off then in pursuit. 
 
 But it needs no strong penetration to see that there 
 must come under the operation of this law a great num- 
 ber of instances in which the law was by no means felt 
 by the person who had to carry it into execution as 
 putting him in an eligible situation. There must have 
 been many instances in which the ex officio avenger 
 would not, had the sanctity of custom and the 
 obligations of honour allowed him, have obstinately 
 grasped at his official privilege and distinction. You 
 picture him to yourself always furiously stimulated by 
 the passion of vengeance ; and the hot pursuit as a 
 pure gratification to the avenger ; but does your expe- 
 rience of human nature indicate that men of them- 
 selves would invariably take the violent death of a 
 relation so deeply to heart that they would go to the 
 ends of the earth to revenge it? They would all desire 
 justice no doubt but would they all go off on a 
 knight-errant expedition to get it ? There must have 
 been a great many avengers of blood who in their 
 hearts would have tolerated, without absolute despair, 
 a temporary sleep of justice. Popular opinion obliged 
 them to rush hot upon the pursuit, and nothing but 
 an immediate chase would be suffered ; but had the 
 avenger been allowed to consult an easy and accom- 
 modating disposition rather than a stern law, might 
 not a much slighter investigation into the matter some- 
 times have satisfied him? After all, human nature, 
 without some more than hint some coercion from 
 
Retaliation: Law of Goel. 207 
 
 the fount of law, is not morosely and inexorably faithful 
 to the rights of the dead. Out of sight out of mind. 
 The gap which even violence creates is soon filled by 
 the rolling tide of life ; and even justice acquiesces and 
 subsides under the pressure of fresh facts. Enough 
 perhaps has been done, and the matter might as well 
 rest. Inquiry cannot go on for ever ne quid nimis : 
 justice may be over rigid, and demand more than can 
 be done for her. With such reflections as these, the 
 thirst for vengeance cools in the reflecting breast of 
 the avenger of blood ; and he contents himself with the 
 ordinary double office of the nearest of kin and heir ; 
 which is, to give his departed relative a solemn and 
 imposing funeral, and to enter upon the enjoyment of 
 his estate. 
 
 Indeed, if we throw ourselves back upon very 
 early times, and contemplate the situation in which 
 justice was placed in the case of a violent death, we 
 shall see that it was a state of things, the necessities 
 of which it was by no means easy to meet. In a 
 civilised age this is all arranged for us, and we have 
 nothing to do but to use the means at hand: the 
 police finds out the murderer, a prison holds him, and 
 the court tries him. But in that primordial age, in 
 which there were neither police, prisons, nor courts, 
 and yet there was a sense of justice in the world, 
 what action was to be taken? Undoubtedly it is 
 everybody's interest in general to avenge a murder, 
 but it is not enough to acknowledge that ; something 
 must be done now, immediately : while at the same 
 time the murderer is off, gone nobody knows where. 
 
208 Retaliation : Law of Goel. 
 
 Imagine then a time before there was any institution of 
 Goel, which armed a particular person with authority 
 for the occasion, and put the law into his hands, and 
 justice is reduced indeed to a great strait ; it is not 
 able to do anything simply for want of an executive ; 
 there is no authorised officer of justice ; there is no 
 staff to start with. In this perplexity, then, a disposi- 
 tion arises to found some primordial apparatus of 
 justice. But the rude ages of the world, in this very 
 commencement of the work of administering justice, 
 are disposed to take decided advantage of the diffi- 
 culties of justice. It would be by no means true to 
 say that rude and violent ages were entirely destitute 
 of a certain kind of moderate tactics; an accommodat- 
 ing temper in particular emergencies ; a disinclination 
 to pushing matters to extremes, and a partiality for 
 compromises. Savage people take a practical view 
 of things in their own way ; they do not look far 
 before them ; or think of adopting any course which 
 will be ultimately and on a large scale beneficial, at 
 the cost of some temporary inconvenience ; but they 
 have a notion of a convenient settlement and arrange- 
 ment for the moment. In coming to deal, then, with 
 the subject of violent deaths, a view of a practical 
 kind rose up in rude ages, which, if there had been 
 any need to do so, would have expressed itself in the 
 case of a murder somewhat in this way : " This is 
 a bad business, but another death does not mend it. 
 Let us come to a sensible understanding about the 
 matter. One thing is certain ; whatever we do now 
 that he is gone, we cannot bring him back again. The 
 
Retaliation : Law of Goel. 209 
 
 gates of death have closed over our friend, and he is 
 where we cannot get at him ; we cannot bring him to 
 life again by any blood that we may shed. To kill 
 another man, then, cannot do him any good : it cannot 
 do us any good. But the infliction of a heavy fine 
 upon the offender promises to be a really useful pun- 
 ishment ; it is a retribution upon him, it is a benefit 
 to us ; not an equivalent, indeed, for the great blow 
 which has fallen upon us, which is not to be expected, 
 but a rectification so far as the case admits of it. On 
 the whole, and all circumstances considered, perhaps 
 the best compensation to enforce for our irreparable 
 loss is a good round sum." Something of this kind 
 of reasoning would seem to have founded the money- 
 compensation for homicide, which rose up among the 
 Hindoos and among the Germans, with whom, Tacitus 
 remarks " Luitur homicidium certo armentorum ac 
 pecorum numero." x 
 
 But it is obvious that such a judicial arrange- 
 ment as this, though it avoided the blind bloodshed 
 of the law of Goel, its striking at the first person 
 that offered, and killing the wrong man, if it so 
 happened, or mistaking his crime, could never have 
 sown the seed of civilised justice. For regular 
 justice the retributive principle was necessary, and 
 death for death was the only way of meeting murder ; 
 the only solid preventive of it. In however rude 
 and uncertain a form, then, the law of Goel was 
 the true germ of civilised justice, which, sanguinary 
 for the moment, seized hold of the true judicial scope 
 
 1 Germ. 21. 
 P 
 
2io Retaliation: Law of GoeL 
 
 of security for the future ; and by the terror of death 
 protected human life. The fine was no help against 
 violence to come; and, as Michaelis observes "The 
 poor man has little security for his life against the 
 rich, because the latter has the means of averting 
 retaliation, by persuading the poor man's relations, 
 which will seldom be a very difficult matter, to accept 
 of money in lieu of blood." 1 The fine was an oblique 
 and distorted aim to begin with. But the institution 
 of Goel caught up the first movement of genuine jus- 
 tice and indignation at wrong, gave it its swing, 
 and put the case in its hand. * With all its hazard and 
 haste, it still contemplated as its object the simple 
 punishment of crime. The judicial aim was true, but 
 acting under the greatest difficulties with respect to 
 evidence, and obliged to take up with the first prima 
 facie indications of the criminal, and the quality of 
 the crime. A true aim, however, once rooted, gradu- 
 ally cleared a way for its own execution ; it built up 
 the necessary structure of police, courts, and wit- 
 nesses, and raised up the edifice of civilised justice. 
 And thus the Jewish Law, in adopting the institution 
 of Goel, imposed and enjoined an imperfect form of 
 justice, which, as acting under defect of evidence, was 
 rash and precipitate, but still acted as the basis and 
 commencement of a regular civil justice. The law of 
 Goel was, at any rate, a law which severed human 
 nature from its lethargy and indifference. "With all its 
 extravagance and looseness, it compelled men to ac- 
 knowledge the claims of the dead, to avenge their 
 
 1 Book iii. Art. 134. 
 
Retaliation : Law of Goel. 211 
 
 wrongs, and to punish the wrong-doer. And a law, 
 with such a root of nobility and justice in it, was not 
 unfit for adoption, as a temporary curb upon human 
 nature, till it could admit of a higher discipline by the 
 Divine Lawgiver, whose necessary policy, when He 
 gave laws to unenlightened man, was accommodation. 
 So again with respect to the principle of whole- 
 sale justice, the subject of a previous Lecture, 
 which included the family in the guilt of the criminal 
 himself, and the whole of a people or nation, the 
 children with the rest, in the guilt of the sinning and 
 predominant part of the nation ; this was also an 
 instance of a rude imperfect justice, deeply seated 
 in the early retributive impulse and sentiment of 
 mankind, which was adopted by God in His leadership 
 of the Jewish nation in its hostile career against other 
 nations. The Israelites were commanded by God to 
 put that principle in practice against particular nations ; 
 and therefore, in these cases, God commanded acts of 
 an imperfect morality. But such a course of Divine 
 conduct is upon no reasonable principle liable to 
 objection. A rude imperfect sort of justice being at 
 that time the idea of justice which mankind had, and 
 that being the shape which the principle of justice 
 assumed in their minds, to lay it down that God was 
 not to regulate the execution of that imperfect law of 
 justice, and command the application of it to one 
 nation as distinguished from another nation, accord- 
 ing as it agreed with His great design regarding the 
 Jewish people, would be an untenable and unreason- 
 able position. How can we exclude it from the scope 
 
212 Retaliation : Law of Goel. 
 
 of His Providence, such being the justice of that age of 
 the world, to direct that justice into its proper channel ; 
 and to put it into men's hearts by extraordinary signs 
 and tokens, to inflict it upon this person rather than 
 that person, upon this family or nation rather than 
 upon that ; and to watch over, and superintend ad- 
 ministration of, an unframed and sanguinary but still 
 sacred law of retribution ? Adopting, for the sake of 
 argument, the theory of the Quakers, and supposing 
 all war to be wrong, could we still pronounce that war 
 did not come under the active providence of God ; and 
 that it was not within its province to cause certain wars 
 to be made, and to suggest and give occasion for the 
 undertaking of some wars rather than of others, 
 according as the interests of society or religion might 
 require ? To exclude in this way all moral patterns 
 from the Divine recognition, except the perfect one, 
 would be simply to shut God out of the direction of 
 His own world ; because in such direction God must 
 deal with man as he is, and prompt him to do, and 
 impart to him the will to do, good actions, according 
 to the type and measure of goodness to which his 
 understanding in each age is confined. Is it an awful 
 solemnity then of retributive justice that God commits 
 to the agency of man? It must necessarily be a 
 justice of the type then acknowledged in the world ; 
 and it must be a justice of the excessive type, if the 
 occasion is extraordinary. To command justice, and 
 to command that pattern of justice, is therefore in 
 fact the same thing ; because, for the very purpose of 
 justice itself, it was necessary that it should be a justice 
 
Retaliation : Law of Goel. 213 
 
 which man could understand, and this excessive type 
 of justice was what he understood as justice. 
 
 This idea, as has been said, was not connected 
 with cruel or inhuman motives in the minds of those 
 who held it. There was no malice in it, no delight in 
 pain, no love of destruction for its own sake ; it was at 
 the root a genuine sense of retributive justice, only not 
 regulated by the strict sense of human individuality. 
 "Was this sense of justice, then, no proper subject of 
 Divine regulation and direction ? God cannot indeed 
 sanction the audacity of a fanatic, who takes up and 
 revives the error of earlier justice after the enlightened 
 conscience of man has cast it aside ; for that which is 
 imperfection before the illumination is sin against light 
 after it. And this distinction will exclude from that 
 religious shelter many notorious acts of enthusiasts in 
 later times, as well as some mistaken courses of policy 
 into which the Christian mind has been misled. But 
 an imperfect idea of justice, so long as it is only imper- 
 fection, and belongs to the earlier state of man before 
 he has advanced in the path of truth, is moral at the 
 root. Do we exclude it from the Divine recognition, 
 as if God could not direct it without violating His 
 own moral nature ? We are not fair to this early idea 
 of justice. It was a sacred, a strong moral idea 
 struggling with confusion and mistakes, carried 
 off by false lights, and entangled in an intricacy 
 of unformed thought, which perplexed the idea of 
 human personality. We can hardly unthread now 
 this labyrinth, and clear up those curious substitutions 
 and transferences of identity, which are like the 
 
214 Retaliation: Law of Goel. 
 
 reasonings of a man in a dream; or get at the sense of 
 those early snares and mazes in which reason was 
 caught, and those forms of thinking to which she bent 
 herself with such flexibility, accepting their impress 
 and the chain of habit. Yet this was vehement 
 early justice, enveloped as it was, like some strong 
 animal, in a net by its own very force and impetuosity. 
 Do not take a police court to judge it by. Throw your- 
 self back into the first ages of the world, look at its 
 serious, its profound sense of retribution, so full of fear 
 and awe, working itself into shape, extricating itself out 
 of its meshes, and clearing its ground gradually out of 
 haze and darkness ; and you will be able, with all its 
 wildness, to respect early justice. It was that excess 
 which made a foundation for the mean; a mere defect 
 and want of the passion would have been a barren 
 spring. 
 
 God then directed into particular channels, He 
 applied to the Canaanites, He applied to the fami- 
 lies of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, He applied to the 
 family of Achan, He applied to the family of Saul, a 
 kind of justice which was the recognised justice of that 
 age, which formed a prominent feature of the civil law 
 of the age, and which the ancient Jewish people main- 
 tained with the rest of the world ; only with the 
 qualification that it did not enter into their regular 
 body of law, but awaited special Divine commands. 
 That was the justice of the day, and that was the 
 justice -by which the first period of the world marked 
 its sense of good and evil. The exclusion of such 
 would have been unintelligible to the age, as that 
 
Retaliation : Law of GoeL 2 1 5 
 
 form of justice was then the natural bulwark of Divine 
 law. 
 
 Divine commands, then, we see, no more in reality 
 compromise the moral nature of the Deity than per- 
 missions do. On the one hand, He can no more permit, 
 in the sense of sanctioning, positive wickedness, than 
 He can command it; while, on the other, He can 
 command imperfectly right actions as much as He can 
 permit them. But if these commands were accommo- 
 dations to early justice, they at the same time directed 
 and applied it to great ends, to marking great sins, 
 and so to impressing the Jewish people with a sense of 
 the heinousness of such sins. How strongly could a 
 judicious and sagacious man of the world argue for the 
 right which he had, and had found it expedient to 
 exercise, of communicating a piece of knowledge in 
 that shape in which an inferior mind could receive it, 
 but which was not itself the absolute truth ! How 
 sensibly he would demonstrate the unavoidableness of 
 such a course ; with what solid force would he state 
 the duty to give another so much truth as he was 
 capable of taking in, when the narrow capacity of the 
 recipient precluded the communication of the whole ; 
 and with what discrimination would he vindicate the 
 distinction between pure error and partial truth ! 
 Now the case of moral practice is quite analogous to 
 that of truth. Yet the man who can see so clearly 
 the legitimacy of accommodation in his own case, when 
 he comes to the case of the Divine Legislator, refuses 
 to allow in Him any condescension to unenlightened 
 men; and incloses the Deity in a network of casuistry 
 
2i6 Retaliation: Law of Goel. 
 
 which precludes Him from acting in His own world. 
 On this rule what man is incapable of receiving must on 
 that very account be given him ; and God can com- 
 mand nothing but what is perfect, while man can only 
 receive what is defective. What is an impracticable 
 procedure is thus alone a right one ; whatever is pos- 
 sible for man's guidance is wrong. Imprisoned in this 
 inextricable dilemma, the Deity is thus precluded from 
 dealing with His own world, and from taking the only 
 course which can be taken for educating man ; that of 
 sustaining an imperfect standard before he can be 
 raised to a perfect one. But this is to impose on the 
 Deity a scrupulous and fantastic morality which 
 rational persons reject for their own conduct ; and to 
 make that a law to God which is fanaticism for man. 
 
 St. Augustine, when he came to the question of 
 Scripture criticism, upon moral grounds, adopted this 
 great principle that which Scripture gives us, viz. that 
 God commands according to the state of mind of the 
 recipient of the command. Is he in a perverse or a 
 mutinous and obstinate state ? The command then 
 becomes hostile to him by the very leaning and favour 
 it shows to his wickedness. Is he simply in an igno- 
 ,rant state of mind following the standard of the day ? 
 The command, then, is not hostile, but only pitying 
 and condescending. It tells him to do what he is 
 equal to ; what is the best thing he can do under the 
 circumstances. But still it is the same principle kept 
 up : the command follows the state of mind. God 
 ordinarily commands a sinner to do something right, 
 though He knows he will disobey Him; but He 
 
Retaliation : Law of Gael. 217 
 
 reserves to Himself the right, if He think good, to 
 command him in judgment ; and, if he has put himself 
 by his previous conduct out of the sphere of discipline 
 and instruction, to do what is wrong. And still more 
 when, in consequence of his imperfect knowledge of 
 right, it is necessary that he should be imperfectly 
 commanded, does God give imperfect commands. 
 
 Divines and commentators on Scripture have thus 
 sometimes erred, when they come to a difficulty in 
 morals in Scripture, in placing the defence of the act 
 criticised entirely upon the strength of a positive 
 command of God, without at the same time any refer- 
 ence to the state of mind of the agent. Thus Calvin 
 defends the spoiling of the Egyptians simply as having 
 been commanded by God : the whole world, and all 
 that is in it, is God's property, and He can give it to 
 whom He pleases ; and from the time of the donation 
 it ceases to be the property of him to whom it has 
 hitherto belonged, and becomes the property of the 
 person into whose hands it has been transferred. But 
 although this is in the abstract undeniably true, the 
 mind of a man who was commanded to steal another 
 man's goods would be divided as to whether it was a 
 Divine command ; because there would be a miracu- 
 lous argument one way and a moral argument another, 
 unless his moral state of mind were of itself an im- 
 perfect one. The command might be given, but it 
 would only be obeyed if the mind itself acquiesced in 
 the robbery from a defect of its own ; or from the wild 
 and irregular standard which it had naturally got 
 from the age, and from the circumstances of the 
 
218 Retaliation: Law of GoeL 
 
 world. The defence implies a certain laxer sense 
 of theft and standard of property in the person, 
 due to the fault of his age rather than his own, 
 and does not rest upon a Divine command alone. 
 Calvin's defence, then, of the act of the Israelites 
 is artificial, and wants natural strength. Theo- 
 doret is more natural, and expresses a sense of 
 irregular and loose justice when he says that what 
 they stole from the Egyptians at going, was only a 
 return for the unpaid labour they spent in building 
 the Pyramids. Tertullian says that it was only a 
 small compensation in reality for the work of the 
 Israelites. Chrysostom says it was a belligerent 
 right ; Israel had a right to make war upon Egypt 
 for great wrongs. These explanations all point to a 
 moral vindication, upon a ground of such popular 
 justice as was thought to be justice at that day, 
 rather than to a ground of positive Divine authority 
 proved by miraculous intervention. 
 
 The objection, indeed, which is felt to the Deity, in 
 the spirit of accommodation, commanding classes of 
 actions which are defective in morality, arises from 
 critics of the Old Testament morality having chosen 
 to represent all these species of actions as not only im- 
 perfectly moral, but as positively bad. Thus, critics 
 of a certain school have chosen to characterise all 
 those actions of excessive justice which have been 
 described as wholly bloodthirsty, vindictive, selfish, 
 and barbarous, in their object and motives. They 
 set down all this early action of mankind to simple 
 inhumanity ; then they say, How can we suppose the 
 
Retaliation : Law of Goel. 219 
 
 Deity commanding such practices as these ? They see 
 no moral element in them, only the outbreak of hateful 
 passion. They see in retaliation only impetuous re- 
 venge ; they see in the law of Goel only the violent 
 thirst for blood ; they see in the exterminating wars 
 of the Old Testament only the savage success of rapine 
 and slaughter. They have no notion of such actions, 
 except such as is described in these terms ; and then 
 they say, How can God command such actions ? Is 
 it not inconsistent with His attributes to do so? 
 But before critics of Old Testament morality object 
 upon these grounds to the Deity commanding 
 in early ages those actions, they should first of 
 all be sure that they do not themselves grossly 
 depreciate and misrepresent such actions; that they 
 do not misunderstand them; that the picture they 
 have of them before their minds is not the coarsest 
 daub ; and that by their gratuitous assumptions they 
 have not altogether dispossessed themselves of the 
 moral key to those actions. Such wholesale con- 
 demnation shows an exceedingly false estimate of 
 these early practices and proceedings. This early 
 action of the sacred people was in truth inspired, 
 in the substance of it, with a sense of justice, and 
 with hatred of crime ; it was impregnated with high 
 feeling, vindication of right, protection of weakness, 
 reverence for the dead ; though there was excess 
 and confusion in it, peo.ple not discriminating 
 accurately, and rushing impatiently into satisfying 
 a rude appetite for just punishment. Especially, 
 to set down the retributions of the Israelitish code 
 
22O Retaliation: Law of Go el. 
 
 simply to sanguinary motives, is to do total wrong 
 to the first great Teachings after civil justice in the 
 world, to those wild and irregular but still noble im- 
 pulses which formed a barrier for the weak against the 
 strong. 
 
 Although for God to command simple cruelty 
 and simple revenge is impossible, and such an idea 
 must be rejected as horrible ; it was not unfitting to 
 Him, rather it was most meet and most suitable to 
 His divine benevolence, in indulgence to man's infir- 
 mity and slow moral growth, to sustain the imper- 
 fect rudimental forms of the great institutions of civil 
 justice. That righteous power in the community, 
 grand in its maturity, was noble also in its birth ; it 
 was great even in infancy; we cannot despise, we cannot 
 pity, we can only reverence, the early struggles of that 
 great principle, as with effort, against infinite obstruc- 
 tions, and in the absence of all external resources and 
 appliances which it had itself to create ; with the very 
 moral sense rushing with early haste and impetuosity 
 prematurely to its object, and almost enlisted against 
 justice, this sacred passion fought its way to stability, 
 and to that steady supremacy which it afterwards 
 attained in the state. There is, at its very first rise 
 and commencement, the augury of the future edifice ; a 
 strength which shows that it will get the mastery. 
 There is in truth, in the mere fact of such accommo- 
 dating legislation, a pledge implied on the part of the 
 Divine Legislator that He will provide, together with 
 it, an education of higher scope to lead to a more per- 
 fect standard ; but what is more, this pledge is ful- 
 
Retaliation : Law of Goel. 221 
 
 filled. The Jewish dispensation, as a whole, does 
 gradually elevate the moral sense of the nation, till it 
 is prepared for the reception of the Christian code; and 
 the highest sample of the nation does in fact receive 
 that code, and spread it through the world. And 
 though some may deny that such a result was due to 
 anything but the natural growth of human reason, - 
 which they may say fully accounts for it, without 
 the need of a special revelation; on the contrary, 
 the singularity of this whole issue, unexampled as it 
 was in the world, and without a parallel in any other 
 nation, shows that there was some peculiar power at 
 work in the Jewish dispensation, and that the people 
 had been under a special educating Providence. But 
 this will be the subject of another Lecture. 
 
LECTURE X. 
 
 THE END THE TEST 
 OF A PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 
 
 "OUT it will be said that upon the estimate of the 
 -*^ moral standard of the Old Testament revelation, 
 arrived at in the foregoing Lectures, we describe 
 revelation as only giving men those commands which 
 men give themselves. It will be said, What is the 
 use of a revelation which only does this ? The very 
 use of a revelation, it will be urged, is to give men 
 a higher standard than what they have by nature. 
 If the Jewish revelation, then, did not do this, but 
 only adopted and imposed the existing highest moral 
 level, what more did it do for man than man had 
 already done for himself ? and how was a revelation 
 any advantage which only established what had been 
 established without a revelation ? If man was not fit 
 for a higher law, and if that excuses the low standard 
 of revelation, it is still unexplained what use a low 
 revelation is, which only takes man and provides for 
 him at his present level. 
 
 But a progressive revelation, such as the Jewish, 
 may adopt for its present use the highest imperfect 
 moral standard of the age, as embodied in particular 
 rules and precepts, and may yet contain an inner 
 
The End the Test. 223 
 
 movement and principle of growth in it, which will 
 ultimately extricate it as a law out of the shackles of 
 a rudimentary stage. In the Jewish dispensation there 
 was something besides, over and above the actual letter 
 of the law, which accompanied the dispensation. The 
 actual letter, indeed, was a rise above the established 
 popular standard, as the checks upon the law of retali- 
 ation and the law of Goel show. But there was also 
 a principle of progress in the system, over and above 
 the letter; an inner spirit and movement in it, a 
 standing guidance which tended strictly in one direc- 
 tion. The worship of the one true God was in itself 
 the great purifying and elevating principle of the 
 system ; drawing the heart and understanding upward, 
 and giving a tendency toward ascent and advance to 
 all the true moral elements in man. The dispensation 
 itself looked out of itself ; it looked forward. It con- 
 fessed its own shortcomings ; it owned itself a prepa- 
 ratory and rudimental structure. This was the standing 
 prophecy which inhabited the older dispensation, and 
 did not belong only as an individual gift to particular 
 persons, but abode like a guiding spirit in the nation ; 
 inspiring it with a sense of an end beyond its present 
 state, a goal in the distance towards which it was 
 advancing. The vision of the pious Jew overlooked the 
 immediate prospect of his nation, to fix upon a remoter 
 horizon which was illuminated by a mysterious glory, 
 and gleamed with a knowledge and perfection of which 
 he had no accurate conception, but which still raised 
 the future above the present day of the nation, and 
 represented the latter only as a journey toward that 
 
224 The End the Test of 
 
 future day. And the same prophetical spirit in the 
 people was also the teacher of the people. An instruc- 
 tion was going on in the Jewish nation throughout its 
 whole course, the instruction, not of the outward law, 
 but of an inward mind, a spiritual intelligence, which 
 maintained its place, and taught, ex cathedra, in the 
 Jewish church, inspiring and illuminating a long suc- 
 cession of prophets, who in their turn revealed and 
 expounded its lessons to the people. In a word, the 
 Jewish nation was under a special Providence, not 
 only with regard to its written Law but also with 
 regard to a special spiritual intelligence which had 
 its seat and taught in the nation throughout the 
 whole period of the Law. Under this providential 
 guidance, the eternal principles of the Law were extri- 
 cated from its temporary structure, the true from the 
 passing morals : the reason and conscience of the Jew 
 were enlightened to the perception of what was right 
 and wrong. 
 
 If, then, there is something great and singular 
 in the end, the end shows the design of the system ; 
 that it was more than a documentary code ; that there 
 was a living guide in it, working in a special direction 
 all the time that it was making use of an imperfect 
 standard and imperfect law. It is true, then, un- 
 doubtedly, that a' Divine dispensation could not con- 
 descend to adopt an imperfect moral standard as a 
 temporary one, unless it undertook the responsibility at 
 the same time of elevating the people by education 
 up to a true standard ; but this is just the thing that 
 was done. A prominent feature of the Jewish dis- 
 
a Progressive Revelation. 225 
 
 pensation was its rude public justice ; but while the 
 Divine dispensation accommodated itself to a defective 
 idea of justice, it was at the very same time eradicat- 
 ing it : it was laying deep in the human mind at the 
 very time the foundation of an enlightenment, which 
 would utterly supplant that defective idea of man 
 upon which that faulty justice arose, and put in its 
 place the true spiritual idea of human individuality. 
 The whole question of what belongs to the individual, 
 what power one man has over another, the whole 
 question of the " rights of man," has been one of 
 slow growth. The whole scheme of modern thought 
 on this subject is a late formation. The judicial sense 
 which settles these points is comparatively new. A 
 whole cycle was necessary to be gone through, a long 
 period of education, before this principle got hold of 
 the world ; and when it did, it came out of revelation. 
 For out of no philosophy under the sun has the idea 
 of the " rights of man " issued. Philosophers laid it 
 down very strongly that philosophers were great men 
 that they were " kings ; " but man as such was not 
 great in their eyes. It may be true that Epictetus 
 says this, and that some other philosopher says that ; 
 but what came of anything they said ? Did they do 
 anything? Were their words more than passing 
 shadows, or the two or three feeble beatings of a pulse 
 which had no life in it ? They were hardly even pro- 
 tests ; and for any force they had the world might have 
 gone on in its old way till now. Even the sanguinary 
 sport of the gladiatorial shows was not interrupted by 
 them, and it was not a heathen philosopher, but a 
 
 Q 
 
226 The End the Test of 
 
 Christian devotee, who leapt into the circus, and by 
 the protest of his death stopped that one triumph and 
 exaltation of Satan. And the aberrations of justice 
 would not have been corrected either. Darius might 
 have gone on casting the wives and children to the 
 lions, and Nebuchadnezzar might have continued to 
 convert men's houses into dunghills, for anything these 
 men would have done. But in the Bible there is an 
 idea an idea which is absolutely inconsistent with 
 this of making one man belong to another, and treating 
 him as the appendage to another. It was an idea 
 which could not be kept down, but must work its way 
 upward, so as to produce at last true justice ; it was 
 the idea of man as having a soul. If he had a soul, 
 he could not be part of another man, and he must be 
 himself, and no one else. It was this irrepressible 
 germ of true justice and true freedom which was 
 given in the Old Testament. Moses could not go on 
 imagining that he was the appendage to another man, 
 when he himself stood face to face with God, when he 
 could pray to Him, intercede with Him ; when he 
 knew that he had power with God. This discovered 
 man to himself, this showed him what he was, this 
 must make him great in his own eyes ; he must gain 
 a different estimate of himself ; he was great though 
 guilty, nay, and even his guilt was like some dark 
 background, upon which his greatness stood out ; for 
 his consciousness how much he fell short of his own 
 standard only revealed the excellence of his own type 
 and design. That he was in relations to the Universal 
 Being gave him a substantial being, and certified it to 
 
a Progressive Revelation. 227 
 
 him: communion with God was communion with 
 himself; he penetrated into himself, and religion 
 unlocked the interior of his soul and brought its 
 secrets into light ; he knew himself and his own value ; 
 that he was not the creature of accidents, mere spray 
 from the unceasing tide of time, which rose up in the 
 air and vanished, but that there was something sub- 
 stantial in him. 
 
 History, and we may add the drama, has unfolded 
 in its own way the greatness of man; but it has 
 only done this for certain men great actors on the 
 stage of life. In the eye of revelation every man 
 is great, born for eternity, and an eternity of glory. 
 It was impossible, when this idea of himself had 
 been matured in man, that it should not have its 
 effect upon the civil status of man : he was no ap- 
 purtenance, no appendage, no belonging, but he was 
 himself. Such justice as the early justice of the world, 
 which has been previously considered, became an im- 
 possibility ; one man could not be punished for another 
 man's sins ; and the human mass stood on a higher 
 level with respect to civil rights and freedom generally. 
 
 There is a sense which is neither fanatical nor 
 carnal, in which the Bible may be said to be the 
 charter of human rights ; it has endowed man with 
 an individuality which he can never lose, and which 
 rulers must respect. The governments of the old 
 world and the new rise upon different bases. The 
 old empires were founded upon the depreciation of 
 man ; he was told he was a nobody, that he was a 
 piece of property, that he had no rights ; and being 
 
228 The End the Test of 
 
 told it, he believed it ; for weak man estimates himself 
 according as others estimate him. Let everybody 
 about a man conspire to put him down, and he is put 
 down, he is lowered in his own eyes. It is hard for a 
 man's sober persuasion, however easy for his infatuated 
 vanity, to resist an external impression. He has to 
 keep up a standing appeal to reason against the force 
 of assertion, which is always difficult ; he has to do 
 without that surrounding and confirming voice which 
 relieves the inward act of judgment. A man distrusts 
 his own assertion the next moment, if half-a-dozen 
 people about him deny it with sufficient positiveness 
 unless he knows his ground well. The force of out- 
 ward opinion acts like a shock, and overthrows us 
 immediately, unless we have a solid ground of truth 
 in ourselves to resist it. Ancient empires, then, were 
 founded upon the insignificance of man ; even the so- 
 called democracies of the old world were in truth 
 oligarchies built upon the degradation of the mass. 
 On the other hand, the governments of the new world 
 are founded upon the high idea of man, as a being 
 who has substance, rank, and rights. Nor is this the 
 character of one form of government only, but of all 
 the civilised governments of modern times, whether 
 democratic or despotic in form ; all recognise man as a 
 being who has rights, and profess to legislate for the 
 interests of the mass. It would be doing injustice to 
 the most rigid European despotism to put it at all on 
 a par with an ancient empire on this head ; the two 
 are based upon altogether a different standard of what 
 is due to the mass of the people. But out of no 
 
a Progressive Revelation. 229 
 
 philosophy has this high estimate of man as such 
 come : it has come straight from revelation. There, 
 in the relation of man to God, is the origin of this 
 great change of rank. Philosophy did not put man in 
 communion with God, because the deity of philosophy 
 was no object of worship, and there was no rank 
 gained by communion with idols ; but communion 
 with the Universal Being gave man position, exalted 
 him, and clothed him with honour. 
 
 What a vast body indeed of philosophy, poetry, 
 and literature has the Bible formed, of which this 
 sentiment regarding man is the ruling and animating 
 idea. I do not refer to writings avowedly expository 
 or illustrative of Scripture, but to what we call secular 
 literature. A s a philosopher, e.g., Pascal's writings come 
 under that head. We know the force and majesty of 
 the Thoughts of Pascal ; the realms of space and the 
 worlds in them are full of grandeur in his philosophy, 
 but there is one thing compared with which all this 
 vast material universe is nothing. "All the bodies, 
 the stars, the firmament, the earth and all its king- 
 doms, are not worth one soul; for that soul knows 
 both itself and them, and they know nothing." 
 The human soul thus stands apart and by itself 
 as the one thinking substance, but it does not stop 
 at this stage and level. Charity is above thought. 
 Charity is supernatural; and he who has it has the life 
 supernatural and immortal. Thus in the universe 
 sphere rises above sphere. Thought and charity are 
 each sui generis. Thought is of an order and kind 
 above matter ; charity is of an order and kind above 
 
230 The End the Test of 
 
 thought. All the matter in the world could not pro- 
 duce one thought ; all the thought could not produce 
 one instance of charity. " La distance infinie des corps 
 aux esprits, figure la distance infiniment plus infinie des 
 esprits a la charite." But man was designed to tran- 
 scend this infinite space and attain the summit. The 
 idea of the greatness of man grandeur de Vdme 
 humaine thus penetrates the philosophy of Pascal. 
 He pauses to look at this being at each of these two 
 stages of his progress. First he contemplates him as a 
 thinking being " Penseefait la grandeur de Thomme. 
 ... La grandeur des gens d'esprit est invisible, aux rois, 
 aux riches, aux capitaines, a tous ces grands de chair." 
 Then he contemplates him in the supernatural character 
 "dans son ordre de saintete." "Les saints n'ont 
 nul besoin des grandeurs charnelles ou spirituelles." 1 
 Nevertheless, though great in his faculties, and great in 
 the end for which he was made, man lives at present a 
 life of misery and exile " like a dispossessed monarch." 
 The very proof of his greatness lies in his misery, for 
 were he not born for higher things he would not be so 
 dissatisfied with lower. He thus derives a sense of 
 elevation even from that very sadness ; at any rate 
 he knows that he is wretched, and that he knows it, 
 is evidence of the superiority of his nature. The 
 chapter of fragments upon the " Grandeur et misere 
 de rhomme" concludes with the words, "Let man 
 estimate himself at his true value, honour himself in 
 his capacities, despise himself in his neglect of those 
 capacities." 
 
 1 Pens&s de Pascal. Ed. Faugere, vol. ii. pp. 90, 330. 
 
a Progressive Revelation. 23 i 
 
 This idea of the greatness of man has thus become 
 a part of modern philosophy, and we see that the idea 
 has a deep philosophical basis in Pascal's mind. Yet 
 Pascal's thought is only Scripture put into a philoso- 
 phical shape, and we have the whole idea of the " gran- 
 deur de Thomrne " in one text " What is a man pro- 
 fited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own 
 soul ? or what shall a man give in exchange for his 
 soul ? " * And thus it is that some minds cast in a 
 philosophical mould, and partially disabled for seeing 
 truth except in that shape rendered somewhat callous 
 too to the deep sense of Scripture by familiarity with 
 the bare letter are introduced to Scripture first 
 through Pascal. He translates the Bible into the 
 language of philosophy. Then, when they turn to 
 Scripture again, they recognise the fount of Pascal, 
 the type and original of his great thoughts. The in- 
 spired page then assumes new life and freshness in 
 their eyes, and the triumph which his sharp weapons 
 gave to the honest conscience over the hypocritical and 
 carnal, is renewed more vividly upon the field of Scrip- 
 ture more vividly, because the most beautiful and 
 keenest philosophical truths derived from Scripture, 
 are not equal to the plenary life, strength, and darted 
 thoughts of the original. 
 
 That the modern world, however, its govern- 
 ments, philosophy, literature, should have been formed 
 so largely as it has upon one Scriptural idea, is not so 
 remarkable, perhaps, as another thing, viz. that an 
 immense body of infidel literature and philosophy has 
 
 1 Matt. xvi. 26. 
 
232 The End the Test of 
 
 been formed upon this same idea. It is indeed an 
 extraordinary anomaly, that a truth for which we are 
 indebted to Scripture alone has become the very 
 watchword of infidelity, and that the enthusiasts of 
 unbelief, its poets, dreamers, and political agitators, 
 should have gone mad upon an idea which is histori- 
 cally the gift of Kevelation to mankind the greatness 
 of man as such. It has been the special cry of the 
 revolutionist, that it is not as a king, as a noble, as a 
 star of refined life, even as a cultivated and educated 
 person only, that man is great ; that he is great in 
 himself; that every man has in him the dignity and 
 excellence of human nature, and is an independent 
 being, and has inalienable rights ; that every man has 
 it in him to be " crowned King of Life." The mind 
 of the infidel poet has kindled at this truth : 
 
 " Yon sun, 
 
 Lights it the great alone 1 Yon silver beams, 
 Sleep they less sweetly on the cottage thatch 
 Than on the dome of kings 1 Is mother earth 
 A step-dame to her numerous sons, who earn 
 Her unshared gifts with unremitting toil ? " : 
 
 " Yet every heart contains perfection's germ : 
 The wisest of the sages of the earth, 
 That ever from the stores of reason drew 
 Science and truth, and virtue's dreadless tone, 
 Were but a weak and inexperienced boy, 
 Proud, sensual, unimpassioned, unimbued 
 With pure desire and universal love, 
 Compared to that high being, of cloudless brain, 
 Untainted passion, elevated will, 
 
 1 Shelley's Queen Mob. 
 
a Progressive Revelation. 233 
 
 Which death (who even would linger long in awe 
 Within his noble presence, and beneath 
 His changeless eyebeam) might alone subdue. 
 Him, every slave now dragging through the filth 
 Of some corrupted city his sad life, 
 Pining with famine, swoln with luxury, 
 Blunting the keenness of his spiritual sense, 
 With narrow schemings and unworthy cares, 
 Or madly rushing through all violent crime, 
 To move the deep stagnation of his soul, 
 Might imitate and equal." ] 
 
 Had the poet been asked whence he got this idea 
 of man, this sense of the dignity of every man, of how 
 much there was in him, and what was due to him, he 
 could not have pointed to a single ancient philosopher 
 as his teacher. The ancient world had no such idea ; 
 and had such a notion been suggested to one of its 
 luminaries, he would have scouted it as visionary and 
 fantastic. The poet has got this idea out of the Bible, 
 however reluctant he might be to own it. It does not 
 exist elsewhere, but only in revelation and the deri- 
 vatives from revelation. This is a matter of fact. We 
 know the history of this idea as we know the history 
 of a scientific idea, of a discovery or invention. The 
 poet, then, may denounce revelation, but he uses it. It 
 has taught him, it has inspired him. It has imparted 
 to him that conception which is the stimulus to his 
 powers, and around which all the treasures of his 
 exuberant fancy collect. And indeed, though cut 
 away from its root, severed from the parent stock of 
 truth, and exiled, this great idea still retains the traces 
 
 1 Queen Mab. 
 
234 The End the Test of 
 
 of its birth. It is a noble and an inspiring thought, 
 but at the same time it is an anarchical one. It swells 
 with tempestuous pride and wilfulness, in the place of 
 that resignation which tempers its strength and vigour 
 upon its own natural ground. Yet it is instructive 
 to see how full the world has become of this idea 
 of humanity when once disclosed ; how it exults 
 in it, and cannot contain itself. As soon as the 
 truth is caught, it is taken up and absorbed into the 
 vortex of human speculation and passion. It is 
 refracted through a thousand mediums, and but too 
 often glares with a sinister and distorted light, in- 
 furiating and not elevating the mass ; but still, how- 
 ever coloured by human thought, it has taken posses- 
 sion of the world, and divides ancient from modern 
 society by an unsurpassable boundary. 
 
 So large has been the fruit which that first truth 
 of revelation, the communion of man with God, has 
 borne, in affecting the relation of man to man, and in 
 improving his civil interests. And thus, though in 
 certain particular Divine interpositions in the Old 
 Testament history, God accommodated His dealings to 
 a defective and debased idea of human individuality, 
 (as when He commanded the family or nation to be 
 included in the same punishment with its guilty head), 
 He was at the very time, in the great foundation of 
 His revelation, educating man in the highest truth 
 upon this very subject; and implanting in him that 
 true idea of himself which was destined to produce 
 the whole edifice of modern society and of civil justice. 
 In human affairs this is considered to be the highest 
 
a Progressive Revelation. 235 
 
 wisdom : to accommodate instruction for the occa- 
 sion, to the imperfect knowledge of the learner, at 
 the same time that you implant a seed of more perfect 
 knowledge. And the same rule applies to the Divine 
 dispensations. While the old type of justice was 
 being executed, the new work of man's education was 
 being carried out. A law was given and a discipline 
 was laid down for this purpose. The Law contained 
 that very truth of the relationship of man to the one 
 true God which was ultimately to raise him ; and this 
 truth was the sum and substance of the Law. The 
 Law then contained the source and secret of man's 
 future elevation. 
 
 But before the Law had worked its end it had in 
 the meantime to be maintained and enforced. The 
 Jewish people chafed under the yoke. The history of 
 the nation throughout shows that the Law was really 
 above the great mass, that it contained principles too 
 sublime for them. It is a history of long lapses of the 
 main body of the people into idolatry, into which they 
 fell because they could not rise to the idea of the 
 communion of the creature with his Maker, of man 
 with the Universal Being ; they could only imagine 
 relationship to inferior invisible beings, or gods whom 
 they clothed with material form. The downward 
 tendency to idolatry was the potent and formidable 
 danger which kept the true faith and the true concep- 
 tion of God constantly trembling upon the verge of 
 utter suppression, and with difficulty just emerging 
 above the flood of corruption : while it was essential 
 to the Divine purposes that that faith should stand, 
 
236 The End the Test of 
 
 and stand not only as the faith of some individuals 
 but as the national faith. The nation, therefore, was 
 terrified into a formal obedience by every scourge 
 that the Divine wrath could employ, and every form 
 of wholesale punishment, which included families in 
 the guilt of fathers, subjects in the guilt of their 
 kings. But the purpose of such judgments was to 
 subjugate man to that law which was ultimately to 
 purify and elevate him, and to keep in existence the 
 precious seed of the future enlightenment of the world. 
 There was a scheme, a purpose, an end in view, in the 
 whole terrific preparatory discipline of the Law. It 
 was administered in order to bow the stubborn neck 
 of man, and keep it from slipping from under the 
 yoke. Under the Law he must, in spite of himself, 
 improve ; once severed from it he was a lost being. 
 The enforcement of the Law was thus the task of one 
 dispensation, though its fruits were shown under 
 another. 
 
 It is evident, then, that a progressive revelation 
 if the idea of such a revelation is once admitted 
 must be judged by its end and not by its beginning. 
 "We see before us a legislative structure, straight from 
 the hands of the original Lawgiver, containing a body 
 of ancient rules and precepts, obviously partaking of 
 the spirit of the age in which they came out, and re- 
 flecting an early moral standard. We then call this 
 the morality of the Old Testament dispensation. But 
 according to any rule of judging in such cases, the 
 morality of a progressive dispensation is not the 
 morality with which it starts, but that with which it 
 
a Progressive Revelation. 237 
 
 concludes. The test is not the commencement but 
 the result. Whatever it is in which the system results, 
 and which by its own natural course it reaches, that 
 is the standard of the dispensation. Because from the 
 final result we infer the intention, and the intention 
 makes the morality of the dispensation. By the 
 gradual creation of a perfect standard, the will of 
 the dispensation from the first is declared to have 
 been in favour of it. There is a side, indeed, on 
 which, in the nature of the case, it exhibits a defec- 
 tive morality, because there is a side on which it is 
 stationary. The litera scripta manet ; the written 
 code necessarily always continues to give the original 
 precepts as they stood, and if any of these are cast in 
 the rude spirit of the early ages of the dispensation, its 
 rude and imperfect moral standard is so far stereotyped. 
 Upon the side of the external written letter it is rude 
 and imperfect. On this side it continues for ever, 
 in the nature of the case, to point backward for its, 
 moral criterion ; but the living teacher, the guiding 
 spirit in the system, from the first, points forward, 
 and is throughout of that moral character which 
 it will ultimately establish. This active essence of 
 the dispensation is throughout in sympathy with 
 its latest production. Do not judge it then, by 
 the stationary letter, but by the principle of pro- 
 gress which is evidently rooted and inherent in it; 
 by that inner movement, by that dominating and 
 persevering tendency, which is the vital spirit of it, 
 and which finally overcomes the temporary and pass- 
 ing elements. 
 
238 The End the Test of 
 
 Whether the imperfect morality of the Old Testa- 
 ment dispensation is a correct expression or not, 
 depends in short upon what you mean by the dis- 
 pensation. If you mean the document of the dispen- 
 sation, it is imperfect morality ; if you mean the 
 design in the dispensation, the morality of that design 
 is Christian morality. Taking the highest sample of 
 the nation as the proper representative of it, regarded 
 as the pupil of a Divine guidance, we see the Jewish 
 people, under the teaching of their dispensation, so 
 advanced in course of ages in the moral faculty, that 
 they at length embrace and grasp the full Christian 
 morals ; that they preach this moral standard through- 
 out the world ; and that it thus becomes ultimately 
 the standard of the whole of civilised mankind. 
 When you talk then of the imperfect and mistaken 
 morality of the Old Testament dispensation, ask 
 yourself, to begin with, what you mean, and what 
 you intend to assert by that expression. Do you 
 mean to say that the written law was imperfect? 
 If that is all, you state what is simply a fact ; 
 but this fact does not touch the morality of the 
 Lawgiver ; because He is abundantly fortified by 
 the defence that He could give no higher at the 
 time to an unenlightened people. Do you mean 
 to assert that the scope and design was imper- 
 fectly moral ? In that case you are contradicted by 
 the whole course of history. Look at the Jewish 
 Dispensation as being a working system, look at it as 
 an actual instructor at work for ages upon the nation 
 under it. How does its work turn out? How is 
 
a Progressive Revelation. 239 
 
 the pupil brought up ? What is the moral standard 
 in which this course of education issues ? That 
 question has been just now answered, and that 
 question decides the scope of the dispensation. The 
 imperfect standard of the original code and nation 
 can only be made a charge by a confusion of mind. 
 You blame in the Old Testament dispensation, i.e., in 
 its Author, what ? The moral standard he permits ? 
 It is the highest man can then receive. The moral 
 standard he desires? He desires a perfect moral 
 standard, and ultimately establishes it. Thus, be- 
 tween the two goals of the dispensation, its com- 
 mencement and its end, your charge falls to the 
 ground, or strikes the air. You bring out with 
 all your power the actual moral condition of the 
 Jewish nation, how rude it was; how coarse, how 
 blind and indiscriminating its moral perception : 
 and you think the facts of themselves condemn 
 the revelation ; that the low condition of the people 
 condemns the Lawgiver; but the Lawgiver is not 
 responsible for the material he has to work upon, 
 the system is not to blame for the rudeness of the 
 people it has to correct. ;The material of accusa- 
 tion is thus made by the mental confusion of the 
 accuser, and at the first clear sight vanishes into 
 air. Eather the material of accusation becomes 
 itself evidence of the Divine power in the sys- 
 tem, and the guarantee to its authority. You 
 expatiate upon the actual crudities of the Jewish 
 morality, as if the dispensation were accountable for 
 them ; but if it in fact overcomes them, all the rough- 
 
240 The End the Test of 
 
 ness of the material which it conquers only redounds 
 to its glory. 
 
 " But/' it will be said, " the crude and imperfect 
 nature of Jewish morals is a plain fact of Scripture 
 history itself, while this running design and inner 
 current of the dispensation is only an interpretation 
 put upon Jewish history by theologians. It is true, 
 the Jewish nation gradually grew out of a rude and 
 barbarous state, and attained to a certain civilisation ; 
 and with that civilisation came a finer moral standard ; 
 but this was not the result of the dispensation they 
 were under, but due only to the natural growth and 
 expansion of reason. The moral standard of the dis- 
 pensation is before us in black and white, and that 
 was a very defective one, and sanctioned 'vengeance 
 and bloodshed on a large scale ; the people, or the 
 higher minds among them, at last outgrew this moral 
 standard by the force of reason. This is the natural 
 and rational account of the progress of the Jewish 
 nation, and of the high morality which at last issued 
 out of that nation. But to attribute this result to 
 the inner working of a dispensation whose written 
 code was marked by plain defects and shortcomings, 
 is mere speculation, and by no means probable specu- 
 lation." 
 
 To this the answer is, that other nations of the 
 world, beside the Jewish, began with an imperfect and 
 crude moral standard; but, of all these nations we 
 observe that, as they began so they ended. Hindu 
 law, Eoman law, Greek codes of law, all led their 
 respective communities a certain way in morals, but 
 
a Progressive Revelation. 241 
 
 they all stopped short of any true development in 
 morals. They never became active inspiring teachers 
 of the people under them, seeds of enlightenment 
 and advancement. Look at Spartan law ; has it the 
 slightest spring or elasticity in it ? or has it anything 
 approaching to a principle of growth in it ? It per- 
 forms a certain set of motions like an automaton ; its 
 whole power is restricted within a certain area of 
 public military virtue, and it has no inward self-moving 
 power by which it can transcend its original limits. 
 This is perhaps an extreme case. But Eoman law, as 
 a moral law, works in chains ; it cannot liberate itself 
 from its own inflexible adherence to the type of slavery, 
 and from those barbarous definitions of personal rights 
 which left no station but a servile one to wife or son ; 
 thus degrading society at its fountainhead of family 
 life. The Eoman law remained essentially savage 
 till Christianity released it and set it . free from its 
 bonds. It could not free itself; it could not make 
 the wife a free woman and at the same time give 
 her the sanctity of marriage, but could only con- 
 fer freedom on her at the cost of license, by the 
 exchange of marriage for a contract which let in in- 
 definite divorce. Hindu law has not raised itself. In 
 other nations, then, the ideas of justice, benevolence, 
 purity, stay at an incipient stage, and never become 
 more than half ideas; in the Jewish alone is there 
 moral progress, an advance, which begins and goes 
 steadily on unchecked, till it reaches the New or 
 Christian Law. In the Jewish nation alone the Law 
 acts not only as a document, but as a guiding prin- 
 
242 The End the Test of 
 
 ciple in the nation. There it is a light, a teacher; it 
 does not abide within its letter only, but conies out in 
 the shape of comment or interpretation to suggest and 
 inspire. It is accompanied and guarded by the great 
 Prophetic order, which carries on, in conjunction with 
 the Law and in check upon it, a standing guidance and 
 teaching. There is a moral ^element in the dispen- 
 sation which has an intrinsic and overruling force of 
 its own, a free unstunted growth, by which it arrives 
 at its completion. V 
 
 But exception may be taken, last of all, to the 
 fundamental assumption upon which this whole argu- 
 ment has been based ; upon the very idea, to begin 
 with, of a progressive revelation. " Natural reason," it 
 may be said, " is, as everybody admits, and as we know 
 by experience, slow and gradual in its processes, it 
 requires time for developing and maturing itself, and 
 it only gains possession of truths after a succession of 
 trials and delays ; but why should a Divine revelation 
 be subject to such conditions as these ? Is not a reve- 
 lation given for the very purpose of supplying the 
 deficiencies of reason ? But if so, why, when it is 
 given, does it exhibit these very deficiencies ? If reve- 
 lation is as slow and dilatory as reason, is it indeed 
 revelation at all, or is it simply reason operating all 
 the time ? For what can be the meaning of the 
 Divine Being instituting an exception to His ordinary 
 providence, if the exception after all follows the pattern 
 of the rule ? what reason can there be why an Omni- 
 potent Being should not communicate what He has to 
 communicate summarily, and by one act? There is 
 
a Progressive Revelation. 243 
 
 that in man, by Ms fundamental constitution, to which 
 a truth can be imparted ; his reason is in him by 
 nature. "Why is not a truth, which is capable of being 
 apprehended, not imparted to that reason at once ? 
 And are not such truths as these capable of being 
 apprehended immediately ? say the Christian law of 
 marriage, that a man should have but one wife ; Chris- 
 tian justice, that a man should be punished only for 
 his own fault. These truths are perfectly plain truths 
 if they are truths at all ; and revelation is able to give 
 man the proper guarantee that they are truths ; and 
 if he knows them to be such, what has man to do 
 but to set about practising them ? Why then should 
 God not reveal what He has to reveal at once ? Why 
 should He purposely deal out His instruction piece- 
 meal, and postpone what He can give immediately, and 
 let a special revelation stand over centuries, which could 
 have been given at the commencement ? A progres- 
 sive revelation is itself an inconsistent transaction, and 
 the very idea of it cannot be admitted. For if there 
 is power to possess man with a certain moral truth 
 now, at this moment, by a summary act of Divine 
 grace, all ground why the knowledge should, be put off 
 is gone, and you are left without a reason to account 
 for the delay." 
 
 This, then, is the objection raised. But here an 
 argument opens upon us, founded on the nature of 
 man as God created him, which necessitates the use 
 of language imposed upon us by our ignorance. When, 
 then, we speak of the omnipotence of God, we do not 
 mean that He can simply and nakedly do anything that 
 
244 The End the Test of 
 
 can be stated in words. It is an attribute with con- 
 ditions ; I mean that is the mode in which we express 
 it in language. God can no more force an immediate 
 moral enlightenment upon an existing age, and antedate 
 a high moral standard by two thousand years, than He 
 can instantaneously impart a particular character to an 
 individual. He has endowed man with intellectual 
 faculties of a certain kind, which move in a certain 
 way, and with a gradual progressive motion requiring 
 time. He cannot impart to it a truth in such a way 
 as contradicts that institution of the understanding, 
 and communicate in a moment that which, by the laws 
 of the being's nature, can be only received slowly and 
 by degrees. The natural motion of the human under- 
 standing is by steps and stages ; after one effort it is 
 weary, sinks back exhausted, and cannot go farther just 
 then, but rests : and there is a pause in the progress 
 until another impulse comes, and another step is 
 made ; and thus the work is accomplished gradually, 
 and some large and complete truth is at last arrived 
 at. To suppose the Deity, then, imparting in a 
 moment some ultimate truth which experience shows 
 requires time for men to embrace, is to suppose 
 Him imparting the truth in a way which contra- 
 dicts those very laws which He has Himself laid 
 down in the constitution of the being with whom 
 He is dealing. 
 
 The understanding of man, again, moves by the 
 action of the will ; it cannot be raised to the compre- 
 hension of any great truth without a succession of acts 
 of attention, and the will must keep up attention. 
 
a Progressive Revelation. 245 
 
 The will and the understanding, then, cannot be sepa- 
 rated in the advancement of the human mind in truth, 
 and in the progress of revelation. But can the Divine 
 power control the human will in its collective aspect 
 any more than it can in its individual? Can it 
 dictate the mode of taking in a revelation, any more 
 than it can secure individual conduct ? The question 
 respecting the immediate comprehension and accept- 
 ance of a revelation is very much analogous to the 
 question of human action and its subjection to the 
 Divine power ; the possibilities in conducting revela- 
 tion are much akin to the possibilities of dictation to 
 the human will. The whole question comes in, of the 
 relations of the Divine power to the human will. 
 
 Here, then, we are launched upon a fundamental 
 difficulty. The will of the human race influences the 
 understanding of the human race in its mode of taking 
 in a revelation. A revelation is accepted readily 
 when it concurs with men's wishes, but the under- 
 standing, when separated from the inclination, stops 
 short, and refuses to exert itself. Can the fact, then, 
 that it is a revelation reverse this slowness in the 
 understanding ? this slowness which is produced by 
 want of inclination ? There is no more reason to sup- 
 pose that it can in the human race at large than 
 that it can in an individual : that the mind of the 
 race can be enlightened by an instantaneous act of 
 Divine omnipotence, than the mind of an individual 
 can be. Nor is there any more reason to suppose that 
 an individual's mind can be enlightened all at once by 
 an act of revelation, than that a man's conduct can be 
 
246 The End the Test of 
 
 made good all at once. The Divine power can assist 
 the individual ; and yet the individual has a will that 
 can resist the Divine power, astounding as the asser- 
 tion may appear. And the human race has collectively 
 the same will, and can resist the progress of revelation 
 within the collective human mind, so as to make it 
 a gradual instead of an instantaneous work, and will 
 do so if it act naturally. "We are accustomed to the 
 idea of a limit to the Divine power in dealing with 
 one individual man ; that God cannot force an indi- 
 vidual to do good acts against his will, but that his 
 will mysteriously, yet still actually or in fact, has a 
 power of resisting the Divine will ; but we do not think 
 of society resisting God ; the race resisting Him. Yet 
 the same limitation which attaches to the Divine omni- 
 potence dealing with one man, applies also to the same 
 attribute in dealing with mankind collectively: it 
 applies to the advancement of the human race, morally 
 and intellectually, and to Divine revelation as the 
 means of such advancement, just as much as it applies 
 to one man, and to ordinary grace as an influencer. 
 This instantaneous enlightenment of mankind by reve- 
 lation is a wild notion ; it is a method of dealing with 
 man as a mass, which is utterly at variance with the 
 conditions which attach to the Divine omnipotence in 
 dealing with man as an individual. Is there in one 
 individual an inherent vis inertice, a stubbornness 
 which is capable of effectively withstanding the Divine 
 influence and desire for his good ; and even if it yield 
 finally, can first withstand it from time to time, thus 
 necessitating successive applications of the Divine 
 
a Progressive Revelation. 247 
 
 moving power? The same principle applies to the 
 Divine action upon the race. This stubbornness and vis 
 inertice exists in the race ; nor is collective humanity 
 by its own inherent constitution capable of being 
 raised to such a level of truth by an instantaneous 
 leap, as it can be made to attain by a long dis- 
 pensation. 
 
 The difficulty of a slow and progressive revelation, 
 as being inconsistent with the Divine omnipotence, is 
 thus only the fundamental difficulty of the Divine 
 power and man's free will. The Divine power acts in 
 a man's conversion, but it is quite consistent with that 
 power acting, that it should act gradually, and only be 
 able to act gradually. In the same way, there is 
 nothing unreasonable in the idea and notion that the 
 human race can be elevated and improved by a Divine 
 dispensation, and yet that that Divine dispensation may 
 be only able to improve and elevate it gradually. The 
 advance and progress may still be proved to have been 
 owing to that dispensation, because it may appear that 
 that result has only in fact been ultimately attained in 
 conjunction with it. 
 
 It must be remembered that that which the Deity 
 communicates with, when He makes a revelation to 
 man, is his reason; and that a revelation does not 
 profess to change the reason of man, or to substitute 
 one kind of reason for another kind, when it com- 
 municates fresh truth. It does not profess to alter the 
 fundamental mode of thought in man, or the pace 
 which is natural to the operations of reason. 
 
 Kevelation, in imparting what it does impart to man, 
 
248 The End the Test of 
 
 takes reason as it finds it, with all its imperfections, with 
 its slow reception of whatever is new, and its hesitation 
 and irregularity. Eevelation does not, with the new 
 truth it gives, create a new instrument for receiving 
 that truth. That which is imparted is new indeed, but 
 that which receives what is imparted is the natural 
 understanding of man, which specially requires time. 
 That is to say, when a revelation is given to man, it is 
 man to whom it is given ; and he gets out of it what it 
 contains according to the natural constitution of his 
 mind. Moral action goes with intellectual. But God, 
 so to speak, cannot force moral action upon him ; and 
 we find that the same obstruction which there is to the 
 Divine power in the case of an individual and his im- 
 provement, exists also in the case of the race and its 
 improvement ; that the same obstruction which is in 
 the way of conversion immediately, exists in the way 
 of enlightenment by revelation immediately. Free 
 will is equally at the bottom of the slowness with 
 which both processes take place; that process by 
 which truths are seen and come to light, and that by 
 which moral changes take place. 
 
 But it may be objected, when we say that revela- 
 tion cannot produce its effect instantaneously, because 
 God has created the reason of man with certain habits 
 and a certain progress and pace of its own, which 
 resist quicker enlightenment, that the very principle 
 of miracles is that God does produce effects which are 
 contrary to the institution of certain laws which He 
 has established in the world for ordinary use. That, 
 therefore, if there ever is such a thing as a miracle, 
 
a Progressive Revelation. 249 
 
 such a thing might be expected to take place in the 
 case of the action of a revelation ; and that revelation 
 must be able to produce, and if it can should produce, its 
 effect upon mankind instantaneously. But it must be 
 remembered that it is a different thing, a contradic- 
 tion to a physical law, and a contradiction to the real 
 will of a real being. A physical law has nothing 
 wherewith to resist God, Who can as easily make or 
 do a thing in another way than that of law, as by that 
 law. A physical law is as nothing, regarding it as 
 preventing God from acting in any special way. If 
 this law acts it acts ; but if it does not act, some other 
 mode does for the occasion. But it is a different thing 
 when we come to the actual wills of real beings. The 
 will of man is admitted, (with that reserve which, as 
 ignorant creatures, we must fall back upon in such 
 mysterious statements,) as that which has the power 
 of resisting the will of God. Free will is claimed as a 
 real attribute of man, power to do or not to do. The 
 will can resist God's will, and can stop the progress 
 of a work of God. Is this an intricate view of Divine 
 dealings, and does putting Divine power under such 
 checks and conditions as a progressive revelation implies, 
 seem radically to interfere with the attribute ? This 
 is an objection which, if it be of any force at all, does 
 not apply to a progressive revelation specially ; it 
 applies to the whole idea of a Deity, as compatible 
 with human free will. Human free will is an internal 
 modification of the idea of God, which is only pre- 
 vented from interfering injuriously with the idea, by 
 the intervention of our resort to ignorance. As 
 
250 The End the Test of 
 
 ignorant creatures we are not entitled to say that 
 apparent limitations of the Divine power are real ones, 
 because they may be only such as the mathematical 
 consistency of truth itself imposes; that is only 
 verbal restrictions upon power, and not real ones. To 
 the intellectual conception, however, the idea of God 
 is thus an idea with checks and conditions in it ; and 
 those who would simplify it absolutely, would establish 
 an idol and not a God. If we invent an idol, all is 
 plain enough ; there are no enigmas in an idol ; there 
 are no reasons why individuals cannot be converted in 
 an instant, and why the human race cannot be enlight- 
 ened in an instant by an abstract Omnipotence. But 
 if we suppose the Deity to be the Being we represent 
 Him in our sermons, our popular treatises, our exhorta- 
 tions, who cannot do some things, and cannot change 
 man without his own concurrence, this is a Deity who 
 cannot give enlightenment or implant a revelation in 
 man by an instantaneous act. Nor does the God of 
 the Jewish covenant do this. Simply, He does not do 
 what God, in our ordinary common-sense conception 
 of Him, does not do. 
 
 To sum up the argument, I explained in a former 
 Lecture that it was the peculiarity of the Jewish dis- 
 pensation that it was both present and prospective in 
 its design ; that it worked for a future end, while it 
 provided also for the existing wants of man. 
 
 The system having thus a double aim, it is obvious 
 that of these two objects, that which is prior and takes 
 the first place in the intention of the system is the 
 end. In what did the dispensation actually result ? 
 
a Progressive Revelation. 251 
 
 In a perfect moral standard. Then we only argue 
 upon ordinary rules of evidence when we say that 
 that was the intention of the dispensation, and that 
 that was the intention even while its morality was 
 actually imperfect. The morality of the Author of 
 the dispensation is the true morality of the dispensa- 
 tion; the final morals are the true morals, the tempo- 
 rary are but scaffolding ; the true morals are con- 
 tained in the end and in the whole. 
 
 Popular critics of the morality of the Old Testa- 
 ment apply the coarsest possible arguments to this 
 subject. They think it enough to point to a rude 
 penal law, to a barbarous custom, to an extirpating 
 warfare, and it at once follows that this is the morality 
 of the Bible ; but this is to judge the sculptor from 
 the broken fragment of stone. It was not the morality 
 of the Bible unless it was the morality of the Bible as 
 a whole, and the whole is tested by the end and not 
 by the beginning. Scripture was progressive : it 
 went from lower stage to higher, and as it rose from 
 one stage to another it blotted out the commands of 
 an inferior standard and substituted the commands of 
 a higher standard. This was the nature of the dis- 
 pensation as being progressive ; it was the essential 
 operation of the Divine government as it acted in 
 that period of the world. The dispensation, then, 
 as a whole, did not command the extermination 
 of the Canaanites, but a subordinate step did ; 
 and this step passed from use and sight as a 
 higher was attained. The fact, though instruct- 
 ive as past history, became obsolete, and was left 
 
252 The End the Test of 
 
 behind as a present lesson ; and the dispensation 
 in its own nature was represented by its end. The 
 very lower steps led to the end, and were for the 
 sake of leading to it. The critic adheres to a class 
 of commands which existed for the moment, as facts 
 of the day; but the turning point is the issue, and 
 the whole can only be interpreted by the event. The 
 morality of Scripture is the morality of the end of 
 Scripture ; it is the last standard reached, and what 
 everything else led up to. 
 
 Nothing, then, can be cruder and more rude than 
 to identify Scripture with the action of the day. In 
 the eyes of some, the action of the day is the self- 
 evident morality of Scripture, and no argument is 
 thought necessary ; but whatever the facts may be, 
 it is a fundamental mistake to suppose that there 
 is any conclusion to be got from them, except 
 through the defile of an argument. In assuming a 
 God in the dispensation, we assume a presiding mind 
 and intention ; and of that intention not the imme- 
 diate fact, but the upshot of the dispensation is the 
 test. We say the upshot is worth all the extraordi- 
 nary and apparently lowering accommodation, the 
 stooping process, and humiliation of the Divine govern- 
 ment. God allowed, during all those ages, rude men 
 to think of Him as one of themselves, acting with the 
 rudest and dimmest idea of justice. But He conde- 
 scended at the moment, to prevail and conquer in 
 the end. In entering into and accepting their con- 
 fused ideas, He grappled with them. Through what 
 a chaos of mistakes did final light arise, and the true 
 
a Progressive Revelation. 253 
 
 idea of justice make its way in the world ! And God 
 tolerated the mistakes, and allowed His commands to 
 go forth in that shape, but the condescension was 
 worth the result. It is the result alone which can 
 explain those accommodations; but the result does 
 explain them ; and bring them out as successful Divine 
 policy. 
 
THE MANICH^ANS AND THE 
 JEWISH FATHERS. 
 
 OT. AUGUSTINE is perhaps the most marvellous 
 controversial phenomenon which the whole history 
 of the Church from first to last presents. One great 
 controversy is usually enough for one man ; but he 
 conducted, or it may be said finished, three ; the 
 Manichsean, the Pelagian, and the Donatist. But it 
 is not so much the number of the controversies which 
 he conducted, as the vigour and prolific power of his 
 pen upon each, and the extraordinary force with 
 which he stamped his own statements permanently 
 upon the Church, which is the remarkable fact. The 
 language in which he summed up the Pelagian con- 
 troversy reigned in the Church and dictated her 
 formulae ; and after moulding the schools of the 
 Middle Ages, prescribed the Articles of our own 
 Church. He was superlatively fitted for fulfilling this 
 function, as well by his defects as by his gifts and 
 merits. Armed with superabundant facility of ex- 
 pression, so that he himself observes that one who 
 had written so much must have a good deal to answer 
 for, he was able to hammer any point of view which 
 he wanted, and which was desirable as a counter- 
 
The Manic hceans. 255 
 
 acting one to a pervading heresy, with endless repeti- 
 tion upon the ear of the Church ; at the same time 
 varying the forms of speech sufficiently to please and 
 enliven. In argument he was not too deep ; to have 
 been so would have very much obstructed his access 
 to the mind of the mass, and prevented him from 
 getting hold of the ear of the Church at large. 
 Nothing could have been more fatal to his influ- 
 ence than that he should have got himself im- 
 bedded in some profound question, the solution of 
 which must only have taken him into lower and still 
 more difficult depths. He undoubtedly dealt with 
 profound questions, but his mode of dealing with 
 them was not such as to entangle him in knots and 
 intricacies, arising from the disposition to do justice 
 to all sides of truth. On some subjects of contro- 
 versy, as on the Manichsean, his line was clearly laid 
 down for him in Scripture, in the assertion of one 
 God of infinite power and goodness, to which Mani- 
 chaeanism was a direct contradiction ; though here he 
 had perhaps in parts and branches of the controversy 
 rather neat answers, than full or final answers. In 
 the Pelagian controversy he had one side of truth, and 
 one fundamental and conspicuous assertion of Scrip- 
 ture, to defend, of which the Pelagian doctrine was an 
 audacious denial ; but he did not allow the unity and 
 simplicity of his answers to be at all interfered with 
 by large and inclusive views of truth. To the extreme 
 contradictory on the one side, he gave the extreme 
 contradictory on the other ; and he gave it, as he did 
 every answer he gave, with the most triumphant 
 
256 The Manichaans and 
 
 copiousness of language; with all the structure and 
 finished mould of a consummate rhetorical style ; 
 with the most neat and admirable adaptation of the 
 form of answer to the form of the hostile proposition ; 
 and with a perpetual freshness, and flexibility of shape 
 and construction, in the composition jof his argument. 
 Augustine is indeed, with all this, monotonous, and 
 perhaps no writer in the whole of Church history tries 
 the patience of his reader more than he does. The 
 surface is elegantly varied, but the variety is thin and 
 superficial, as compared with a monotony which is 
 solid, bulky, and substantial. The reader feels that 
 the discussion, under Augustine's hand, is wanting in 
 the novelty and variety of trunk lines of thought. 
 We travel over the ground, aware that we are not 
 making solid way upon the substantial point; while 
 the outer coating of the subject shows variety 
 and versatility. But this was in fact all the better 
 for his writing, looked at in its controversial scope. 
 It was so much the more powerful an instrument 
 for impressing a certain class of thoughts upon 
 the mass of men ; so much the more effective from 
 its repetition and constancy. He was made, by 
 this very modification of a varied monotony, - 
 perpetually bringing in the same ideas under very 
 slight difference of dress, only the more nearly per- 
 fect a controversialist ; only the more effective an 
 instrument for fixing particular positions, and im- 
 pressing a particular language upon the Church. 
 Augustine's was a different thinking from modern 
 philosophical thought : he did not advance by regular 
 
the Jewish Fathers. 257 
 
 steps, and unfold an argument from a foundation, 
 as a modern superior writer does ; lie thought with 
 his pen in his hand, and the great mass of his 
 treatises were pamphlets ; many of them, latterly, hit 
 off in the intervals of public business, and to meet 
 particular occasions and attacks. 
 
 His first controversy was the Manichaean, to 
 which he was the more committed from having been 
 a convert to Manichseanism himself. And it may be 
 asked, "What could have made Augustine ever turn 
 Manichsean ? When we come across these Oriental 
 religions, Gnosticism and Manichseanism, their phrase- 
 ology, whether it is about aeons, or about nations of 
 light or nations of darkness, and mixtures of the two, 
 is so extravagant and empty, that it seems the in- 
 vention of children rather than of men. In Mani- 
 chaeanism (it is Augustine's description), " On the side 
 of the bright and holy land was the deep and immense 
 land of darkness, wherein dwelt fiery bodies, pestilent 
 races. There were boundless darknesses emanating 
 from the same nature, countless with their progeny ; 
 beyond which were muddy and turbid waters with 
 their inhabitants, and within which were horrible and 
 vehement winds with their princes and producers. 
 Then again a destructive fiery region with its leaders 
 and nations." 1 The Manichseans spoke of the five 
 caves of the nation of darkness; they " assigned to the 
 people of darkness five elements, each of which pro- 
 duced its own chief; and these elements they called 
 
 i S. Aug. contra Epist. Manichai, 15. 
 
258 The Manichczans and 
 
 vapour, darkness, fire, water, wind." 1 Both light and 
 darkness were spoken of as Principles, Natures, Sub- 
 stances, Gods;" 2 In Manichseanism, then, the king- 
 dom of darkness made an attack on the kingdom of 
 light ; and the Light or Divine Nation, being in some 
 trepidation for itself, thought it best to make a 
 compact with its opponent; and a certain section 
 of the former, entering into combination with the 
 latter, formed the composition of this world. With 
 respect, then, to these and such like representations, it 
 must be observed that they are only the pictorial part 
 of the system giving a scenic effect to the theory. 
 Though even this had its influence in proselytising ; 
 and when Augustine says that this imagery put 
 into marked contrast before him the " most lucid sub- 
 stance of God," and evil as having its own foul and 
 hideous bulk, whether gross which they called earth, 
 or thin and subtle like the body of the air," 3 we can 
 imagine the winning effect of a bright and dark con- 
 trast on a boy. But all this must have been meant, 
 by the very construction of Dualistic theories, only as 
 so much imagery, putting the theory into a portrait 
 shape, and adapting it to the minds of the mass. 
 What was represented by it, was, that there were two 
 original substances in nature, a good and an evil one. 
 And this has an argument of its own, which is by no 
 means obsolete at the present day. All Dualistic 
 religions contain their main appeal to human reason 
 in the circumstance of their pretension to represent 
 
 1 S. Aug. contra Epist. Manichcei, 18 ; and de Hceres. 46, p. 35, Ed. 
 Migne. 2 Contra Faustum, xxi. 1. 3 Confess, v. 20. 
 
the Jewish Fathers. 259 
 
 facts. This is a mixed world, and it must have a 
 mixed Deity. That is their real basis. In what form 
 they do this, whether under the form of two gods, a 
 good and an evil, or of one God who is a mixture of 
 both good and evil, or who is devoid of either, 
 is a subordinate point. 
 
 Hume declared it his opinion that there was 
 a great deal in Manichseanism. That philosopher, 
 although he could, as he said, argue ingeniously for 
 ever against final causes, still avowed that, as a man 
 of common sense, he could not see his way to denying 
 that this world must have originated in a Designing 
 Mind. But what kind of Mind ? Yes, that was the 
 difficulty. "Look round this universe," he says. 
 " What an immense profusion of beings, animated 
 and organised, sensible and active ! You admire this 
 prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little 
 more narrowly these living existences, the only beings 
 worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to 
 each other ! How insufficient all of them for their 
 own happiness ! How contemptible or odious to the 
 spectator ! The whole presents nothing but the idea 
 of a blind Nature, impregnated by a great vivifying 
 principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without dis- 
 cernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive 
 children ! Here the Manichaean system occurs as a 
 proper hypothesis to solve the difficulty : and no doubt, 
 in some respects, it is very specious, and has more 
 probability than the common hypothesis, by giving a 
 plausible account of the strange mixture of good and 
 ill which appears in life. But if we consider, on the 
 
260 The Manichceans and 
 
 other hand, the perfect uniformity and agreement of 
 the parts of the universe, we shall not discover in it 
 any marks of the combat of a malevolent with a 
 benevolent being. There is, indeed, an opposition of 
 pains and pleasures in the feelings of sensible creatures : 
 but are not all the operations of Nature carried on by 
 an opposition of principles, of hot and cold, moist and 
 dry, light and heavy ? The true conclusion is, that 
 the original Source of all things is entirely indifferent 
 to all these principles ; and has no more regard to 
 good above ill, than to heat above cold, or to drought 
 above moisture, or to light above heavy." 
 
 " There may four hypotheses be framed concerning 
 the first causes of the universe : that they are endowed 
 with perfect goodness ; that they have perfect malice ; 
 that they are opposite, and have both goodness and 
 malice ; that they have neither goodness nor malice. 
 Mixt phenomena can never prove the two former un- 
 mixt principles; and the uniformity and steadiness 
 of general laws seem to oppose the third. The 
 fourth, therefore, seems by far the most probable." 1 
 
 Hume, then, regarded Dualism only as one form of 
 that theory of theism which was based upon the actual 
 condition of the universe. It was an inconvenient 
 form, because there was no appearance of a struggle 
 in the construction of the world. But so long as your 
 God was an induction from facts, which philosophically 
 Hume thought He must be, He must be either two, 
 a good and an evil, or one Deity mixed of both ; or 
 a wholly negative and extra-moral Deity. And thus 
 
 ^ * Hume's Philosophical Works, ed. 1826, vol. ii. p. 526. 
 
the Jewish Fathers. 261 
 
 in Mr. Mill's autobiography we see a testimony paid 
 to the merits of Manichseanism as a mode of theism 
 doing justice to facts. Mill says of his father James 
 Mill, that the grounds of his objection to established 
 theism were moral more than intellectual : that he 
 found it impossible to believe that a world so full of 
 evil was the work of an Author combining infinite 
 power with perfect goodness and righteousness ; and 
 that his intellect spurned the subtleties by which men 
 attempt to blind themselves to this open contradiction ; 
 that he would not have equally condemned the Sabsean 
 or Manichaean theory of a good and an evil principle 
 struggling against each other for the government of the 
 universe ; and that he had expressed surprise that no 
 one revived that theory in our own time. 1 
 
 So far, however, Manichaeanism was only the 
 ancient theistic Dualism, and stood upon the ground 
 of the Parsee religion, and the doctrine of Zoroaster 
 or the Magi. But Manichseanism had this notable 
 peculiarity, that it was a proselytising and propa- 
 gandising religion. In this respect it had parted 
 company with the parent stock. It was Magianism, 
 not staying at home and content with its ancestral 
 domains, but wandering about over the whole world 
 like a knight-errant in the cause of truth and in quest 
 of disciples. It was the ordinary character of these 
 Oriental religions to be stationary ; where they had 
 grown up, there they remained as traditionary systems, 
 and they manifested no inclination for adventure or con- 
 quest. And so Magianism was naturally a stationary 
 
 1 Autobiography nf John Stuart Mill, p. 39. 
 
262 The Manichceans and 
 
 religion : but this was a fiery offshoot of it, which 
 had so far diverged from the character of the parent 
 religion. Manichseanism was Zoroastrianism feeling 
 a want and void in its own local confinement, be- 
 ginning to suspect that truth ought to be common to 
 all the world, and so adopting the aim and the scope 
 of a universal religion. 
 
 But this could not be managed without considerable 
 difficulty. The ancient Zoroastrianism had very small 
 resources for a universal religion. There was little to 
 satisfy the human heart in a twofold Deity, and in an 
 internecine war of good and evil, in which the theory 
 did not speak, at any rate with any trumpet voice, as 
 to the issue. But when the Manichaean had issued 
 forth from the precincts of his own national worship, 
 and looked around him on open ground, he saw 
 before him the youthful and vigorous religion of 
 Christianity, avowedly aiming at universal empire, 
 and considering that its lawful and natural prize. It 
 had already even, partially accomplished its purpose, 
 had broken down the boundaries of nations, and shown 
 itself of a universal type. This was a striking phe- 
 nomenon to a religious propagandist, who aimed at 
 the same result, but with wholly inadequate means. 
 The idea struck him that he would use the Christian 
 religion for the purpose of giving universality to the 
 Magian. He had, as it were, a universality provided 
 for him and ready at hand in the catholic Church and 
 creed, if only it could be appended to his own religion ; 
 but unfortunately at present it belonged to a differ- 
 ent stock and antecedents. How was the transfer to 
 
the Jewish Fathers. 263 
 
 be effected ? Obviously by a bargain or compact of 
 some kind ; but what ? Magianism must of course 
 engraft its own main doctrines upon Christianity ; that 
 was essential, otherwise it would not be Magianism 
 which would attain universality in Christianity ; which 
 was the object. But, on the other hand, Magianism, i.e. 
 the Manichsean offshoot of it, would professedly receive 
 into itself certain portions of Christianity. There 
 would thus be an incorporation of Magianism into Chris- 
 tianity, of Christianity into Magianism ; and the com 
 bination would be an eternal and universal religion. 
 
 Manichseanism, then, in order to fulfil its share 
 in the compact, incorporated in a certain shape, 
 though a wholly spurious one, the Christian doctrines 
 of the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Atonement. 
 It acknowledged in words a Holy Ghost, 1 but it 
 placed His habitation in the air. It acknowledged 
 again the Second Person in the Trinity, and gave 
 Him the name of Logos ; but it assigned to Christ 
 the sun as His residence, and even identified Him 
 with the vivifying power of the sun. This was a 
 physical theory of our Lord, who thus became partly 
 the ancient Mithra of the Magian system, and partly 
 the source of the animating principle of the physical 
 world. This was the office of power 2 which belonged 
 to the Eedeemer. The patibilis Christus, the suffer- 
 ing Christ, consisted in the same power being detached 
 and delivered from the channels in which it had re- 
 sided i.e., from the receptacles of vegetable nature ; 
 which detachment and delivery took place by death. 
 
 1 Contra Faustum, xx. 2. 2 Ib. xx. 2. 
 
264 The Manichceans and 
 
 Our Lord was thus spoken of as undergoing injury, 
 degradation, and pollution, "in the bands of earthly 
 materials, in the juices of herbs, and in the corrup- 
 tion of all flesh ; " l and it was said that " the Saviour 
 was crucified in the whole world and in every soul ; " 
 and Christ, it was said, " was daily born, suffered, and 
 died that He hung from every tree/' 2 A more local 
 presence of our Lord upon earth even was accepted, 
 but no true incarnation. "The light," says Manes, 3 
 " touched not the substance of the flesh, but was only 
 shaded with a likeness and form of flesh." It was 
 denied that Christ really took on Him human flesh, 
 that He was born, or died, or rose again, or was cir- 
 cumcised, baptized,, or tempted, or had any of the 
 affections of a man. But the delivery which was 
 assigned to Christ as a function was still the delivery 
 from error and slavery, from enmity and from death. 
 Though these expressions too receive a Manichsean 
 sense from the interpretation of their uses elsewhere. 
 They seem to mean only what Christ was and did as 
 a teacher. " We cannot be reconciled," the Manichsean 
 said, 4 " save through a Master, who is Christ Jesus." 
 " We follow the true knowledge, and that knowledge 
 restores the mind to the memory of its former state 
 in the kingdom of light." 5 
 
 But there was another exchange to be made 
 before the compact of Manichaeanism with Chris- 
 tianity was completed. When the Manichsean turned 
 
 i Contra Faustum, xx. 17. 2 Ib. xx. 2. 
 
 3 Epist. ad Zebenam ap. Fabric. Bibl. Gr. v. 284. 
 
 4 Contra Fortunat. 17. 6 Ib. 20. 
 
the Jewish Fathers. 265 
 
 his eye upon the spectacle of Christianity, he saw 
 there a mighty and expansive future, but, in his view, 
 a somewhat degraded and ignominious past. He could 
 not tolerate the Old Testament Saints. The Patriarchs, 
 the Judges, the Prophets, the Kings, he regarded 
 them all as simply involved in one charge of im- 
 morality, barbarism, fraud, and bloodshed. Their ways 
 and mode of life were odious to him, and conflicted 
 in the most marked way with the Oriental standard 
 of sublimity and sanctity. He could not possibly 
 understand how a high Saint could have many children, 
 still less how a Patriarch could have several wives, 
 and how a Judge, under the impulse of inspiration, 
 could slay a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass. 
 The freedom, the impulse, the impetus, not to say the 
 irregularities of the Jewish saints more than perplexed 
 him, they astounded, shocked, and disgusted him. He 
 could not conceive how such men could stand at the 
 root of that sacred stem which bore the Christian 
 branches. Moses, in spite of the moral scope of his 
 legislation, was intolerable to him ; he inveighed 
 against his cruelty, his judicial slaughters, his exter- 
 minations. Though an antagonist, upon his own 
 Magian basis, to idolatry, Faustus, taking the part of 
 the Canaanites against Moses, declared of him that 
 " humanorum nulli unquam divinorumque peper- 
 cerit." 1 He asserted that when our Lord said that 
 all before Him were thieves and robbers, He referred 
 to the Patriarchs and Prophets of the Old Testament. 2 
 
 1 Contra Faustum, xv. 1. "He spared nothing either human or 
 divine." 2 76. xvi. 12. 
 
266 The Manichceans and 
 
 The Law, with its bloody rites, circumcision, and 
 sacrifices, was denounced as only a form of paganism. 
 Even the quiet and peaceful family life of the Jewish 
 Patriarch was low in his eyes ; it was enveloped in 
 the chains of earth ; it did not scale the heights of 
 holy absorption, or mount up to the empyrean of 
 mortified rapture. It did not at all embody, but 
 seemed coarsely to contradict, the subtle Eastern type, 
 which demanded as its first condition the separation 
 from matter and the rejection of sense. The fiery 
 proud spirituality of the Oriental religions put to 
 shame the simplicity, humility, and practical temper 
 of the Jewish saintly mind. The Manichsean could 
 not imagine that such a life could be a chastised life. 
 Though it is the experience of most people, when 
 any peculiarly showy specimens of goodness have 
 been before them in life, that some character less 
 striking in outward effect has been really the best, 
 this was not his conclusion. The Old Testament 
 saints and prophets were not showy enough for him. 
 What was to be done with such a spiritual ancestry ? 
 The large prospect of the Christian Church, its strong 
 and vigorous present, were objects of ambition for the 
 Manichaean to get hold of, but he could not accom- 
 modate his stomach to its low progenitors. Could he 
 persuade it to give them up, and in the place of 
 Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Patriarchs and the Pro- 
 phets, to adopt as spiritual forefathers the Magi 1 
 For this was virtually the scope of the compact. It 
 assumed the/brm indeed of disbelieving all the accounts 
 of the Old Testament saints, and rejecting the whole of 
 
the Jewish Fathers. 267 
 
 the Bible narrative on that head : " Puniantur scrip- 
 tores, damnentur eorum libri, purgetur propheticum 
 nomen indigna fama, gravitati atque censurse suse 
 Patriarcharum reddatur auctoritas." * But if the 
 actual recorded character of the Jewish saints was 
 thus blotted out, and another substituted for it 
 by an hypothesis ; what must that substituted cha- 
 racter be ? It must of course be the one which as a 
 Manichsean he considered was the proper character for 
 saints to possess ; or the sanctity of his own Magi. 
 This was in fact, then, to say : You really cannot keep 
 these Old Testament saints ; I can assure you they do 
 not do for you ; they really are a discredit to you ; you 
 must change them ; it will be a great improvement ; 
 attach the Magi to Christianity ; they are real saints, 
 and will make you forefathers of whom you need not 
 be ashamed, vx 
 
 Now it is certainly an advantage which belongs 
 to hypothetical spiritual ancestors, that their merits 
 can be exalted to the utmost point of perfection 
 without any fear of contradiction. This undescribed 
 and unrecorded line of Jewish saints which was to oust 
 the known recorded line, would have been supposed 
 to possess all the highest qualifications of Eastern 
 saints, and all the ascetic and contemplative virtues. 
 And so to the Manichsean Faustus the exchange would 
 have seemed a most happy one. But to us at the present 
 day it is more than questionable whether the torpid, 
 
 1 Contra Faustum, xxii. 3. " Let the writers be punished, let their 
 books be condemned, let the name of the prophets be purified from 
 the fame that degrades them, let the authority of the Patriarchs be 
 restored to the sober and severe life that is truly theirs." 
 
268 The Mamchceans and 
 
 ascetic contemplativeness of the Eastern saint would 
 have seemed a good exchange for the true and genuine 
 form of character which belongs to the Old Testament 
 saint, its naturalness, its life, with all its irregulari- 
 ties ; and whether it would not have appeared like a 
 substitution of dead men for living ones. 
 
 It was indeed one of the principal weapons which 
 the Manichaean controversialist wielded against Chris- 
 tianity the character of the Old Testament saints ; 
 i.e., the striking difference of moral standard in the 
 Old Testament and the New. He made the very 
 most of this, and threw in the face of Christians 
 the actions of the Patriarchs, with an insolence 
 which reminds one of the lowest ranges of modern 
 controversy. The tone in which Faustus censures 
 Abraham, Moses, the Judges, and David, is like that of 
 the National Reformer. And when we meet Augustine 
 afterwards as a champion and defender of the Jewish 
 saint against Manichseanism, we can easily under- 
 stand that this difficulty would have pressed upon him 
 strongly when that system first gained him as a 
 convert ; and that the escape which the Manichsean 
 offered from the moral difficulties of the Old Testa- 
 ment was among the principal attractions of his 
 side of the argument; that it would have great 
 influence upon youthful philosophical minds. The 
 objections to Old Testament morals were upon the 
 surface, the answer was indirect and roundabout. 
 
 Putting aside, then, the substantial part of the 
 Manichsean controversy, that concerned with the dual- 
 istic basis of that religion, which Augustine refuted 
 
the Jewish Fathers. 269 
 
 upon the principles of the Old Testament revelation of 
 one God of infinite power and goodness, let us attend 
 to this offshoot, but still very important offshoot, of 
 the subject, which had to do with the difficulty of Old 
 Testament morality. 
 
 The answers of Augustine, then, to the Manichsean 
 invectives against the Patriarchs and saints of the Old 
 Testament, were characterised by that ingenuity which 
 so marked his controversial treatment of subjects. 
 "Those who raise these objections," he says, "against the 
 actions of the Patriarchs, are like schoolboys, who would 
 reprove their masters for some apparent grammatical 
 mistake, which is no real mistake : for example, they 
 know the rule that a noun singular cannot be joined 
 with a verb singular ; and so when their teacher, who 
 is most learned in the Latin tongue, repeats the line 
 'pars in frusta secant;' some boys would correct 
 him, and say, ' No, not secanZ ; it must be secatf/ And 
 when he says ' jReZligione patrum/ they would say, 
 ' No : religione, not reZligione.' There is an analogy 
 between these absurd corrections and the charges of 
 these objectors. The virtues of great minds are some- 
 times like the faults of little minds. There is as 
 much distance between the typical acts of the Prophets 
 and the sensual sins of the wicked, as there is between 
 the solecisms or barbarisms of tyros and the figures 
 and metaplasms of grammarians." 1 
 
 So again . . . "They" Manichsean objectors to Old 
 Testament morals " are like to men who decry the 
 utility of things, when they do not know what the 
 
 1 Contra Faustum, xxii. 25. 
 
2 7O The Manichczans and 
 
 things themselves are. As if a deaf man should see 
 the lips moving of men talking, and should blame the 
 superfluity and deformity of the motions ; or as if a 
 blind man put into a house, which he had heard much 
 praised, should feel round with his hand to test the 
 smoothness of the walls, and coming to windows, 
 should find fault with their inconvenience, and suppose 
 them to be ruinous holes." 1 
 
 The typical aspect of Old Testament actions is 
 strongly pressed by Augustine. But now we come to 
 a solid and real defence, viz., that the Divine orders 
 in the Old Testament to do actions which we think 
 wrong now, are the necessary accommodation of the 
 Divine policy, and with it of the Divine commands, to 
 the circumstances and moral standard of the day. To 
 the contrast drawn beween Patriarchs and Apostles 
 he replies " Nee valetis disumere consuetudinem 
 temporis illius, quo promissio velabatur, a consue- 
 tudine temporis istius, quo promissio revelatur." 2 
 "Why does Faustus object to the spoiling of the 
 Egyptians ? As if Moses would not have sinned had 
 he not done it I " Deus enim jusserat qui utique novit 
 . . . secundum cor hominis, quid unusquisque, vel 
 per quern perpeti debeat. . . . Digni ergo erant et isti 
 quibus talia juberentur, et illi qui talia paterentur." 3 
 
 1 Contra Faustum, xxii. 7. 
 
 2 75. xxii. 71. "You are not able to discern between the custom 
 of that time, when the promise was being veiled, and the custom of 
 the (present) time in which the promise is revealed." 
 
 3 Ib. xxii. 71. "For God had ordered it, who really knows . . . 
 according to the state of man's heart what each ought to suffer, and at 
 whose hands. . . . Therefore they were worthy for their part to receive 
 such commands, and the others to suffer such treatment." 
 
the Jewish Fathers. 271 
 
 . . . And he adheres to the answer in spite of the 
 objection raised that a true or good God could not 
 have given such commands. ..." Imo vero talia recte 
 non jubet, nisi Deus Verus et Bonus, qui et solus novit 
 quid cuique jubendum sit ... solus novit quando, 
 quibus, per quos fieri aliquid vel jubeat vel per- 
 mittat." 1 
 
 The extermination of the Canaanites was thus an 
 instance of the execution, by means of human instru- 
 ments (who were qualified by the carnal stage of mind 
 through which they were then passing to be the 
 recipients of such commands), of a great Divine prin- 
 ciple that the kingdoms of idolaters were the pro- 
 perty of the true God : a principle which it was 
 specially necessary to promulgate at that time : " Sed 
 earn rerum dispensatum ae distributionem, temporum 
 ordo poscebat, ut prius appareret etiam ipsa bona 
 terrena . . . propter quse maxime civitas impriorum 
 diffusa per mundum supplicare idolis et dsemonibus 
 solet, non nisi ad unius Dei veri potestatem atque arbi- 
 trium pertinere." 2 ... Do not they understand, he says, 
 this principle of Divine accommodation ? " Jamne in- 
 telligunt quemadmodum nulla inconstantia prsecipien- 
 
 1 Contra Faustum, xxii. 72. "Nay rather, none gives such com- 
 mands rightly except the true and good God, who at once alone knows 
 what commands each should receive . . . and who alone knows when, 
 to whom, and by whose means, He should either command or permit 
 anything to be done." 
 
 2 Ib. 76. " But the order of time demanded this dispensation and 
 distribution of things, that it should first appear that even earthly 
 goods, for which the community of impious men diffused throughout 
 the world is wont to make greatest supplication to idols and demons, 
 are really only in the disposition and free will of the one true God." 
 
272 The Manichceans and 
 
 tis, sed ratione dispensantis pro temporum diversitate, 
 prsecepte vel consilia vel permissa mutentur ? " 
 
 We are in this part of the Manichsean controversy 
 introduced early into a difficult question, which has 
 been a special subject of modern, and most particularly 
 of very recent thought I mean the difficulty of Old 
 Testament morality how God could give commands 
 to persons to do the actions, which He did command 
 in those ages. This has been a fertile subject of dis- 
 cussion in the present day, and it can hardly be said 
 that any answer has even yet been arrived at in 
 which there is general concurrence. Augustine 
 appears to me to have struck out in a rough way 
 what is the main answer to the difficulty, viz. that 
 God gives commands in accommodation to the state 
 of mind and moral standard of the recipients of them. 
 ..." Deus Verus et Bonus solus novit quid cuique 
 jubendum sit .... novit secundum cor hominis, 
 quid unusquisque, vel per quern perpeti debeat. . . . 
 Digni ergo erant et isti quibus talia juberentur, et illi 
 qui talia paterentur." 2 Here is involved the principle 
 that God could, in a former age and to people of a 
 lower moral standard, give commands to do actions, 
 which we should think it wrong ] to do now. "Deus 
 jubet secundum cor hominis . . . digni erant quibus talia 
 juberentur/' There was a certain inward want, an 
 unenlightenment, a rudeness of moral conception, in 
 
 i Contra Faustum, xxii. 77. " Do they understand at last how pre- 
 cepts, or counsels, or permissions are changed, with no inconstancy in 
 Him who gives them, but by the wisdom of Him who dispenses them 
 according to the difference of the times ?" 2 Ib. 71, 72. 
 
the Jewish Fathers. 273 
 
 those to whom such commands were given; other- 
 wise they would not have been given. God would 
 not have given a command to- slaughter a whole 
 nation to an enlightened people : we cannot suppose 
 Him, e.g., giving such a command to us at the present 
 day. " But when people were ' digni quibus talia jube- 
 rentur,' then God commanded 'secundum corhominis/" 
 When their moral standard was such as admitted of 
 such a command being received by them as a Divine 
 command, then the command was given, when in the 
 Divine course of policy it was expedient that it should 
 be given. 
 
 There is something natural in this answer ; and if 
 any one of ordinary understanding were asked in an 
 ordinary way his idea of the explanation of such 
 commands, he would most likely state it in this way. 
 But when it has come to formal judgment in theo- 
 logical writing, something has prevented Divines from 
 being willing to admit that God can command an 
 action which, according to a perfect moral standard, 
 is wrong. In their account of the Divine accommoda- 
 tion, they go as far as permission ; but they stop with 
 permission, and do not recognise the idea of God 
 actually commanding an action below our moral 
 standard, though on a level with the inferior moral 
 standard of an early age. This element accordingly 
 does not enter into Butler's explanation of these com- 
 mands; 1 his explanation, e.g., of the Divine command 
 to destroy the Canaanites does not bring in, or avail 
 itself at all of, the special defence or excuse of an in- 
 
 1 See ante, p. 31. 
 T 
 
2 74 The Manichteans and 
 
 ferior moral standard in the Jewish people of that age. 
 His explanation rests entirely upon the Divine right 
 to destroy life, and to communicate the intention to 
 execute that right to the persons through whose 
 instrumentality it was to be carried out. But this 
 defence would apply as much to such a command 
 given in the present day, as it would to a like com- 
 mand given in the age of Moses and Joshua. It does 
 not rest on or avail itself of any distinction of 
 moral standard existing between the two ages. And 
 though Butler would doubtless acknowledge such a 
 distinction as afact, his explanation does without it. 
 
 Augustine's explanation distinctly avails itself of 
 this element of defence, and expressly acknowledges 
 the moral right of the Deity not only to permit, but 
 to command, actions of imperfect morality, when the 
 moral standard of the age does not rise above that 
 level. 
 
 But while Augustine acknowledges the imperfect 
 moral standard of the Patriarchal and Prophetic age, 
 this does not in the least affect his estimate of the 
 high sanctity and greatness of Patriarchs and Prophets 
 themselves. Underneath the differences of special 
 moral rules and ideas, in which they were at a dis- 
 advantage, and which were those of the age in which 
 they lived, he sees a fundamental unity of general 
 sanctity and greatness, and loftiness of character, 
 which unites them with the Apostles and the highest 
 saints of the New Testament. It is a difficult question 
 in moral philosophy how far any man is lowered in- 
 dividually in moral character by the faults and 
 
the Jewish Fathers. 275 
 
 defective rules of his age. One sees a moral greatness 
 in an individual which lies underneath the growth 
 and progress of moral ideas in the race; which 
 greatness is the same in a Patriarch that it is in an 
 Apostle. We rest satisfied that there is this fun- 
 damental unity, in the moral character of Patriarch 
 and Apostle, notwithstanding the variety of particular 
 rules under which they lived, which unity puts them 
 on the same basis as religious men. With St. Augus- 
 tine it is always " Tantus Patriarcha, Pater Abraham, 
 Sanctus vir Jacob, sancti Patriarchse quorum se 
 Deum appellari voluit Deus." l 
 
 1 Contra Faustum, xxii. 46, 47, 59. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 LECTURE I, NOTE 1, p. 1. 
 
 AN inscription on the bricks of Mugheir seems to identify the 
 god whom Terah worshipped, with the Moongod whose worship 
 was established in the ancient Chaldsean capital (see Kawlinson's 
 Herodotus, vol. i. p. 365). The expression, "served other gods" 
 evidently alludes to some decided form of idolatry. Some sort of 
 superstitious use of images appears to have adhered to the family 
 stock which Abraham left behind him in Haran at his second and 
 solitary migration into Canaan, even after the first migration of 
 the whole house from the other side the flood from Ur of the 
 Chaldees. When Eachel, a daughter of the branch at Haran, 
 fled with Jacob from her father Laban, she stole " his gods," and 
 " put the images in the camel's furniture." l And whatever the 
 superstition was, it seems to have gone on surreptitiously for 
 some time even among Jacob's own household ; for on his jour- 
 ney to Bethel, he " said unto his household and to all that were 
 with him, Put away the strange gods that are among you, and be 
 clean, and change your garments." 2 But this corrupt use of 
 images could hardly have been any formal system of idolatry ; 
 for the worship of the one God, as the open and established 
 worship of Jacob's household, would have precluded this j nor, 
 had the kindred left behind in Haran been formal idolaters, 
 would there have been any reason for the family of Abraham so 
 carefully maintaining the connection with them, and its heirs 
 taking their wives exclusively from them, religiously avoiding 
 the daughters of the people of the land. There would have been 
 no religious ground for keeping up this marked distinction be- 
 tween the kindred at Haran and the Canaanites, had both wor- 
 shipped false gods. This use of images is generally supposed to 
 
 1 Gen. xxxi. 30, 34. 2 Gen. xxxr. 2. 
 
278 Appendix. 
 
 have been connected with some practice of divination or some 
 minor form of superstition, which was consistent with the regular 
 worship of one God. But the forefathers of Abraham " served 
 other gods," they were idolaters who paid to false gods that 
 worship which was due to the one true God. The book of 
 Judith follows the statement of Scripture. "This people (the 
 Jews) are descended of the Chaldseans : and they sojourned 
 heretofore in Mesopotamia, because they would not follow the 
 gods of their fathers, which were in the land of Chaldeea. For 
 they left the way of their ancestors, and worshipped the God of 
 heaven, the God whom they knew : so they cast them out from 
 the face of their gods, and they fled into Mesopotamia, and so- 
 journed there many days. Then their God commanded them to 
 depart from the place where they sojourned, and to go into the 
 land of Chanaan." * 
 
 " Frequens et obvia est de ea re apud veteres historia ; sed 
 vereor ut suam satis liberent fidem, qui tarn constanter de rebus 
 tarn priscis sententiam proferunt. Tradunt sane Ebrsei statu- 
 arium fuisse Tharam, atque eandem cum eo aliquandiu exercuisse 
 artem Abrahamum. Et legitur Sacris Literis Tharam, et patres 
 ei contemporaneos, alienos Deos coluisse, quod in Josuse cap. 
 xxiv. com. 2 reperitur. Quod ansam forte prsebuit, ut idolatrise 
 initia ei deberi posteri censerent. Abrahamum item in ardentem 
 fornacem a Nimrodo conjectum, cum idolorum cultum detrectaret, 
 scribunt. Id prseter vulgo tritos scriptores habet Chaldseus 
 paraphrastes in Ecclesiastem cap. iv. com. 13 sed vix est ut 
 parentalia seu feriarum dehicalium sacra tarn celeri in divinos 
 honores transitu, quam brevia sevi inter Sheruchum et Tharam 
 intervalla proposcerint, demutarentur. At vero Chaldaica ilia 
 paraphrasi, Uzielidi tributa, etiam locus ille Mosis, qui quartum 
 Genesis caput claudit de idolis, capitur perinde ac si diu etiam 
 ante diluvium coli ccepissent, circa annum nempe a mundi con- 
 ditu ducentisimum quadragesimum." 2 
 
 " Imagines illas quas furata est Eahel, Ebraei vocant Teraphim, 
 Gen. cap. xxxi. comm. 19. Pro Diis esse habitas, testis est ipse 
 Laban, Quare, inquit i\le,furatus es Deos meos ? Jacobum adlocutus. 
 Fictas eas ab astrologis, ut futura prsedicerent, sentit R. D. 
 Kimchi, et humana forma factas, ita ut ccelestis influentise essent 
 1 Chap. v. 6-9. 2 Selden, vol. ii. p. 238. 
 
Appendix. 279 
 
 capaces, adnotat Abraham Aben Ezra theologus et astrologus 
 Judseorum maximus ; atque ad earn mentem interpretatur Tera- 
 phim quse pro liberando Davide, in lecto posuit Michal uxor ejus, 
 de qua historia est 1 Sam. cap. 19. Inter causas etiam, cur 
 Eahel eas sustulerit, hanc unam recensent, ne scilicet Labani 
 illarum inspectione innotesceret, per quod iter ilia abierat. Ideo 
 D. Augustinus Quaest. xciv. in Genesim. Quod Laban, inquit, 
 dicit, Quare furatus es Deos meos ? Tiinc est illud fortasse quod et 
 augurari se dixerat. Imo et Aben Ezra augurium illud ad Tera- 
 phim Labanis refert. Utrum autem ut Dii colerentur Teraphim, 
 utcunque Dii dicti, an vero divinationis tantum instrumenta 
 haberentur ; vetus est inter magistros controversial x 
 
 LECTURE III., NOTE 2, p. 74. 
 
 WARBURTON'S great theory of the sacrifice of Isaac is based 
 upon the Scriptural account of that sacrifice, as undertaken with 
 the full expectation of the restoration of the victim to life ; but 
 he raises upon this basis a bold superstructure of his own, for 
 which it is not easy to find equal Scripture warrant, the theory, 
 viz., that the sacrifice was a scenical representation, a representa- 
 tion by action of the Atonement and Resurrection of Christ, and 
 a revelation of the Gospel scheme to Abraham. The whole sub- 
 ject of teaching by action, which prevailed in antiquity, and is 
 adopted in Scripture, is discussed and elucidated by Warburton. 
 To Jeremiah it is said, " Make thee bonds and yokes, and put 
 them upon thy neck ; " 2 to Hosea, " Go, take thee a wife of 
 whoredoms ; " 3 to Ezekiel, " Prepare thee stuff for removing," 4 
 etc. This was information by action instead of words. The 
 Almighty, by the first of these actions, indicating the conquest of 
 Nebuchadnezzar over Edom, Moab, etc. ; by the second, declaring 
 His abhorrence of the idolatries of the house of Israel ; by the 
 third, foretelling the approaching captivity of Zedekiah. And 
 thus Ahijah rent his garment into twelve pieces, of which he gave 
 Jeroboam ten, to signify the secession of the ten tribes. 5 The 
 
 1 Selden, vol. ii. p. 279. 
 
 a Jer. xxvii. 2. * Hos. i. 2. 4 Ezek. xii 3. 
 
 5 1 Kings xi. 29, 30. 
 
280 Appendix. 
 
 sacrifice of Abraham then was, according to Warburton, an 
 example of the same manner of teaching. The offering up of 
 Isaac, in which the real death of that victim was contemplated, 
 combined with the event of his son's restoration, revealed to the 
 Patriarch the Atonement and the Resurrection. Substantial action 
 was at the same time scenic representation. The information, he 
 supposes, had been solicited by Abraham ; and " the father of the 
 faithful must, from the nature of the thing, become very desirous of 
 knowing the manner how this blessing [In thee shall all the fami- 
 lies of the earth be blessed] was to be brought about. A Mystery, 
 if we will believe the Author of our Faith, that engaged the 
 attention of other holy men, less concerned than Abraham, and 
 consequently less stimulated and excited by their curiosity : 
 1 And he turned unto his disciples, and said . . . For I tell 
 you, that many prophets and kings [and much more Abraham, 
 must] have desired to see those things which ye see,'" 1 etc. 
 (Luke x. 23, 24). 
 
 And the text, " Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my 
 day," is adduced as proof that the information thus solicited by 
 Abraham beforehand had been promised to him, the argument 
 being that the Greek word for rejoiced qyaXXidaaro signifies 
 " the tumultuous pleasure which the expectation of an actually 
 approaching blessing occasions." So convinced, indeed, is War- 
 burton that Abraham received information by action of the great 
 events of the Gospel, that he accounts for the knowledge not 
 having been divulged, but having been concealed by the Patri- 
 arch. 
 
 But such a theory as this encounters great and insuperable 
 objections. Warburton explains, indeed, the total silence of the Old 
 Testament about this communication to Abraham, by saying that 
 it would have been contrary to the Divine scheme to have recorded 
 a revelation which would have indisposed the Jewish nation to 
 the preparatory discipline of the Law. And he answers the 
 objection, that the command to sacrifice Isaac is plainly described 
 in Scripture not as the vouchsafement of a singular privilege, but 
 as a trial and temptation, by saying that the privilege was granted 
 upon the condition of and by means of a trial ; that Abraham 
 having requested to know the mode in which the blessing would 
 
 1 Divine Legation. Book vi. 5. 
 
Appendix. 281 
 
 be accomplished, the answer was, Offer up Isaac, and it shall be 
 revealed to you. But the fact still remains, that Scripture is 
 altogether silent about this communication to Abraham, and that 
 therefore the supposition is wholly gratuitous and without foun- 
 dation. The whole proof, indeed, of this supposed revelation to 
 Abraham rests upon that single text in the New Testament, 
 " Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day ; and he saw it and 
 was glad;" but it is an extravagant strain upon this text to extort 
 this meaning out of it. " To see my day " is an indefinite 
 expression, which does not necessarily mean more than that 
 Abraham looked forward to the time when the Divine promise 
 would be fulfilled, and that sublime gift in which all the nations 
 of the earth were interested would be actually bestowed. 
 
 One consequence of Warburton's adoption of a peculiar theory 
 of the sacrifice of Abraham was a bad one viz., that he defended 
 that sacrifice by the shield of his own theory, and not by the 
 simple statement of Scripture. To confute the notion that it was 
 a propitiatory human sacrifice, in imitation of Canaanitish worship, 
 the statement of Scripture was enough, viz., that he who had 
 received the promise " That in Isaac shall thy seed be called," 
 offered him up, " accounting that God was able to raise him up, 
 even from the dead." It was of the very nature of propitiatory 
 sacrifices that they contemplated the loss of the victim, but 
 Abraham did not contemplate the loss of Isaac. But Warburton 
 prefers resting the defence of Abraham's sacrifice against the 
 charge of being a propitiatory human sacrifice, upon the ground 
 that the sacrificial action in it was only scenical representation 
 to reveal to Abraham the sacrifice of Christ. " This action being 
 mere scenery, had no moral import ; that is, it conveyed or implied 
 none of those intentions in Him who commanded it, and in him 
 who obeyed the command, which go along with actions that have 
 a moral import. Consequently, the injunction and obedience, 
 in an action which hath no such import, can no way affect the 
 moral character of the persons concerned : and consequently, this 
 command could occasion no mistakes concerning the Divine Attri- 
 butes, with regard to God's delighting in human sacrifices." 1 
 The defence is good, were the fact of the scenical representation 
 certain : the latter, however, is no more than a theory, and is 
 
 1 Divine Legation, vi. 5. 
 
282 Appendix. 
 
 therefore a weak substitute for a Scripture statement. But 
 though Warburton erects a superstructure of uncertain theory on 
 this subject, the groundwork of his view is true and Scriptural 
 viz. that Abraham offered up Isaac, not with the idea of losing 
 him, but with the full expectation of the recovery of the heir of 
 the promise. 
 
 LECTURE V., NOTE 3, p. 121. 
 
 THIS is from a passage on the subject of punishment on the didactic 
 principle. We say that punishment for the fathers' sins is pun- 
 ishment on that principle, and we call it vicarious punishment, 
 regarding it as being on that principle and not on the judicial 
 principle. I hear that certain persons are selected by their 
 relationship to others to be instances of the consequences of sin. 
 Now this is very clear of those who are thus didactically punished 
 on account of their fathers' sins. But Tucker points out, and 
 with great truth, that it is not only true of those persons who are 
 punished on account of their fathers' sins, who make this a 
 marked and definite class ; but that it is true of numbers of 
 men everywhere who are singled out for this use and purpose of 
 didactic punishment. Everywhere we see persons who are 
 singled out for providential inflictions, for the purpose of im- 
 pressing others, reminding them of the consequences of connection 
 with sin, whether it is the sin of a father or of a gover- 
 nor, of a political or a military leader, does not signify. These 
 men are singled out for didactic punishment. They are not 
 worse than other men in themselves ; and therefore so far their 
 punishment upon the didactic principle is a vicarious one it is 
 in fact suffered for the benefit and instruction of others, and for 
 the good of society. As Tucker says : " It is not so much actual 
 suffering, as the terror of it, that operates upon free will ; " but 
 there must be some actual suffering to produce this terror. And 
 some must submit to this suffering by visitation of Providence ; 
 constituting an indefinite and constantly seen class. We have, 
 in fact, vicarious punishment of a didactic kind illustrated and 
 exemplified everywhere, not only in those who suffer for their 
 fathers' sins, but in persons who are visited by Providence gener- 
 ally. The punishment for fathers' sins is brought under a more 
 
Appendix. 283 
 
 general head, and is only one specimen of a large and compre- 
 hensive system. 
 
 Now this being the case, Tucker goes off into another point 
 as to how justice is to be satisfied with this kind of didactic 
 vicarious punishment, some people being visited by Providence 
 for the instruction of others, when they are not worse in them- 
 selves than others. And the general fact that it is so may be 
 allowed, while it may be difficult to explain the rationale of its 
 justice. And Mr. Tucker may have stated the fact rightly, and 
 may have rather missed a rationale. When we come across the 
 fact, indeed, a man says, I object to this fact : I object to being 
 made an example of didactic punishment for the instruction of 
 others. Say, I am one of the host of Pharaoh that was over- 
 thrown in the Red Sea for an example. How is this treatment 
 justified ] Tucker then seems to admit that he has a grievance, 
 but thinks he sees a way out of it. He tells the man " In this 
 light of punishment it appears that the party undergoing it does 
 a signal service to his fellow creatures, by exhibiting to them an 
 example of utmost importance ; and necessary to preserve them 
 in happiness : for which service I see nothing in our ideas of a 
 gracious Governor that should hinder His making him amends" l 
 He then supposes some arrangements made in a future life to 
 meet the case. But this is loose and rough speculation. Yet 
 the fact of vicarious didactic punishment, it will be allowed, may 
 be separated from the particular form of it exhibited as a visit- 
 ation for fathers' sins, and may be considered as a general law 
 taking place here. Indeed, when we look abroad in the world, 
 how much we see of great masses of providential visitation, 
 which look like didactic punishment of some kind or other, 
 punishment meant to arrest our attention, though not judicial 
 with respect to individuals ! A great battle arrests our attention, 
 and we think it must be meant to be reflected on. The pride 
 and ambition of nations produces terrible punishment. Num- 
 bers of individuals are not implicated in this public pride and 
 ambition, still we cannot help seeing that this fate is congenial 
 to this public vice and stain, of kings and statesmen. The whole 
 is a lesson, and has a moral effect. 
 
 1 Tucker's Light of Nature, vol. iv. p. 396. 
 
284 Appendix. 
 
 LECTURE VI, NOTE 4, p. 143. 
 
 EAHAB'S act was the saving of two believers in the true God, 
 whereas Jael's was the destruction of an enemy of God ; but 
 deception was common to both acts. 1 The whole statement 
 in answer to the king of Jericho's demand for the two spies was 
 false, the two men being at the very time on the roof of the 
 house hid with the stalks of flax. St. James, however, 2 says 
 that Eahab " was justified by works," and that this very conceal- 
 ment of the messengers was the work which justified her. 
 Scott's comment is "Various opinions have been formed con- 
 cerning Eahab's conduct on this trying occasion. Some object 
 that her treachery to her king and country cannot be vindicated ; 
 but it may be answered, that as she firmly believed the God 
 of heaven had devoted the Canaanites to be utterly destroyed by 
 the Israelites, she must either side with Israel and Israel's God 
 against her country, or perish with it in a hopeless contest against 
 the Almighty : so that, in her circumstances, she could not have 
 acted otherwise, if influenced by a true and living faith. ... In 
 respect of the falsehoods that she uttered ... if it were her indis- 
 pensable duty if possible to protect the spies, and there were no 
 other conceivable way of obeying this, it seems not necessary to 
 condemn her conduct altogether. Stratagems of war, and similar 
 impositions upon determined enemies and persecutors, are not 
 absolutely condemned in Scripture, though inconsistent with 
 exact veracity." 8 Bacon, in his tract " On Church Controversies" 
 speaking of certain enthusiastic preachers of his day, says " In 
 this kind of zeal, they have pronounced generally, and without 
 difference, all untruths unlawful; notwithstanding, that the 
 midwives are directly reported to have been blessed for their 
 excuse, and Eahab is said by faith to have concealed the spies." * 
 
 LECTURE VII., NOTE 5, p. 172. 
 
 HOWEVER justly Dante offends modern commentators, it is clear 
 that he did not outrage the conscience of his own age, character- 
 
 1 Josh. ii. 4, 5. 2 James ii. 25. 3 Scott's Bible. Joshua ii. 4. 
 
 4 Bacon's Works, Ed. 1819, vol. ii. p. 520. Exod. i 9 ; 2 Sam. xvi. 18, 19 ; 
 2 Kings vi. 19. 
 
Appendix. 285 
 
 ised as it was by bitter enmities, when he treats an inmate of 
 the Inferno as a proper subject for deception ; as having no right 
 to truth. In the circle of traitors, who are plunged up to the 
 head in a frozen lake, where tears on the upturned face freeze 
 before they fall, thus forming a crystal vizor of ice, he is accosted 
 by Frate Alberigo, who had murdered his guests at a banquet. 
 Alberigo, mistaking him and Virgil for guilty spirits on the 
 way to their doom in the lowest circle, thus piteously accosts 
 them : (Inferno < t Canto xxxiii. 110.) 
 
 " anime cnideli 
 
 Tanto, ehe data v' e 1' ultima posta 
 
 Levatemi dal viso i duri veil. 
 
 Si^ch'io sfoghi il dolor che' 1 cuor m' impregna 
 
 Un poco, pria che il pianto si raggieli." 
 [" souls so cruel that for you is sealed 
 The doom of the lowest gulf ! " so crying prayed me 
 One of the sad ones of the crust congealed ; 
 " Lift from my sight the hardened veil, and aid me, 
 To vent the sorrow through my heart extending, 
 A little ere the frost again invade me."] 
 
 Dante answers readily : 
 
 " Perch' io a lui : Se vuoi ch' i ti sowegna, 
 
 Dimmi chi se' : e s' io non ti disbrigo, 
 
 Al fondo della ghiaccia ir mi convegna." 
 [Then I, "If thou would' st have me succour lending, 
 Say who thou wast ; and if thou art deceived, 
 Down to the lowest ice be my descending."] 
 
 He knew himself bound to the icy bottom under the care of his 
 guide, and in fact plays upon the traitor's misapprehension, who 
 accepts the conditions \ and declaring himself, " I am the Friar 
 Alberigo," tells his tale, and calls for the fulfilment of the 
 promise, 
 
 "Ma distendi oramai in qua la mano 
 Aprimi gli occhi : " 
 [But stretch out now thy hand, and 
 open my eyes.] 
 
 "Ed io non glieli apersi 
 E cortesia fu lui esser villano. " 
 [And I opened them not for him, and to 
 be rude to him was courtesy.] 
 
286 Appendix. 
 
 LECTURE VII, NOTE 6, p. 175. 
 
 FROM this deceit of esprit de corps to benefit a clan, or tribe, 
 or party, or cause, we go to deceit for another object, viz. in 
 execution of justice. A man has exposed himself to death for 
 the crime of bloodshed, and another man has it imposed upon 
 him, as a sacred function, to secure justice and kill him. This is 
 the law of Goel ; it may happen that the law can only be carried 
 out by stratagem and deceit ; and when these are necessary the 
 avenger of blood must use them. The Arabian character, then, is 
 described as generous and courageous, noble and frank in all the 
 ordinary relations, but the tactics which the law of Goel imposes 
 on it try its fidelity to these features, and engraft upon the main 
 stock of the character some special and occasional modes of 
 action which are very opposite ; we find conspicuous untruthful- 
 ness, treachery, and double-dealing, but it is still an insertion in 
 the general portrait of a noble-minded and magnanimous man. 
 In the very fulfilment of the law of Goel he undertakes danger 
 for the sake of duty, and sacrifices himself for a sacred object. 
 It is only when killing has been imposed as a duty, that the 
 discharge from the obligation of truth has been considered to go 
 with it : it ought to be said the prohibition to speak the truth, 
 the obligation to deceive. In proportion to the sanctity which 
 attached to the office of avenger of blood, and to the obliga- 
 tion which lay upon him to pursue the man guilty of homicide to 
 death, was also the strength of the conviction in the avenger's 
 mind, that he had the right, or rather the duty to put aside all 
 the ordinary rules of sincerity and truth-speaking in the means he 
 adopted for accomplishing his end. Extreme deceit was allowed, 
 or rather imposed on him, when it was necessary; because it 
 was supposed that the duty of taking away life superseded the 
 right to truth-speaking. The use of such tactics in an excep- 
 tional case, then, implied no general tendency to dissimulation and 
 treachery in the man ; they were a special instrument for a special 
 end, and were totally different from meanness in the character. 
 
 The whole moral sentiment of the East has utterly cashiered, 
 within the direct sphere of the duty of slaying, the duty of 
 veracity. The slayer, while he is under the direct obligation to 
 kill a man, is under no obligation to truth ; but considers that as 
 
Appendix. 287 
 
 the man is the fitting object of assassination, he is the fitting 
 victim of deceit and dissimulation. Michaelis, in his Arabic 
 Chrestomathy, which he quotes in his Commentary on the Laws 
 of the Hebrews, relates stories of the Arabs which show how 
 completely, in the execution of the sacred task of avenger of 
 blood, the Arab discards the whole ordinary duty of veracity, 
 and adopts the most intricate and elaborate arts of deceit and 
 duplicity to get hold of the manslayer whose life has become a 
 solemn forfeit to him which he is bound to secure. The most 
 honourable Arab is under an obligation in this instance to use 
 every piece of dissimulation which can promote his end, and 
 bring the guilty man within his grasp. 
 
 " Hatim, the father, and Adi, the grandfather, of Kais had 
 both been murdered ; but as that happened before Kais was 
 capable of reflection, his mother kept it a secret from him, that 
 he might not at any future period meditate revenge, and thereby 
 expose his own life to danger. In order to guard against his 
 having any suspicions, or making any inquiries as to their 
 deaths, she collected a parcel of stones on two hillocks in the 
 neighbourhood, that they might have the appearance of burial- 
 places, and told her son, that the one was the grave of his 
 father, the other of his grandfather. Kais had of course no other 
 idea than that his progenitors had died natural deaths, and were 
 there buried .... Kais had a quarrel with another young Arab, 
 and received from him this bitter taunt, " You would do better 
 to show your courage on the murderer of your father and grand- 
 father." These words spoke much and deeply to his heart ; he 
 became melancholy; and threatened his mother with killing 
 either her or himself, if she did not tell him the whole truth 
 relative to the deaths of his father and grandfather. He thus 
 extorted the secret from her ; and immediately set out on a 
 peregrination, to which I cannot apply a more proper phrase, 
 than our common one, of going in quest of adventures. He 
 went to a distant part of the country, in quest of a man named 
 Chidasch, a friend of his father's, and whom he knew to have 
 been indebted to his father on the score of gratitude for that 
 too enters into an Arab's idea of honour, barbarous as it other- 
 wise is. When he found him out, he at first entered his house 
 merely as a stranger, according to the Arabian laws of hospi- 
 
288 Appendix. 
 
 tality. The wife of Chidasch immediately observed something 
 in his face, which led her to ask whether he was not going to 
 avenge blood. Chidasch himself recognised in him a likeness to 
 his friend, and after a short conversation, Kais told him where- 
 fore he was come. Chidasch was somewhat perplexed ; for one 
 of the murderers was his own uncle : but he told Kais, that 
 although he would fain put the murderer into his hands, he 
 could not do it openly, but that he had only to mark his pro- 
 cedure next night, when he would set himself down by the 
 murderer, and give him a blow familiarly, and in jest, upon 
 which signal he, Kais, might kill him himself, and trust to him 
 for protection against all retaliation from the family. This was 
 agreed upon ; Chidasch betrayed his uncle by the preconcerted 
 signal; Kais killed him; and when the family threatened 
 vengeance, Chidasch apologised for him, and said he had done 
 nothing more than put his father's murderer to death. They 
 then set off both together for the province of Heger, or Baharein, 
 on the Persian Gulf, where the murderer of his grandfather 
 dwelt. Chidasch hid himself behind a sandhill, and Kais went 
 up to the murderer, and after complaining to him that a robber 
 had attacked him among the sandhills, and taken his property 
 from him, requested that he would help him to recover it. 
 According to the prevailing maxims of honour and valour among 
 the Arabs, he could not refuse the stranger's request, and 
 immediately commanded some of his people to attend him. 
 This, however, did not suit Kais's view, whose countenance 
 instantly betrayed the appearance of a smile ; and on the other 
 asking him why he laughed, replied, " With us no brave man 
 would take so many people to his aid, but would rather come 
 alone." The man was ashamed, and ordered his people back, 
 which was what Kais wanted. And when they got a sight of 
 the pretended robber among the sandhills, and the man was 
 about to attack him, Kais stabbed his succourer through the 
 body from behind. And this base and treacherous procedure is 
 immortalised by a poem, which exactly suits the national taste 
 of the Arabs. So completely did the avengement of blood 
 justify and extol, as brave and honourable, everything which we 
 would account infamous, and characteristic of a ruffian." 1 
 
 1 Commentary on the Laws of the Hebrews, Book iii. art. 134. 
 
Appendix. 289 
 
 This then is another purpose for which a lawful use was 
 assigned to treachery among rude people, viz. the execution of 
 justice. As a means of securing justice and the capture of 
 criminals, treachery was completely and boldly justified ; and 
 Jael's act had a strong alliance with this form and use of 
 treachery. Sisera was a criminal flying from the righteous 
 justice of God ; she arrests his flight by false promises, and 
 engages him to accept hospitality within her tent. It is the 
 same dissimulation which the law of Goel adopts, only applied to 
 a different type of criminal. And like the deceit employed 
 under the law of Goel, it is not a general habit of deceit so much 
 as a local habit confined to a special set of circumstances, and 
 justified by the previous obligation to slay. 
 
 LECTURE VII, NOTE 7, p. 178. 
 
 THE comparison between an earlier and a later age is pre- 
 sented in the case of Lord Olive and his Indian administration ; 
 and a long contest between two rival principles received a deci- 
 sive settlement in English opinion. The great Indian statesman 
 had been under the dominion of the false principle of retaliation, 
 as a just mode of action under the difficulties of Indian admini- 
 stration. It seemed necessary to meet fraud by fraud, the gross 
 chicanery of the Hindu by counter-trick. Simple honesty 
 appeared but a weak instrument to bring to bear against subtle 
 and inveterate deceit. Was it anything more on the part of an 
 English statesman, than to do justice to himself, when he resisted 
 one flagrant imposition by another ? " All was going well," says 
 Lord Macaulay, " when Olive learned that Omichund was likely 
 to play false. The artful Bengalee had been promised a 
 liberal compensation for all that he had lost at Calcutta. But 
 this would not satisfy him. His services had been great. He 
 held the thread of the whole intrigue. By one word breathed 
 into the ear of Surajah Dowlah, he could undo all that he had 
 done. The lives of Watts, of Meer Jaffier, of all the conspirators, 
 were at his mercy ; and he determined to take advantage of his 
 situation, and to make his own terms. He demanded three hun- 
 dred thousand pounds sterling as the price of his secrecy and of 
 his assistance. The committee, incensed by the treachery and ap- 
 
 U 
 
290 Appendix. 
 
 palled by the danger, knew not what course to take. But Olive 
 was more than Omichund's match in Omichund's own arts. The 
 man, he said, was a villain. Any artifice which would defeat such 
 knavery was justifiable. The best course would be to promise 
 what was asked. Omichund would soon be at their mercy ; and 
 then they might punish him by withholding from him, not only 
 the bribe which he now demanded, but also the compensation 
 which all the other sufferers of Calcutta were to receive. 
 
 " His advice was taken. But how was the wary and sagacious 
 Hindu to be deceived 1 He had demanded that an article touch- 
 ing his claims should be inserted in the treaty between Meer 
 Jaffier and the English, and he would not be satisfied unless he 
 saw it with his own eyes. Olive had an expedient ready. Two 
 treaties were drawn up, one on white paper, the other on red, 
 the former real, the latter fictitious. In the former Omichund's 
 name was not mentioned ; the latter, which was to be shown to 
 him, contained a stipulation in his favour. 
 
 " But another difficulty arose. Admiral Watson had scruples 
 about signing the red treaty. Omichund's vigilance and acuteness 
 were such that the absence of so important a name would pro- 
 bably awaken his suspicions. But Olive was not a man to do 
 anything by halves. We almost blush to write it. He forged 
 Admiral Watson's name. . . . 
 
 " The new sovereign was now called upon to fulfil the engage- 
 ments into which he had entered with his allies. A conference 
 was held at the house of Jugget Seit, the great banker, for the 
 purpose of making the necessary arrangements. Omichund came 
 thither fully believing himself to stand high in the favour of Olive, 
 who, with dissimulation surpassing even the dissimulation of 
 Bengal, had up to that day treated him with undiminished kind- 
 ness. The white treaty was produced and read. Olive then 
 turned to Mr. Scrafton, one of the servants of the Company, and 
 said in English, 'It is now time to undeceive Omichund.' 
 * Omichund,' said Mr. Scrafton in Hindostanee, 'the red treaty 
 is a trick. You are to have nothing.' Omichund fell back insen- 
 sible into the arms of his attendants. He revived ; but his mind 
 was irreparably ruined. Clive, who, though little troubled by 
 scruples of conscience in his dealings with Indian politicians, was 
 not inhuman, seems to have been touched. He saw Omichund a 
 
Appendix. 291 
 
 few days later, spoke to him kindly, advised him to make a pil 
 grimage to one of the great temples of India, in the hope that 
 change of scene might restore his health, and was even dis- 
 posed, notwithstanding all that had passed, again to employ him 
 in the public service. But from the moment of that sudden 
 shock, the unhappy man sank gradually into idiocy. He, who 
 had formerly been distinguished by the strength of his under- 
 standing and the simplicity of his habits, now squandered the 
 remains of his fortune on childish trinkets, and loved to exhibit 
 himself dressed in rich garments, and hung with precious stones. 
 In this abject state he languished a few months, and. then died." l 
 This policy has received a defence from the old school of 
 statesmen, represented by the great statesman who practised 
 it ; but it has been utterly unable to stand its ground before pub- 
 lic opinion j and the verdict of the whole of English thought has 
 been that no amount of Hindu dishonesty is any justification of 
 our own. " That honesty is the best policy," says Lord Macaulay, 
 " is a maxim which we firmly believe to be generally correct, even 
 with respect to the temporal interests of individuals ; but, with 
 respect to societies, the rule is subject to still fewer exceptions, 
 and that for this reason, that the life of societies is longer than 
 the life of individuals. It is possible to mention men who have 
 owed great worldly prosperity to breaches of private faith. But 
 we doubt whether it be possible to mention a State which has on 
 the whole been a gainer by a breach of public faith. The entire 
 history of British India is an illustration of the great truth that 
 it is not prudent to oppose perfidy to perfidy, and that the most 
 efficient weapon with which men can encounter falsehood is truth. 
 During a long course of years, the English rulers of India, sur- 
 rounded by allies and enemies whom no engagement could bind, 
 have generally acted with sincerity and uprightness ; and the 
 event has proved that sincerity and uprightness are wisdom. 
 English valour and English intelligence have done less to extend 
 and to preserve our Oriental empire than English veracity. All 
 that we could have gained by imitating the doublings, the evasions, 
 the fictions, the perjuries which have been employed against us, is 
 as nothing, when compared with what we have gained by being 
 the one power in India on whose word reliance can be placed. 
 
 1 Macaulay'* Article on Lord Olive. 
 
292 Appendix. 
 
 No oath which superstition can devise, no hostage, however 
 precious, inspires a hundredth part of the confidence which is pro- 
 duced by the 'yea, yea,' and 'nay, nay,' of a British envoy." 1 
 
 LECTURE IX., NOTE 8, p. 201. 
 
 " I MUST now speak (says Michaelis) of a person quite unknown 
 in our law, but very conspicuous in the Hebrew law, and in regard 
 to whom Moses has left us, I might almost say, an unexampled 
 proof of legislative wisdom. In German, we may call him by the 
 name which Luther so happily employs, in his version of the 
 Bible, Der Blutracher, the blood-avenger ; and by this name we 
 must here understand ' the nearest relation of a person murdered, 
 whose right and duty it was to seek after and kill the murderer 
 with his own hand ; so much so, indeed, that the neglect thereof 
 drew after it the greatest possible infamy, and subjected the man 
 who avenged not the death of his relation to unceasing reproaches 
 of cowardice or avarice.' If, instead of this description, the 
 reader prefer a short definition, it may be to this effect ; ' the 
 nearest relation of a person murdered, whose right and duty it 
 was to avenge his kinsman's death with his own hand.' Among 
 the Hebrews this person was called ?&O, Goel, according, at least, 
 to the pronunciation adopted from the pointed Bibles. The 
 etymology of this word, like most forensic terms, is as yet 
 unknown. Yet we cannot but be curious to find out whence the 
 Hebrews had derived the name, which they applied to a person 
 so peculiar to their own law, and so totally unknown to ours. 
 Unquestionably the verb $>&O, Gaal, means to buy off, ransom, redeem; 
 but this signification it has derived from the noun ; for origin- 
 ally it meant to pollute or stain. 
 
 " If I might here mention a conjecture of my own, Goel of blood 
 (for that is the term at full length) implies Hood-stained; and the 
 nearest kinsman of a murdered person was considered as stained 
 with his blood, until he had, as it were, washed away the stain, 
 and revenged the death of his relation. The name, therefore, 
 indicates a person who continued in a state of dishonour, until 
 he again rendered himself honourable, by the exercise and accom- 
 plishment of revenge ; and in this very light do tne Arabs regard 
 1 Macaulay's Article on Lord Clive. 
 
Appendix. 293 
 
 the kinsman of a person murdered. It was no doubt afterwards 
 used, in a more extensive sense, to signify the nearest relation in 
 general, and although there was no murder in the case ; just as in 
 all languages words are gradually extended far beyond their 
 etymological meaning. ... In Arabic writings, this word 
 occurs ten times for once that we meet with Goel in Hebrew ; 
 for the Arabs, among whom the point of honour and heroic 
 celebrity consists entirely in the revenge of blood, have much 
 more to say of their blood-avenger than the Hebrews ; among 
 whom, Moses, by the wisdom of his laws, brought this character, 
 in a great measure, into oblivion 
 
 " Moses found the God already instituted, and speaks of him in 
 his laws as a character perfectly known, and therefore unneces- 
 sary to be described; at the same time that he expresses his fear 
 of his frequently shedding innocent blood. But long before he 
 has occasion to mention him as the avenger of murder, he intro- 
 duces his name in his laws relative to land, as in Lev. xxv. 25, 
 where he gives him the right of redeeming a mortgaged field. . . 
 
 " The only book that is possibly more ancient than the Mosaic 
 law, namely the book of Job, compares God, who will re-demand 
 our ashes from the earth, with the Goel, chap. xix. 25. From 
 this term the verb ?JO, which otherwise signifies properly to pollute, 
 had already acquired the significations of redeeming, setting free, 
 vindicating, in which we find Moses often using it, before he 
 ever speaks of the blood-avenger, as in Gen. xlviii. 15; Exod. 
 vi. 6 . . . ; and even re-purchase itself, is, in Lev. xxv. 31, 32. 
 thence termed r6*O geulla. Derivatives in any language follow 
 their primatives, but very slowly ; and when verba denominative 
 descend from terms of law, the law itself must be ancient. 
 
 " . . . . Mahomet endeavoured to mitigate this law, which 
 was often dangerous to innocence ; but unfortunately he began at 
 the wrong end. For, instead of enjoining a previous investigation, 
 that an innocent person might not suffer instead of the guilty, 
 he recommended as an act of mercy, pleasing in the sight of 
 God, the acceptance of a pecuniary compensation from the actual 
 murderer, in lieu of revenge. His words are : ' In cases of 
 murder, retaliation is prescribed to the faithful, so that freeman 
 must die for freeman, slave for slave, wife for wife. But when 
 a man's nearest kinsman departs from that right, he has a just 
 
294 Appendix. 
 
 claim against the murderer for a moderate compensation in 
 money, the acceptance of which is an alleviation of the crime in 
 the sight of God, and an act of mercy. But if he afterwards 
 oversteps this rule/ (that is by killing the person to whom he 
 has remitted the murder), ' God will punish him severely. For 
 the security of your lives rests on the right of retaliation.' (See 
 chap. ii. of the Koran, v. 173-175.) 
 
 " In this strange law, which, in fact, makes the right of retalia- 
 tion quite ineffectual to the security of a man's life, because it 
 can be compounded for by the payment of money to his kinsman, 
 Mahomet manifests a much greater opposition to the national 
 maxims of honour than a wise legislator would have done, by 
 representing as merciful, and pleasing to God, a practice which 
 to be sure was not uncommon, but still was deemed base 
 and selfish. . . . But on the principles of sound philosophy, 
 such a transaction is by no means acceptable in the sight of God, 
 who commands murderers to be punished without mercy, that 
 men's lives may be secure ; and an Arab, bred up in the national 
 ideas of honour, must always have had a stronger inclination to 
 trespass a precept of his religion, thus half left to his option, 
 than to forfeit his honour. I remember a passage of an Arabian 
 poet, who lived before Mahomet, which describes cowards in the 
 following terms : ' Those who injure them they forgive, and to the 
 wicked they repay good for evil : men so pious as they are, God 
 has not created among all the human race besides. But give me 
 the man who, when he mounts his horse or camel, is furious in 
 attacking his enemy.' . . . Now where poems of such a nature 
 express the sentiments of a nation, a precept of false morality, 
 recommending mercy and forgiveness in the wrong place, could 
 scarcely have much influence, except with a few enthusiasts, who 
 might happen to be among the people, and whose belief of 
 religion was very ardent. 
 
 " No doubt, in those countries without the bounds of Arabia, 
 where the people had not the same ideas of honour in avenging 
 blood, and where the Mahomedan religion, which its victorious 
 adherents propagated by the sword, was adopted only from 
 terror, as in Persia for instance, such an admonition might have 
 an influence on the law. Chardin, in his Travels, relates that in 
 that country, when a person is murdered, his relations go before 
 
Appendix. 295 
 
 a court of justice, making a great outcry, and demanding that 
 the murderer be delivered up to them, that they may satiate 
 their revenge ; and that he is accordingly delivered up to them 
 by the judge, in these words : * I give this murderer into your 
 hands ; take satisfaction yourselves for the blood he has shed ; 
 but remember that God is just and merciful ; ' which manifestly 
 allude to the two passages above-quoted from the Koran, the 
 relations may then, if they please, put him to death, and that in 
 whatever way they think fit. A rich murderer, on the other 
 hand, endeavours to accommodate matters with the relations of 
 the murdered person, and to prevail on them to accept a 
 pecuniary compensation ; and the judge, to whom he also gives 
 money, exhorts them to mercy, that is to be satisfied with such 
 a compensation, although he cannot compel them to accept it." 1 
 
 1 Michaelis' Commentaries on the Laws of Moses, Book iii. Arts. 131, 134, 136. 
 
 Printed by R. & R. CLARK, Edinlut^-i. 
 
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