tibvwy of €he theological gminaxy 
 
 PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 John Stuart Conning, D.D. 
 
 
 BM 535 .J45 1877 
 
 
 The Jews in relation to the 
 
 
 church and the world 
 
THE JEWS IN RELATION TO THE 
 CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 
 
 % Crorae oi %tdmz% 
 
 BY 
 REV. PROFESSOR CAIRNS, D.D. REV. CANON COOK, M.A. 
 REV. PROFESSOR LEATHES, M.A. 
 RT. REV. BISHOP CLAUGHTON, D.D. REV. DONALD FRASER, D.D. 
 REV. PROFESSOR BIRKS, M.A. 
 
 With a Preface by the 
 RIGHT REV. BISHOP PIERS CLAUGHTON, D.D., 
 
 Canon of St. Paufs, Chaplain-General of the Forces, etc. , etc. 
 
 SJtrotari* : 
 
 HODDER AND STOUGHTON, 
 
 27, PATERNOSTER ROW. 
 
 MDCCCLXXVII. 
 
 {All rights reserved.) 
 
Haieli, Watson, and Viney, Printers, London and Aylesbury 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 The accompanying Lectures were delivered at the 
 request of a Committee which was itself the result 
 of a meeting of Clergy and Laity held at the Cannon 
 Street Hotel, and of a very interesting discussion 
 which then took place on the subject of the Jews. 
 The Conference was not in itself of a missionary 
 character, nor are its lectures to be viewed as mis- 
 sionary addresses : they were undertaken by the 
 Lecturers at the desire of the Committee, in some 
 instances at considerable inconvenience to them- 
 selves ; and the views which they express are those 
 of men who have not come prominently forward as 
 having special opinions on the very interesting sub- 
 ject of which they treat, but who, in the midst of 
 much thought and study on kindred subjects, have 
 naturally formed a judgment upon this, which lies at 
 the root of our religious belief. The Lectures were 
 composed without previous consultation amongst the 
 authors, and it is not to be wondered at (nor scarcely 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 to be regretted) if, in some instances, they travel 
 over the same ground, and touch the same points 
 with similar or with varying opinions. This, indeed, 
 renders their general agreement the more valuable, 
 whilst it must give somewhat greater weight to the 
 several judgments of those who express them. It is 
 fair to add that to a certain extent the writers 
 themselves are taken at a disadvantage, as they may 
 appear to be giving judgment on very momentous 
 questions without special preparation. For what 
 they lose by exposing themselves to this charge they 
 will, there is good reason to believe, find ample 
 compensation in the evident candour and courage 
 they have shown for good, risking cheerfully some 
 loss of repute for deep study, when invited to 
 discuss, almost without notice, the tenets of a very 
 ancient and remarkable race, and to treat of the 
 very oldest form of religion — that religion, be it 
 remembered, itself the actual evidence of their own, 
 its Revelation in part the authority on which it 
 depends, and its history the fountain from which it 
 springs. 
 
 The Lectures address themselves to three classes 
 of hearers — each class, it is believed, represented 
 amongst those who listened to them apparently with 
 increasing attention during their delivery. They 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 appeal incidentally to Christians, not as those for 
 whom they were specially intended, but as the 
 body, as it were, which they represented, in urging 
 (though indirectly) the claims of the later Revelation 
 upon those who were the recipients of the first. 
 Christians could not but be interested in an 
 attempt to draw the attention of the Jewish race 
 to their actual position, as holding a creed so closely 
 affecting their own. Nor do we deny that virtually 
 these Lectures must be taken as an appeal to the 
 generous candour of Jews to look upon Christianity 
 at least with less hostile feeling, as being the 
 fulfilment, not the contradiction, of their own rich 
 promises and Divine Law. It is unnecessary to say 
 more on the character which these Lectures must 
 present to the Christian portion of the audience. 
 
 There is another section of that audience which 
 may be assumed to have listened to remarks on 
 Judaism and Christianity with interest, though not 
 perhaps with favour, — those who dislike anything 
 which assumes the existence of a Revelation, and who 
 would especially distrust Judaism, as containing the 
 evidence of its own verity and that of the Christian 
 religion besides. To these I would point out the 
 significance of the words they heard, (or may yet 
 read,) as the utterances of men worthy, surely, of 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 their attention, on a subject which they may have 
 failed sufficiently to consider in their category of 
 evidence, and to point out the absolute agreement 
 of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures as bearing 
 testimony to certain facts. To say this is not to 
 impute to them a carelessness not shared by others. 
 Too many Christians, it is to be feared, look upon 
 Jews simply as they would on Mahommedans, or 
 with more disfavour, from the memory of one terri- 
 bly dark page in their history. To the Freethinker, 
 or to the careless Christian, these Lectures present 
 a very important and profitable study : to either, 
 the perusal of them can scarcely fail to be of 
 service, and (surely we may add) of deep interest. 
 
 To Jews, and especially in proportion to their 
 education and higher intellectual advancement, these 
 Lectures are presented — with the deepest respect, 
 and an earnest hope that they may be accepted 
 — as they are intended — as the simple honest treat- 
 ment of a most important question, " Is the present 
 condition of this remarkable race that which from 
 their own Scriptures they must — as all other think- 
 ing men — conclude it was designed that it should 
 be ? It is to be regretted that, in some quarters, 
 another (and a less worthy) estimate appears to 
 have been made of the spirit in which this move- 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 ment has been made — the mere expression of differ- 
 ence has been taken to be an attack upon them 
 as a people. Such views will not prevail with the 
 intelligent and the well-informed amongst the repre- 
 sentatives of the race dwelling amongst ourselves ; 
 and to these the Lectures are addressed by those 
 who, they may be assured, whether the Lecturers 
 themselves are considered, or the Committee who 
 invited them, have no feelings towards them but 
 those of sincere respect, deep interest, and a sure 
 belief in the great and glorious destiny for which in 
 the mysterious counsels of God they are designed. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 — ♦ — 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. The Greatest Historical Marvel, and how 
 
 TO ACCOUNT FOR IT I 
 
 By the Rev. Professor Cairns, D.D. 
 
 II. Christianity the Justification of the 
 
 Mosaic Economy 31 
 
 By the Rev. Canon Cook, M.A. 
 
 III. The Relation of the Jews to their own 
 
 Scriptures 61 
 
 By the Rev. Professor Stanley Leathes, M.A. 
 
 IV. The Relation of the Jews to the Nations 
 
 AT LARGE 89 
 
 By the Right Rev. Bishop Claughton, D.D. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 V. The Comparative Effects of Judaism and 
 
 Christianity upon the World . .107 
 By the Rev. Donald Fraser, D.D. 
 
 VI. The True Prerogative and Glory of the 
 
 Jews 135 
 
 By the Rev. Professor Birks, M.A. 
 
re featest Historical Cartel : §oio to &uom& 
 
 fox it ? 
 
 BY 
 
 REV. PROFESSOR CAIRNS, D.D. 
 
I. 
 
 THE GREA TEST HISTORICAL MAR VEL : HO W 
 TO ACCOUNT FOR IT? 
 
 "^O myself and other lecturers in this series the 
 •* subject is so interesting, that we may well 
 bring to it any powers of argument that we may 
 possess, and also so new, that we may well be 
 excused by Jewish hearers if we fail in anything to 
 catch their point of view, or if we assume through 
 imperfect information any thing which they deny. 
 For myself, I have no wish but to conduct this 
 discussion with perfect fairness; and my only regret 
 is, that, having been engrossed till quite recently 
 with work that could not be intermitted, I have 
 had less time than I should otherwise have taken 
 to consult authorities on the Jewish side. I have, 
 however, for a considerable number of years studied 
 the Jewish controversy. I have carefully read, to 
 the best of my ability, the Old Testament in the 
 original, and such Jewish interpretations of it as are 
 reported in the standard Christian commentators, 
 especially in regard to the Messiah. I have gone 
 
THE GREATEST HISTORICAL MARVEL: 
 
 over the objections to Christianity put by Celsus 
 into the mouth of his Jew, as met and replied to by 
 Origen. I have studied fully the dialogue of Justin 
 Martyr with the Jew Trypho, and also the long and 
 interesting debates maintained by Eusebius in his 
 "Gospel Preparation" and "Demonstration;" and of 
 more modern literature, omitting much that is less 
 formal, I have travelled through the friendly 
 conference (Arnica Collatid) between the learned 
 Jew Orobio, and the Christian theologian, Limborch, 
 towards the end of the seventeenth century, in 
 which the argument on both sides is pretty well 
 exhausted. In travel, also, and residence on the 
 continent, as well as at home, I have had no small 
 discussion with non-Christian Jews, and with Jews 
 who had become Christians, and have learned some- 
 thing of the internal conflicts in the Jewish com- 
 munion, and of the reactions of modern opinion upon 
 the Synagogue as upon the Christian Church from the 
 days of Spinoza to our own. In ordinary circum- 
 stances, to mention these or similar particulars would 
 savour of egotism or of impertinence. But the Jew 
 is entitled, when addressed in an argument, to know 
 something beforehand of his fellow-reasoner — at least 
 to the extent of such an interest being proved in his 
 national literature and distinctive religious opinion 
 as shall be some guarantee for sympathy of spirit, 
 earnestness of aim, and general accuracy of repre- 
 sentation. 
 
HOW TO ACCOUNT FOR IT? 
 
 It falls to me, therefore, in the plan of these 
 Lectures, to consider Christianity, including Christ 
 Himself, as a sign and a wonder in history, upon any 
 theory of explanation whatsoever, and specially to 
 examine the theory to which a Jew is shut up so 
 long as he disowns Christianity, and regards it either 
 as delusion or imposture. The difficulty exists, not 
 for Jews only, but for Gentile unbelievers, according 
 to their different schools of more reverent, or more 
 defiant negation; but I shall endeavour to look at 
 the matter more from a Jewish point of view; and, as 
 for this I must separate the Jew from the unbeliever, 
 I shall generally assume the literal truth of the Old 
 Testament as a miraculous history, and as the history 
 of a revelation, though here and there also meeting 
 the unbelief which has entered into Jewish circles, 
 and which, to find Him whom we call Christ, would 
 need likewise to recover Moses and the Prophets. 
 
 I shall, in conducting this argument, then, ask 
 three questions. First — How came Christianity as a 
 distinctive doctrinal and moral system ? Secondly — ■ 
 How came the historical character and picture of 
 Jesus Christ ? and Thirdly — How came the histori- 
 cal success, prevalence and influence of Christianity, 
 with its prospects and tendencies as contrasted 
 with the present state of Judaism ? 
 
 I. First — How came Christianity as a distinctive 
 doctrinal and moral system ? While the Christian 
 contends that his religion is not distinctive, at least 
 
6 THE GREATEST HISTORICAL MARVEL: 
 
 radically, so far as the Old Testament itself is con- 
 cerned, he must hold, and the Jew must agree with 
 him, that it is distinctive as contrasted with the modern 
 Jewish interpretation. The rationalist, indeed, may 
 bring his Christianity very near to modern Judaism, 
 and even to Mahometanism ; but the ordinary Chris- 
 tian must contend for the world-wide difference 
 between modern Judaism and Christianity; and the 
 Jew must accept this assertion, if Christianity, as taught 
 by Christ and His apostles, involved such doctrines 
 as the Trinity, the Incarnation, the atonement of 
 Christ as the Son of God for human sin, the justifi- 
 cation of the soul by His blood, the sanctification of 
 men by the Spirit of God as His agent, and the 
 coming of this God-Man from the heaven where He 
 reigns to raise the dead and judge the world. If 
 these things ever existed, as the Christian believes, in 
 the role of the Old Testament Messiah, they have 
 each and all been dropped in the recent beliefs of 
 Judaism, and Christianity stands out against it, con- 
 trasted in these great distinctive articles which are its 
 very foundation and substance. How then did this 
 great system of Christian doctrines originate ? It is 
 very inconvenient for the Jew that he cannot accept 
 the hypothesis of the unbeliever, that these doctrines 
 were Jewish errors taught in the Old Testament and 
 participated in by Jesus and His apostles, who, 
 having their minds filled with Old Testament pro- 
 phecies and representations, transferred all to the 
 
HOW TO ACCOUNT FOR IT? 
 
 supposed Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, as an actual 
 person. This theory of Strauss will not suit the 
 orthodox Jew, for he cannot afford to have the 
 Old Testament made the matrix out of whose 
 shadowy outlines the doctrines of the Trinity or of 
 the Deity of the Messiah may have arisen ; and out 
 of whose more distinct teachings and emblems, in 
 regard to sacrifice, the rest of Christianity may have 
 been developed. 
 
 The Jew is bound to repel every plausible deriva- 
 tion that carries up the Christian doctrine of the 
 Trinity, for example, to the creation-narrative : " Let 
 us make man in our image, after our likeness," etc. ; 
 that sees, in Proverbs viii. 30, a son brought up with 
 an eternal Father; and that finds in Daniel's vision of 
 the Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven, 
 the source of the impression of Jesus and His 
 followers, that .such an appearance was to precede 
 t and usher in a supernatural kingdom. And likewise 
 the Jew is bound to protest with all vehemence 
 against the Epistle to the Hebrews as a right inter- 
 pretation of Leviticus and of the Mosaic ordinances 
 of sacrifice, since the Jew has now excluded the 
 idea of expiation from the work of the Messiah, and 
 stands at the greatest possible remove from the 
 words of Jesus in Matt. xx. 28, " The Son of Man 
 came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, 
 and to give his life a ransom for many." There is 
 indeed in the Jewish prayer-book a frequent and 
 
8 THE GREATEST HISTORICAL MARVEL: 
 
 earnest confession of sin, more especially on the day 
 of annual Atonement, of which this is a specimen : "O 
 my God, before that I was formed I was incapable ; 
 and now that I exist, am as though I had not been 
 formed: dust I am while I live, how much more so 
 at my death: behold, I am in thy presence as a 
 vessel full of shame and dishonour. Let it be willed 
 before thee, O Lord my God, and the God of my 
 fathers, to enable me that I sin no more, and let the 
 sins which I have sinned before thee be erased 
 through thine abundant mercies ; yet not by means 
 of chastisements and sore sicknesses" (p. 136, 
 Tephilloth, London, Alexander, A. M., 5548). And 
 there are also repeated prayers for the coming of the 
 Messiah, of which this, one of the series of petitions 
 on the same anniversary day, is an example: "And 
 herewith, O Lord, grant glory to thy people, praise 
 to them that fear Thee, and hopes to those that seek 
 Thee, and confidence unto those that wait upon 
 Thee; joy to Thy land and gladness to Thy city; 
 and a flourishing restoration of the kingdom of 
 David Thy servant, and a splended light to the son 
 of Jesse, Thine anointed, speedily in our days " 
 {Tephilloth, p. 119). But it is to be noticed that, 
 nowhere in the Jewish prayer-book, are any of the 
 functions of what Christians call a Mediator between 
 God and man ascribed to the Jewish Messiah. He 
 has no special place in connexion with the pardon 
 of sin ; and in another of these anniversary prayers 
 
HOW TO ACCOUNT FOR IT? 
 
 he is put on the same level with the petitioners and 
 their fathers : " Our God and the God of our fathers 
 shall cause our prayers to ascend, and come, ap- 
 proach, be seen, accepted, heard, and be thought on, 
 and be remembered in remembrance of us, and in 
 remembrance of our fathers, in remembrance of Thy 
 anointed Messiah, the Son of David Thy servant, 
 and in remembrance of Jerusalem, Thy holy city, 
 and in commemoration of all Thy people, the house 
 of Israel before Thee, to a good issue, with favour, 
 with grace, with compassion, and with a happy and 
 peaceable life, on this day of Atonement " {Tephilloth, 
 p. 130). It is true that it forms an article in the 
 Jewish creed (the 12th of 13) that a Messiah shall 
 come. But this is expressed in the vaguest terms: 
 " I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the 
 Messiah, and though notwithstanding he tarrieth, I 
 will await in expectation of his daily coming" 
 rTephilloth, p. 2); and of the prayers which shed 
 light upon his expected work, none is perhaps more 
 definite than the following: "O the merciful, He 
 shall make us worthy to behold the days of the 
 Messiah, and that we may enjoy life in futurity" 
 {Tephilloth, p. 142); and this longer prayer for the 
 three festivals, which (though the Messiah is not 
 mentioned in it), evidently sums up his work, as 
 being what He is called elsewhere, a 7fcO or Re- 
 deemer: " For reason of our sins we were driven from 
 our land, and removed far distant from our terri- 
 
io THE GREATEST HISTORICAL MARVEL: 
 
 tories, that we are unable to go up for to appear and 
 to worship, and to perform our duty before Thee in 
 the temple of Thy choice, the great and sanctified 
 temple where we called unto Thy name, for the sake 
 of the power which was sent against Thy sanctuary. 
 Let it be willed before Thee, O Lord our God, and 
 the God of our fathers, most merciful King, again to 
 have compassion upon us and upon Thy sanctuary, 
 and through Thine abundant mercies quickly rebuild 
 it and magnify the glory thereof. O, our Father, 
 our King, manifest the glory of Thy kingdom over 
 us speedily, shine forth and be exalted over us in 
 the sight of all living ; and gather our dispersions 
 from among the nations; erect Thou an ensign and 
 assemble us that are scattered from the extreme 
 parts of the earth, and conduct us, O Lord, our God, 
 unto Zion, Thy city, with rejoicing, and unto Jeru- 
 salem, the city of Thy sanctuary, with everlasting 
 joy, that we may there perform before Thee the 
 offerings of our duty, the continual offering accord- 
 ing to their order, and the additional offering ac- 
 cording to their institution. And the additional 
 offering of this Sabbath-day, [or] of this day of the 
 feast of unleavened bread, [or] of this day of the feast 
 of weeks, [or] of this day of the feast of tabernacle, on 
 this eighth day of the feast of solemn assembly, will 
 we observe and offer unto Thee with love" {Tephil- 
 loth, pp. 114, 115). 
 
 We thus see how limited is the function of the 
 
HO IV TO ACCOUNT FOR IT I n 
 
 Jewish Messiah according to the prayer-book. He 
 has nothing to do with priesthood or sacrifice, save 
 only restoring the Old Testament ritual in Jeru- 
 salem according to the law of Moses. He has no 
 influence in the pardon of sin, and may, for any- 
 thing that appears, be himself a sinner. He is not 
 in any proper sense a prophet, much less a lawgiver 
 like Moses, for the prayer-book carefully exalts 
 Moses and guards his law as in all things unchange- 
 able ; and it is even doubtful whether Orobio has, 
 in the prayer-book, anything that supports his view 
 that the Messiah is to make the true religion uni- 
 versal ; for though this seems to follow from other 
 statements, such a result is nowhere directly con- 
 nected with the Messiah's name. He is a mere 
 king or ruler, who, like Joshua, conquers a territorial 
 centre for the chosen people, and thence develops and 
 extends the spirit of their unchanged Mosaic institu- 
 tions ; but he is not clothed with any transcendent 
 greatness, intellectual or spiritual, and is the simple 
 servant of Jehovah, bringing round a change neces- 
 sary to the corporate well-being of the Jewish 
 people, but in no way needful to their individual 
 salvation, which solely depends on their adherence 
 to Moses, and on God accepting their very partial 
 conformity to the original law, and covering the rest. 
 We are thus in a position to see how stupendous 
 a revolution, tried by Jewish ideas, in religious 
 thought, was brought in by Christianity, and how 
 
THE GREATEST HISTORICAL MARVEL 
 
 far modern Judaism is from being able to explain its 
 origin. Christianity, indeed, borrowed a portion of its 
 doctrine, from Judaism as still held, the unity and 
 perfections of God, the moral law, and the prospect 
 of immortality both for soul and body. But in regard 
 to all characteristic points, Christian belief was in 
 flagrant contrast. The Jew, according to the prayer- 
 book, while confessing sin and deprecating punish- 
 ment, had so slight an idea of its evil, that he 
 never dreamed of God finding any difficulty in 
 pardoning it ; the Christian, though believing it par- 
 donable, regarding it as so deadly, that a whole 
 mighty system of mediation had to be introduced, 
 rising up to a Trinity in the Godhead, an Incarna- 
 tion of the Son of God, and a voluntary sacrifice of 
 this Great Being for the expiation of human guilt. 
 The Jew in his prayer-book can speak, indeed, 
 of atonement, but it is of atonement made by him- 
 self, as when he prays, " Alas, through our iniquities 
 Thy holy temple was destroyed, and there is not 
 unto us temple nor priest to expiate for us ; therefore 
 let it be willed from Thy presence, that the diminish- 
 ing of my fat and blood which I have consumed this 
 day may be as the fat that was laid on the altar 
 before Thee, and be accepted from me " ( Tephilloth, 
 p. 40). And again, " If the time is approached that 
 I am to die, O let my death be an expiation for all 
 my sins, iniquities, and transgressions, wherein I 
 have sinned, offended, and transgressed against Thee, 
 
HOW TO ACCOUNT FOR IT? 13 
 
 from the day of my existence on the earth until 
 this day" {Tephillolh, p. 162). But the Christian 
 utterly shrinks from any atonement made by him- 
 self or any other sinful creature, and looks to the 
 Incarnate Saviour as the Lamb of God that taketh 
 away the sin of the world. 
 
 How, then, were these doctrines introduced into 
 human thought and literature — doctrines which, 
 though the Christian regards them as a develop- 
 ment, and the greatest development of Judaism, the 
 Jew utterly denies to have any trace of themselves 
 or any justification in the Old Testament ? They 
 originated, as an absolute creation, according to the 
 Jew, in the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth and His 
 immediate disciples. There is no room for any 
 theory that they were gradually formed in the 
 Christian Church. They appear in the debate of 
 Justin with Trypho, as they would do in a modern 
 discussion, and they are found, not only in the 
 earliest Gospels, but in the four Epistles of Paul to 
 the Corinthians, Galatians, and Romans, before the 
 year 60 of the Christian era, as the most extreme 
 rationalism acknowledges. They came, then, into 
 birth at once, if we are to follow the Gospels, mature 
 in the mind of Jesus ; or, if we try to construct a 
 theory by setting the Gospels aside, they were de- 
 vised by His followers as a means of obviating the 
 shame of His death, or were hinted at by Himself, 
 when He anticipated its occurrence. Is this credible 
 
14 THE GREATEST HISTORICAL MARVEL: 
 
 upon Jewish premises ? The thoughts involved are 
 confessedly great, startling, and gigantic, and they 
 are also parts of a coherent system, which, starting 
 from the infinite evil of sin, brings in a Divine yet 
 voluntary sacrifice, and connects the work of expia- 
 tion with that of regeneration and sanctification, 
 through another manifestation of the one Godhead. 
 The very connexion claimed by this system with the 
 Old Testament as a fulfilment of the great hope of a 
 Messiah and kingdom of God, and as the antitype of 
 the wonderful and significant ritual of sacrifice, indi- 
 cates a farther reach and vastness of thought, which 
 the candid Jew, in disowning it, must respect ; but 
 looking simply at the naked greatness and loftiness of 
 the ideas in themselves, is it at all reasonable to say 
 that they were the dreams of a solitary and unedu- 
 cated Galilean, or the hallucinations of a Rabbi like 
 Saul, who left the synagogue, and gave for his other- 
 wise inexplicable defection this justification, that 
 the crucified Nazarene was an incarnation of the 
 Divinity, and an atoning Messiah hitherto undreamt 
 of in the schools of Rabbinism ? Could the radical 
 principles of Christianity have originated thus . by a 
 sudden descent from the clouds or emergence from 
 the abyss, more especially when we find the Old 
 Testament idea of the perfections of God and the 
 supreme duty of loving Him so faithfully adhered 
 to ; when we find a morality preached, which Orobio 
 confesses is so pure, that anyone practising it would 
 
HOW TO ACCOUNT FOR IT?- 15 
 
 live like an angel (Arnica Collatio, p. 78), and when, 
 not least, Christ and His apostles, in disregard of 
 the allegation that the Old Testament doctrine of 
 immortality was obscure or uncertain, unhesitatingly 
 strike into the line of their Pharisaic opponents, and 
 defend it against the Sadducees ? Are these indi- 
 cations of tender sensibility of conscience, of sound 
 thought, and of wise discrimination, compatible with 
 the Jewish hypothesis that such men were abandoned 
 by God to a wild and monstrous hypothesis respect- 
 ing His own Being, and His mode of forgiving and 
 renewing sinners ; or that they actually fabricated, 
 on the spur of the moment, and ex post facto, (as 
 nothing of the kind is seen in the faith of the dis- 
 ciples up to their Master's death,) this sweeping 
 series of dogmas, alike in defiance of reason 
 and Old Testament Scripture, to retrieve the 
 shame of the crucifixion, and to turn that into a 
 Divine sacrifice which was a merited, or at least 
 not unnatural, punishment for blasphemy or incen- 
 diary delusion ? That Christ and His apostles were 
 deceivers, happily the Jews in general no longer 
 hold ; but it is put to the calm consideration of all, 
 whether they could, under the conditions which 
 alone the Jewish belief allows, have either intel- 
 lectually or morally originated so vast and stu- 
 pendous a scheme, and whether it is not still to 
 the Jew an unexplained marvel, and one that should 
 lead him farther for its solution ? 
 
16 THE GREATEST HISTORICAL MARVEL: 
 
 II. The second question connected with this en- 
 quiry is, How came the historical character and 
 picture of Jesus Christ ? This is so far included in 
 the discussion of Christ's doctrine, but not mainly ; 
 since it is one thing to be the author of an epoch- 
 making doctrine, and another thing to be the 
 exhibitor and standard in one's own person of a 
 perfect moral life. Now this honour the Christian 
 claims for Jesus Christ, and he presses the claim on 
 the attention of the Jew. This controversy in 
 regard to the life of Jesus has lately agitated the 
 public mind in all intellectual communities, and 
 though non-Christian Jews have not contributed 
 much to it, they doubtless have not been insensible 
 to its interest and gravity. Very large concessions 
 have been made to the Christian side by those who 
 might have been expected, a priori, to have more 
 sympathy with the depreciatory estimate of Judaism. 
 No doubt candid and favourable judgments of Jesus 
 have been passed before by Jews, as by Orobio, who 
 speaks of Him as a " just and innocent man " (vir 
 Justus et innocensy p. 63) ; but the recent strain of 
 commendation by unbelievers has been singular. 
 Renan thus speaks of Him: "This sublime person, 
 who daily presides still over the destiny of the 
 world, we may call Divine, not in the sense that 
 Jesus has absorbed all divinity or been (to speak 
 scholastically) adequate to the idea, but in the sense 
 that Jesus is the individual who has made His 
 
NO IV TO ACCOUNT FOR IT? 17 
 
 species take the greatest step towards the divine " 
 (Vie de Jesus, p. 457). Thus also Strauss : " When 
 Jesus exhorted His disciples to be perfect as their 
 Father in heaven was, He thought of God in a 
 moral point of view, as He found Himself affected 
 in the loftiest moments of His own religious life, 
 and by this ideal He strengthened His own religious 
 life in turn. The deepest religious sentiment which 
 lay in His consciousness was that all embracing love 
 — the love that overcomes evil with good, which He 
 accordingly transferred to God as the essence of His 
 
 being And when Jesus had developed in 
 
 Himself this spirit which, joyfully one with God, 
 embraced all men as brethren, He had realized in 
 Himself the prophetic ideal of a new covenant 
 along with the l^w written on the heart, Jer. xxxi. 
 31 " {Neues Leben Jesu, p. 207). These writers, in- 
 deed, do not hold Jesus faultless, but they allow Him 
 to have gone as near that point as human infirmity 
 permitted, and the same concession is made by a 
 well-known English writer of the freest school, Mr. 
 Rathbone Greg : " I value the religion of Jesus, not 
 as being absolute and perfect truth, but as containing 
 more truth, purer truth, higher truth, stronger truth 
 than has ever yet been given to man. Much of His 
 teaching I unhesitatingly receive as to the best of 
 my judgment unimprovable and unsurpassable, 
 fitted, if obeyed, to make earth a Paradise indeed, 
 and man only a little lower than the angels " {Creed 
 of Christendom, p. 244). And again, "The spiritu- 
 
 2 
 
1 8 THE GREATEST HISTORICAL MARVEL: 
 
 ality of Christ's character, and the superhuman 
 excellence of his life lie at the bottom of the 
 dogma of the Incarnation" (p. 283). 
 
 It may be respectfully suggested to Jewish minds, 
 that only a strong and overpowering excellence 
 could have drawn forth these tributes from writers 
 opposed to the divine origin and authority of Chris- 
 tianity ; and it has to be added that the chief objec- 
 tions which they take to the absolute completeness 
 of the moral character of Jesus, are removed by 
 granting His Divine dignity ; for the air of authority 
 complained of as one fault, and a certain enthusi- 
 astic expectation of greater honours and results than 
 fall to the lot of man or any creature, are, by this 
 supposition of a higher, while at the same time 
 inclusively human, personality, turned into harmonies 
 and fitnesses. Could the assumption of the Divinity 
 of Jesus be maintained, it is quite certain also that 
 the Jewish charge of blasphemy would lose its force, 
 and that the appearance of throwing life away would 
 vanish ; for not to mention that a good man is 
 entitled, like the Maccabean martyrs, to sacrifice life 
 for a good object, the superiority to ordinary laws of 
 one whose life is self-dependent, must vindicate here 
 for Jesus a more than mortal liberty. Nor can the 
 natural prejudice of Jewish minds against the charac- 
 ter of Jesus, as connected with a claim to enlarge 
 and modify the religion of Moses, maintain itself, if 
 the position be once looked at, that a higher, even 
 
HOW TO ACCOUNT FOR IT? 
 
 19 
 
 a divine, prophet is not in the nature of things incon- 
 ceivable; and that then the tone of authority, which 
 sounds at first like arrogance, is a natural fitness and 
 perfection ; as Moses, had he returned to earth, would 
 naturally have dwarfed all other prophets. To 
 judge of Jesus here, and especially to annul all His 
 other moral excellences, without attempting to enter 
 into the Christian point of view, is hardly fair ; and 
 a Christian would be guilty of the same unfairness 
 were he to dismiss Mahomet without even looking- 
 at any real or alleged virtues or glories of character, 
 that supported his pretensions. In this connexion 
 the very patriotism of Jesus ; His tears shed over 
 those who rejected Him ; His prayer for the authors 
 of His death, " Father, forgive them ; for they know 
 not what they do ; " His command to His disciples, 
 to begin the preaching of the good news, which He 
 believed Himself called to seal by His blood, in Jeru- 
 salem, reveal a grandeur and depth of charity, which 
 blend the extremes of earnestness and of tenderness, 
 and attest, even by the highest Jewish standard, the 
 calling of a prophet, and more than a prophet. It is 
 the same to a Christian eye at every point of his 
 moral career. Orobio admits (p. 63), that in de- 
 nouncing the sins of the people and the hypocrisy 
 of the rulers, He did no more than the Rabbis were 
 bound to do in the synagogues every Sabbath-day ; 
 and the courage which thus braved a worse death 
 than any of the prophets, was in the track of their 
 
20 THE GREATEST HISTORICAL MARVEL: 
 
 sufferings in its deepest spirit and motives ; while 
 His whole life was a going about doing good in 
 ways which none of them organized into a daily 
 labour. It is impossible to think of the humanity 
 and gentleness of Christ without indignant repudia- 
 tion in His name of the wrongs and cruelties, so 
 long and shamefully inflicted by Christians upon the 
 race for whom His image and memory ought to 
 have secured not only recognition, but sympathy ; 
 yet what Christian heart has been so wounded by 
 these injuries, as that of the loving Saviour Himself, 
 who all through has been mourning over the stain 
 thus cast upon His religion, and rebuking His perse- 
 cuting disciples, who knew not what spirit they were 
 of! 
 
 Is not this to a Jewish mind the most instructive 
 lesson of the perfection of Jesus, that it avails at 
 length to correct the errors alike of friends and foes, 
 and that every great advance in mercy and in hu- 
 mility, as in truth and righteousness, is connected 
 with His name ? We have already the confession of 
 Orobio, that if Christ's morality were practised, men 
 would live like angels : but even as in Himself, so in 
 those who follow Him, the morality cannot be dis- 
 joined from the doctrine ; and as Christ can only shine 
 in His true moral splendour when placed in the higher 
 firmament of a Divine glory, so it is, as united with 
 Him, and thus cleansed from sin, and impelled 
 by that Divine Spirit whom He puts within them, 
 
HOW TO ACCOUNT FOR IT? 
 
 that men and nations rise to the level of His calling. 
 He needs to descend that He may rise and lift 
 others with Him ; and this mystery of suffering and 
 death for human salvation, as it gives the deepest 
 consecration to His own moral greatness and ten- 
 derness, alone supplies the impulse to repentance, 
 and the spring to a higher than natural virtue. If 
 this career of a moral Reformer and Saviour is not 
 stamped upon the life and work of Jesus Christ, first 
 by His efforts of love and intercession with God, not 
 to change His will but carry out His grace, and then 
 by His sublime influence and example as an appeal 
 to the hearts of men, Christians have wholly misread 
 His history. But having felt this impulse, and felt it 
 with a power and a blessedness denied to all besides, 
 they may, nay, they must speak of it, and to Jew and 
 to Gentile they must bear the testimony, "That which 
 we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that 
 ye also may have fellowship with us, and truly our 
 fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son 
 Jesus Christ." 
 
 This impression made by Christ's personal cha- 
 racter, as revealed and standing unchallengeable 
 in history, is something altogether unique. Socrates 
 among the Greeks, Moses among the Hebrews, has 
 drawn forth no such tributes, has been surrounded 
 with no such wide and ever-growing veneration. 
 How is it to be explained on the supposition 
 that all is a mistake, or mere natural greatness 
 
22 THE GREATEST HISTORICAL MARVEL: 
 
 exaggerated to Divine proportions ? The Jew has 
 here to bow to the voice of history, as he believes in 
 the supernatural, and since the supernatural cannot be 
 exhausted in one manifestation. If the Incarnation 
 is not an impossibility, it may be a fact ; and a fresh 
 reading of the prophets may shew that prophecy too 
 lends its witness, and that this wonderful life is 
 written twice over, not only in Gospel records, but 
 first of all and centuries before, in oracles like those 
 which even an Ewald applies to a Messiah, the hope 
 of Israel ; and which even a Strauss, as in regard to 
 the liii. of Isaiah, admits to be very hard to be 
 turned away from a single person, and in which he 
 grants that the mighty Sufferer read beforehand — 
 with a sense of strength and consolation — what He 
 took to be the inspired story of His own death as an 
 anticipated atonement for the sins of many. 
 
 III. The third and last question connected with 
 this historical wonder is, How came the historical 
 success, prevalence, and influence of Christianity ? 
 This branches out into two parts — the success of 
 Christianity, and the comparative failure of Judaism 
 since the Christian era. And first, of the success of 
 Christianity. No doubt Christianity has been only 
 imperfectly successful. In the first ages it reached 
 its limits in a few centuries; it was long torpid and 
 stagnant, if not declining; and to this day it is but 
 the religion of a minority of the human race. Other 
 religions, too, have been successful in some sort — ■ 
 
HOW TO ACCOUNT FOR IT? 23 
 
 Buddhism in China, Mahometanism both in the East 
 and in the West — while ancient Rome, with all its 
 tolerance, spread its gods, and especially the worship 
 of the emperor, from the Euphrates to the Rhine. 
 But with every abatement, Christianity has been the 
 most successful religion in history, and, at this day, of 
 all religions, rules in the intellectual and moral world. 
 The gigantic systems of ancient paganism which it 
 found in full possession of the centres of civilization, 
 and which Judaism had done so little to eradicate, or 
 even to assimilate to itself, Christianity in three or 
 four centuries wholly swept away. Nor will it avail 
 to account for this revolution, as Orobio does (p. 68), 
 by the congeniality of a human God, dead, raised 
 and seated on high, to Gentile conceptions; for the 
 cross was to the Greek as great a scandal as to the 
 Jew, and Christianity had to force its way by the 
 arguments of innumerable apologists, and the blood 
 of countless martyrs, and only in its victory relapsed 
 into conformity with paganism. It created, even in 
 its decay, the institutions of the middle ages, out of 
 which modern Europe rose, and by which it is still 
 fashioned. It revived with the revival of letters, 
 shaking off its own corruptions, and in Protestantism 
 coming nearer to Judaism in the best sense, and 
 linking its future career with Bible study, with 
 prophet-like earnestness of spirit, and with true and 
 universal liberty. Of all religions Christianity is the 
 only one that has carried through a successful Re- 
 
24 THE GREATEST HISTORICAL MARVEL: 
 
 formation, and that has stood its ground to this hour 
 amidst the advancing tide of culture and even of 
 unbelief, blessing the poor and the outcast with its 
 inward consolations and immortal hopes; while owning 
 no defeat in the sorest conflicts with sceptical phi- 
 losophy, with materialistic science, and with the wild 
 spirit of anarchy and revolution. It is identified in 
 our own and in other lands with the progress of 
 temperance ; with the sacredness of chastity and 
 domestic ties; and with the alliance between edu- 
 cation and a pure and virtuous literature. In this 
 one century it has abolished the slave-trade and 
 burst the fetters of colonial slavery, emancipated the 
 serfs of Russia, and overruled the most terrible of 
 civil wars to the same merciful issue. It at once 
 impels and makes tributary to itself every useful 
 industry and healing art, writes its name upon 
 colonization and discovery, and, by its missions in 
 every land, binds itself up with the purpose of history 
 and the unity of the world. These are but the out- 
 ward victories of Christianity; its best conquests are 
 in depths to which no eye of man can penetrate. 
 When the heart is wrung with the sadness of remorse 
 and fear, it recalls the " Man of sorrows," who found 
 a remedy for sin in His own unutterable woe and 
 solitude ; it recovers the wanderer by the memory of 
 the good Shepherd who gave His life for the sheep ; 
 amidst the sullen gloom of affliction it gives wing to 
 prayer by the thought of that Intercessor whose own 
 
HOW TO ACCOUNT FOR IT? 25 
 
 head was bowed in agony; and when the last 
 parting comes it meets the mourner at the gate with 
 words to which Death has already yielded — " I am 
 the Resurrection and the Life!" So long as Christ 
 can constrain the inmost spirits of men by spells like 
 these, His religion is not a failure. It is on its way 
 to a wider empire over everything that is not fatally 
 hostile; and that earlier faith which before His day, 
 as Christians believe, heralded its coming and its 
 victories, has only departed from it for a season to 
 be recovered for ever. 
 
 The second element of wonder is, that Chris- 
 tianity should have been advancing while Judaism is 
 stationary or in comparative decay. Doubtless, the 
 vitality of the Jewish race is wonderful. Its preser- 
 vation is a miracle of history. Its resources, intel- 
 lectual, commercial and political, are as fresh and 
 inexhaustible as ever. It is not in these spheres 
 that we speak of abated energy or influence. It is 
 in the strictly religious sphere, where it comes most 
 into contrast with the boundless vigour, the pro- 
 selyting enthusiasm, the world-subduing spirit of 
 Christianity. Where is there anything parallel in 
 Jewish circles ? Where anything even to equal the 
 impulse which Judaism gave in its Alexandrine 
 development before the Christian era, and by the 
 circulation of the Septuagint over the Greek-speak- 
 ing world ? For generations Judaism, as a religious 
 force, has been little more than conservative. It has 
 
26 THE GREATEST HISTORICAL MARVEL: 
 
 neither opened its gates to the Gentile, nor witnessed, 
 by an active and missionary propagandism, for the 
 great doctrines anciently given it to hold up before 
 the nations. If they have been taught the unity of 
 God, it has been by Christian more than Jewish 
 influence. If the Ten Commandments, with the 
 Sabbath law in the heart of them (though in an 
 altered form) have become the moral lesson-book of 
 nations, it is because Christian voices have re-echoed 
 the trumpet-sound by which they were first spoken. 
 If the hallowed names of Abraham, and Isaac, and 
 Jacob have gone to the antipodes, and entered into 
 the devotions of cannibals recovered from infanticide 
 and worse horrors to follow these patriarchs in the 
 way of righteousness, it is because the books of the 
 Old Testament, that instructed them, form a portion 
 of the millions of copies, in two hundred tongues, scat- 
 tered by other than Jewish hands. Whence is this — 
 a fact so patent and so acknowledged, that the men- 
 tion of it can give no offence ? Nay, whence is it 
 that the dearest and most sacred of Jewish memories 
 have found other propagators more effectual than 
 their first custodiers, so that the Christian readers of 
 Moses, as an inspired man of God, far outnumber 
 the Jewish ; the Psalms are unspeakably more widely 
 sung in the church than in the synagogue, and the 
 Christian counterpart of the Passover leaves every 
 way behind in diffusion the original celebration ? 
 Can it be that the God of Israel has employed 
 
HO IV TO ACCOUNT FOR IT? 27 
 
 aliens more largely for the memory of His wonders 
 than His own children, as if the tribe of Joseph in 
 dispersion had carried His name farther than the 
 tribe of Judah, or as if the Samaritans had made the 
 law of Moses a world-wide book, while the chosen 
 seed retained it in a corner ? How is it that at 
 every point the Jew finds his ground pre-occupied 
 and his associations disturbed ? He is confronted 
 by another, and yet not another — for he hears every- 
 where in Christian lands of Israel, of Zion, of Jeru- 
 salem, of David, of a great High-Priest and an 
 endless sacrifice, and of a people that sat long in 
 darkness coming to walk in the light of the Lord. 
 Is it not that the Israel of God's covenant has a 
 wider sense, or at least an earlier birth, than has been 
 dreamt of ; that the great words of Moses' song have 
 been fulfilled, " Rejoice, ye Gonn, with His people ! " 
 and that the Gentiles sooner than the eyes of 
 Israel have beheld the change, have responded to 
 the call, " Ye are the children of the living God " ? 
 Does not this look like the fulfilment of the early 
 Christian hope, not to mention Old Testament fore- 
 shadowings, that the outcast Gentiles would for a 
 season get the start, and Israel at length awake as 
 these gathered home ? O that the spreading light 
 might reveal the already risen Sun, and that under 
 His glad and glorious beams, cheering the sadness 
 of dispersion, chasing the darkness of alienation, 
 Jew and Gentile might embrace as brethren, careless 
 
28 THE GREATEST HISTORICAL MARVEL: 
 
 who had been first, and who last, in hasting to the 
 meeting-point, but alike returning to Zion with 
 songs and everlasting joy ! Yes, the common song 
 is prepared, the song of penitence to both, of glory- 
 ing to neither, as abased they lie in the dust before 
 that sovereign word which binds Sinai and Calvary 
 in one: " I will have mercy on whom I will have 
 mercy, and will have compassion on whom I will have 
 compassion:" and its strain is this, " Lo, this is our 
 God; we have waited for Him, and He will save us; 
 this is the Lord, we have waited for Him ; we will 
 rejoice and be glad in His salvation ! O that this 
 salvation of Israel were come out of Zion ! When the 
 Lord bringeth back the captivity of His people, Jacob 
 shall rejoice and Israel shall be glad ! " In the view 
 of such a future, the desire of all nations, the fulness 
 of the Messianic age, the common need and hope of 
 Jew and Christian, struggling already through the 
 sin and darkness of time and brightening to the 
 glory of an eternal kingdom (which, O thou God of 
 our fathers, grant that through thine own Messiah we 
 all may share ! ) let us with one heart take up the 
 prayers, " Look down from heaven, and behold from 
 the habitation of Thy holiness and of Thy glory ; 
 where is Thy zeal and Thy strength, the sounding of 
 Thy bowels and of Thy mercies towards me ? are 
 they restrained ? Doubtless, Thou art our Father, 
 though Abraham be ignorant of us and Israel ac- 
 knowledge us not : Thou, O Lord, art our father, 
 
HOW TO ACCOUNT FOR IT? 29 
 
 our Redeemer; Thy name is from everlasting." 
 " Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, Thou that leadest 
 Joseph like a flock, Thou that dwellest between the 
 cherubim, shine forth. Before Ephraim, and Ben- 
 jamin and Manasseh stir up Thy strength and come 
 and save us. Turn us again, O God, and cause Thy 
 face to shine and we shall be saved ! " " Let Thy 
 hand be upon the man of Thy right hand, the Son 
 of man whom Thou madest strong for Thyself. So 
 will not we go back from Thee ; quicken us and we 
 will call upon Thy name. Turn us -again, O Lord 
 God of hosts, cause Thy face to shine and we shall 
 be saved," Amen. 
 
II. 
 %irfkmfg, % iwti&ttihm of % TS^mt 
 
 BY 
 
 REV. CANON COOK, M.A. 
 
II. 
 
 CHRISTIANITY, THE JUSTIFICATION OF 
 THE MOSAIC ECONOMY. 
 
 \ li 7" HEN we consider the early history of man- 
 * • kind, specially that portion in which our race 
 attained its highest development, one name stands 
 out in unrivalled pre-eminence. It is the name of 
 the man who first promulgated the central truths of 
 all religion in a form which has impressed itself inde- 
 libly upon the conscience of humanity ; who first in- 
 stituted a political system resting on the basis of law 
 in the place of individual will ; who declared the 
 principles on which all sound morality depends, and 
 that in a code equally remarkable for simplicity and 
 completeness ; who in his own life exemplified the 
 principles which he inculcated, not as his own dis- 
 covery, but as derived by a personal communication 
 from the eternal source of light and life ; the name 
 of the first and most original of historians, legislators, 
 patriots, prophets, and divines, — the name of the 
 Hebrew Moses. 
 
 The facts are indeed such as cannot but excite the 
 
 3 
 
34 CHRISTIANITY, THE JUSTIFICATION OF 
 
 deepest feelings of interest and curiosity. If we look 
 at them as they are recorded in the narrative of the 
 Pentateuch, fully and faithfully, as the truest repre- 
 sentatives of Hebrew and of Christian thought have 
 ever held ; if even we set aside all contested points 
 confining ourselves to circumstances which, as all 
 admit, must underlie the narrative, we have results of 
 transcendent and unquestioned importance, — results, 
 be it noted, accomplished by the instrumentality of 
 one man, unaided, and, indeed, from first to last 
 thwarted by those among whom and for whom he 
 worked. Wherever we find a recognition of the 
 unity and absolute supremacy of God ; wherever we 
 find the religion which, whatever may be its other 
 claims, is, at present, unquestionably co-extensive 
 with all true civilization, which is professed by all 
 nations which recognise the mutual rights and obli- 
 gations of men, and alone for some ages have ad- 
 vanced and are still advancing in every department 
 of science and art, there we find, fair and full in 
 proportion to the stage of mental and moral develop- 
 ment, a recognition of the principles established in 
 the Mosaic dispensation, of the position of Moses as 
 foremost among the early teachers of the world. 
 
 When, indeed, the Pentateuch was first brought 
 into contact with the Gentile mind, clothed by the 
 Alexandrians in the language of Greece, it took its 
 place at once among the chief factors of progres- 
 sive thought. The originality, the grandeur of its 
 
THE MOSAIC ECONOMY. 35 
 
 first utterances were discerned by the profoundest 
 critics ; philanthropists and legislators found in it 
 a new source for the elucidation of fundamental 
 principles of right. Late inquiries have shown that 
 shortly before the Christian period, its influence, indi- 
 rectly and unconsciously, but rapidly, pervaded the 
 religious and philosophic atmosphere of the ancient 
 world. Nor when under a new form — a form, as we 
 hold, distinctly foreshadowed or intimated in the 
 narrative — the inmost principles of the Pentateuch, 
 divested of all merely local and temporal associa- 
 tions, in their highest energy and perfect development 
 achieved the conquest over heathenism in the fairest 
 regions of Europe and Asia, was the great name of 
 the author eclipsed, or obscured. If indeed you 
 would look out for the fullest appreciation of the 
 genius, the principles, the influence of the Hebrew 
 legislator, you will find it, not, as might perhaps be 
 expected, in the early Rabbinical writings, nor even 
 in the works of the noble and lofty spirits of me- 
 diaeval Judaism, or of the worthiest representatives of 
 Israel in our own time ; but in the writings of large- 
 hearted and earnest Christians, who see in every tri- 
 umph of their religion a continuation of his work, in 
 every discovery of Divine truth a development of his 
 principles. A new light is indeed cast upon that noble 
 countenance seen through the medium of Christianity. 
 The cross, with its antecedents and results, does not 
 stand out in antagonism to Sinai. It alone explains, 
 
36 CHRISTIANITY, THE JUSTIFICATION OF 
 
 and in explaining it alone justifies, the code with all 
 its concomitants, its multifarious and mysterious in- 
 stitutions, which were there committed to Moses. It 
 tells us for what purposes they were given, it teaches 
 their necessity and their use ; and no man accepts all 
 the claims of Moses to our admiration and reverence 
 so unreservedly and gratefully as he to whom the 
 cross is dearest, who sees in it, and in it only, the 
 pledge of the redemption of man. 
 
 This is indeed the point which I am specially 
 called upon to bring before you. The full explana- 
 tion, and therefore the full and the only real justifi- 
 cation, of the Mosaic dispensation, is to be found in 
 the fulfilment of all that it promised or prefigured by 
 the Christ ; for whose coming every true Israelite 
 was ever looking forward ; by whose coming, as 
 every true Christian believes, salvation has been 
 made attainable to every individual of the human 
 race. 
 
 Here, however, on the outset I am met by the 
 obvious objection : If the character and work of 
 Moses be such as I have described, how can I 
 speak of the need of any explanation, more specially 
 of any justification ? To this I answer, the whole 
 question is, in what light are we to look on that 
 character or that work ? Is the system as it stands 
 in the Pentateuch to be regarded as complete and 
 final — the last word of God to man ? Or is it to be 
 regarded as a preparatory dispensation, a necessary 
 
THE MOSAIC ECONOMY. 37 
 
 stage in the progressive revelation of the Divine will, 
 and as such of necessity incomplete, its true glory 
 being derived from what it prefigured, and for which 
 it paved the way ? The former is the Jewish, the 
 latter the Christian point of view. The Jewish 
 view is stated clearly by the most authoritative 
 exponents of Judaism. These are the words of 
 Maimonides in the ninth chapter of his treatise 
 on the fundamentals of the law : — " It is declared 
 and expounded in the law that its every precept 
 standeth fast for all generations ; that in it there 
 is no place for any variation — nothing can be taken 
 from it, nothing can be added to it." This principle, 
 which in the Bible applies to the immutable moral 
 and spiritual law, is thus extended to the whole 
 Mosaic system. All prophets and inspired writers 
 had but one work — to determine the application 
 of unvarying truths to ever-varying circumstances. 
 Indeed, the whole of the prophetical books — those 
 books in which the voice of God sounds to us 
 and to the Israelite so grandly — were regarded as 
 destined to pass away ; eternity was reserved to the 
 Pentateuch alone, which was to retain its position as 
 the source and substance of all revealed truth, even 
 in the Messianic time* Some modern advocates 
 of Judaism, as opposed to Christianity, tell us that 
 
 * The passage is curious. In the " Hilcoth Megilla " Maimonides 
 says: _«All the books of the Prophets, and all the Cetubim {sc. 
 Hagiographi) are to be abolished in the days of Messiah, except the 
 history of Esther. " 
 
35 CHRISTIANITY, THE JUSTIFICATION OF 
 
 we are to judge of the code and institutions of 
 the Pentateuch with reference to later expositions ; 
 but the older and more influential rabbis taught 
 that attempts to explain its injunctions, to develop 
 its principles, are presumptuous, and utterly uncalled 
 for. Moses, according to them, alone saw God 
 face to face, received into his own mind and com- 
 municated to others all that could be revealed of 
 the Divine will. That was the essential distinction 
 between all other prophets and Moses — they saw 
 in shadow, in enigma, through a veil or a glass 
 darkly, and prophesied in dream, or ecstasy, or 
 vision ; God revealed to him what no man knew 
 before him, or saw after him. Hence the Talmud 
 holds " that Messiah must be the greatest of future 
 prophets, as being nearest in spirit to our master 
 Moses." Now, I hold that position to be absolutely 
 untenable ; it is, in fact, though tacitly, yet really 
 abandoned by the ablest Jewish writers themselves ; 
 there is no precept, no institution peculiar to 
 Mosaism which does not undergo a complete trans- 
 formation in order to bring it into conformity with 
 the developed intelligence of man. In fact, if we 
 examine the distinctive principles and institutions 
 of Mosaism, without reference to their bearings 
 upon higher truths, afterwards to be revealed, we 
 shall find them incapable of justification in some 
 points of most serious importance ; a retrograde 
 even rather than an onward movement is demon- 
 
THE MOSAIC ECONOMY. 39 
 
 strable. They stand out in unfavourable contrast 
 to the religion and principles of the patriarchs 
 as described by Moses himself, whether we regard 
 their forms of worship, their family life, or their 
 relations to the world without. But on the 
 other hand, when we look into those institutions 
 and examine that code, with reference to what 
 was to follow them, we recognise their full signi- 
 ficance and grandeur; we see in them a real and 
 necessary stage in the progressive revelation of the 
 Divine will: bringing all that preceded them up 
 to the point of culmination ; causing the need of a 
 future disclosure to be intensely realized ; taking man 
 in a state of immature development ; keeping him 
 for a season in a state of subjection and training ; 
 exercising faculties for which full scope would be 
 afterwards given ; thus doing their proper work as 
 the best conceivable ircuSaycDyos, guide, protector, 
 and tutor, until he was fit for admission into the 
 school of Christ. 
 
 It is evident that it would take a long time to 
 work out this proposition. I can only hope to 
 throw out a few suggestions, which those who are 
 interested in the subject may follow up at their 
 leisure ; nor do I fear that the imperfect form in 
 which they are necessarily presented will entirely 
 obscure the great truths which, if received, would 
 complete the reconciliation of God's ancient people 
 with the followers of their own Christ. 
 
40 CHRISTIANITY, THE JUSTIFICATION OF 
 
 First let us consider the form of religion, specially 
 of religious worship as it was settled by the Mosaic 
 code. Was it, regarded by itself, an advance ? 
 Could it have been intended to be permanent ? 
 Here the means of forming a tolerably correct 
 judgment are at hand. We have the earlier forms 
 of religious service depicted by the same master 
 hand which sets before us the multifarious and 
 imposing ceremonial of the Israelites. Both are 
 brought into immediate juxtaposition in successive 
 books ; and certainly no greater contrast can well 
 be conceived than that which comes before us in 
 two of these books, the one dealing with the period 
 before Moses, the other detailing the institutions 
 which Moses was commanded to establish. It 
 would make no substantial difference in this argu- 
 ment were we even to allow weight to the assertions 
 of those critics who assume that the two books, 
 Genesis and Leviticus, not to speak of Exodus, 
 belong to different authors, and to different times. 
 No one questions that the former book presents the 
 only portraiture, no candid and well-informed reader 
 doubts that it presents a singularly vivid and faithful 
 portraiture of the patriarchal times, or that the latter 
 gives a no less faithful account of the Mosaic insti- 
 tutions. That Moses wrote both is my own con- 
 viction, that which has been, till within the last 
 hundred years, the general, the all but universal 
 belief among Jews and Christians ; but whether he 
 
THE MOSAIC ECONOMY. 41 
 
 wrote both or not, it is certain that in both we 
 find the only account of the great facts which he 
 received and taught. 
 
 In the former book let us confine our attention to 
 the form of religion as presented to Abraham. No 
 personage in the Old Testament stands out more 
 distinctly before us. He is, indeed, the very first 
 person in the world's history with whom we seem 
 to have a personal acquaintance. Other forms are 
 there with clear, definite outlines, — nothing, indeed, 
 is more remarkable than the vivid impression which 
 the inspired historian makes by a few plain words 
 as he brings before us the ancestors of our race. 
 But in Abraham we see a friend ; we note the 
 movements of a kindred heart ; his words and 
 thoughts find a response in our mind. We revert 
 naturally to him when we would touch the chord 
 of religious emotion, when we would see how a 
 noble and loving spirit would approach its God. 
 Now, of all characteristics of the religion of Abra- 
 ham, the most striking is its thorough personality. 
 In prayer, in every act of religious worship, his soul 
 is in direct contact with its object. God speaks to 
 his spirit, his spirit addresses God, without any inter- 
 vention. Abraham knows indeed of the existence 
 of a priesthood : he recognises the position and 
 claims of Melchizedek ; but for himself, for his 
 family, he feels no need of such an institution : it 
 did not belong to the inner sphere of communion 
 
42 CHRISTIANITY, THE JUSTIFICATION OF 
 
 with God. Sacrifices he offers on certain occasions, 
 but they do not enter into his daily life, and they 
 are offered by his own hands, not in a temple, but 
 under the' open vault of heaven ; offered as the 
 expression of a heart devoting itself, and all that it 
 loves and prizes, unreservedly to God. Such was 
 the religion of Abraham, such was the religious 
 worship of all the Patriarchs, — each father in his own 
 household discharging the simple but most signifi- 
 cant offices of the priesthood, each drawing near 
 to God without any burdensome or elaborate cere- 
 monial, each receiving from God personal marks of 
 acceptance. Nor is this true only of the head of 
 each family. The wife, the children, the dependents, 
 live in habits of direct communion with a Father 
 ever accessible, ever willing to receive and to answer 
 their prayers. The religious life had free play. 
 Certainly the limits within which it was called forth 
 were somewhat narrow. The problems which surge 
 up from the depths of thought perplexed by the 
 mysteries of the material and the spiritual universe 
 did not come within its scope. The relations be- 
 tween the Almighty and vast communities remained 
 to be discovered or revealed ; but still there we 
 have in principle and potentiality an exemplar which, 
 fully developed and applied, comes exceedingly near 
 to the ideal of a living intercourse between God 
 and man. 
 
 Turn from this to the Israelite under the Levitical 
 
THE MOSAIC ECONOMY. 43 
 
 code. What we first note is the separation of the 
 nation into diverse and strongly contrasted classes. 
 The elements of religious life, which hitherto had been 
 harmoniously combined in the patriarchal family, 
 were now violently and permanently disjoined. On 
 the one side a priesthood remarkable, even when 
 compared with the priesthood of other nations, for 
 the completeness of its isolation ; hereditary, trans- 
 mitted from father to son, irrespective of personal 
 qualifications ; a priesthood carefully shielded from 
 ceremonial impurity by avoidance of all contact 
 with those without, commanded to abstain from 
 demonstrations of natural affection in times which 
 draw out man's deepest and tenderest feelings ; a 
 priesthood marked out by striking accessories, per- 
 sonal and official, performing the most sacred offices, 
 those which most nearly concerned the spiritual life 
 of the people, in a part of a sanctuary inaccessible 
 to all others, spending the greater portion of their 
 own lives in duties which, notwithstanding all that 
 can be said as to their significance, must have been 
 wearisome to the last degree ; duties, in fact, which 
 might seem in some respects suitable only to persons 
 of coarse habits and blunted senses ; foremost among 
 them being the sacrificial rites when the blood of 
 unnumbered victims dyed the marble pavement, 
 when the courts of the temple echoed with the 
 moans of beasts expiring under the priestly blows. 
 Taken as the last, the highest representative of man, 
 
44 CHRISTIANITY, THE JUSTIFICATION OF 
 
 permitted to worship his Maker, we cannot but look 
 upon the Levitical priest with amazement, — such 
 amazement as Abraham might be conceived to have 
 felt had the Levitical service been presented to his 
 spirit in vision, had he seen the mass of his own 
 descendants — a people in covenant with God — shut 
 out from the priest's court, the high priest isolated 
 from his brethren, forbidden himself to enter the 
 sanctuary and approach the mercy-seat save on one 
 solemn occasion, when above all points the most 
 striking was the intimation of a fearful chasm be- 
 tween God and man. We seem to hear the great 
 Patriarch, the father of the faithful, say, What 
 beggarly elements are these ? What strange super- 
 stition ? What is become of the promises ? Where 
 is the adoption ? Are these my children ? Are 
 these the children of God ? Abraham, in fact, 
 once fully assured that all this ceremonial, with its 
 countless details, was actually appointed by God 
 Himself, must have been driven to one of two 
 alternatives : either that his descendants were so 
 degenerate, so lost to spiritual truths, that they were 
 incapable of the communion to which he was him- 
 self admitted, in which he found the source of 
 spiritual life, — an alternative in which it was scarcely 
 possible for him to acquiesce, though I may observe 
 in passing, it has at various times been maintained 
 not only by some Christian thinkers but by writers 
 of great authority among the Hebrews themselves; — 
 
THE MOSAIC ECONOMY. 45 
 
 or Abraham would take the other and the true 
 alternative, — all these forms pointed to realities 
 hereafter to be revealed ; they foreshadowed some 
 great truths of eternal significance, they were in- 
 tended to awaken the spiritual sense, and to prepare 
 it for a spiritual manifestation, for the coming of 
 One who would satisfy all wants of the human 
 heart. It was simply impossible that what was 
 then presented to the outer sense should be the 
 ultimate form of a religion which has for its special 
 and, indeed, its only object, the entire restoration of 
 union with God. 
 
 And let me ask you, who know anything of the 
 history and writings of those descendants of Abraham, 
 who have not accepted the realization in Christ, of 
 all promises and foreshadowings, has not such been 
 more or less consciously a general feeling among 
 them ? The temple, the priesthood, the altar of 
 sacrifice, the whole Levitical ceremonial, have long 
 since past away ; Israelites have no substitute for 
 them. Regarding them, as they undoubtedly were, 
 the most prominent, in fact the essential character- 
 istics of the Mosaic system, they can with difficulty 
 prove themselves to be still true Jews : subject, 
 indeed, to the law, so far as regards its penalties, but 
 without its atonements ; bound by enactments with 
 which they know it is impossible to comply. We 
 might expect one long wail for the loss of what 
 were once regarded, and are still formally represented, 
 
46 CHRISTIANITY, THE JUSTIFICATION OF 
 
 to have been the most glorious privileges of the 
 chosen race. And doubtless the loss is inwardly 
 felt ; there is a profound melancholy in the devout- 
 est works of the devoutest Hebrews. Longings for 
 the past, aspirations for the future, call forth our 
 deepest and tenderest sympathy as we listen to the 
 supplications and hymnody of the synagogue ; but 
 after all it is true that the restoration of the Temple 
 service, of all the ceremonial of the Levitical code, is 
 far from being to them the main object of desire. 
 It would, in fact, be a terrible incumbrance to them. 
 Their ablest teachers are well aware, and they are dis- 
 posed to triumph in the fact, that the doctor has taken 
 the place of the priest, the teacher of the sacrificer. 
 For the service of the Temple they recognise a 
 not inadequate substitute in the service of the syna- 
 gogue — an intermediate service between that of the 
 Mosaic institution and that of the Christian Church ; 
 differing from both inasmuch as it is without the 
 sacramental foreshadowings of the one and the 
 sacramental representations of the other, and as such 
 essentially inferior to both in significance and effect, 
 but which after all they feel comes nearer to the 
 reasonable service which man is bound to offer to his 
 God than that external form, when divested of the 
 prophetic significance to which alone it owed its 
 worth. I ask, how is it that the learned, the devout, 
 the powerful, the opulent community of the Hebrews 
 remains satisfied in a condition so hardly to be 
 
THE MOSAIC EC 0X0 MY. 47 
 
 reconciled with their religious principles ? Is it not 
 a proof that the most influential of their leaders, 
 nay, that the great mass of the people, have ceased 
 to long really for the restoration of the temple ? 
 And if so, does not this prove that they are inwardly 
 conscious that the Mosaic code in its literal sense 
 and outward observances belongs to the past ? 
 Strangely enough we do sometimes hear of the 
 reconstruction of the Temple, of the restoration of 
 the old ritual, the re-establishment of the priesthood 
 with all ceremonial forms as a thing in itself desir- 
 able, and to be looked for as a concomitant of the 
 restoration of the Hebrews to their old homes ; but, 
 so far as I am aware, such speculations have little 
 vogue among the Hebrews themselves ; at least I find 
 scarcely any indications of them in the writings of 
 their chief teachers ; they occur chiefly, if not ex- 
 clusively, in the expositions of prophetical sayings by 
 some Christians, who seeing, and that very rightly, 
 in all those divinely appointed forms figures and 
 representations of the work and person of Christ, 
 most unreasonably, as I think, would have us look 
 forward to their restoration. 
 
 What we feel — I speak now in the name of 
 the great body of my fellow-Christians — is that all 
 those rites and forms, the sacrifices, the altar, the 
 temple, the priesthood, were full of meaning, and 
 that they were instituted at the right time, that they 
 did their appointed work ; they were according to the 
 
48 CHRISTIANITY, THE JUSTIFICATION OF 
 
 pattern shown to Moses on the mount ; presenting to 
 the eye of sense, and through that sense to the awakened 
 conscience, what the greatest of prophets saw with the 
 spiritual sense. In the exclusion of the people from 
 the sacred courts we read the judgment of God on 
 sin, its unspeakable defilement, its inevitable condem- 
 nation, the separation from God which it necessarily 
 involves, and which must continue until it has been 
 expiated ; in the representation of the high priest 
 we have a singularly complete bodying forth of the 
 ideal of One in whom the reunion of God and man 
 should be complete, at once one with God and one 
 with man, a true Mediator, not as distinct from both, 
 but as inseparable from both, the righteousness of 
 God being satisfied, the sin of man being put away. 
 The first Christian teachers dwell lovingly upon each 
 significant detail, realizing the absolute identity of 
 the truths which underlay the whole system of Moses 
 with those revealed in the person of Messiah : and 
 here I may express my own confident hope that 
 fuller, clearer, and more critical expositions may be 
 looked for when many descendants of the chosen race 
 — a race specially remarkable for keenness and depth 
 of spiritual instinct — come among us, not as strangers, 
 but as our elder brethren, restored to their rightful 
 place among the subjects of their Christ. 
 
 From the forms of worship I pass to the legisla- 
 tion. Here I admit that it stands out conspicuous 
 for principles of the highest value, partially recog- 
 
THE MOSAIC -ECONOMY. 49 
 
 nised or wholly ignored in all other ancient codes. 
 No legislation ever kept the balance between private 
 and public duty so justly. The claims of the state 
 were as in all codes paramount, yet here in this 
 code, and here alone, with due regard to the rights 
 of individuals. Each family preserved its own 
 integrity, domestic affections held their own place, 
 not trampled upon as elsewhere when competing 
 with national interests. The wife, the mother had 
 a far higher place than that assigned to her in the 
 great Aryan communities most remarkable for their 
 civilization. The child, though subject to the 
 parent, was not, as among the Romans, his slave 
 or chattels. The servant himself differed essentially 
 from the slave of Gentile peoples ; he was a member 
 of the .family; whether Hebrew or alien by race 
 he was admitted to all the privileges of religious 
 worship, no distinction being made between him 
 and the child of the family in the holiest rites. 
 Large as were the powers of the owner, they were 
 strictly defined and limited by law. I gladly 
 accept all that has been eloquently urged by 
 Salvador in his great work on the Institutions of 
 Moses. Regarded as a stage in man's progress, we 
 recognise a mighty advance. We have, in fact, the 
 very first instance in the history of the world of an 
 organized community living on terms of absolute 
 equality before God, without a despot, without an 
 oligarchical caste, governed wholly by law ; nor can 
 
 4 
 
50 CHRISTIANITY, THE JUSTIFICATION OF 
 
 we think without admiration of the man who, having 
 the whole disposition of affairs in his own hand, 
 made no special place of rank and power for his 
 own descendants, and effectually excluded the de- 
 scendants of his brother from the secular position 
 which, in conjunction with the priesthood, has created 
 and perpetuated the most formidable despotisms 
 known to the world. 
 
 But all this rests on the assumption that we are 
 contemplating a stage in human progress under 
 Divine guidance ; not a completion. Nothing can 
 be fairer than the defence on this ground of regu- 
 lations which now jar painfully on our feelings, 
 which, were they maintained as the last word of 
 God, would be simply unendurable. The people was 
 to be kept together as a distinct nation. It was 
 necessary that all relations, external and internal, 
 should be settled with reference to that condition. 
 The laws which defined their relations must needs 
 be such as would be intelligible to the people in 
 their actual state of mind and feelings — their ob- 
 servance must be practicable ; and this involved 
 a certain amount of accommodation, of regard to 
 temporary and mutable circumstances, an accommo- 
 dation of which the proper limits are discernible by 
 the highest wisdom, but which necessarily implies 
 a partial application, nay, an apparent ignoring, of 
 the absolute principles of right and justice, — such, 
 in fact, as can only be justified by reference to an 
 
THE MOSAIC ECONOMY. 
 
 ultimate object,, to be achieved by the separation of 
 Israel from all surrounding nati©ns. These obser- 
 vations apply to other points of high importance, 
 to the relations between husband and wife, the 
 toleration of easy divorce, to the relations between 
 citizens, and very specially to the laws of retribu- 
 tive justice, to the recognition of the right of 
 revenge. But the point which most needs justifi- 
 cation, for which no justification can be found save 
 that of temporary and peculiar preparation for a 
 work important to all future races, is the bearing 
 of the Mosaic legislation upon the feelings and 
 conscience of the whole nation in reference to a 
 vast sphere of moral duties. The special circum- 
 stances of the Israelites involved a total, though 
 temporary, suspension of the principles of inter- 
 national law. Other nations were on terms of 
 varying feeling towards their neighbours, — hostile 
 for the most part it is true, yet often indifferent, and 
 sometimes friendly; those most bitterly opposed were 
 not separated by fundamental principles, save in 
 isolated cases which belong to a later period ; but 
 the Israelites were to be absolutely apart, at open 
 undying enmity with those idolatrous nations with 
 which they were necessarily brought into closest 
 contact. Feelings which now exist between nations 
 at war with each other, specially Christian nations, 
 could not be encouraged, or even tolerated. It was 
 a tremendous condition attached to the necessary 
 
52 CHRISTIANITY, THE JUSTIFICATION OF 
 
 isolation of the people ; one which presents a most 
 unfavourable contrast to the condition of their great 
 ancestors, one which Moses must have felt could 
 only be imposed with a view to its entire abrogation 
 when the purposes for which it was imposed should 
 be fulfilled. 
 
 Look indeed at the contrast. Abraham and his 
 descendants lived among heathens, keeping aloof 
 from their superstitions, yet on terms of friendly 
 intercourse ; Abraham recognised in the chieftain of 
 a Canaanitish tribe a real priest of the Most High 
 God (Gen. xiv. 12): a principle which was fully 
 accepted by Moses both in his writings and in the 
 case of his own wife's father and brother, yet one of 
 which all traces disappear after the promulgation of 
 the law. The marriage of Joseph with the daughter 
 of the priest of On is recorded without any intimation 
 that it was displeasing to God or offensive to his 
 own family when they joined him. The Egyptians 
 indeed are described as shrinking from contact with 
 Joseph's brethren, but no corresponding feeling is 
 noted in their case, or in that of the two patriarchs 
 who visited Egypt previously. But from the time of 
 Moses to that of the Apostles it was the most pro- 
 minent characteristic of Israelites ; it has been the 
 main cause of mutual repulsion between them and 
 all Gentiles ; and we must never forget that it came 
 in with the institution of the ceremonial law. It 
 answered its purpose thoroughly. It raised_a_barner 
 
THE MOSAIC ECONOMY. 53 
 
 between the Jew and the Gentile insurmountable so 
 long as that law should be outwardly observed ; until, 
 its object being secured, it should be withdrawn. 
 War raging without truce or term became the 
 normal state between the Israelite and those who in 
 the mind of God, declared to the great forefather 
 of the Hebrews, recorded by the legislator himself, 
 were destined to be partakers of all the blessings. 
 We look in vain for any justification of this state of 
 hostility in the Old Testament, apart from its future 
 results. We cannot indeed but feel that it implied 
 a state of deplorable weakness in the Hebrew ; it 
 implied that he was so accessible to temptation that 
 he could only be preserved from idolatry, the dead- 
 liest of all sins, by complete isolation ; a child under 
 a jealous tutor, kept, so to speak, in quarantine lest 
 he should contract infection. But what a strange 
 contrast to his true destiny ! He was called to be the j 
 teacher, the light-bearer, the converter of the world, 
 the firstborn among God's children, the instrument 
 by which in God's own time the work of man's re- 
 demption from sin, from ignorance, from death was to 
 be accomplished. What was he then, what is he now, 
 so long as he remains in that isolation ? He pre- 
 sented indeed, and still presents, a type of character 
 which in important points commands respect and 
 admiration, rising far above the highest standards of 
 Gentilism. In religion a pure Monotheist, utterly aloof 
 from the superstitions of heathendom on the one 
 
54 CHRISTIANITY, THE JUSTIFICATION OF 
 
 hand, and, on the other, from the baseless speculations 
 and materialistic tendencies of Gentile philosophy. In 
 domestic relations singularly pure, and remote alike 
 from an unnatural asceticism and from the sensuality 
 which disgraced the most civilized and intellectual 
 races of the Old World. Towards the poor, the 
 afflicted, ever compassionate, charitable to an ex- 
 tent not surpassed, and not often equalled, by any 
 people. In truth a high and noble character, one 
 which stands out grandly through the various vicissi- 
 tudes of national history, whether we look at the 
 Jews in their own land, or in their dispersion, under 
 Persians, Greeks, Romans, Mahometans, or Christians, 
 but withal a character in one respect apart — apart 
 and incomplete exactly to the extent of his adhe- 
 rence to the old law, of his rejection of its highest and 
 truest bearings ; wanting one qualification, and one 
 only — entire sympathy with man as man, a sympathy 
 resting on the recognition of man's inherent and 
 inalienable relation to God, developed by the work 
 of Christ. It was because the law formed such men 
 as the Apostles, whom we recognise at once as 
 Hebrews of the Hebrews, and as our own leaders, 
 that we see its complete justification ; but only be- 
 cause those men realized and accomplished their true 
 vocation as heralds of salvation to mankind. 
 
 Another point on which the law of Moses speci- 
 ally needs the justification which it finds in the 
 Gospel — a proof indeed that it was not, and could 
 
THE MOSAIC ECONOMY. 55 
 
 not be intended to be, the final revelation of God's 
 will — is the extent and character of its omis- 
 sions. I can but touch on this point very briefly, 
 but must not pass it over unnoticed. The most 
 striking omission is that of a distinct and authorita- 
 tive revelation of a future state. Now there are 
 good reasons why this should not have formed part 
 of a merely temporary law. That law had to deal 
 with outward acts. Its sanctions, its penalties were 
 temporal ; it dealt with man in every state and con- 
 dition ; it taught him that he was under the govern- 
 ment of one from whom no act or thought could be 
 concealed, that the judgment was certain and im- 
 mediate. A great thinker found in this limitation a 
 strong evidence of the supernatural character of the 
 Mosaic dispensation ; but it certainly is a conclusive 
 evidence of its incompleteness. Within the sphere 
 of political, social, ceremonial life there was light, 
 sufficient to guide every movement ; without that 
 sphere there was an infinite blank, so far as the law 
 was concerned. Now sufficient reason may be 
 alleged for the omission, provided that it was for a 
 season only. The subject could not be dealt with 
 in a Divine revelation at all, if it were not dealt 
 with thoroughly. A future state involves a future 
 judgment, and the conditions of that judgment, 
 specially as regards the punishment of sin, could not 
 be fully declared until the terms on which pardon 
 is attainable should be revealed. In fact, the an- 
 
56 CHRISTIANITY, THE JUSTIFICATION OF 
 
 nouncement of expiation by the sacrifice, which all 
 other sacrifices prefigured, was a necessary prelimi- 
 nary for the revelation of eternal life. Observe, this 
 applies only to the Mosaic dispensation, to the 
 written code. The ancestors of the Hebrews lived in 
 sure hope of another state, and ever spoke of them- 
 selves as sojourners on earth, exiles from their true 
 home. They felt, though they may not have drawn 
 out the thought in express words, that the soul 
 living to God must live to Him for ever. In truth 
 had they not lived in that conviction they would 
 have had less light than the Gentiles. We find the 
 belief in a state after death a prominent character- 
 istic in every ancient religious system. In Egypt, the 
 people best known to Moses and his brethren, it 
 may almost be said that the present life had no 
 significance but as a preparatory stage towards re- 
 union with the Deity : every act, every thought 
 was to be examined after death, and to receive exact 
 and full recompense. But the light which shone on 
 the minds of early saints was not held up, as might 
 be expected, by the great teacher of the Hebrews to 
 his people. The only imaginable justification for 
 this is surely that it was necessarily reserved for the 
 coming Revealer. The state of the Hebrew mind 
 in the meantime is strangely interesting, and without 
 a clear perception of its bearings it is somewhat per- 
 plexing. A deep gloom rested at times upon noble 
 spirits. There are passages in the effusions of the 
 
THE MOSAIC ECONOMY. 57 
 
 devoutest and deepest thinkers which make us feel 
 that they were passing through the valley of the 
 shadow of death. Upon lower carnal minds the 
 effect was deadening. The evil liver, the sensualist, 
 the secularist, found in the omission a relief from all 
 fear of responsibility in the future. But on the 
 other hand, — and this is the main point to which 
 I would bespeak your attention, — the withholding of 
 the light wrought powerfully upon noble spirits. The 
 yearnings of the heart created in God's image could 
 not rest unsatisfied. A deep, intense faith, deeper 
 and more intense in the absence of external support, 
 was developed, — a faith not, as some will have it, 
 derived from alien sources, not, properly speaking, 
 the outcome of the Mosaic law, but resting on inti- 
 mations of the Divine work in the Mosaic record of 
 older times, and heartily received by all true Hebrews. 
 Towards the close of the national career, nay, before 
 the struggles of the Maccabean period, belief fully 
 developed, and that in the form recognised by Chris- 
 tianity, belief in the immortality of man, in the 
 continuance and perfect restoration of his personal 
 identity, was become the special and distinctive cha- 
 racteristic of the true Hebrew, What the belief 
 needed was a pledge, a proof, an authoritative assu- 
 rance of its truth, such an assurance as was afforded 
 by the resurrection of our Lord. 
 
 In concluding this incomplete, but, I fear, 
 tedious attempt to deal with a great subject, let 
 
53 CHRISTIANITY, THE JUSTIFICATION OF 
 
 me revert briefly to a hope which has found ex- 
 pression more than once in my address. It lies 
 very near to my heart. I speak of the hope that 
 many true Israelites will ere long be found among 
 the ablest champions of the cross, the faithful 
 soldiers of their own Messiah. It is certain that 
 if they join us they will find all the claims of 
 their own forefathers heartily recognised. No words 
 will they hear from Christians in disparagement 
 of the patriarchs, the prophets — the great repre- 
 sentatives of Israel. They will find us earnestly 
 and lovingly studying the words which sound most 
 powerfully in their own hearts. They will have 
 nothing to unlearn which they have drawn from 
 their own scriptures ; what they have to learn will 
 be but a development of their most precious points 
 of faith. That the mass of the people will join 
 us in a period within the range of human fore- 
 sight is perhaps not to be hoped for, much as 
 it is to be desired. Much must be done before 
 the Church of Christ is in a state which would 
 justify the expectation : but there is no reason to 
 doubt that here and there one, nay, very many, 
 certainly not the weakest or lowest spirits will be 
 attracted to the Cross. They have had precursors 
 in all ages. In the tenth century Ibn Gebirol, 
 known in Europe as Avecebron, influenced the 
 forms of theological thought among the greatest 
 schoolmen ; in the twelfth, Maimonides, a man re- 
 
THE MOSAIC ECONOMY. 59 
 
 cognised by Hebrew and by Gentile as one of 
 the master-spirits of the world, was acknowledged 
 as a fellow, not to say teacher, by the mighty 
 intellect of Thomas Aquinas ; and the works of 
 both have lately been brought into stronger light 
 than heretofore by the labour of one of the greatest 
 scholars and thinkers of our own time, but lately 
 deceased, the Hebrew Munk. Looking at the 
 indirect, unconscious tendency of their writings, 
 chiefly intent on reconciling science with religion, 
 we may safely assert that the profoundest thinkers 
 among them have come very near us. Many 
 indeed have come among us. One great school 
 especially (I speak of the masters of the Cabbala) 
 came so near to us as to rouse excessive and 
 not unreasonable alarm among the upholders of 
 the national traditions. They were persons whose 
 minds influenced very powerfully some of the lead- 
 ing spirits at the time of the great Reformation 
 I speak of Ricci, the physician of the Emperor 
 Maximilian ; of Leo the Hebrew, the gifted son 
 of a gifted father, Abarbanel ; and others, whose 
 works were eagerly studied by such men as Reuch- 
 lin, Mirandola, and many devout and large-hearted 
 Christians. Nor is our own age without examples. 
 We count indeed among our clergy more than one 
 hundred Hebrews, to a great extent occupied in 
 missionary work. Germany has produced a vast 
 array of Hebrew scholars, distinguished in every 
 
60 THE MOSAIC ECONOMY. 
 
 department of literature science, and art : foremost, 
 annong philologians — Benfey, Fuerst, Bernstein, Ber- 
 nays, and Delitzsch, one of the soundest, ablest, and 
 most learned expositors of Holy Scriptures ; great 
 among historians — Jost, Gratz, Weil, and above 
 all the Christian Neander, of all Church historians 
 the most candid, genial, and devout, the man of 
 widest and tenderest sympathies ; nor can we 
 pass without a tribute of gratitude and admiration 
 the warm-hearted genius who has given the fullest 
 expression to the devout feelings of Christians in 
 strains of unparalleled beauty and grandeur, Felix 
 Mendelssohn ; — these and others may be named as 
 instances of what may be expected from Hebrews 
 retaining all the zeal, energy, religious instinct, special 
 mental and moral qualifications of the race, and 
 combining with them hearty allegiance to the 
 Hebrew of Hebrews, the Man of men, the Com- 
 pleter of all revelation, the Mighty God, the Ever- 
 lasting Father, the Prince of Peace. A long period 
 of preparation preceded His first coming, during 
 which many a great light shone forth among 
 the Hebrews ; a still longer period has elapsed, 
 during which the people have done no small work 
 in transmitting the light of lofty thought from east 
 to west and west to east ; may the time be near 
 when they will take once more their true place 
 among those who will prepare mankind for His 
 second coming, and justify all that their own legis- 
 lator did and said as the servant of their God. 
 
III. 
 
 BY THE 
 
 REV. PROFESSOR STANLEY LEATHES, M.A. 
 
III. 
 
 THE RELATION OE THE JEWS TO THEIR 
 OWN SCRIPTURES. 
 
 T F one were asked to specify the oldest historic 
 -*> people in the world, one could have little hesi- 
 tation in naming the Jews. It is possible that 
 the continuous existence of the Chinese may reach 
 back for a yet longer period, but this can hardly 
 be said of their historic existence ; while the re- 
 moteness and comparative seclusion of the Chinese 
 people may be regarded as exempting them from 
 competition for the palm of national antiquity. 
 When we speak of the oldest historic people in 
 the world we naturally think of those nearer home 
 who have a recognisable existence in the present 
 and a definite and distinct historic existence in 
 the past. Compared, for example, with ancient 
 Rome, the Jewish nation may boast of a venerable 
 and hoary antiquity. Suppose we accept the date 
 754 B.C. as that beyond which no actual existence 
 can be assigned to Rome ; then that date carries 
 us but a very little way back in the history of 
 
64 THE RELATION OF THE JEWS TO 
 
 Israel — only to the era of some of her greatest 
 kings and prophets. She was then in the fulness 
 of her strength and maturity, when we can barely 
 discern the very earliest commencements of the 
 foundation of Rome. Or if we turn to Greece, 
 and take the first Olympiad as our starting-point 
 in 776 B.C., we find ourselves in the grayest and 
 earliest dawn of Grecian national life. Draco 
 flourished in the thirty-ninth Olympiad, Solon in 
 the forty-sixth ; the first Messenian war was 743, 
 and the battle of Marathon, with which the long 
 line of national glories may be almost said to 
 begin, was more than 250 years later, or 490 B.C. 
 But the same period brings us within a little to 
 the close of the first great epoch of Jewish history 
 as comprised in the records of the national sacred 
 literature. The kingdom of Israel had come to 
 an end more than two centuries before. Judah 
 had been carried captive to Babylon more than 
 one. The second Temple had already been built 
 and dedicated some twenty-five or thirty years. 
 The generation of old men who had wept when 
 its foundation was laid must now have slept with 
 their fathers, and the generation of younger men 
 who on the same occasion had shouted for joy 
 had already arrived at middle and mature age, or 
 were feeble and gray-headed. 
 
 But this comparison has reference only to the 
 past. Of historic Greece and Rome it may be 
 
THEIR OWN SCRIPTURES. 65 
 
 truly said that they once were. As national 
 entities they have no continuous existence reaching 
 down to the present. The liveliest imagination 
 can scarcely recognise in the modern kingdoms 
 of Greece or Italy anything more than the suc- 
 cessors of the old republics. There is nothing 
 answering to continuity or identity of national 
 existence. 
 
 But with Israel it is widely different. Her 
 national existence is as distinct and well defined in 
 the era of the Maccabees as in the time of Zerub- 
 babel or Hezekiah ; in the time of Christ as in the 
 era of the Maccabees ; in the middle ages, though 
 under circumstances vastly modified, as in the first 
 century of the Christian era ; and in the present day 
 as in the middle ages. 
 
 Physiologists tell us that the characteristics of 
 race are among the most permanent and ineffaceable 
 of all ; but I question very much whether in all the 
 annals of ethnology any other instance can be pro- 
 duced that bears any true analogy to the permanence 
 and ineffaceable characteristics of the Jewish nation, 
 whether any other people can point to a continuity 
 of national existence so marked and undeniable as 
 that of the Jews. For we must bear in mind that 
 there is this great difference between the Chinese and 
 the Jews, that though you may know a Chinaman 
 whenever you see him, as you may know a Jew, 
 yet the Chinaman has a home and a country, while 
 
 5 
 
66 THE RELATION OF THE JEWS TO 
 
 the Jew has none, — has none, that is, peculiar to him 
 as a Jew; for the Jew cannot be said to be any more 
 at home in Palestine than he is in London. There 
 is no country on the face of the world where you 
 would at once say, " This is the natural home of the 
 Jews ; here they are indigenous, and here they 
 constitute the bulk of the existing population." 
 Whereas if you go to China it will at once be 
 obvious that though you may have met with many 
 Chinamen in various parts of the world, yet there 
 you have traced them to their natural and original 
 home. The continuity, therefore, of the Chinese 
 nation, so far as it has had a continuous national 
 existence, has been intimately bound up with their 
 national localisation in China. But with the race of 
 Israel it is very different. For the long period of 
 eighteen centuries, at least, it cannot at any time have 
 been said, that they were indigenous or peculiar to 
 any one country in the world. And yet they have 
 never at any time become mingled with, or absorbed 
 in, the particular people or nation among whom they 
 have lived. Their home is everywhere, and yet no- 
 where. They are to be found in every nation under 
 heaven, and yet they are a distinct and separate 
 people of themselves. 
 
 It is perfectly certain that no other instance can 
 be produced exactly parallel to theirs. The Negro 
 or the Mongol presents the characteristics of race 
 sufficiently marked, but in a few generations they 
 
THEIR OWN SCRIPTURES. 67 
 
 become entirely obliterated, and though we can 
 speak of the Negro or Mongolian race we cannot 
 speak of the Negro or Mongolian nation. Their 
 individuality is more conspicuous than that of the 
 Jew, but their nationality is much less so ; in fact it 
 has no existence whatever. And this arises from 
 the circumstance that their peculiarities of race run 
 up to a period prior to all history, and have no 
 special connection with history. Whereas in the 
 case of the Jew his existence from first to last is an 
 historic existence. No other person than Abraham 
 has ever been regarded as the first father of the 
 nation, and he it was who was first known as Abram 
 the Hebrew. Attempts have recently been made to 
 treat the times of Abraham as mythical, but these 
 are only to be regarded as symptomatic of an age that 
 is impatient of anything like traditional opinion and 
 is wildly enamoured of speculation for its own sake. 
 And with respect to them it is sufficient now to say 
 that if these records are to be treated as mythical 
 then the world possesses no ancient records, not to 
 say no records at all that can justly be considered 
 as history. And such a position is critically suicidal, 
 because the very foundations are undermined upon 
 which alone it becomes possible to base our pro- 
 posed reconstruction of history. Though Abraham, 
 however, is justly to be regarded as the first indi- 
 vidual in whom the Jewish nation existed in form, 
 and though there is probably no other nation that 
 
68 THE RELATION OF THE JEWS TO 
 
 can point to a first original so certain or so well 
 defined, yet we must not forget that properly speak- 
 ing there was no national existence of the people in 
 patriarchal times. The grandson of Abraham was 
 the first that bore the name of Israel, and though 
 he and his fathers seem to have been regarded as 
 strangers and sojourners by the people among whom 
 they dwelt, and to have possessed a kind of family 
 nationality, yet it was not till centuries later that 
 the existence of the nation definitely began. And in 
 this respect the history of Israel presents the same 
 marked contrast to that of other nations as it does 
 in other respects. If we speak of ancient Rome or 
 Greece, it becomes very difficult to say when the 
 national existence of either one or the other first 
 began. But with Israel we can put our finger upon 
 the very month and day and hour. It was at mid- 
 night, on the fourteenth day of that memorable first 
 month, when " the Lord smote all the firstborn in 
 
 the land of Egypt, and there was a great 
 
 cry in Egypt, for there was not a house where there 
 was not one dead," x — " this is that night of the Lord 
 to be observed of all the children of Israel in their 
 generations." 2 " And it came to pass the selfsame 
 day that the Lord did bring the children of Israel 
 out of the land of Egypt by their armies." 3 On 
 that day a people six hundred thousand strong, who 
 had before no national existence, but only the exist- 
 
 1 Exodus xii. 29, 30. 2 Exodus xii. 42. 3 Exodus xii. 51. 
 
THEIR OWN SCRIPTURES. 69 
 
 ence of slaves in the hands of their oppressors, was 
 written among the nations. 
 
 And this took place in the broad daylight of 
 contemporary nationalities and national history. 
 Egypt was then flourishing in the strength of her 
 maturity under the Pharaohs. She was the oldest 
 of the nations. Her monuments, which we our- 
 selves have learnt to read within the last fifty years, 
 go back for more than ten centuries before ; and 
 though they not unnaturally are silent upon this 
 event, which was obviously attended with great 
 national calamity, yet they so far establish the 
 general accuracy of the Mosaic narrative that it is 
 utterly impossible to call in question the main 
 statements of it. There is a clear background of 
 historical Egyptian nationality, on which is pro- 
 jected in strong and definite outline the first com- 
 mencement of the independent existence of the 
 Israelitish nation. And after all allowance is 
 made for the partiality of the native historian, the 
 material facts cannot have been very different from 
 his narrative of them. Perhaps in all history there 
 is no other instance but one which bears any strict 
 analogy to the birth of Israel as a nation, and that 
 was the memorable occasion when, on the 4th of 
 July, 1776, the independence of the American Re- 
 public was declared in the Town Hall of Philadel- 
 phia. Then a nation was born at once, with the 
 hope and promise of unlimited and unimaginable 
 
70 THE RELATION OF THE JEWS TO 
 
 greatness. But with this exception there is, perhaps, 
 no true parallel in the world's history to the definite 
 and clearly marked manner in which the people of 
 Israel entered on their existence as a nation. The 
 date that is traditionally assigned to this event is 
 about a thousand years before the battle of Mara- 
 thon. At a period so remote we may well be 
 uncertain as to exact time, and by some the date 
 has been placed earlier, and by others later. The 
 possible limit of variation is probably not much more 
 than one hundred and fifty years- either way ; and 
 however this is eventually decided, if decided it can 
 ever be, the historic character of the event is inde- 
 pendent and indisputable, and a national existence of 
 many centuries is left for Israel before Greece or 
 Rome began to appear upon the stage. 
 
 From the moment, however, that the national 
 existence of Israel became a fact, the existence of 
 the race became identified therewith, and marked 
 thereby. No Israelite can sever himself from the 
 past. His individual existence is stamped by the 
 characteristics of his national history. He is, in 
 spite of himself, a member of the nation that was 
 born on the night of emancipation from Egypt, and 
 there is no Israelite anywhere who can, if he would, 
 disengage himself from the association of this con- 
 nexion. It is different with the Mongol or the Negro. 
 He belongs to a race but not to a nation. With 
 Israel the race and the nation are one and the same. 
 
THEIR OWN SCRIPTURES. 71 
 
 Or take again the Gypsies, who may be thought 
 to present some features analogous to those of the 
 Jews. Strange as their habits are, they have scarcely 
 the characteristics of a race, and certainly not those 
 of a nation, for they have no national history, and 
 therefore no national existence. But from the 
 moment that Israel came out of Egypt to the 
 present day, their national existence has been un- 
 broken, and their national history continuous. That 
 they have a continuous history is obvious, for it has 
 many times been written, but they have also a con- 
 tinuous national existence, for they have a definite, 
 individualised existence as a race which in every 
 particular individual instance runs up into identity 
 and community of historic national existence in the 
 past. To no Israelite, in any quarter of the globe, 
 can we assign a distinct historic nationality of less 
 than three thousand years. For thirty centuries 
 then, for a hundred generations, every Israelite 
 throughout the world has had an individual existence, 
 bequeathed from sire to son, and a share in a national 
 existence, independent of the nations of the world. 
 Captivity, conquest, oppression, violence, rapine, and 
 cruelty, have alike been unable to obliterate these 
 distinctions, and have served rather to make them 
 yet more indelible. Words that were spoken in the 
 early dawn of their national history have been 
 strangely fulfilled to the last syllable of recorded 
 time. " Lo, the people shall dwell alone, and shall 
 
72 THE RELATION OF. THE JEWS TO 
 
 not be reckoned among the nations." 1 In them and 
 in them only the peculiarities of race have run up 
 into and become identical with the peculiarities of 
 national existence; and the great marvel has been 
 that though not reckoned among the nations, the 
 race of Israel have yet preserved distinct and un- 
 contaminated their national existence. 
 
 And when we bear in mind the variety and 
 vicissitude of circumstance under which this has 
 been done, and the length of time that the national 
 peculiarities have been maintained, it becomes a 
 matter of certainty that there is no second instance 
 to be produced altogether analogous. And the 
 reason is that though similar peculiarities of race 
 scarcely less permanent may possibly be found, 
 there is no case in which there is added on to them 
 the yet more striking phenomenon of identity of 
 national existence. Wherever we find an Israelite, 
 there we know we have a man whose ancestors were 
 brought out of Egypt by Moses ; but of no Greek 
 can it be said that his ancestors fought at Marathon 
 or Thermopylae, and of no Roman that he is de- 
 scended from the men who strove with Pyrrhus at 
 Tarentum, or with Hannibal at Cannae. All that 
 in these cases can be said is, that the modern Greeks 
 and Romans are apparently or possibly descended 
 from the nations that originally were so distin- 
 guished. 
 
 1 Num. xxiii. 9. 
 
THEIR OWN SCRIPTURES. 73 
 
 But in addition to the oneness of national existence 
 that characterises the Jews wherever found there is 
 another point in which they are pre-eminent, and 
 that is in the antiquity of their national literature. 
 This also is marked with the same features of unity 
 and cohesion that distinguish their nation, and they 
 are features that are peculiar to it. There is nothing 
 in Greek or Roman literature at all answering to this 
 unity and cohesion ; except community of language, 
 there is no principle of unity. There is nothing in 
 common between Homer and Plato, between Cicero 
 and Virgil, any more than there is between Bacon 
 and Shakspeare. But there is a principle of unity 
 and cohesion running through all the writers of 
 the Old Testament. There is a strong principle of 
 nationality. There is more or less a community of 
 purpose, or object, and identity of teaching. It is not 
 fortuitous that the Psalms, Isaiah, and Genesis are 
 bound up together in the same volume, though the 
 product of various ages and the work of various 
 writers separated by an interval of a thousand years. 
 They are intimately related, and we cannot but con- 
 nect them. But no one would think of connecting 
 together in the same way Sophocles and Plato, 
 Virgil and Horace, though in these cases the for- 
 tuitous connexion of age and circumstance was far 
 closer than between Moses, David, and Isaiah. 
 
 Nor is there anything answering to this essential 
 unity in any other literature if we except the early 
 
74 THE RELATION OF THE JEWS TO 
 
 Christian literature, which grew out of and was based 
 upon it. Take, for instance, the hymns of the 
 Veda, the only literature which can pretend to com- 
 pete with the old Hebrew literature in respect of 
 antiquity. There is no principle of cohesion there. 
 A family likeness runs through all, inasmuch as they 
 are for the most part sacrificial and connected with 
 the worship of Indra, Agni, Varuna, and the like. 
 But there is no common nationality, no principle of 
 inherent unity. They are no more essentially one 
 than the songs of Horace or the odes of Pindar. 
 But when we come to examine the Psalms, though 
 the writers were separated by intervals of many cen- 
 turies there is something more than an ideal unity 
 pervading them. Many celebrate the same national 
 incidents. All are addressed, more or less directly, 
 to the same national God. All are instinct with the 
 same conception of His nature, the same knowledge 
 of His will, the same longing for or confidence in 
 His favour. The Psalms are unique in the literature 
 of the world, as the expression of the devotional 
 spirit. More exclusively national than the hymns of 
 the Veda, they yet speak the language of all the 
 nations of the world ; while the skill with which they 
 have traversed and explored all the innermost recesses 
 of the human heart is not only unsurpassed but alto- 
 gether unequalled by any similar compositions, ancient 
 or modern. They have knocked at the door of 
 heaven and taken it by storm ; they have carried 
 
THEIR OWN SCRIPTURES. 75 
 
 the soul on the wings of prayer to the very footstool 
 of the throne of God ; and they have brought the 
 Most High Himself from His holy habitation as a 
 gracious visitant to the humble and contrite soul. 
 If the Hebrew nation had produced nothing else but 
 the Book of Psalms, it had laid all the families and 
 generations of the world under a permanent obliga- 
 tion of insolvent gratitude. 
 
 But in point of fact this is but a fraction of the 
 debt that is owing from mankind to the Hebrew 
 race. That which confirmed the existence of the 
 Israelitish nation after the exodus, and which 
 moulded the national existence, and stamped upon it 
 a character absolutely ineffaceable, was the giving of 
 the Lazv from Sinai. We have heard of an English 
 clergyman in recent years who renounced his orders 
 because he could no longer find it in his conscience 
 to repeat the formula, " God spake these words, and 
 said, Thou shalt have none other gods but me : I am 
 the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the land 
 of Egypt." But one would respectfully and with all 
 due submission ask, Who else but God can have said 
 " I am the Lord thy God " ? Whose law is it but 
 God's which says Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not 
 commit adultery ? Is it a law which man has im- 
 posed upon himself ? Is it a law which the wisdom 
 of the majority has discovered, and mankind have 
 agreed in recognising ? Did Moses impose it upon 
 Israel ? Did the people whom he characterised as 
 
76 THE RELATION OF THE JEWS TO 
 
 stiff-necked and uncircumcised immediately submit to 
 be imposed upon by him with out a doubt or ques- 
 tion ? Or were they, in spite of their stiffneckedness, 
 at once and forthwith so enamoured of the wisdom 
 and sublimity of his law that they without hesitation 
 unanimously ascribed it, not to him, but to God, 
 though they knew that he was really the author of 
 it. There is and can be no question which all man- 
 kind are more concerned in than the question whether 
 the moral law is Divine or human in its obligation ; 
 but if it is Divine in its obligation how is it possible 
 that it can be other than Divine in its origin ? And 
 if if really is Divine in its origin, then I do not know 
 that we can discover, and I am quite certain that 
 history has not recorded, a more probable, consistent, 
 congruous, or sublime theory of its origin than that 
 which has been propounded and described as a fact 
 by Moses. 
 
 But what must be the obligations of mankind to 
 that people who were the first authoritative pro- 
 pounders of the moral law! Even supposing that 
 we may have considerable difficulty in reducing the 
 statements of Moses' narrative to the exact condi- 
 tions of a narrative by a special correspondent of 
 the Times or Daily News, we at all events have got 
 as the nucleus of that narrative, after stripping it of all 
 apparently supernatural accidents, the Decalogue itself, 
 with its alleged Divine authority, preserved in letters 
 as distinct and legible as those in which it was first 
 
THEIR OWN SCRIPTURES. 77 
 
 written with the finger of God on the two tables of 
 stone. And here is an heir-loom for the world. 
 An absolutely complete and perfect moral law, the 
 backbone and foundation of all laws which have 
 ever regulated the conduct or controlled the actions 
 of mankind ; a law far more ancient than any which 
 has been preserved among any people ; far more 
 simple, far more thorough, far more searching ; a 
 law the undoubtedly historical connexion of which 
 with the name of Moses must alone and of itself 
 give him a valid claim to be the very greatest bene- 
 factor of mankind that the ancient world ever saw, 
 and must serve for all generations and for all time 
 to place him, second only to One, as the greatest 
 among all the great men that have ever lived. If 
 the world consents to bestow its admiration upon 
 the captains and conquerors who, from the very 
 nature of their work, have been the destroyers of 
 society, even though they may also have defended 
 and avenged its interests, how shall we determine 
 adequately to honour him, or acknowledge our im- 
 measurable obligations to one who laid broad and 
 deep the foundations of all human society by the 
 first authoritative promulgation of the moral law, 
 and thereby established his claim to be for ever 
 regarded as the founder and preserver of society. 
 
 And it is not possible to separate the name of 
 Moses from relation to the Decalogue. Even 
 though we may acknowledge its origin to be never 
 
78 THE RELATION OF THE JEWS TO 
 
 so much Divine, yet he, at all events, was the human 
 agent by whom it was given to his people. He, 
 therefore, humanly speaking, is entitled to the full 
 credit of its wisdom. And whether we regard it 
 as a Divine code, or prefer to judge it as a human 
 law, the obligations of the world to its human 
 author remain the same, for even supposing that 
 he originated its actual form, he yet had the wis- 
 dom to see that its authority was Divine, and to 
 propound it accordingly to the nation. And it was 
 here that his law differed from all human codes, in that 
 it was based upon man's relation to his Maker, and 
 assumed the form of a direct covenant made between 
 God and every individual of the nation. I am the 
 Lord thy God : thou shalt have none other gods but 
 me. The moral law thus became to every Israelite 
 an essential part in the foundation of his nationality. 
 Every violation of the moral law was to him an act 
 of personal ingratitude towards the Being who had 
 brought him and his fathers out of the land of Egypt. 
 The foundation of the law was thus laid in that prin- 
 ciple of love which was afterwards declared to be the 
 end of the law. 1 And a line of demarcation was 
 strongly and deeply drawn by the law between the 
 children of Israel and all other nations of the earth. 
 
 Another characteristic which is peculiar to the 
 literature of this remarkable people is the possession 
 of unbroken historical records covering a period of 
 
 1 Rom. x. 4. 
 
THEIR OWN SCRIPTURES. 79 
 
 nearly a thousand years, from the exodus till the 
 return from captivity. It is in the highest decree 
 improbable that this literature originated after the 
 captivity. It bears all the appearance of being 
 compiled from contemporary and authentic docu- 
 ments ; but however this may be, there is no nation 
 which has any literature at all to be compared to it. 
 The Father of history did not begin to write till the 
 historical records of Israel had come to an end. 
 Opinions may vary as to the actual value of these 
 records; the point to which I desire to draw attention 
 is their existence, and their existence it is which 
 distinguishes the literature of Israel from every other 
 literature in the world. After the modern dis- 
 coveries in Babylonia and the progress in decy- 
 phering the cuneiform inscriptions, comparisons will 
 doubtless be instituted between the brick annals of 
 Babylonia and Assyria, and those of Israel ; but 
 from the specimens as yet given to the world, we 
 need not hesitate as to the result of those compari- 
 sons, while the very fact of such records having been 
 discovered only serves to show conclusively that a 
 neighbouring if not a kindred nation may well have 
 preserved the annals of its history. 
 
 But there is yet another point in which this 
 people and their literature are widely distinct from 
 those of all other nations, and that is in the possession 
 of prophecy and a race of prophets who committed 
 their works to writing, which has preserved them to 
 
So THE RELATION OF THE JEWS TO 
 
 the present day. But prophecy is by no means pecu- 
 liar to the so-called prophets of Israel or of Judah. 
 Several very important prophecies are enshrined in 
 Genesis, and in fact in every book of the Pentateuch. 
 It is no part of my business now to insist upon the 
 genuineness or antiquity of these prophecies. I am 
 content to take my stand upon the very broadest 
 possible ground. Let the Pentateuch in its present 
 form have been written at the latest possible date on 
 which the critics can agree, (we still reserve our own 
 judgment on the matter), — there are yet prophecies, 
 or at all events statements hazarded in those writings 
 which cannot be placed late enough by them not to 
 have been in existence ages before the occurrence of 
 events which have made them strangely significant. 
 Such, for instance, as the various promises made to 
 Abraham, the blessing of the tribes of Jacob, and of 
 Moses, the prophecies of Balaam, and those scattered 
 over Deuteronomy, and in the twenty-sixth chapter of 
 Leviticus. It is not too much to say that the entire 
 literature of the world, in all languages combined, 
 cannot present a series of apparent predictions so 
 remarkable as those which are contained in the five 
 books of Moses alone. And besides these there are 
 predictions scattered over Joshua, Judges, the books 
 of Samuel, Kings, and the Psalms, which may be 
 safely said to defy adequate explanation if they are 
 not prophecies, and which if they are can only be 
 regarded as in the highest degree remarkable and 
 
THEIR OWN SCRIPTURES. Si 
 
 important, before we enter upon the prophetical 
 writings properly so called. 
 
 Written prophecy had an existence in the Hebrew 
 nation of about 400 years. It is ascribed to fifteen 
 different writers, or to sixteen including Daniel. 
 They were all subsequent to the division of the 
 monarchy, and did not exclusively belong to the 
 kingdom of Judah. They were all alike characterised 
 by the severely moral tone which they assumed. 
 They were the censors of public morals, and the 
 great preachers of the day. There is nothing in the 
 literature of any ancient people at all corresponding 
 to the phenomenon of prophecy as it existed in 
 Israel and Judah. Indeed it is a phenomenon that 
 would have been naturally impossible but for the 
 peculiar position in which the nation stood to God, as 
 testified by the Decalogue alone. No prophet could 
 have spoken in the name of the Lord as he did had 
 he not been taught by the previous history of his 
 nation, and the salient points of its literature — as, for 
 instance, the decalogue — the special and exceptional 
 relation in which every member of the nation stood 
 to God. In fact, all the writings of the prophets and 
 their very existence may be said to be but one long 
 commentary of fact and exhortation upon the ancient 
 Mosaic words " I am the Lord thy God, which 
 brought thee out of the land of Egypt and out of 
 the house of bondage : thou shalt have none other 
 gods before me." l But in thus speaking of the 
 
 1 Exodus xx. 2, 3. 
 
 6 
 
82 THE RELATION OF THE JEWS TO 
 
 Hebrew Prophets it must not be forgotten that we 
 are speaking of a race of men the very youngest of 
 whom is more ancient than the whole of the Roman 
 and the bulk of all the Grecian literature, and every 
 one of the least of whom, judged by his own stand- 
 ard and on the written evidence before us, knew 
 more of the relation in which he stood to God than 
 Socrates did in his most inspired moments ; and 
 whose influence on the world at large has been 
 far wider and deeper and more beneficial than 
 that of Socrates. Take, for instance, the very 
 last words of the least in bulk of the Hebrew 
 Prophets, " And the kingdom shall be the Lord's." 1 
 Where, in all the writings of Xenophon, Plato, and 
 Aristotle combined, is there any sentiment so far 
 reaching, so permanent, so inexhaustible and so sure 
 as that ? And yet that perhaps was uttered nearly 
 five-and-twenty centuries ago, before Socrates taught 
 or Plato wrote ; but it contains the germ and promise 
 of all that they were feeling after and could not find. 
 And it is either true or not true. If it is not true, 
 then not only are the dreams of Plato more baseless 
 than ever, but the destiny of man is a hopeless puzzle 
 and his mere existence a disaster ; but if it is true, 
 then it is contrary to all analogy or experience that 
 the insignificant Hebrew Prophet should have dis- 
 covered its truth ; nor, indeed, did he profess to have 
 done so. In whatever sense it was true, and in pro- 
 
 3 Obadiah 31. 
 
THEIR OWN SCRIPTURES. 83 
 
 portion as it was true, it must have been revealed to 
 him. It must have come from God, and have been 
 the word of the Lord, and it is true, and is only true, 
 because the prophet was able to say in truth, without 
 imposture or delusion, " Thus saith the Lord God." 
 But this is nothing more nor less than what every 
 prophet of Israel and of Judah said. They all alike 
 professed to be the bearers of a Divine message, and 
 to speak with authority not their own. And the 
 verdict of many nations for little less than two thou- 
 sand years has fully recognised and confirmed their 
 claim. 
 
 But the most remarkable feature of the Hebrew 
 prophets consisted in this, that they were ordained 
 more than any men that ever lived as prophets to 
 the world. Their message fell indeed upon their own 
 nation, but it was of far wider scope. It was not 
 only directed occasionally to the neighbouring nations, 
 but it was given in trust to Israel for the world. 
 The consciousness is not seldom bursting from the 
 prophets that there is a mighty future in store for 
 Israel. They knew that the covenant-God of Jacob 
 would ultimately be acknowledged as the Lord of the 
 whole earth. They promised that out of Zion should 
 go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from 
 Jerusalem ; that he should judge among the nations, 
 and should rebuke many people. Nor is it a slender 
 confirmation of their truth that in countries far dis- 
 tant, among alien races and languages of a different 
 
84 THE RELATION OF THE JEWS TO 
 
 family, their message should have been accepted as 
 the very word of God, and their honour should be 
 as great as among the descendants of their own 
 nation. 
 
 It was, however, not only visions of glory that the 
 prophets saw for Israel ; they declared in unmistak- 
 able language the then future destiny of the people, 
 which marvellously corresponds to what it is at pre- 
 sent. The great Lawgiver Himself had said, " And I 
 will scatter you among the heathen, and will draw out 
 a sword after you, and your land shall be desolate, 
 and your cities waste " 1 and again, " And the Lord 
 shall scatter thee among all people, from the one end 
 of the earth even to the other;" 2 and Nehemiah, 
 living under the close of the Old Testament times, 
 had acknowledged the truth of that promise ; and 
 Haman had said to King Ahasuerus, " There is a 
 certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among 
 the people in all the provinces of thy kingdom, and 
 their laws are diverse among all people." 3 But in 
 neither case had the words of Moses received the 
 illustration that the history of the last eighteen cen- 
 turies has given them. The dispersion must now be 
 tenfold more than it was then, or for ages afterwards, 
 and it is now and has been for years the great and 
 unique ethnological problem for which we cannot 
 naturally account. But the Hebrew prophets have 
 accounted for it, for Amos wrote twenty-five centuries 
 
 2 Deut. xxviii. 64. 3 Esther iii. 8. 
 
THEIR OWN SCRIPTURES. 85 
 
 ago, " For lo, I will command, and I will sift the 
 house of Israel among all nations, like as corn is sifted 
 in a sieve ; yet shall not the least grain fall upon the 
 earth." 1 The scattering therefore of the Hebrew 
 nation was a fact foreseen in the providence of God ; 
 upon the written evidence of their own prophets, which 
 we have seen, there is so much ground for treating 
 with the utmost deference. But it is only one feature. 
 Notwithstanding the national attachment to the law, 
 the national observance of the law is and has been 
 for eighteen centuries a thing impossible ; and this 
 also the prophets had declared, for Hosea had said, 
 " The children of Israel shall abide many days 
 without a king, and without a prince, and without 
 a sacrifice, and without an image, and without an 
 ephod, and without teraphim ; afterwards shall the 
 children of Israel return and seek the Lord their 
 God and David their king, and shall fear the Lord 
 and His goodness in the latter days." 1 Part of this 
 has long been fulfilled to the very letter, and part of 
 it yet awaits fulfilment. For centuries the Jews 
 have had neither king nor prince nor sacrifice. 
 For centuries it has been impossible for them to 
 keep the annual feasts according to the prescriptions 
 of the law. While, therefore, the Jewish nation is 
 bound by ties that cannot be severed to their law, 
 their history, and their prophets, which alone give 
 any explanation of the actual phenomena of their 
 
 1 Amos ix. 9. 2 Hosea iii. 4, 5. 
 
86 THE RELATION OF THE JEWS TO 
 
 past and present existence, they are nevertheless 
 unable to comply with the requirements of the law 
 to which they owe their nationality, although the 
 injunction with which prophecy expired was, " Re- 
 member ye the law of Moses my servant, which I 
 commanded unto him in Horeb, for all Israel, with 
 the statutes and judgments;" 1 and though the Law- 
 giver himself gave utterance to the solemn warning, 
 " Cursed be he that confirmeth not the words of this 
 law to do them." 2 
 
 But, furthermore, the law, the history, the Psalms, 
 and the Prophets of Israel alike bear witness to an 
 inextinguishable hope on the part of the Jewish 
 nation, of the rise of a great Personage who should 
 be the flower and glory of their race. No critical 
 interpretation of the records can do away with the 
 actual ground for this hope, because its existence for 
 the first thousand years of the Christian era is one 
 of the patent and unquestionable facts of history 
 witnessed by the testimony of their own greatest 
 writers. While, therefore, their national existence 
 and their national history testify to the validity and 
 truth of their ancient prophecies, they are con- 
 strained to confess that those prophecies have failed 
 in the most characteristic and significant particular 
 of the national hope of the Messiah. The national 
 portraiture of Israel has been sketched by an 
 unerring hand, but the portrait of the Messiah, 
 
 1 Mai. iv. 4. a Deut. xxvii. 26. 
 
THEIR OWN SCRIPTURES. 87 
 
 which is yet more Divine and masterly, has been a 
 misconception and a failure, not because history has 
 not supplied a counterpart to the prophetic delinea- 
 tion, but because the national face has been per- 
 sistently averted from the counterpart that has been 
 supplied. Israel, as a nation, is obliged to confess 
 that for many centuries, both before and after Christ, 
 the hope of a Messiah was its glory and joy. Israel 
 as a nation is obliged to confess that there is no one 
 in all history that has vindicated and realised the 
 hope of the nation, if Jesus of Nazareth is not he ; 
 and yet Israel, as a nation, is obliged also to confess 
 as a historic fact that it is through the preaching of 
 the first disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, and through 
 them alone, that the fairest and most enlightened 
 kingdoms of the civilised world have been led to 
 acknowledge the God of Israel as their own God, 
 and to acknowledge none other gods but Him. The 
 relation of Israel, therefore, to their own Scriptures 
 is one of the most inexplicable problems of literature 
 and of history; nor does it seem possible to solve it 
 but by the introduction of a third element, which 
 is that of the rise of the Christian Church and the 
 existence of the Christian literature, and that does 
 completely and effectually solve it, for it shows that 
 the promised ingathering of the nations has been 
 made, not to Moses, or David, or Isaiah, as kings 
 and prophets in themselves, but to the Prophet 
 greater than Moses, even to Jesus, the Son of 
 
88 RELATION OF THE JEWS TO THEIR SCRIPTURES. 
 
 David, by the proclamation of Him as the Christ of 
 God, " the end of the law for righteousness to every 
 one that believeth ... to the Jew first and also to 
 the Gentile." 1 
 
 1 Rom. x. 4 ; i. 16. 
 
IV. 
 
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 at Sargc. 
 
 BY 
 
 THE RIGHT REV. BISHOP CLAUGHTON, D.D. 
 
IV. 
 
 THE RELATION OF THE JEWS TO THE 
 NATIONS AT LARGE. 
 
 IT is an objection not unfrequently made to the 
 revealed history of creation, that there has been 
 a failure in what is set before us as God's own design, 
 and especially in what we must believe to have been 
 His chief object, mankind. The entering in of evil 
 into the world, which had been pronounced " very 
 good ;" the startling expression, " It repented God 
 that He had made man on the earth" (Gen. vi. 6) — 
 these are adduced as an evident admission of failure, 
 in itself incompatible with the entire theory of abso- 
 lute goodness and almighty power. 
 
 It does not seem to occur to such reasoners that 
 Scripture itself puts it into their power to adduce 
 these objections, or that there must be some very 
 obvious reason for an admission which might seem 
 to contradict God's own declaration, — nay, the very 
 letter of the assertion — "the gifts and calling of God 
 are without repentance," (Rom. xi. 29) — shews clearly 
 that there is some very simple reconciliation of the 
 
92 THE RELATION OF THE JEWS TO 
 
 apparent incongruity. It is, indeed, not uncommon 
 for revelation to employ the form of speech which we 
 call "paradox ;" and it is one, we may safely assert, 
 of which the great value is that it intensifies the 
 truth which it asserts. More than this, it is often a 
 correct description of the mode in which God works 
 His ends. Thus evil is permitted to enter and to mar 
 the world He had made. Sin comes into it, and 
 death by sin; but redemption takes away sin, and 
 resurrection destroys death. And the very fact of 
 having sin to conquer is a means of attaining holi- 
 ness and virtue ; whilst a world redeemed is but added 
 and greater glory to the Creator. "An enemy hath 
 done this!' Here is the admission, but as the 
 parable goes on — the very illustration of the world's 
 history in its brief sentence — we see the final triumph 
 of good over evil — " In the time of harvest I will 
 say," etc. Matt. xiii. 30). 
 
 This view is most strikingly illustrated in the 
 Mosaic account of the separation of the various 
 races of mankind. The first great judgment after 
 the fall had come, the very face of the earth had 
 been changed, — a change to which its surface still 
 bears witness, — but men, beginning to recover 
 their lost numbers, and fresh from the dread of the 
 punishment which had fallen upon them, devised 
 the strange scheme of defence by union against 
 God. This He made impossible by the confusion 
 of tongues, and sent them forth as nations, work- 
 
THE NATIONS AT LARGE. 
 
 ing out His own gracious design of good, whilst 
 chastening them, and preparing them for another 
 and better ultimate unity than any they could 
 have devised, bringing them to be again one family, 
 when they had first learned to acknowledge His 
 goodness, and been taught by the experience of His 
 judgments to submit themselves to His power. 
 
 It is to this period of the history of mankind 
 that I would draw your attention to-day, and to the 
 feature in God's design which I have noticed in my 
 opening remarks, viz., how He makes very opposites 
 combine in working His will. From the scattering 
 of the various families of the earth into nations 
 we date the commencement of the building up of 
 the unity of mankind as one family ; at first, as it 
 might seem, only by a wide separation, the choosing 
 of one family, to be fpi; long years kept distinct and 
 -marked off from the relt, for the preservation of the 
 one principle on which, only true unity could rest, 
 — the worship and acknowledgment of the One God. 
 
 It is this principle which marks the choosing of 
 one family or race from amongst the rest. Abraham 
 appears as God's servant, a believer in His love and 
 goodness, maintaining the ordinances that we have 
 most clearly noticed in Scripture — that, for instance, 
 of sacrifice — and carefully bringing up his family to 
 the same right belief, — selected, indeed, to be the 
 recipient of special promises and signs from God 
 Himself, and in his whole life a pattern of devotion 
 
94 THE RELATION OF THE JEWS TO 
 
 and obedience. The part assigned to him seems to 
 be the natural reward of his own character. He is 
 the father of the faithful, the ' believer ' of his genera- 
 tion, as his ancestor Noah had been at a yet earlier 
 date. We pass over the record of his immediate 
 successors ? We find a nation emerging from Egypt, 
 under the guidance of Moses, whose history very 
 soon places them in a prominence such as no other 
 nation ever has attained. It is not their power or 
 their warlike strength, their wealth or their territorial 
 empire, that distinguishes them, — they are God's 
 own people. His hand is visibly extended to pro- 
 tect and guide them. They have, we may say in 
 few words, a history such as no other race can pre- 
 tend to claim. Miracles follow their footsteps, — their 
 very sins are punished as no other nation's sins are 
 punished. They lived under a system of immediate 
 rewards and punishments. God is their actual Sove- 
 reign, and when in their folly they choose a king to 
 reign over them his selection is by the voice of 
 their Almighty Ruler, as the Judges of a yet earlier 
 period had been simply persons raised up to execute 
 His will. I need not follow their history in its de- 
 tails. It is familiar to us, and before us all. 
 
 We call to mind the wonders of the wilderness and 
 the entry into the promised land ; we see in our 
 mind's eye the glorious Temple rise at Jerusalem ; 
 we picture the greatness of Solomon, — a greatness 
 which cast its shadow over the whole East. It 
 
THE NATIONS AT LARGE. 95 
 
 matters not, indeed, which period or portion of this 
 remarkable race's fortunes we observe. With them- 
 selves we remember the wonders of their old time,— 
 what their fathers have told us, — "God hath not dealt 
 so with any nation ; " with them we say, " The Lord 
 hath chosen Jacob unto Himself, and Israel for His 
 own possession." Their creed evidently holds in itself 
 that of mankind ; their Scriptures are the evidence 
 of its truth, and in their hands is, in God's provi- 
 dence, the destiny of the human race. Such, and not 
 less than this, is the position of the great Jewish 
 nation of whom I am to speak to you to-day. None 
 of you can say I derogate from their greatness in 
 what I have advanced; and yet I have said nothing 
 but what every Christian in effect believes. What, I 
 now ask, is the legitimate conclusion of such high 
 claims ? What must we look for at the hands of a 
 race with such credentials as these ? If I were 
 speaking of Christianity, I might show you that all 
 this great past was to lead to a great future, that 
 the real source of the greatness of Abraham's race was 
 that in his seed " all the families of the earth were to 
 blessed " ; but I am going to confine my remarks to 
 a narrower circle of questions, nay, to one single 
 question — What is the relation in which this nation 
 stands with regard to the other nations ? — how do 
 they discharge, if they do discharge, the functions 
 of the high office they hold as God's witnesses to 
 mankind ? It needs not much reasoning to prove 
 
96 THE RELATION OF THE JEWS TO 
 
 that the duty of Jews to the other races of the earth 
 is singularly clear and plain. I do not think they 
 were meant to be their actual teachers ; they were 
 to preserve the great truths of Revelation for later 
 times, and, whether they accept it or no, they have 
 been the instruments of such a preservation of 
 revealed truth for ourselves, who have " entered " 
 (in this sense) into their labours. We use their 
 Scriptures, the words of their Prophets, the types and 
 forms of their religious worship, in establishing the 
 correctness of our own faith. 
 
 I want, however, to press this much further. I 
 want to ask, What effect are they producing — 
 nay, what effect have they in all these long years 
 produced upon other races ? Are those races, 
 bettered by their sojourn amongst them ? Is their 
 religion, not only by its own evidence, but by 
 the example of themselves its professors making 
 way amongst the religions of the world? You may 
 say, "Such was not the task imposed upon them; 
 they were to maintain (as they have done) their 
 belief against opposition, — to hand down (as they 
 also have done) the same belief to their children." 
 I utterly deny that this is all or the chief part of 
 what is laid upon them ; they are to teach others, at 
 least by example, and, putting religion aside, they 
 are to regenerate the nations of the earth with the 
 effect of their own high privilege — the knowledge of 
 the true and only God. Have they done so in any 
 
THE NATIONS AT LARGE. 97 
 
 perceptible degree ? Can they maintain with any 
 show of reason that their position amongst the 
 nations of the earth is that of a race which has 
 blessed those amongst whom they sojourned, and 
 whose history if they passed away (as races have 
 passed away as to any distinct existence) would be 
 that of a people who spread civilization and taught 
 a higher morality in all the lands where they dwelt? 
 I must say it plainly — the reverse is the fact; they 
 have received rather than conferred benefit; their 
 own moral and social position has been improved by 
 dwelling amidst those whose laws had already been 
 improved, whose social system had been elevated, — 
 I do not mean to say necessarily by Christianity 
 as the direct cause, but by all the various accom- 
 paniments and effects of Christianity ; and I add 
 that the Jews have rather sought these races than 
 others their inferiors in these important respects. 
 We do not find them dwelling amongst the igno- 
 rant and degraded Africans or the Hindoos, but 
 amongst the Christians of Europe, — the Moham- 
 medan in a less degree ; and whilst from the latter 
 they seem to have gained nothing and imparted 
 nothing to them, from the former they have ob- 
 tained education (and, to their credit, valued and 
 used it). The laws governing their social condition 
 have been improved. I do not say this as depre- 
 ciating them in comparison with other nations ; but 
 I must contend that in a degree this fact it derogates 
 
 7 
 
98 THE RELATION OF THE JEWS TO 
 
 from any claim of superiority they may make in 
 their present condition. 
 
 I should here carefully distinguish what I am 
 
 saying from any depreciation of the high character 
 
 of individuals of the race I am thus canvassing so 
 
 freely, or, indeed, of the entire people. We know 
 
 them as dwellers in our midst, we respect their 
 
 many virtues as good citizens, we know that in 
 
 any good work of beneficence they set us an 
 
 example ; and I should be doing injustice to my 
 
 own feelings if I did not give expression both to 
 
 my own high esteem for them and to the deep 
 
 interest I feel both in their character and in their 
 
 fortunes. I look on them as destined to occupy 
 
 a position even in relation to our own Christianity 
 
 of no common importance. What I lament is 
 
 that they do not, so far as we can judge, take 
 
 the same view of themselves. It is not enough 
 
 that they should be men of mark amongst us 
 
 for wealth, for charity, for aid towards objects of 
 
 high education and political benefit to us all. I 
 
 have worked at their side in some of the various 
 
 matters of the day ; I have met them in social 
 
 converse and friendship ; it is in their place that 
 
 I am, as it were, putting myself, when I urge 
 
 upon them not to subside into a mere monument 
 
 of a great past, but to prove their high ancestry 
 
 by a course worthy of and corresponding to the 
 
 deeds of their fathers and the words of their 
 
THE NATIONS AT LARGE. 
 
 99 
 
 prophets. Almost every nation has a past ; the 
 origin of a people is usually the portion of its 
 history that lives, or more frequently perhaps, the 
 point where it culminates and reaches its climax. 
 But the history of Israel is not great only, but its 
 promised future is more glorious than anything that 
 has gone before. For them, to live in the past is 
 itself a decadence and a fall. We, whose own 
 faith is bound up in theirs, have a right to speak 
 to them in this strain. We who have stood on 
 the shores of the Red Sea, where even now those 
 who tread its soil, though of a different faith, 
 believe the record ; we who are applying their 
 Psalms and prophecies to our own souls, and our 
 own lives, — we may well claim to say to them of 
 their own Zion, "We 'think upon her stones ; it 
 pitieth us to see her in the dust ' " (Psalm cii.). 
 
 I ask, then, is the true relation of this remark- 
 able race to the rest of the nations simply what 
 history and our own experience tell us it has 
 been ? Some special object and use in the world, it 
 must be believed, was assigned to them : are they 
 discharging it, fulfilling their high destiny? Take 
 their case as compared with Mohammedans, the 
 latter, with an erroneous creed, only true so far as it 
 is in accordance with the Jewish Scriptures and our 
 own, have evidently no special use except so far as 
 God has turned their very crimes into His own 
 instruments of good. I do not ignore the excep- 
 
ioo THE RELATION OF THE JEWS TO 
 
 tional appearance of a sort of missionary spirit 
 amongst Mohammedans in some parts of the world, 
 and I do not sympathise with the harsh expressions 
 that, in the late controversy, some have used re- 
 garding them. I only assert that it would be a 
 wild and untenable theory to maintain that we were 
 to look to the Mohammedans for the amelioration 
 of our race ; it is clear that we must reverse the 
 position : it is our task to raise and improve them, — 
 not by the sword, but by our influence and example, 
 and, I am bold to add, (waiting for the opportunity 
 and the call) by direct teaching of the truths we 
 hold. Compare, however, the position of Jews with 
 that of Mohammedans. Ought these not, to be a 
 very contrast with the latter? Are they not — 
 putting out of the question political relations — sim- 
 ply in a like position, teaching nothing — forgetting 
 nothing, we may almost add ? What great prin- 
 ciples of glorious hope for man, what high enthu- 
 siasm for the deliverance of God's noblest creature 
 from the thraldom of his own errors or passions, 
 have emanated from one or the other of these re- 
 markable families of mankind ! Yet do not let me 
 be supposed for a moment to place them on an 
 equality: for the one there is present empire, 
 threatened, no doubt, with peril which may prove 
 its ruin ; for the other, I ask, is there not a field 
 and a future greater than that of empire, — their 
 gathering together, as one people, to Jerusalem 
 
THE NA TIONS A T LARGE, 
 
 itself ? It is not, indeed, that I speak of, though I 
 do not hold it either impossible or unlikely ; indeed, 
 in some sense, this will take place in God's own time 
 and God's own way, but " His ways are not our 
 ways," and it is by events often that we discover 
 His plan. We have to obey His word and trust His 
 promise, and He " will bring it to pass." 
 
 Faith, however, implies action. The time is long 
 past for His once chosen people simply to maintain 
 a worship and a creed ; doubtless that worship pre- 
 served the creed in dark and troublous times. The 
 hour of action has arrived, and a choice must be 
 made. We Christians are moving according to \he 
 command given to us, to " go and teach all nations." 
 We may often fail, we have sometimes fearfully 
 neglected the work, but by God's mercy it is still in 
 our hands to do. We are the teachers of the 
 nations. To you we turn, men of Israel, through 
 whom we received our credentials, and say, Take 
 part with us in our ministry; too long have ye 
 waited inactive. "The kingdom of God cometh 
 not with observation!' Join us and restore the 
 glories of your own past, or rather, see them 
 merged and lost in the greater triumphs of the 
 Heir of David, your own and our Messiah, the Shiloh 
 to whom the gathering of the nations shall be 
 (Gen. xlix. 10). " O Jerusalem, Jerusalem," cried 
 He who loved it with more than human love, "how 
 often would I have gathered thy children together " 
 
THE RELATION OF THE JEWS TO 
 
 (Luke xiii. 34); but in His very words there was 
 a latent promise, a condition offered, of late but 
 effectual repentance. " Your house is left unto 
 you desolate." The words are true to the letter, 
 fulfilled before your eyes. Is not the promise 
 equally so which foretells the end of desolation and 
 the day of glad belief at last ? " Ye shall not see 
 this until the time come when ye shall say, Blessed 
 is He that cometh in the name of the Lord." 
 
 There remains one question yet more clearly 
 affecting the sons of Judah — their relation to their 
 own brethren, the tribes of Israel, separated for a time 
 in the mysterious counsels of God, but this separa- 
 tion one that clearly cannot be accepted as final by 
 themselves. The sad disruption that followed on 
 the cry of offended Israel, " What portion have we 
 in David ? now see to thine own house, David " 
 (1 Kings xii. 16), has surely in these long years had 
 its answer, — not such as they fashioned in their own 
 blind anger. They have simply, as far as their own 
 act tended, blotted themselves out of history ; but 
 not so. The true tenor of all the great promises 
 to Abraham and his seed utterly forbids such an 
 interpretation of God's designs. Special promises, 
 doubtless, attach to Judah ; but almost every scrip- 
 ture that speaks of them adds the glory of Ephraim 
 as part of the mighty future of the chosen race. 
 If the Patriarch whose name yet marks the royal 
 tribe, saved Joseph the future preserver of all his 
 
THE NA TIONS A T LARGE. 103 
 
 brethren, it was the common fortune of all that were 
 in his hand. And Christian writers never failed to 
 see this. " To the twelve tribes which are scattered 
 abroad, greeting," is the heading of the Epistle of St. 
 James ; by birth a Jew, by faith the first Christian 
 Bishop at Jerusalem. Nay, yet higher authority 
 remains. The Book of Revelation, which foretells 
 the " things that must be hereafter," omits (save one) 
 no tribe in the list of those enumerated as amongst 
 the ' sealed ' for acceptance in the last great day 
 (Rev. vii). That awful omission has a parallel in the 
 record of God's dealings with His once called disciples 
 — one afterwards unhappily found faithless. And 
 as He that "judged His people as one of the tribes 
 of Israel," became a serpent by the way, an adder 
 in the path (Gen. xlix. 16, 17), so Iscariot, the son 
 of Simon, " was guide to them that took Jesus " 
 (Acts i. 16), and his name is not found after the 
 brief record of his sin and its punishment, and 
 "another took his office." If I introduce mention of 
 this history, it is for the happier contrast in the 
 hope I would have all (especially themselves), enter- 
 tain who care to read the wondrous annals of this 
 peculiar race of a great and noble future that is 
 before them, — not their own glory alone or chiefly, 
 but a great debt they owe to mankind, and, as I 
 now remind them, to their own brethren lying hid for 
 the present and lost amongst the nations — missing 
 as they are said to be to our eyes, but not to Him 
 
104 THE RELATION OF THE JEWS TO 
 
 Who is the Redeemer of Israel, Who " saith to the 
 prisoners, Go forth ; to them that are in darkness, 
 Show yourselves " (Isa. xlix.). 
 
 I have not made it my object in these remarks 
 to urge upon the sons of Judah the great debt they 
 owe to Christianity, which has ever clung to belief in 
 their high destiny, and (however its own history may 
 be disfigured by some traits of cruel injustice and 
 persecution in dark superstitious days) cherished as 
 a part of its own creed a recognition of the great 
 part they have yet to play in the regenerating of 
 the nations. I ask them the more confidently to 
 listen to the plea that I urge — that they should 
 view soberly and honestly the relation in which they 
 stand to mankind at large. Have they not been 
 singled out in God's providence in the past ? Are 
 they not now fulfilling a wonderful and unexampled 
 destiny — scattered in every land, dwelling amongst 
 the nations, — having a part, yet no part, in their 
 polity and their fortunes? 
 
 What, I ask, then, must the end be ? " Search the 
 Scriptures," said One to them of old, " for in them ye 
 think ye have eternal life ;" and still to their own 
 Scripture we refer them, — " to the law and to the testi- 
 mony " (Isa. viii. 20). And there we read, "There 
 shall be a root of Jesse, which shall stand for an 
 ensign of the people ; to it shall the Gentiles seek " 
 (Isa. xi. 10-13). "And it shall come to pass in the 
 day that the Lord shall set His hand the second time 
 
THE NA TIONS A T LARGE. 105 
 
 to recover the remnant of His people. . . . And He 
 shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall 
 assemble the outcasts of Israel. ..." For the Lord 
 will have mercy on Jacob, and will yet choose Israel, 
 and set them in their own land : (Is. xiv. 1) and the 
 strangers shall be joined with them." 
 
BY 
 
 THE REV. DONALD FRASER, D.D. 
 
T 
 
 V. 
 
 ON THE COMPARATIVE EFFECTS OF JUDA- 
 ISM AND CHRISTIANITY UPON THE 
 WORLD. 
 
 HE topic assigned to us does not lead into 
 disputed interpretation of ancient oracles, or a 
 discussion of the origin and rationale of religious 
 belief; what is proposed is to apply to the religious 
 systems known as Judaism and Christianity the 
 practical test of usefulness to mankind. Let us 
 compare them as respects the power to bless the 
 world at large which each of them has shown in the 
 course of history. 
 
 When, however, we apply such a test to religion 
 
 any religion — we must keep certain conditions 
 
 and explanations in view; e.g. (i.) We do not seize 
 on this as a primary and fundamental test of truth. 
 Enough that proved usefulness supplies a presump- 
 tion in support of a religious system before its truth 
 has been otherwise investigated, and a corroboration 
 of the verdict when an investigation has issued 
 favourably; for all who believe in God and in His 
 beneficent government of the world, must admit that 
 
no COMPARATIVE EFFECTS OF JUDAISM 
 
 a true religion, pleasing to Him, must be expected to 
 have a loving aspect towards mankind, and to pro- 
 duce good and happy results wherever its influence 
 extends. (2.) When we speak of utility we do not 
 mean popularity, or the adherence of vast numbers 
 to a religious banner, for truth is not determined by 
 majorities. We mean well-approved adaptation to 
 the moral and spiritual wants of many nations, and 
 the production of holy and beneficial effects upon 
 the world. (3.) The test must be applied on a large 
 scale of history and observation, if it is to be of any 
 real use. The view must range over many countries 
 and many generations. Concomitant and incidental 
 effects must be distinguished from essential and in- 
 variable fruits. For attendant evils allowance must 
 be made according to the best information within 
 our reach, that we may arrive at the nett practical 
 result, and put that, and that only, to the credit of a 
 religion in our comparative estimates. 
 
 No son of Abraham can forbid us to apply such 
 a test to his religion.* Let it be that the law given 
 
 * The "Jewish World," in a critical notice of this lecture, abandons 
 all claim to propagate Judaism, and denounces the propagation of 
 Christianity as "an impracticable task, and an unmitigated curse." 
 " The especial mould in which our religion is cast is determined by 
 race. We claim Judaism for the Jews. It is not our province to 
 dictate what special form the religions of other people shall assume. 
 . . . It is by the development, not of any particular system, but of the 
 parent interests of Humanity that the world is to be really elevated." — 
 Jewish World, nth May, 1877. 
 
 And to this poor rationalistic level have fallen some of the children of 
 Abraham ! 
 
AND CHRISTIANITY UPON THE WORLD. in 
 
 under Moses, which moulded Israel into a nation, 
 separated them to Jehovah from all the world around, 
 and that the effect of their theocratic institutions 
 was to place them in a position of sharp contrast to 
 the neighbouring peoples and tribes ; still there is a 
 larger and kindlier aspect of Abraham's tent, and of 
 David's throne. 
 
 Abraham was chosen, called, and placed in covenant 
 relation to God for this very end — that in his pos- 
 terity all families of the earth might be blessed. It 
 will not be alleged that this blessing was designed to 
 consist of secular benefits, as that the descendants of 
 that patriarch were to teach arts and sciences to 
 other nations, to be the first discoverers, builders, or 
 engineers. Indisputably, the promise meant that by 
 their faith, or in their religious character, Abraham's 
 posterity would be of the highest service to mankind. 
 And no one who glories in having Abraham for a 
 father can complain if the religion he professes be 
 brought to this test : Has it blessed, and is it now 
 blessing the families, or tribes, and nations of the 
 earth ? 
 
 The same observation applies to David's throne. 
 Its glory was to appear in its beneficent aspect to 
 the world. A great Hebrew song of the Davidic 
 royalty has these words : " Let men bless themselves 
 in Him ; let all nations call Him blessed." No one 
 will say that such language bears on the mere poli- 
 tical welfare of mankind, and that the royal sway of 
 
COMPARATIVE EFFECTS OF JUDAISM 
 
 the Son of David over the world is meant to be just 
 of the same nature with that of the Ptolemies or the 
 Caesars. It is a sacred and religious value that 
 David's throne has for all the earth. And no 
 Israelite or Jew who believes in his own sacred 
 poetry, as having a genuine prophetic strain, can 
 complain of the question, Who is the king ? Where 
 is that Son of David who blesses all nations, and 
 whose name all nations reverence ? 
 
 A Christian can just as little as a Jew refuse the 
 test which we propose to apply. He professes to 
 have a religion founded on the Hebrew basis. He 
 affirms that the Christ in whom He believes is by 
 emphasis "the seed of Abraham," and "the Son of 
 David." Therefore he is bound to show that the 
 promises made to the lineage of Abraham and the 
 throne of David are being fulfilled by or through 
 Jesus whom he affirms to be Christ. Nay, more ; 
 he is bound to this by the primary conception of 
 Christianity. Though Jesus Christ did not Himself 
 go to the Gentiles, He proclaimed the love of God 
 to the world, and sent out His apostles with good 
 tidings to all nations. There was some hesitation 
 and delay before those Apostles quite understood 
 the extent of their commission ; but it is historically 
 certain that they, and the other missionaries whom 
 they associated with them, did preach the gospel as 
 addressed and applicable to the world at large. 
 There is therefore no alternative for a Christian but 
 
AND CHRISTIANITY UPON THE WORLD. 113 
 
 to submit the religion which he professes to this 
 test: Has it, or has it not, on the whole blessed and 
 bettered the nations of the earth ? Has it approved 
 itself as adapted to the moral and spiritual wants of 
 mankind at large ? 
 
 Both parties, then, in the great controversy with 
 which this course of lectures deals, are obliged to 
 admit the application of this very practical test. We 
 proceed to apply it ; and as we do so, endeavouring 
 to review with all candour " the comparative effects 
 of Judaism and Christianity upon the world," we 
 must keep in mind that the distinction between 
 these systems is not like that which subsists between 
 two modes of faith radically different and uncon- 
 nected, as between Christianity and Buddhism or 
 Parseeism. By Judaism, in this discussion, we must 
 mean anti-Christian Judaism, for only this can form 
 a contrast to Christianity; and it is a very impor- 
 tant element in the whole case, that the two 
 systems of which we treat are not radically different, 
 but radically connected. Rightly or wrongly, the 
 Church was born out of the Temple and the 
 Synagogue. And Christianity, equally with that 
 Judaism to which it is now opposed, claims to have 
 at its back the old Hebrew faith, and the venerable 
 Scriptures in which that faith is enshrined. 
 
 First then, let us survey the relation borne to 
 the world by that pre-Christian Judaism, or rather 
 Hebrewism, about which we have no controversy 
 
 8 
 
1 14 COMPARA FIVE EFFECTS OF JUDAISM 
 
 It was a witness for the unity of God, and for His 
 law of righteousness maintained for centuries by one 
 chosen nation, when all the world lay in darkness 
 and the shadow of death. That elect nation was 
 not always faithful to this calling, or true to this 
 testimony; but even an imperfect loyalty to such 
 a religion placed the tribes of Israel in well-defined 
 opposition to the surrounding world. Their rites 
 and ceremonies were their own ; and their religious 
 temper was exclusive. The Hebrews regarded the 
 nations, the Goyim, as a profane mass, which they 
 might have to fight, but with which they could not 
 mingle. Their thought was not of converting the 
 nations, but of subduing them in the name of 
 Jehovah. 
 
 And yet, in the Old Testament the spirit of pro- 
 phecy had larger thoughts, and cast a more gracious 
 light upon the Gentiles. The bards of Israel in the 
 Psalter have strains of great severity toward the 
 nations, but also strains of benevolence and hope. 
 They stigmatize the Gentiles as idolaters who deserve 
 to be smitten with the sword, and humiliated before 
 the theocratic king. They compose patriotic songs 
 to celebrate victory, and to incite the people of 
 Jehovah to do valiantly in future conflicts with the 
 heathen. But kinder thoughts also breathe through 
 these Psalms, recalling the old promise of the 
 Abrahamic epoch about the blessing of all families 
 of the earth. The stern exclusive spirit cries, " The 
 
AND CHRISTIANITY UPON THE WORLD. 115 
 
 nations compassed me about; but in the name of 
 Jehovah I will destroy them." The more benevolent 
 temper or wider sympathy of the old religion has 
 expression in the words, " praise Jehovah, all ye 
 nations; celebrate Him, all ye peoples." "Let all 
 the earth be filled with His glory." 
 
 The same double strain is plainly found in the 
 great prophets of Judah. Isaiah and Jeremiah fore- 
 tell heavy judgments incurred by the proud and 
 idolatrous nations of the East ; but they also predict 
 a return of nations to the service of Jehovah, or a 
 reconciliation of the world to God; and, beyond the 
 dark days of conflict and carnage, reveal a golden 
 age of righteousness and peace. In their eyes Mount 
 Zion is a hill of blessing for all the earth ; and the 
 ultimate joy of Jerusalem is to be the centre of the 
 joy of all mankind. 
 
 Not only had the refRgious books of the Hebrews 
 (which are reverenced by modern Jews and Christians 
 alike) this aspect of mingled severity and goodness 
 toward the world at large, but the Hebrew people 
 exhibited more or less distinctly in their history a 
 corresponding twofold relation to the tribes and 
 nations around them. During their times of fidelity 
 to Jehovah they were separate from the heathen, wit- 
 nesses against their idolatry and licentiousness; yet 
 they received strangers into the commonwealth of 
 Israel, and even when there was no such ingathering 
 they did something in their dispersion to diffuse among 
 
1 1 6 COMPARA FIVE EFFECTS OF J UDAISM 
 
 other races a knowledge of the supreme Jehovah, 
 and the hope of a future reign of justice and of 
 truth. At one time or other, this people, numeri- 
 cally small, but influential from their very singu- 
 larity, touched all the great nations and systems of 
 antiquity, and were a blessing in the midst of all 
 countries wherein they were scattered. Thus, in a 
 measure, though in quite a limited measure, the 
 families of the earth got a blessing through the seed 
 of Abraham. 
 
 But a very remarkable fact now strikes our view. 
 As the Roman power overspread the known world, 
 the Jews settled in large numbers in Gentile cities, 
 enjoying, on the whole, under the Roman praetors 
 protection and security. They lived and worshipped 
 apart, receiving from the authorities a half-contemp- 
 tuous toleration ; and they were content with this. 
 Some of the heathen, for one cause or another, re- 
 sorted to their synagogues as proselytes; but the Jews 
 made no attempt to enlighten and bless the world. 
 Their ancestral belief had come to be burdened with 
 minute Rabbinical traditions, and any fervour that 
 remained showed itself in a narrow fanaticism. So 
 they had not faith enough to attempt the overthrow 
 of heathen religions ; and they had not love enough 
 to become channels of blessing to the Gentiles. 
 Judaism was more than ever before in contact with 
 Gentilism; but there appeared in it no power, 
 hardly any disposition, to bless the nations. It was 
 
AND CHRISTIANITY UPON THE WORLD. 117 
 
 becoming more and more formal, traditional, pedan- 
 tic, fanatical, self-righteous, and self-enclosed. 
 
 Now mark what ensued. At that very time there 
 arose at an obscure village in Galilee, one Jesus. 
 He grew up under the veil of obscurity, reared 
 among mechanics, trained in no Rabbinical school, 
 and, so far as appears, not cast into association with 
 cultured intellects. This Man, after He became 
 known to His countrymen, had only a short career 
 of perhaps three years ; and during that time, 
 though He attracted a few followers, and sometimes 
 even crowds, He was steadily opposed by the leaders 
 of the Jewish people, and at their instance was put 
 to a shameful death. He did not visit other lands, 
 or express any wish to confer with learned men, or 
 so much as to see the chief seats of human knowledge 
 and power. But this Jesus somehow began to exert 
 an influence upon the v/orld, learned and unlearned, 
 greater than the most famous prophets of Israel had 
 ever done. While displaying a knowledge of the 
 ancient Scriptures which surprised the Jews, and 
 showing the highest honour for " the law and the 
 prophets," He gave to His teaching a breadth and 
 fulness quite unknown to the contemporary teachers 
 of His nation, but in harmony with the larger and 
 brighter thoughts of the ancient prophets. He dealt 
 with matters great in themselves, and supremely im- 
 portant to all men. He declared the Father whom 
 the world had not known. He announced the king- 
 
1 1 8 COMPARA TIVE EFFECTS OF JUDAISM 
 
 dom of God. He proclaimed Himself in Jerusalem 
 to be the Light of the world. And having trained 
 certain disciples, and infused His own spirit into 
 them, He bade them make more disciples in all the 
 nations. 
 
 Those messengers whom he sent forth were them- 
 selves men of Israel — men of Galilee. They had the 
 narrow ideas of their time and nation, and found it 
 hard to believe that Gentiles should be placed on a 
 par with the seed of Abraham. But, obeying the 
 command of their Master, they lifted up their 
 testimony to the Jew first, then to the Samaritan, 
 and then to the Gentile ; and lo ! they began to 
 act upon the world with a power that had never 
 shown itself in even the most eminent men of the 
 Hebrew race. Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Solomon, 
 Daniel — all these played a great part with reference 
 to the Gentiles in their time. But the fishermen of 
 Galilee, and Paul of Tarsus, and Apollos of Alex- 
 andria, with others of the same stamp, turned the 
 world upside down. They resisted the churlish 
 separatism into which Judaism had degenerated ; 
 and they did what the most religious Jews through- 
 out the Roman Empire had shrunk from attempting 
 — they combated heathenism in its strongholds, and 
 assailed it with success. 
 
 These began to be called Christians, and be- 
 tween them and the bulk of their own nation a 
 great gulf opened. Though they took Jewish 
 
AND CHRISTIANITY UPON THE WORLD. 119 
 
 grounds of argument and belief, and dwelt on the 
 promises made to the Hebrew fathers, they were 
 dealt with as renegades, and the heathen were 
 incited by the Jews to treat them with violence. 
 Nevertheless, their testimony prevailed. The move- 
 ment which began with those plain men of Galilee, 
 who affirmed that Jesus was the Christ and the 
 Son of the living God, could not be stayed by 
 emperors or praetors, by priests or rabbis, by 
 philosophers or satirists, by magistrates or mobs. 
 
 But now we are come to the parting of the roads, 
 or of the streams' Judaism pursues one way, Chris- 
 tianity another. Judaism flows in one channel 
 Christianity in another. The former is in a narrow 
 bed, hemmed in by Talmudic commentary and the 
 traditions of the elders, flowing continuously through 
 the world, but holding itself apart. The latter flows 
 in a wide, strong stream, sometimes turbid enough, 
 it must be confessed, but full of diffusive life, and 
 touching in its course all human interests, — the 
 domestic circle, morals, education, liberty or slavery, 
 public spirit, and every part of the social economy; 
 and that, too, in every nation which has received the 
 Christian faith. Surely it is a fair question : In 
 which of these ways or channels is the promise 
 being fulfilled, that all families of the earth should 
 be blessed ? Both come from Abraham ; for, as we 
 have already pointed out, Christianity looks back 
 as reverentially as Judaism to the father of the 
 
I2Q COMPARATIVE EFFECTS OF JUDAISM 
 
 faithful, and in point of fact has done far more than 
 modern Judaism to make known to the world 
 Abraham and the Patriarchs, Moses and the Pro- 
 phets. We think it clear, and mean to maintain, 
 that the modern or anti-Christian Judaism has had 
 a very feeble, if any, world-blessing influence ; and 
 that it is Christianity — notwithstanding the corrup- 
 tions and superstitions that have infected and 
 weakened it — that has shown a real power to bless 
 the families of the earth. 
 
 Let us consider the great truth of monotheism, 
 of which the Jews have unquestionably been the wit- 
 nesses. Even in the former " times of ignorance," the 
 pre-Christian centuries, we cannot see that the Jews 
 have any ground to boast of the way in which they 
 fulfilled their high commission ; for it appears from 
 their own Scriptures that they were continually 
 hankering after the gods of the heathen round about ; 
 and, in fact, never were for any long time steadfast 
 monotheists till after their return from captivity in 
 Babylon. But the question before us has reference to 
 post-Christian and anti-Christian Judaism, and we 
 ask what effect it has given to its testimony ; what 
 has it done during the past eighteen centuries to 
 convince the world that there is but one living and 
 true God ? We do not forget or deny that the Jews 
 occasionally suffered under the Roman Emperors 
 for their absolute refusal to acknowledge the gods 
 of their heathen rulers. This for their own con- 
 
AND CHRISTIANITY UPON THE WORLD. 121 
 
 sistency. But what did they then, and what have 
 they done sinc3 that time to spread monotheism 
 through the world ? After Christianity arose, the 
 Jews seem to have lost the power of making prose- 
 lytes which they had before, and it became a rare 
 thing for Gentile converts to appear in the synagogue. 
 As for the great overthrow of heathenism, no one can 
 ascribe it to the Jews. They were not the merffhUt 
 smote with withering force the vast polytheism of the 
 ancient world. They were not the men who brought 
 Europe and the north of Africa and Western 
 Asia to cast away their idols. What they cared 
 for was that they themselves should be better than 
 others, and that Jehovah should delight in them. 
 They did not love the world, and took no trouble, 
 ran no risk, displayed no zeal to bring the nations 
 to Jehovah's feet. Mohammedanism, in fact, has 
 done far more to spread monotheism over a large 
 part of the globe than Judaism. And Christianity 
 has done immeasurably more. It has thrown down 
 the shrines and images of false gods all over the 
 earth. It does so still with undiminished zeal. 
 And whereas the world, for all that Judaism does, 
 might continue as polytheistic and idolatrous as it 
 was two thousand years ago, Christianity is busy 
 now in exposing and abolishing the heathenism of 
 India, of China, of Central and Southern Africa, and 
 of the Islands in the Pacific; just as in former days 
 it destroyed the Druidical native worship of the 
 
122 COMPARATIVE EFFECTS OF JUDAISM 
 
 Gauls and Britons, and drove away the legendary 
 gods of Germany and the North ; or, in days still 
 more remote, put an end to the worship of I sis 
 and Serapis, of Jupiter and Apollo, and Venus, 
 and Bacchus, and Pan. 
 
 It is notorious that the Jews avoid those countries 
 where their monotheistic testimony is most needed. 
 In heathen communities they are hardly ever seen. 
 It is among Christians they live, where their witness 
 to one God is not required, or among Mohammedans, 
 with whom they have much sympathy ; for they 
 have these things in common : They say that there 
 is one God — Jehovah — Allah. They boast of a great 
 prophet — Moses — Mohammed. They have every- 
 thing in a book — the Torah— the Koran. Withal 
 they are self-righteous, and despise others. 
 
 But let us enquire whether, in other ways, modern 
 Judaism has conferred blessings on the world. What 
 of moral culture and attainment ? The Jew boasts 
 of that law, which (as Mordecai says to Daniel 
 Deronda) " has carried within its frame the breath of 
 social justice, of charity, and of household sanctities. " 
 But is it the Jew who has taught these virtues to the 
 nations ? Who has spread over the earth the Ten 
 Commandments ? Is it not the Christian ? And 
 who has driven into the conscience of the human 
 race a great sentiment of duty which may be vio- 
 lated but cannot be crushed ? Is it the Jew ? Who 
 can deny that it is the Christian, the man under 
 
AND CHRISTIANINY UPON THE WORLD. 
 
 123 
 
 law to Christ, who has received the ethics of the 
 old legislation as expounded in the teaching of Jesus 
 Christ, enforced by His authority, and written on 
 fleshy tables of the heart by the power of His Holy 
 Spirit ? We do not for a moment dispute that high 
 specimens of moral integrity have been and are ex- 
 hibited among the Jews. What we point out is that 
 not the Christ-rejecting Jews, but those, whether 
 Jews or Gentiles, who have followed Christ, have 
 made much moral impression on the world. 
 
 It is too true that the impression has been imper- 
 fect, and that much remains to be done in the moral 
 education of mankind ; but in so far as men of many 
 nations have learned the baseness of deceit and self- 
 ishness, and the beauty and obligation of justice, 
 truth, and love, the lesson has been received from 
 that Christianity which has all along its history been, 
 though with varying efficiency, according to its purity 
 at different periods, the great aggressive instrument 
 of moral civilization. This is all the more remarkable, 
 because Christianity has often been represented in 
 such a way as to do it great injustice. Unright- 
 eous and cruel deeds have been perpetrated, and 
 gross frauds have been practised in its dishonoured 
 name ; yet it has had vigour enough to survive and 
 correct those evils, and to impress on mankind great 
 ideas and motives of equity and of mercy, which 
 Judaism never succeeded in propagating to any great 
 extent, either from feebleness of moral purpose, or 
 
1 24 COMPARA Tl VE EFFEC TS OF JUDA ISM 
 
 from defect of sympathy with humanity at large. 
 But without this there is no blessedness for the 
 " families of the earth." Wealth, numbers, military 
 prowess — none of them, nor all of them, can make a 
 nation well and strong, without a moral substratum 
 of character, the feeling of honour, the love of justice, 
 kindness, and truth. 
 
 We are disposed to push the question also into 
 the region of the intellect. The Jewish people are 
 endowed with a strong and swift intelligence, and 
 have had a religion which exercised thought, and 
 encouraged the pursuit of knowledge. Yet how 
 little have they attempted for the education of man- 
 kind! how little have they even cultivated their own 
 minds in times and in countries where they have not 
 received a stimulus from Christianity ! 
 
 Let us explain what we mean. We do not at all 
 forget the reputation of the Jews for erudition and 
 the pursuit of certain arts and sciences, at a time 
 when intellectual darkness and lethargy brooded 
 over Europe. We recognize a truth in the proud 
 saying, that " there were no dark ages for Israel." 
 Especially under the caliphs in Spain the Jews 
 were men of letters, and their sons thronged the 
 great schools of Cordova, Toledo, Barcelona, and 
 Grenada. They almost monopolized the profession 
 of medicine, and were proficients in the mathematics 
 and in such astronomy as was cultivated at that 
 time. They made known to Europe the Arabian 
 
AND CHRISTIANITY UPON THE WORID. 125 
 
 philosophy, of which Averroes was the great master — 
 a mass of speculation and of comment on Aristotle 
 — which has been fairly enough compared with the 
 Christian Scholasticism. The Sephardim, or Spanish 
 Jews, have the most distinguished history ; but in 
 Portugal also, and in Italy, this people cultivated 
 letters and sciences ; and by the intelligence which 
 their habits of travelling greatly promoted, and the 
 commercial enterprise which marked them off from 
 the rough and reckless population around them, they 
 gained a disastrous prominence throughout most of 
 the countries of Europe. Disastrous ! because it 
 exposed them to jealousy and persecution. Now we 
 have not a word to say in palliation of the shameful 
 cruelty with which so-called Christian governments, 
 instigated by ecclesiastics, and supported by popular 
 fanaticism, drove the Jews from their homes, confis- 
 cated their property, and by violence robbed them 
 of their children : not a word, unless it be that 
 which applies to all persecution on religious grounds, 
 that man is an animal that learns very slowly. He 
 has taken thousands of years to climb up to moral 
 truths, which when reached are so obvious, that one 
 cannot comprehend how they were not seen from the 
 beginning ; and especially the rights of conscience, 
 the simple principles of religious liberty, have only 
 in these late generations got possession of the human 
 mind, and in many quarters, even in England itself, 
 are not completely understood and acted on even at 
 
126 COMPARATIVE EFFECTS OF JUDAISM 
 
 the present hour. But our indignation is livelier 
 even than our pity, when we think of the bloody 
 cruelty of the Crusaders to the Jews in Germany ; or 
 of the conduct of the kings of France, who showed 
 some toleration to the Jews when they wanted 
 money from them, then scouted and expelled them, 
 then allowed thern to return only to plunder and 
 banish them again. Our kings of England were 
 little if any better in their conduct to the inof- 
 fensive Hebrews who settled in such ancient cities 
 as London, Bristol, and York ; and in the time 
 of Edward L, at the desire of Parliament, all the 
 Jews were banished from this realm, with pitiless 
 exactions and ruthless severities. Most monstrous 
 of all these acts of unchristian injustice was the 
 expulsion of the Jews from Spain, under Ferdinand 
 and Isabella, in the year 1492, at the instigation of 
 the infamous Inquisitor-General Torquemada. When 
 we read the story, our sympathy is entirely and 
 warmly with the Jews ; and our admiration kindles 
 as we mark the steadfastness of a people who, to 
 the number of hundreds of thousands, sacrificed all 
 that they had, bore every hardship and indignity, 
 and risked every danger, fleeing to Barbary, to Italy, 
 and to the Levant, rather than change their faith at 
 the bidding of their persecutors. 
 
 Now, it is only reasonable to infer that so many 
 oppressions and transportations seriously interrupted 
 the pursuit of knowledge by the Jews, and tended to 
 
AND CHRISTIANITY UPON THE WORLD. 127 
 
 narrow the sympathy of the race. And it is quite 
 fair for the Jew to retort upon us, that if his people, 
 after making acknowledged attainments in various 
 branches of learning and of practical skill, failed to 
 do anything of importance for the intellectual pro- 
 gress of the world, the blame lies not so much on 
 them as on their Christian tyrants. 
 
 We are willing to go further still in ascribing a 
 certain intellectual renown to the Jews. It is the sign 
 of a well-endowed race, that even when the level of 
 culture is not high, they produce a certain proportion 
 of lofty and powerful minds. And, to confine our 
 view to the last 1,000 or even 800 years, we have 
 no difficulty in recognizing such minds among the 
 Jews. 
 
 Abraham Ben Ezra, of Toledo, in the twelfth cen- 
 tury, was for his time eminent as a commentator, 
 grammarian, philosopher, cabalist, physician, mathe- 
 matician, astronomer, and poet. 
 
 He had a contemporary who is even more famous, 
 Moses Maimonides of Cordova, a disciple of Aver- 
 roes, who was not only a most distinguished phy- 
 sician, but also a voluminous author in theology, 
 logic, and astronomy. He was too much of a philo- 
 sopher, however, to be a good traditional Jew. 
 
 Don Isaac Abarbanel, born at Lisbon in I437> 
 was a man of much erudition and wonderful 
 versatility, but of a bitter and haughty spirit. Not 
 unlike him was Manasseh Ben Israel, the eminent 
 
128 COMPARATIVE EFFECTS OF JUDAISM 
 
 linguist and theologian, who came over from Amster-: 
 dam to confer with Oliver Cromwell regarding the 
 restoration of the Jews to England, — a project which 
 found favour with the Lord Protector. 
 
 Benedict Espinoza is a name which becomes more 
 and more illustrious in the history of abstract thought. 
 He was excommunicated from the synagogue for 
 his opinions ; but when we are thinking of great 
 intellects of the Jewish race, we cannot omit one 
 who, judge as we may of his pantheism, must be 
 pronounced one of the most blameless men and pro- 
 found thinkers in all the annals of philosophy. 
 
 And, to mention but one more, Moses Men- 
 delssohn, grandfather of the musical genius, Felix 
 Mendelssohn, did in the last century acquire such 
 distinction throughout Germany as a metaphysical 
 writer, without breaking away, as Spinoza did, from 
 the Jewish theology, that he powerfully influenced 
 public opinion in a direction favourable to his 
 brethren, and raised the Jews out of the obloquy 
 under which they had lain. Mendelssohn revived 
 the speculative, some said the rationalizing, tendency 
 of Maimonides. 
 
 We say nothing of the eminent Jewish intellects 
 that have been in the service of Christianity, because 
 we are discussing the intellectual influence of anti- 
 Christian Judaism. And we have cited a few illus- 
 trious names to show that we are far from taunting 
 that Judaism with mental barrenness. Yet, after all 
 
AND CHRISTIANITY UPON THE WORLD. 129 
 
 this, we return unshaken to our position, that not 
 Judaism but Christianity has been the intellectual 
 elevator of the modern world. Whenever and 
 wherever the Jews have been scholars and scientists, 
 we shall find that they have been under another and 
 a stronger intellectual stimulus than their own. In 
 Spain they were impelled towards learning by the 
 Arabian scholars, and encouraged by the Saracen 
 princes. In other countries of Europe they have 
 been influenced by the Christian light that shone 
 around them. 
 
 To make this more plain, consider the history of 
 the Jews in those regions where they have not had 
 this light round about them, — e.g., in Persia, in Egypt, 
 in Morocco. They have been for generations sunk 
 in superstition and ignorance. They are Phari- 
 saically religious, and scrupulously observant of 
 Rabbinical ceremonies and dietary regulations. 
 But in what condition are their minds ? Education 
 is neglected, and the only mental food which their 
 religion supplies consists of mere shells or husks 
 of Rabbinical commentary and tradition. Now this 
 cannot be ascribed to religious persecution. In some 
 of these lands — notably in the Turkish Empire — the 
 Jews have long enjoyed more favour than any 
 Christians. In days when the Greek or the Arme- 
 nian had to skulk like a criminal through the streets 
 of Stamboul, the Jew could walk erect and without 
 fear. It is not oppression, it is the pernicious in- 
 
 9 
 
130 COMPARATIVE EFFECTS OF JUDAISM 
 
 fluence of the traditional system in which they are 
 bound, which has hindered the mental development 
 of this people under the protection of the Crescent. 
 
 We have not been sparing in our admissions that 
 in many parts of Europe the Jews were grievously 
 wronged by Christians who misconstrued the mind 
 of Christ. Yet we maintain that it is Christianity 
 after all that has given culture to modern Jews, and 
 set them on that course of intellectual improvement 
 which, taken with their remarkable commercial capa- 
 city and financial position, gives them a new im- 
 portance in the world. In Western Europe, and in 
 America, they have so far conformed to Christian 
 ideas as to abandon practices which have been detri- 
 mental to the family life of their brethren in the 
 East; and even in Russia, the Rabbinic laws of 
 divorce and early marriage, though in force among 
 the Jews, are gradually falling into discredit. 
 Whatever touches family life touches also the edu- 
 cation of the young. Now it is notorious that a 
 great thirst for education has sprung up among 
 English, American, and German Jews. And it is 
 the fashion at present to take special notice of the 
 successes of Jewish students, and to anticipate great 
 things from the Jewish mind, pointing to the part it 
 plays already among the statesmen, jurists, financiers, 
 and journalists of Europe. But to what is the 
 intellectual advance of the modern Jews really due ? 
 Have the Rabbinical schools brought about this 
 
AND CHRISTIANITY UPON THE WO RID. 131 
 
 result ? Is it traditional Talmudic Judaism that has 
 educated the Jew into this fitness to cope with, and 
 even to lead, the Christian ? Assuredly not. It is 
 not too much to say that to be educated and influ- 
 enced by such Judaism alone is to be doomed to 
 grow up a mere pedant, out of harmony with con- 
 temporary thought and life, and quite unfit to exert 
 a real influence upon the world. 
 
 It was the Prussian Government that first com- 
 pelled the Jews to give a useful education to their 
 children. The Rabbis were alarmed. And the boon 
 of a thorough education, which has proved of such ser- 
 vice in many ways to the whole German nation, had at 
 first to be forced on the Jewish portion of the popu- 
 lation. But it soon came to be appreciated ; and there 
 has followed a great improvement in the education of 
 the Hebrew people in Holland, Italy, England, and 
 elsewhere ; so great an improvement, that there has 
 sprung up a generation of Western Jews wider in cul- 
 ture than any generation that ever went before, and 
 not only qualified to act, but unquestionably acting, 
 with no small effect on the public opinion, and there- 
 fore on the course and fortunes of the leading nations 
 of the world. How far this new element is perilous 
 to the Church of God, and is practically an ally of 
 Positivism and Infidelity, is a serious question, which 
 we must not at this time pause to examine. What 
 we maintain is, that the intellectual progress of the 
 modern Jews, and the consequent increase of their 
 
132 COMPARATIVE EFFECTS OF JUDAISM 
 
 influence, are due, not to an impulse from within 
 acting through the dreary formalism of the Rabbini- 
 cal schools, but to an impulse from without, i.e., from 
 the surrounding Christian civilization acting through 
 schools, lyceums, and universities which Chris- 
 tianity has founded and continues to support. If 
 the modern Jew in Berlin, Paris, or London is quite 
 a citizen of the world, able to join without hesitation 
 in the scientific investigations, literary discussions, 
 and political strifes of the day, it is because he is as 
 little as possible of a Rabbinical Jew, has conformed 
 himself to Christian models, and thrown himself out 
 of the narrow limits of Jewish thought into the broad 
 stream of European civilization. 
 
 The sum of our lecture is this, that whether we 
 regard theology, morality, or intellectual life, it is 
 Christianity and not Judaism that has blessed our 
 modern world. We return to the thought that when 
 the Church and the synagogue parted company, two 
 rivers went apart, both tracing their origin to the 
 covenant with Abraham. It seems to us that one of 
 them has singularly failed to irrigate the dry plains 
 of the earth, and is losing much of its water among 
 the sands of materialistic unbelief. The other has 
 sent out branches into almost every land, and, even 
 where its waters have been soiled with admixtures 
 of superstition and error, they have never failed to 
 communicate some blessing as they flowed. Aye, 
 and though this river, too, loses much in the sands 
 
AND CHRISTIANITY UPON THE WORLD. 133 
 
 of unbelief, it has such vital supplies as to grow wider 
 and fuller and more irresistible in its flow. Respect 
 for woman, family purity, public justice, the love of 
 mercy, the spread of knowledge, the progress of the 
 arts, the noble passion of liberty, all these grow 
 best on the banks of our Christian stream. Jews 
 have them, but have them when they live among 
 Christians, and cannot help breathing a Christian 
 atmosphere. 
 
 It is in our hearts to appeal to the enlightened 
 philanthropic Jew. You think of the Almighty God, 
 not as your national Deity merely, but as the God 
 and Father of all. And you have caught the idea 
 and the feeling of humanity. Though your own 
 nation be most properly the first in your eyes, you 
 wish to see all nations blessed in virtue, in peace, in 
 the knowledge of God. Now what religion is in 
 fullest harmony with this aspiration ? Is it Judaism, 
 self-contained and non-missionary, laying stress on 
 rites and restrictions which are obviously adapted to 
 an oriental race only, and can never become uni- 
 versal ? Or is it Christianity, which contains all the 
 ancient Scriptural revelation that you have in Juda- 
 ism, and adds a luminous declaration and heart- 
 thrilling proof of God's love to all, binds as many as 
 receive it into one brotherhood, requires no rites that 
 may not with equal facility be adopted and practised 
 by all families of the earth, and has shown an in- 
 herent power to root itself in every clime, to elevate 
 
134 COMPARATIVE EFFECTS OF JUDAISM. 
 
 the life of every people, to twine with itself the men- 
 tal and moral progress of the race, to penetrate all 
 social conditions, surmount every barrier, survive and 
 correct the errors of its own administrators, face 
 without fear every new school of human speculation, 
 and steadily move on to conquer and to mould the 
 world ? 
 
VI. 
 
 re fee §m0ptifo mxir @Iarg 0f % Jeta. 
 
 BY 
 
 THE REV. PROFESSOR BIRKS, M.A. 
 
VI. 
 
 THE TRUE PREROGATIVE AND GLORY OF 
 THE JEWS. 
 
 THE title of this Lecture implies the previous 
 admission of one or two fundamental truths, 
 apart from which its terms could have no consistent 
 and intelligible meaning. 
 
 First, it is assumed that our world is no piece of 
 mere mechanism, but the theatre of a great scheme 
 of moral government and human probation. It is 
 not the slave of physical laws, acting mechanically 
 with irresistible force, beginning we know not how, 
 and tending we know not whither. Men are not 
 machines of a very complex and peculiar kind, con- 
 densations of solar force, wrapped up mysteriously, 
 one knows not how, in the convolutions of the brain. 
 They are not automata, in that unnatural sense of the 
 word, which makes it denote the absence of all self- 
 moving power, things pushed and pulled to and fro 
 by environing conditions of existence, without choice 
 or volition of their own. They are beings endued 
 with reason and the power of choice, and responsible 
 
138 THE TRUE PREROGATIVE AND 
 
 to the Supreme Governor of the universe for all their 
 actions. Life is no series of illusions, in which men 
 and nations rise, like bubbles, to the surface of a 
 vast ocean of ceaseless fatal changes, and then burst 
 and disappear. In such a world of slaves or 
 shadows, it would be senseless to claim for any man, 
 or race of men, dignity, prerogative, or glory of any 
 kind. Each of them must bear about with them the 
 brand of a slave, and the clank of their fetters must 
 be heard in every step of their movements. We 
 must assume that all physical laws are only the 
 basement of a lofty edifice, surmounted by laws of a 
 higher kind ; moral and spiritual truths, which appeal 
 to the hearts and consciences of men, as made at 
 first in the image of God ; and that the architect of 
 the material and outward world is also the Supreme 
 Lord and Governor of the moral universe. 
 
 Man is a responsible being. He has a power of 
 choice, which may be, and often is, abused. He has 
 duties which he is bound to fulfil, a law which he 
 ought to obey. Traces of that Divine image, in 
 which he was created at first, still remain, however 
 obscured, and constitute a common prerogative and 
 glory of all mankind. They may debase themselves 
 by brutish lusts and sensual appetites, but still they 
 are not brute beasts, with no understanding for 
 higher things. They are rational and accountable 
 creatures, over whom we may read that Divine 
 message, as a title of honour and a voice of warn- 
 
GLORY OF THE JEWS. 139 
 
 ing — " Every one of us shall give account of himself 
 unto God." 
 
 But a second truth is also implied, which does not 
 command universal assent, even among Theists and 
 Christians themselves. Moral duties, and their corre- 
 lates, moral distinctions, prerogatives, and honours, 
 belong not only to individuals, but to communities, 
 societies, nations, and races of men. Their union 
 with each other, by common descent, and in smaller 
 or larger families, gives rise to a large variety of 
 special duties one towards another, and of all in 
 common towards other families, and the rest of man- 
 kind. Union is strength, and with moral agents, 
 added strength is added responsibility. A race or 
 nation have power to do many things, by their 
 combined action, which the separate units could not 
 do. And hence there is a wide range of obligations, 
 which depend on the capacities of men for social 
 and combined action, and apply to all nations, races, 
 or voluntary associations of men. These obligations, 
 when fulfilled, must have their counterpart in common 
 privileges, honours, or tokens of Divine power and 
 blessing. Nor is this the whole truth. He who has 
 made us men, not brutes, by His own good pleasure, 
 has the power and right to vary His own gifts, and 
 to allot variously, to different men or sets of men, 
 special distinctions, gifts and privileges, entrusting 
 more talents to one class, and fewer to another ; but 
 all under one common charge, to use them aright for 
 
140 THE TRUE PREROGATIVE AND 
 
 His glory, and the good of their fellow-creatures, 
 and with the certainty of a later inquiry as to how 
 they have actually been employed. 
 
 Here, then, is the starting-point of our inquiry. 
 All men, from our first parents onwards, are actors 
 in a vast scheme of Divine Providence, in which 
 every individual, and every race or nation, has duties 
 to fulfil, a work assigned to them to accomplish, 
 various gifts and talents committed for their use, 
 and privileges and honours of different kinds, which 
 may either be forfeited by abuse, or become fuller, 
 larger, and more complete, when recognised as a 
 sacred trust from the Giver of all good things, and 
 rightly improved. Is there any such privilege 
 which belongs to the Jewish race and people ? If 
 they had such a privilege in the times of their 
 national greatness, does it still continue, or has it 
 come utterly to an end ? Or is the truth some- 
 where between these limits ? What if the preroga- 
 tive and honour of the Jewish people is, like the 
 Jewish damsel of old, in a state of suspended 
 animation, but not of utter death, so that it may be 
 said with truth, " The damsel is not dead, but sleep- 
 eth," and a voice of power may soon go forth, in 
 which it may revive once more, partake of the food 
 of life, and stand forth before the world in all the 
 beauty of a life from which the shadows of the grave 
 have passed away, and on which there will rest the 
 clear light of the manifest blessing of heaven ? 
 
GLORY OF THE JEWS. 141 
 
 There is a great scheme of Providence, carried on 
 from age to age in our world, of which God is the 
 author, the subjects the whole race of mankind 
 through successive generations, and the aim and 
 purpose, redemption and recovery from the bondage 
 of moral evil of ever-increasing numbers of souls, to 
 heights, ever unfolding more and more, of life, 
 immortality, holy happiness, communion with God, 
 and everlasting felicity. The true privilege and 
 honour of any child of man is, first, to be the 
 receiver of a share in the benefits of this great 
 redemption ; and next, to be a chosen instrument, in 
 the hand of God, for the larger unfolding and wider 
 spread of these heavenly blessings. Nearness of 
 union with God Himself, first, as the receiver of His 
 gifts, and next, and still more, as a fellow-worker in 
 His great plan of love, is the only true standard of 
 prerogative, dignity, and honour, in the sight of 
 heaven. All honours apart from this are mere 
 shadows, and, in proportion as the Divine plan 
 unfolds itself more fully, will disappear like the 
 dreams of a night vision. 
 
 Again, the highest form of privilege and honour 
 cannot belong to any race of men, or corporate 
 body of men, but to individuals alone. For God's 
 highest gifts to men are those which apply to them 
 as personal moral agents, who must bear each his own 
 burden, give account for his own works, and have a 
 direct and immediate relation of union and fellow- 
 
142 THE TRUE PREROGATIVE AND 
 
 ship with the great Author of his moral being. 
 The personal, individual life is that which is inner- 
 most and deepest in man's complex and many- 
 sided existence. Nearness to God, in a community, 
 can only result from the nearness of individual 
 members of that community, through whom, by asso- 
 ciation, the rest are raised into an intimacy they 
 could not otherwise have attained. To drink in the 
 words and messages of God, to experience their 
 quickening power in the deepest chambers of the 
 heart, to be set free by them from the dominion and 
 curse of sin, to be renewed in the image of the 
 Creator, and then to co-operate, consciously and 
 willingly, in the great work of redemption, for which 
 the whole system of the universe is sustained, is the 
 highest of all privileges. It cannot belong to any 
 one, either by birth, as descended from any special 
 stock or race, nor by the will of men, associating in 
 any voluntary fellowship, but by a direct work of 
 Divine adoption, which is not . and cannot be given 
 in a crowd, or to men as parts and fractions of 
 a community ; but to such moral agents, one by 
 one, as if standing alone in the presence, and 
 under the gracious eye, of the King of heaven. 
 And thus, to the Jew under the Old Testament, 
 to be a true servant and worshipper of the God 
 of Israel, admitted to nearness of communion with 
 Him, was a higher privilege than simple mem- 
 bership in the family of Israel, however great and 
 
GLORY OF THE JEWS. 143 
 
 manifold the favour shown to God's peculiar 
 people. 
 
 What, then, is the standard of these privileges by 
 which one race or people may be honourably dis- 
 tinguished from another ? It is the intimacy of 
 their relation to God's great plan of redemption, and 
 the special post or office assigned them in connection 
 with the final aim of universal Providence ; in modern 
 phrase, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, 
 but in words more truly appropriate to describe it, 
 the glory of God in the spiritual and eternal salva- 
 tion of men. 
 
 Now the same Scriptures, which reveal to us the 
 unbroken constancy of this great scheme of Divine 
 love and mercy from the days of Paradise until now, 
 reveal it, from first to last, in most intimate connec- 
 tion with the people of Israel. Let us trace briefly 
 the connection, in the times of the Old Testament, 
 from Moses to Malachi, in the days of the Gospels, 
 in the past eighteen centuries of Jewish dispersion 
 and captivity, and in the hopes and promises made 
 to Israel in the days to come. 
 
 The Old Testament, the writings of Moses and 
 the Prophets, entrusted to the Jewish people as the 
 oracles of the living God, contain a long series of 
 promises of good things to come, all connected with 
 a Person, dimly announced at first, and more clearly 
 when the ages moved on, as the future Deliverer of 
 mankind from the bitter consequences of their own 
 
144 THE TRUE PREROGATIVE AND 
 
 wilful departure from the law and command of God. 
 He is the Seed of the woman who is promised to 
 bruise the head of the serpent, receiving himself a 
 bruise in the great moral conflict ; the Seed of Abra- 
 ham, in whom all nations are to be blest ; the Shiloh, 
 the Prince of Peace, to whom all nations are to be 
 gathered ; the Lamb whom God would provide for a 
 burnt offering ; the Prophet like unto Moses, to 
 whom his people should give ear ; the Son of 
 David, the Son of the Virgin, the Anointed Servant 
 of the Lord, the Man whose name is the Branch, the 
 Shepherd of Israel, the Lord, pierced by his own 
 people, the Man who is Jehovah's fellow, the Angel 
 of the Covenant, the Sun of Righteousness, to rise 
 upon his people with healing in his wings. All 
 the various rays of promise, and voices of prophetic 
 hope, converge in this one great object from first to 
 last. Whether Jesus of Nazareth is the person in 
 v/hich these promises all meet, or, in the words of 
 the Baptist, we need still to look for another, is the 
 great question at issue between Judaism and Chris- 
 tianity. But that the writings of Moses and the 
 Prophets, the sacred Scriptures of the Jews, do con- 
 tain such a series of statements, connected most 
 intimately with the hopes they reveal of future times 
 of restitution, deliverance, and blessing, is a patent 
 fact to all who read them with an intelligent mind and 
 unbiassed heart. Testimony to the reality, person, 
 and work of a coming Messiah, through whom God's 
 
GLORY OF THE JEWS. 145 
 
 purposes of grace towards our world are to be at 
 length fulfilled, is the burden and sum of their mes- 
 sage through four thousand years. It runs onward 
 from the voice to the serpent, " It shall bruise thy 
 head, and thou shalt bruise his heel," to the parting 
 promise, veiled under the noblest symbol the phy- 
 sical world can supply, — " Unto you that fear my 
 name shall the Sun of Righteousness arise, with 
 healing in his wings." 
 
 Now every step in this long chain of promised 
 mercies, and each new development of the hope of 
 the Messiah, is linked closely and inseparably with 
 the history of the Jewish people. Their very birth, 
 as a nation, was inwrought with one leading promise 
 of the coming Redeemer of the world. When it was 
 said to Abraham, " In thy seed shall all the families 
 of the earth be blessed," the promise might seem to 
 apply, either to Messiah in person, or to the family 
 amongst whom he was to appear, as descended from 
 Abraham. They are set apart, by a solemn conse- 
 cration at Sinai, to receive a series of messages, 
 which contain the unfolding of the great purpose of 
 Divine wisdom and love. In the midst of a world 
 fast sinking into gross idolatry they are made the 
 depositaries of a pure and lofty Theism. The code 
 of laws provided for them bears the impress of this 
 great truth, that there is one God, and none other 
 but He ; that to forsake and deny Him is the fore- 
 most of all evils, and that to worship and serve Him 
 
 10 
 
i 4 6 THE TRUE PREROGATIVE AND 
 
 with the whole heart and mind and strength, is 
 more than all burnt offering and sacrifice, the first 
 and great commandment, the chief duty and highest 
 privilege of man. 
 
 All the gifts bestowed on the Jewish people, and 
 recorded in the sacred history for a thousand years, 
 are summed up in the fact that they were stewards, 
 trustees, and depositaries of the great hope of a 
 coming redemption for all the rest of mankind. 
 The promised Saviour of the world, the Beginner of 
 the new creation, the Author of the good things to 
 come, was to be specially the hope and the glory 
 of Israel. From their race he was to spring. In 
 Bethlehem, the city of David, he was to be born. 
 The law which the Jews had received through 
 Moses, their great prophet and the founder of their 
 nation, was the discipline under which he was 
 to be trained. He was to magnify it, and make 
 it honourable, by his own obedience. All the rays 
 of light in the Old Testament, which meet on the 
 head of the promised Messiah, pass through an 
 atmosphere of history, prophecy, type and figure, 
 commands and promises, all steeped in Jewish as- 
 sociations, and connected with the sacred records of 
 the history of Israel. The morning beams of the 
 Sun of Righteousness are all coloured with Jewish 
 colouring, when he is set before us in the last of 
 the Jewish prophets, as about to rise upon our dark 
 and benighted world with healing in his wings. 
 
GLORY OF THE JEWS. 147 
 
 Such was the great privilege and chief glory of 
 the Jewish people, all through the fourteen or fifteen 
 centuries of the Old Testament, from the time of the 
 first passover to the Christian era and the last of 
 the Asmonaean kings. What light is thrown on this 
 subject by the momentous changes of those seventy 
 years, which include the rise of Christianity, the 
 downfall of the Temple, and the dispersion of the 
 Jewish people ? 
 
 In the view of Christians, the privilege and glory 
 of the Jews did not then cease, but rather attained 
 its more complete development. The hope and ex- 
 pectation became an accomplished reality. What 
 Jewish' prophets and kings had long desired and 
 wished for was at last fulfilled. And this fulfilment, 
 while it realized their best hopes, went beyond them, 
 and revealed a mystery of Divine love and wisdom, 
 so grand and glorious, that it could only be dimly 
 guessed at before it was actually realized. The 
 Word, the Maker of all things, was made flesh, and 
 tabernacled among us. He whose goings forth were 
 from of old, even from everlasting, was born at 
 Bethlehem. The long series of prophetic hopes and 
 promises, of which the Jewish people had been made 
 the chosen trustees for all mankind, were fulfilled in 
 a way which crowned and completed the honourable 
 pre-eminence given to them among all people and 
 nations on the face of the earth. The truth finds 
 its condensed expression in the words of the great 
 
148 THE TRUE PREROGATIVE AND 
 
 Apostle himself — a Hebrew of Hebrews, and brought 
 up after the strictest severity of the Jewish faith. 
 He thus describes the privileges divinely bestowed 
 ononis own people, " Who are Israelites, to whom per- 
 taineth the adoption, and the glory, and the cove- 
 nants, and the giving of the law, and the promises ; 
 whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning 
 the flesh Christ hath come, who is over all, God 
 blessed for ever, Amen." 
 
 Here, then, as taught by the lips of the Apostle, 
 and re-echoed by the deep instincts of every Christian 
 heart, is the crowning privilege of the Jews as a 
 people, and the special honour assured to them by 
 the sovereign will and firm decree of the God of 
 heaven, who' is also, by a special title, the God of 
 Israel. 
 
 Let us consider the great facts of the New Testa- 
 ment in their bearing on the privilege or dishonour, 
 the glory or the shame, of the Jewish people, under 
 four different views which have been and are still 
 held as to their real character. 
 
 First, let us examine the view of the main body 
 of the Jewish people for many ages, and of some 
 eminent unbelievers of our own times, that Jesus of 
 Nazareth was an impostor and a blasphemer, who 
 deceived the people, either by false pretences to mira- 
 culous powers, or else by miracles wrought by magic, 
 and compact with the powers of darkness. Such, in 
 substance is the view upheld by one celebrated 
 
GLORY OF THE JEWS. 149 
 
 modern poet, in the " Revolt of Islam," that Christi- 
 anity is one more instance of new weapons supplied 
 by darkness, in the cycles of revolving years, to the 
 powers of evil. In this case the appearance of Jesus 
 of Nazareth, and the later success of His religion, 
 would be a deep and indelible disgrace to the 
 whole people amidst whom the delusion arose. A 
 Jewish deceiver, sustaining his pretensions by the 
 ambiguous words of Jewish prophets, propagating 
 falsehood by Jewish disciples, would have effected a 
 reign of falsehood and delusion on the largest scale, 
 and thereby impressed a strange and mournful cha- 
 racter on the whole history of the world, for near 
 two thousand years. The rich melodies of the songs 
 of Zion will find their only issue in a terrible and 
 hateful discord. A long series of Divine messages, 
 rich in noblest thoughts and varied utterances of 
 sublime and lofty hope, will have issued in some- 
 thing worse than mere disappointment and vexation 
 of spirit. They will have their final result, on the 
 one hand, in the scattering, distress, and desolation 
 of the chosen people, lasting through long ages ; 
 and on the other, in the birth and growth of the 
 most gigantic and astonishing fraud, which has ever 
 interfered with the growth and progress of genuine 
 science, or distorted, hindered, and disturbed the 
 progress of the human race to its destined goal of 
 truth, wisdom, and love. Once accept this dark 
 view of Christianity and its Founder, and men of 
 
150 THE TRUE PREROGATIVE AND 
 
 every tribe may point at the Jew the finger of scorn, 
 and say, " You are the one race and people who 
 have brought upon our race the greatest of calami- 
 ties. We asked for bread, and you have given us a 
 stone ; we asked for a fish, and you have given us 
 a serpent. You led us by the books you revere, 
 and the writers whom you uphold to have been true 
 messengers from the God of heaven, to look for 
 some great Deliverer to spring from your race, in 
 whom all families of the earth should receive a 
 large and full blessing. Instead of this, what have 
 you given us ? A false creed, a subtle deceiver, a 
 gigantic birth of fraud and delusion, growing more 
 colossal in stature, and wider in range, year by 
 year, the fruits of which have been, to yourselves, 
 countless persecutions, to the world, an immense 
 increase of superstition, idolatry, and spiritual delu- 
 sions ; and the delay, for long ages, of the hoped-for 
 regeneration of our race, and the triumph of liberty, 
 wisdom, peace, and love." 
 
 But the same view of the facts of the Gospel, 
 which turns them from the chief honour and glory 
 of the Jewish people, unto their greatest reproach 
 and shame, involves also a moral problem im- 
 possible to solve without a denial of the moral 
 government of the world, or else making God 
 himself an accomplice in the work of fraud and 
 delusion. For the history parts the Jewish people 
 into two classes, — those who received and accepted 
 
GLORY OF THE JEWS. 151 
 
 the claim of Jesus of Nazareth to be the true Messiah, 
 and those by whom it was rejected and disowned. 
 And that is the double fact, in the later history, 
 which has to be explained. On this view, the class 
 and party among the Jews who were faithful to the 
 trust they had received from the God of Israel, 
 refused the claims of an impostor to be the Messiah 
 of God, who punished him for blasphemies which 
 the law of God condemned, and clung to the 
 genuine hope of their own prophets, though long 
 delayed ; have ever since been outcasts, fugitives, 
 persecuted, wandering to and fro through the earth, 
 the crown fallen from their head, combining strangely 
 the righteousness of Abel with the curse of Cain, a 
 proverb of reproach and a byeword through long 
 ages of dispersion and shame. On the other hand, 
 those who adopted the delusion, who countenanced 
 and even worshipped the Deceiver who had risen 
 within the sacred bounds of Israel, have thriven and 
 prospered, both in numbers, intellectual gifts, and 
 worldly prosperity. The mightiest nations of the 
 earth, through long ages, have accepted their teach- 
 ing, and ranged themselves on their side. They 
 have wrought a complete revolution in the institu- 
 tions, morals, and habits of one-fourth of the whole 
 human race, and of that fourth which has power and 
 influence beyond all the rest. Is not this, indeed, a 
 marvellous paradox, an enigma most strange and 
 unaccountable and incredible, that the God of heaven 
 
152 THE TRUE PREROGATIVE AND 
 
 should single out one nation, for a thousand years, 
 to be special depositaries and stewards of Divine 
 messages, and then at last, out of the bosom of this 
 very people, there should arise, not the fulfilment of 
 the glorious hopes He had kindled in the hearts of 
 men, but a gigantic counterfeit and delusion, receiv- 
 ing through long ages all the outward signs of 
 blessing from above ; while those who have faithfully 
 withstood the progress of error, and kept the old 
 landmarks of Moses and the prophets, have suffered 
 exile, dispersion, imprisonment, and troubles almost 
 unexampled in the history of mankind. On this 
 view of the true character of the history of Jesus of 
 Nazareth, not only a deep reproach, instead of 
 honour, rests on the Jewish people as a whole, but 
 the opposite issues, in the case of the believers in 
 the crucified Nazarene, and the rejectors of his claims, 
 imperil our faith in the moral government of the 
 world, and would almost imply that an evil power, 
 friendly to imposture, and the enemy of righteousness, 
 has determined the outlines of the world's history 
 for the last two thousand years. 
 
 Let us now consider an hypothesis less extreme, 
 though far unlike the faith of Christians, which 
 many Jews less rigid than their fathers, and some 
 philosophers, have espoused within the last fifty 
 years. The Reformer of Galilee is not to be defamed 
 as a mere impostor, nor yet to be honoured as a 
 Prophet, but regarded as a sincere enthusiast, bent 
 
GLORY OF THE JEWS. 153 
 
 on the liberation of the poor from the oppression of 
 the rich and mighty, and full of a generous sympathy 
 for the sorrows and distresses of mankind. He was 
 not a deceiver, but honestly self-deceived. He per- 
 suaded himself, and strove to persuade others, that 
 he was the Messiah whom his people expected, 
 and of whom the prophets wrote. And when the 
 opposition of the rulers made him despair of im- 
 mediate success, he laid down his life by a kind of 
 voluntary suicide, rather than confess his error, or 
 abandon his purpose, and confess that events had 
 disproved his claims. Thus at the last, the noble 
 enthusiast in the cause of humanity passed from 
 self-deception into the unworthy task of deceiving 
 others, but his faults are to be condoned from the 
 loftiness of his aim. 
 
 On this view of the character of Jesus, the dis- 
 honour his course, and the success of his creed, 
 reflects on the Jewish people, is less aggravated, but 
 not less real, than before. The history of the nation 
 from Abraham onward, through near two thousand 
 years, the long series of Divine messages given to 
 Jewish prophets, so grand in conception, so rich and 
 various in the elements of lofty hope, spiritual aspira- 
 tion, and promises of heavenly blessing, reduce them- 
 selves to a melancholy illustration of the proverb, 
 " Whoso boasteth himself of a false gift is like clouds 
 and wind without rain." The issue of what assumes 
 to be a vast continuous scheme of Divine revelation, 
 
154 THE TRUE PREROGATIVE AND 
 
 carried on for fifteen hundred years, would be to 
 have promised much and performed nothing, and to 
 have wakened high hopes in the minds of men only 
 to dash them to the earth when the time of their 
 fulfilment seemed to have come, and thus to have 
 trifled with and disappointed the deepest instincts of 
 the heart and the noblest aspirations of mankind. 
 The children ask for bread, and their heavenly Father 
 gives them a stone, the mere dreams of a mistaken 
 enthusiast, and not the living bread that cometh 
 down from heaven. On the other view, examined 
 before, the case is still worse, and they receive a 
 serpent. On either view the Jewish people must 
 share largely in the reproach which is cast upon God 
 himself, by the frustration of His own messages of 
 hope and comfort to mankind. He has said, and 
 has not done it. He has spoken, and will not 
 make it good. The eyes of His people have 
 failed with longing for a promised Messiah, who 
 never appears, and a dreaming enthusiast comes 
 in His stead, who deludes millions on millions of 
 mankind with visionary hopes and promises, which 
 have no real warrant from the God of heaven. 
 
 A third view of the facts of the gospel may be 
 taken, and is not quite so wide of the truth as the 
 two others. Jesus was not indeed the Son of God, 
 come down from heaven. But he was a prophet 
 sent with a message from God, and greater than all 
 who had gone before. This is the view held by all 
 
GLORY OF THE JEWS. 155 
 
 the followers of Islam, with the further addition, that 
 one prophet, still greater, has since appeared, and 
 now claims the allegiance and submission, to his later 
 message, of all mankind. Such a view, it is true, 
 cannot be reconciled with the historical truth of the 
 narratives in the four Gospels. If Jesus were a mere 
 man, and said what he is reported to have said, and 
 did what he is reported to have done, the charge of 
 a blasphemous claim to Divine honour, on which he 
 is said to have been condemned by the Jewish rulers, 
 would have been clearly proved. The sentence pro- 
 nounced against him would have been just, however 
 severe. But, setting aside this great difficulty, and 
 moulding the facts to suit this mitigated Christianity 
 of Mahometans and Unitarians, the appearance of 
 Christ and the success of his religion would be an 
 honour to the Jewish people, and not a disgrace. It 
 would add one more to the long list of spiritual 
 benefits which they have been entrusted with — the 
 high privilege of receiving in trust themselves, and 
 then of transmitting, as honoured stewards, to the 
 other nations of the earth. 
 
 But while this view of the Christian message does 
 not deprive the Jew of all honour, and turn his glory 
 into shame, one result at least is clear. It abolishes 
 his primacy, and deposes him from the first to only a 
 secondary place in the scale of national privilege. If 
 the Son of Mary were a great prophet, succeeded by 
 one still greater, the son of Abdallah, and the New 
 
[56 THE TRUE PREROGATIVE AND 
 
 Testament, after supplementing Moses and the Pro- 
 phets, has in turn been supplemented by the Koran, 
 the children of Ishmael must replace the sons of 
 Israel in the station of highest honour in the spiritual 
 history of the world. The prerogative may still 
 remain with the seed of Abraham, the common fore- 
 father of the Jews and the tribes of the Arabian 
 desert. But the relative order in Genesis is reversed. 
 The son of the bondwoman takes precedence of the 
 son of the free woman, and the child who was born after 
 the flesh outstrips in spiritual dignity him who was born 
 in spirit, and by promise. The honour of the Jewish 
 people may still be great, from the long series of 
 Divine messengers who have appeared among them. 
 But the latest will have cast all the others into the 
 shade, and transferred the pre-eminence to another 
 tribe and race, the Hashemites of Arabia, to whom, 
 if this doctrine were true, the place of highest honour 
 will have been allotted among the various tribes of 
 mankind by the sovereign will of heaven. 
 
 But let us now turn to the fourth and last view 
 of the New Testament history, which has been em- 
 bodied in the faith of Christians in every age. 
 Jesus of Nazareth is no impostor, deceiving others, 
 or enthusiast self-deceived, but the great Prophet who 
 was to come into the world — the Messiah of God. 
 And this is not the whole truth. This Prophet, who 
 sums up and completes the message of a long series 
 who have gone before, is no mere man invested 
 
GLORY OF THE JEWS. 157 
 
 with special gifts and miraculous powers : He is the 
 Son of God, come down from heaven. He is the 
 Word of God, by whom all things were created, and 
 without whom was not made one single thing that 
 has been made. He is Emmanuel, which means, 
 being interpreted, God with us. He is the Lord, 
 the messenger or angel of the covenant, who bears 
 the name Jehovah, and before whom, as the Lord 
 God, a messenger was sent to prepare the way. 
 His coming was the crown of a long series of Divine 
 privileges and honours which the people of Israel 
 had received through long ages, summed up in those 
 impressive and solemn words, " Whose are the fathers, 
 and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came, 
 who is over all, God blessed for ever." 
 
 The incarnation, as it is the foundation-stone of 
 the Christian faith, is also the crown and top-stone 
 of the privileges and honours of the people of Israel. 
 For what does this doctrine imply ? All the laws 
 of nature, and all physical changes, are only the 
 basement and pedestal of a vast scheme of Divine 
 Providence, which includes in its structure all moral 
 and spiritual truths, and a full unfolding of the 
 glorious attributes of the Creator, and of which the 
 scope and aim is the redemption of innumerable 
 souls, to be renewed in God's image, and made 
 supremely blessed in His love for evermore. All 
 the earlier steps of this great scheme are set before 
 us in the Scriptures of the Old Testament, Moses 
 
158 THE TRUE PREROGATIVE AND 
 
 and the Prophets, and centre in the hope of a 
 coming Redeemer of the world. These hopes were 
 conveyed to the rest of mankind through messages 
 given first to Israel, and the voices of Jewish pro- 
 phets from age to age. A hundred various types, 
 in ordinances of the Jewish law, and the persons of 
 Jewish lawgivers, priests, judges, prophets, and kings, 
 centre in the person of the promised Messiah, who 
 was to be the seed of Abraham, and the Son of 
 David, and through whom a large blessing was 
 assured to all the nations of the earth. But the 
 Old Testament, amidst the rich and varied har- 
 monies of the songs of Zion, has throughout its 
 whole course one great unresolved discord. It de- 
 nounces from first to last the sin of idolatry, as 
 most abominable in the sight of God, and lays 
 down his solemn decision, " I am the Lord, that 
 is my name, and my glory I will not give to an- 
 other." Yet, side by side with these statements 
 and warnings, it contains a series of messages, which 
 teach the people of God to look forward with eager 
 desire to the coming of the promised Messiah, as 
 one born of woman, who was to be the object of their 
 deepest affection and most intense longing, and in 
 whose name they were to trust. This discord, so 
 strange at first sight, finds its solution in the great 
 mystery of the Christian faith. Messiah, the Son 
 of man, is also the Son of the living God : his 
 name is Emmanuel, God with us. God has been 
 
GLORY OF THE JEWS. 159 
 
 manifested in the flesh. In the words of Micah, 
 One would be born at Bethlehem, " whose goings 
 forth have been from of old, even from everlast- 
 ing." 
 
 Man's true place in creation is not to be a 
 little higher than the ape, but a little lower 
 than the angels. But the highest glory of our 
 human nature is one which even the angels do 
 not share. It is the mysterious truth that the 
 Son of God, the world's Redeemer, took not on 
 him the nature of angels, but our own. And this 
 marvel of Divine love is linked inseparably with 
 the special honour and prerogative of the Jewish 
 people. He took on him "the seed of Abraham." 
 The Word was made flesh, and made flesh in the 
 royal line of the house of David. The Son of the 
 Most High God became the son of a Jewish mother. 
 His birthplace was a village of Judea. His child- 
 hood and youth were one long training in obedience 
 to the Jewish law. The notes which resound at 
 every step of his history are such as these : " Where 
 is he that is born King of the Jews ? " " He shall 
 reign over the house of Jacob for ever." " Glad tidings 
 of great joy, which shall be to all the people." " I 
 am not sent save to the lost sheep of the house of 
 Israel." " Hosanna to the Son of David." " Blessed 
 be the King of Israel which cometh in the name of 
 the Lord." " This is Jesus, the King of the Jews." 
 " Neither shalt thou swear by Jerusalem, for it is the 
 
160 THE TRUE PREROGATIVE AND 
 
 city of the great King." From the cradle to the 
 grave, every title of mystery and ascription of rever- 
 ence to the world's Redeemer overflows also with 
 undertones of privilege, honour, and blessing for his 
 brethren after the flesh, the chosen race and line 
 amongst whom he was to be born, beloved for the 
 sake of the fathers. 
 
 Through long ages the sons of Israel have failed 
 to see, or refused to own, the greatest of all the many 
 gifts of honour and national distinction which they 
 have received from the sovereign bounty of God. 
 The most precious jewel in their diadem, the choicest 
 and most unfading flower in the chaplet which the 
 supreme King of nations has prepared for their 
 brows, has been ignominiously cast away. In cleav- 
 ing to the traditions of the Talmud, many of them 
 very childish, and refusing to own the Messiahship 
 of Jesus of Nazareth, and the further and deeper 
 truth, that the long-promised Saviour was no mere 
 man, however good or wise, but the Son of God 
 come down from heaven, they have sorrowfully 
 fulfilled the saying of their own prophet, uttered 
 when he was rehearsing in his own history a great 
 type of the coming redemption, "They that choose 
 lying vanities forsake their own mercies." How we 
 should long for the time when the veil which has 
 rested on their eyes so long shall be taken away, 
 and all of them shall adopt the confession of the 
 true Israelite, when a word of Divine insight re- 
 
GLORY OF THE JEWS. 161 
 
 vealed to him the secrets of his life and hidden ex- 
 perience: "Rabbi, thou art the Son of God, thou art 
 the King of Israel ! " 
 
 But scarcely less strange and wonderful than this 
 refusal of the Jewish people to recognize the most 
 astonishing of the many honours God has bestowed 
 upon them, is the treatment they have received, for 
 long ages, from the professed followers of Christ, of 
 which many sad traces continue even to the present 
 day. All Christians profess to believe that salvation 
 is of the Jew, and that it is from Jewish prophets 
 and apostles they have received the word of 
 eternal life; nay, that He whom they adore as the 
 Saviour of the world, the everlasting Son of the 
 Father, is a Jew by descent, and has sprung from 
 the race of Israel. They believe and profess that it 
 is a Jew, to whom, by Divine decree, all power is 
 given in heaven and earth, and who receives a full 
 tribute of praise and worship from ten thousand 
 times ten thousand angels around the throne of 
 heaven. Yet, how have the Jews been maltreated 
 and despised by these Christians ! What re- 
 proaches and contumely they have endured ! what 
 sufferings of every kind, from those who have claimed 
 to be disciples of the Lord Jesus ! Their faith in 
 Him, degenerating into utter superstition, has led 
 them to make his virgin mother, a Jewess of the 
 line of David, a modern Ashtaroth, a new Queen of 
 heaven, the object of a heathenish and idolatrous 
 
 i i 
 
162 THE TRUE PREROGATIVE AND 
 
 worship. Surely there is no stranger or sadder 
 spectacle in the whole history of the world, than 
 these two facts, standing side by side for many 
 generations, Divine honour heaped by Christians 
 upon a Jewish maid, under the unscriptural, man- 
 invented title of the Mother of God, and cruel, 
 bitter persecution, by the same Christians, of the 
 whole people to whom this maiden belonged, and 
 amidst whom she was born. 
 
 During all those ages, the honour which God had 
 given to the Jewish people, when his own Son, the 
 brightness of his glory, took human flesh of a Jewish 
 mother, was made subject to the Jewish law, and 
 grew up as a root out of dry ground, in the midst of 
 the Jewish people, and in despised Galilee, did not 
 cease and could not pass away. The gifts and call- 
 ing of God are without repentance. But the highest 
 and choicest benefits and bounties of God depend, to 
 be completely realized, on the co-operation of the 
 human will. In Messiah's works of temporal mercy, 
 the method of their performance, sometimes ex- 
 pressed, always implied, was this, " Believe ye that I 
 am able to do this ? According to your faith be it 
 unto you." The Jews have complained, loudly and 
 justly, of the reproach, contempt, and persecution they 
 have endured for ages from those who have called 
 themselves disciples of Christ. And still they have 
 icontinucd to inflict on themselves a deeper wrong 
 than all they have endured from others. If this 
 
GLQRY OF THE JEWS. 163 
 
 strange and unnatural blindness is some day to cease, 
 prayer for spiritual light, like that of Bartimeus, 
 must first be offered up to the Lord whom they have 
 rejected, and receive a gracious answer, and the Spirit 
 of grace and supplication be poured out on all the 
 remaining families of Israel. They must fulfil the 
 description of the prophet, and mourn in secret 
 places for their own pride and the pride of their 
 fathers, " all the families that remain, every family 
 apart, and their wives apart." 
 
 This great and glorious privilege of the Jewish 
 people, however hidden from their own eyes by 
 unbelief, or forgotten and denied by nominal Chris- 
 tians in years of gross idolatry and hateful persecu- 
 tion, cannot be set aside or made void by the neglect, 
 ignorance, or perverseness of men. It is inwoven 
 into the whole texture of the great scheme of re- 
 demption from first to last. When we compare the 
 prophecies both of the Old Testament and the New 
 with the past history and present state of the Jews, 
 we see, on the largest scale, solemn warnings of 
 judgment signally and exactly fulfilled. And this 
 fulfilment of many threatenings is a sure pledge of 
 the fulfilment, in their own time, with equal exactness, 
 of the rich and various promises which accompany 
 these threatenings, blessings assured to the whole 
 house of Israel and Judah, in their day of national 
 repentance and of godly sorrow. Their special re- 
 lationship to the promised Messiah has not ceased. 
 
164 THE TRUE PREROGATIVE AND 
 
 and can never cease. He announces his own thoughts 
 of deep love towards them, even when exalted at the 
 right hand of the Father in heaven. " For Zion's 
 sake I will not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem's 
 sake I will not rest, until the righteousness thereof 
 go forth as brightness, and the salvation thereof as 
 a lamp that burnetii.' 5 Their own fervent prayers to 
 the God of grace are the needed signal that the long 
 arrest on the outflow of Divine power towards them 
 may cease, and the mercies of God, in full tide of 
 blessing, visit them once more. They are still 
 "beloved for the fathers' sake." When their self- 
 righteousness shall cease, and the ornament of a 
 broken heart, a meek and quiet spirit, shall be seen 
 in them, they will then be beloved, not only for the 
 fathers' sake, but for their own, and most of all for His 
 sake, who is the true King of Israel. They are the 
 chosen seed, singled out from the rest of mankind, 
 from whom the world's great Redeemer was to be 
 oorn. And that Redeemer is no other than the Eternal 
 Word, by whom all things were created, the bright- 
 ness of the Father's glory, in whose Divine person 
 there are unsearchable riches of goodness, wisdom, 
 and love. The curse on those who have rejected or 
 denied this great truth, and the sin which suspends or 
 reverses the blessings that should naturally flow from 
 it, is to the third and fourth generation. But the 
 blessing of their father's covenant is to a thousand 
 generations, and has never yet been exhausted or 
 
GLORY OF THE JEWS. 165 
 
 fulfilled. When in the words of Moses they confess 
 their iniquity, and the iniquity of their fathers, and 
 the trespass by which they have grievously sinned 
 against their God, and mourn for their own and their 
 fathers' sins with deep and genuine repentance, then 
 at last the mercies of God will return to them, and 
 His covenant be fulfilled, when He shall take away 
 their sins. 
 
 The repentance of a whole nation for national sins 
 is always a hard and difficult thing. Even now we 
 have before our eyes the spectacle of nations, nomi- 
 nally Christian, and even claiming to be patterns of 
 Christian orthodoxy, on whom a sore judgment of 
 God for their idolatry has lighted for four hundred 
 years, and who seem, at the close, as mad upon their 
 idols, as corrupt in their worship, as when the woe 
 first lighted upon them. We see fierce wrath against 
 the instruments of their punishment, and utter un- 
 consciousness of the sin for which it was sent, and 
 not only unchanged idolatry in their own worship, 
 but the same readiness as before to persecute the 
 brethren of that Lord whom they profess to adore. 
 We are told by Ezekiel that wild beasts are one of 
 God's four sore judgments. How much easier do 
 men find it to rail against these wild beasts, or the 
 God of holy judgment who looses them to destroy, 
 than to discover and renounce the sins which brine 
 down the terrible judgment ! 
 
 Now this, which is true, and seen before our eyes 
 
1 66 THE TRUE PREROGATIVE AND 
 
 in the case of Christian nations, not wholly excluding 
 our own, is true also of the people of Israel. But 
 the blindness will not last for ever. Amidst all the 
 dark clouds of oppression, discontent, and degrading 
 superstition, there are already streaks of light in the 
 eastern skies, which shew that a new era of the 
 world's history is close at hand, and will soon begin. 
 In times like these a few years may effect great and 
 surprising changes. The outer court of God's Provi- 
 dence has to do with all the revolutions of earthly 
 kingdoms, by which they minister to God's wonder- 
 ful counsel of redeeming love. And in this outer 
 court of Providence, soon or late, Israel must hold 
 the foremost place, because their relation is more 
 close and intimate than that of any other race or 
 people to the person of the world's Redeemer. 
 Jesus Christ, our Lord, is also the son of David, and 
 the son of Abraham. This truth, in the opening 
 sentence of the New Testament, is like a keynote 
 to the whole message which follows. It links the 
 gospel with all the earlier histories of the Old 
 Testament, with the sad mystery of the broken 
 covenant, the house overthrown and ruined, the 
 people outcast, the land left waste and desolate, 
 and with the blessings still to come, when God shall 
 visit His people in mercy once more, and largest 
 blessings shall be given to them, and through them 
 to the whole world. Then the words of the Apostle 
 shall crown and complete the message of the earlier 
 
GLORY OF THE JEWS. 167 
 
 prophets,— "And so all Israel shall be saved, as it is 
 written, there shall come out of Zion the Deliverer, 
 and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob: for this 
 is my covenant with them, when I shall take away 
 their sins." The true Joseph will reveal to his brethren 
 after the flesh the depths of his Divine compassion, 
 and they will then understand, as they have never 
 understood till now, and the world will understand 
 also, what is the chief prerogative and highest honour 
 of the Jewish people. It is their nearness by descent, 
 to Him, who is the great centre of universal Provi- 
 dence, and the Sun of righteousness to the whole of 
 the moral and spiritural universe, Jesus Christ our 
 Lord. " He that scattereth Israel will gather them 
 and keep them as a shepherd doth his flock." Their 
 land will be once more, as of old, " the glory of all 
 lands," and in their restored honour and blessing will 
 be seen the most conspicuous sign of the unchanging 
 truth and goodness of the Lord. When once the 
 people of the Jews, from the proudest become the 
 humblest of all nations, their privileges will return to 
 them in amplest measure, and chief among them will 
 be their manifested nearness to the Saviour, who is 
 the meek and lowly Son of God. " For whosoever 
 exalteth himself shall be abased, but he thathumbleth 
 himself shall be exalted." 
 
 This is the universal law and method of God's 
 moral government, and must be fulfilled, as in all 
 beside, so pre-eminently in His dealings with Israel, 
 
1 68 THE PREROGATIVE AND GLORY OF THE JEWS. 
 
 the beloved and chosen people. For "before honour 
 is humility." Their deep humiliation and godly sor- 
 row will be the sure signal for their recovered honour 
 and abiding fulness of blessing. 
 
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