BR 121 .C65 1896 1 Coyle, John Patterson, 1852- 1895. 1 The spirit in literature anc THE SPIRIT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE THE E. D. RAND LECTURES IN IOWA COLLEGE FOR THE YEAR 1894 BY ^ JOHN PATTERSON COYLE, D. D. BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY (C&e ^itocrjsibe ^rc^tf, CamtrtDgc 1896 Copyright, 1895, By MARY CUSHMAN COYLE. All rights reserved. SECOND EDITION. The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Co. TO MY FATHER AND MOTHER FROM THE SECOND OF WHOM I RECEIVED THE NEVER-FORGOTTEN ADVICE TO THINK FEARLESSLY AND FROM BOTH OF WHOM I RECEIVED AN IMPRESSION OF THE REALITY OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTLIKENESS WHICH COULD NOT BE EFFACED BY YEARS OF BLACK DOUBT AND DREARY AGNOSTICISM AND TO WHOM BELONGS THE CREDIT IF I HAVE BEEN ABLE TO THINK THROUGH ANY ONE OF THE PROBLEMS OF THE AGE PREFACE. Since I hope that these lectures may have the good fortune to be read, as they were heard, by some true scholars, I would draw at least one of the stings of criticism by saying in advance that they do not bring to their subject a scholarship worthy of it. The views expressed in them have been withheld for years because of a cherished ambition to be able some day to give to them a fit setting of research. But hoped-for leisure is still denied, time passes, they seem to be needed as a keystone for an arch, special scholars over- look the clew to them, an imsought invitation to lecture brings the opportunity, and so at a good deal of sacrifice of pride they are put forth in this imperfect shape. I claim for them that they are the fruit of a spirit of scholarship which I was once permitted to breathe, that they will bear its test in the main, and with what grace I can I leave to others their correction and development. Following as they do an untrodden path, which traverses at an unaccustomed angle the whole field VI PREFACE. of possible knowledge, only a cyclopedic know- ledge could fully satisfy the demand they make. Many matters had to be disposed of summarily which are worthy of studied attention. One or two authors have been consulted on special topics upon which libraries have been written. Yet the references in the footnotes do not begin to indi- cate the influence which the writings of others have had in the formation and the maturing of these ideas. Those whose service has been great, est have given it in the form of mental nutriment and stimulus, or by subtle suggestions which can- not be verified by quotations. The major axes of interest in many most diverse dej)artments of investigation seem to me to converge to the point here made. Problems of force in all its manifes- tations, of inspiration, of sociology, of psychology in its broader outlines of philosophical history, all demand a new treatment of this subject, and will receive an illmnination from its successful treat- ment. Well may the words of Montesquieu, in the introduction to his great treatise on " The Spirit of Laws," be here quoted: "If this work meets with success I shall owe it chiefly to the grandeur and majesty of the subject." JOHN P. COYLE. CONTENTS. I. PAGE The Three Stages of Thought. — Jesus as a Pure Phenome- non. — Spiritual Phenomena in General, — Individualism. — The New Spiritual Force. — Semitic Spirit. — The Spirit as a Social Force . 1 n. Age of Disorganization. — David. — Elijah the Prophet. — Amos and his Line. — Ethics of the Prophets. — Heroes. — Priest-Prophet and Scribe-Prophet. — The Synagogue. — The Hebrew and the Hellenic Spirit 40 III. The Literature of the Spirit. — Literature and Hebrew Life. — Doctrine of God and of the World. — Prophetic Guilds. — Literature a Force. — The Spirit and the Canon. — The Great Crisis. — Messianic Expectation. — The " Remnant " 73 IV. The Mother of Jesus. — The Home and the Nation. — The National Consciousness. — Jesus' Thought of the Divine Fatherhood. — Providence and Angels and Demons. — Gospel of the Kingdom. — The Philosophy of Outlawry. — Hebrew History in the Light of Jesus' Spirit. — Jesus an Era. — The Age of the Spirit 117 V. The Organization of the Early Church. — The Spirit of the Church and Social Customs. — Slavery. — Property. — viii CQN TENTS. Woman. — The Family. — Nationalism. — Politics. — In- dustrialism. — Literature. — Science. — The Old and the New Testaments. — The Bible aa a Force. — Bibliolatry. — Plenary Inspiration 154 VI. The Spii-it a Moral Force. — Miracles. — The Spirit and the Unseen World. — Friendship. — Immortality. — Apotheo- sis of Jesus. — Apotheosis of the Father. — Apotheosis of the Spirit. — The Holy Trinity. — Divine Ordering and Continuity. — The Atonement. — Summary 197 THE SPIRIT IN LITERATURE AND LIFE. I. It was the fruitful observation of Auguste Comte that the human mind in its treatment of facts was likely to take three successive _ , •^ • c 1 -^^^ three attitudes. At first it would infer that stagesof all facts not easily accounted for had been caused by the capricious interference of non- human personalities, gods and demigods. Comte called this the theological, though it might more properly be described as the mythological method. Then, taking what he regarded as a step in ad- vance, it adopted the metaphysical method, and ac- counted for things, not by the caprices of persons, but by the fixed attributes of entities. Finally, perceiving the futility also of this explanation, it was fain to be content with positivism, and simply to observe and classify facts, seeking to learn their general characteristics and such causes and effects as belong to the same phenomenal order. 2 METHOD OF POSITIVISM, It may be doubted whether the mind can be Method of content with positivism without maiming positivism, -^ggjf ^^^^ doing less than full justice to the facts. But praise should not be withheld from Comte and his fellow prophets of kindred schools, for their services in overthrowing the undue power of doctrines founded upon premature or illicit inferences, and in encouraging prolonged and patient study of facts. While it would be unfair to assert that these assumed personalities and en- tities, though they may have been unreal, served no useful j^urpose in the pursuit of truth, since they often filled the place which would to-day be filled by provisional hypotheses, yet it was a common vice of the past to infer them too hastily, and then to cling to them so tenaciously as to let them dominate and vitiate further observation. Aside therefore from any question as to their use- fulness or validity, it is a gain to have at least temporarily arrested the tendency to make them, so that an era of observation, unhindered by stereotyped notions, may yield material either for pure induction, or, if they should be adjudged legitimate, for a more adequate set of inferences concerning entities or personalities. There is one field where the method of attend- ing strictly to facts, and abstaining from prema- ture and questionable inferences concerning causes or existences outside the reach of observation, promises to yield exceptionally rich residts. Tliis HIS SPIRIT AS A PURE PHENOMENON. 3 is in the study of the most significant phenome- non in the known universe, the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Hardly any other pure pife* fact has been so hampered by the grave- " "^®"°"- clothes of dead speculations of the mythological and metaphysical orders. Although the work which has been accomplished in this field of re- search has been done chiefly by incompetent, be- cause biased and unfriendly critics, yet when once it has been restated by sympathetic hands, men will not be slow to acknowledge the gain, and to confess that it has been the means of verifying rather than of contradicting his own saying that he is "the truth." Alongside of Jesus, and so far identified with him as to be for the most part imperfectly distin- guished from him, and to form with him a single though not a simple phenome- apurephe- non, stands another fact of equal propor- tions and significance, his spirit. The distinction between the spirit of Jesus and Jesus himself is as fundamental and important as their identity. They are historically and numerically one fact. With equal emphasis, however, it must be af- firmed that they are historically and numerically two facts, subjects of more or less independent investigation. It is to the study of this spirit, as a fact by itself, and a pure phenomenon, that our attention is invited.^ 1 Professor Fairbairn, in his Place of Christ in Modern The- 4 SPIRITUAL PHENOMENA IN GENERAL. Like as in the fruitful study of the person of Jesus it is necessary to first exhaust him on his more intelligible side ; to treat him as capable of classification with other men, and as phenomena forming au integral part of the history m genera. ^^ ^^^ racc ; SO this Corresponding fact, his spirit, can be observed to good purpose only by postponing any emphasis which might be placed upon its uniqueness, and by considering it as a member of a class. But the class of phe- nomena to which it belongs is one which has been so commonly treated in the mythological or meta- physical way that little else can be done until we have first learned to avoid the pitfalls which have thus been prepared. We must undertake to per- ceive and speak of a certain class of spirits as pure phenomena, and must observe some of their leading characteristics and general laws. Fortu- nately the genius of language has as usual some- what anticipated the demands upon it, and has provided in common speech distinctions which permit us to employ the term " spirit " in the ology, has a chapter on " The Rediscovery of the Historical Christ." "What is here sought is the rediscovery of the histori- cal spirit. Says Professor Ladd (Doctrine of Sacred Scripture^ vol. ii. , p. 357) : " Of spirit which is not now and here con- cretely made known, we can take no cognizance ; from it we can expect no appreciable communication. And if the Bible is, in any intelligible sense of the word, theopneustic, it is so because the spirit from which it comes has caused it to come into exis- tence concretely, and in accordance with the laws and processes of nature and history." UNTEODDEN GROUND. O positivist sense. We speak habitually of the spirit of a man, or of a book, or of a movement, or of a party, without even hinting at any mysterious person or entity behind the phenomenon. The study of a spirit as on the one hand a pure phenomenon, without implying anything meta- physical or mythological, and on the untrodden other hand an actual independent fact, ^'■*'"'''^" rather than a mere quality or abstraction, is at- tended, however, with most of the advantages and disadvantages of a pioneer effort. A new and rich territory is to be explored. It has occurred to few to enter it armed with the scientific method. Most of those who have made the attempt have speedily succumbed to the tendency to treat the spirit as an entity or a personality, and have passed up into the region of theology or meta- physics, or down into that of vulgar spiritism or theosophy. Those who have not done this have rarely avoided treating it as an abstraction, or have employed the term in some vague literary rather than in a scientific sense. ^ 1 Approaches to the use of this method are found in Mathe- son's Growth of the Spirit of Christi-anity, and in Lester Ward's Dynamical Sociology and Psychic Factors in Civilization. Mon- tesquieu in his Spirit of Laws was instinctively attempting it, but without a conscious critical method, so that he was lost in detail. See Dhering, Spirit of Roman Law, where the method is con- sciously employed. I have discovered no suggestion of the method in modern theological literature, where it ought to he expected. It is essential, though they themselves have not per- ceived it, to the carrying out of either Comte's or Spencer's schemes for a scientific sociology. Perhaps Kenan's frequent 6 IMPORTANT CLASS OF FACTS. To note tlie distinction between phenomenal spirits and those of the mythological or metaphy- sical order, it is only necessary to at- cSS'of*" tempt to classify together the spirit which l^rompts the building of hospitals and that alleged spirit which raps upon tables in dark- room seances. The mind at once protests against such classifications. Yet, while we never think of identifying the spirit of the hospital-building spe- cies with any mysterious person or entity, its real- ity in the sense in which we employ that term in every-day life is better confirmed than that of the spirit of the table-rapping species. It belongs, as the other does not, to the class of spirits which are. among the most numerous and powerful factors in history. It belongs to the class of facts to which Guizot refers when he sjDeaks of " a power which no law can comj)rise or suppress, and wdiich in times of need goes further than institutions. Call it the spirit of the age, public intelligence, opinion, or what you will, you cannot doubt its existence. It is of the greatest importance that these indirect influences should be kept in view in the study of history. They are much more efficacious and often more salutary than we take them to be. . . . Every country in Europe has seen rise and develop itself within it a certain public mind." ^ and lucid reference to the " spirits " of the race and of humanity in his History of the People of Israel is traceable to the influence of Comte. ^ Ilistory of Civilization^ vol. i., pp 129, 16^. AND A LARGE CLASS. 7 The world is densely populated with spirits of this phenomenal kind. They are doing a good part of its work, and are mustering to And a large fight henceforth its greatest battles. It '^^^''• is because of the imperial authority of spiritual forces that the greatest material armaments that ever stood prepared for conflict are spell-bound, and dare not make a hostile movement. The con- tests are to be no longer those of flesh and blood, but of spiritual hosts in higher regions. Among spiritual phenomena of historical importance at this time are to be found the spirit of brotherhood, transcending differences of race and political boun- daries and economic conditions. Somewhat coun- terpoising this are such newly-born or requick- ened national spirits as never before looked so consciously into one another's faces. There is a Zeit Geist, and there are many anti-zeit-geists, reactionary spirits resisting the Zeit Geist to the uttermost. Among them, of the same class with them, yet stronger and destined to make con- quest of all, is the spirit which we are to study, greater than the Zeit Geist, "the spirit of the ages," measuring itself up with the spirit of the age. This is the Christ spirit, and stands in the same relative attitude toward these other spirits in which Jesus of Nazareth stands toward other men. As Jesus is being most fruitfully known to-day as one among men, whatever further thing concerning him may be true ; so this spirit, whatever «^lse mny 8 OBJECTIVITY OF SPIRITUAL PHENOMENA. be true of it, may first be most profitably studied as one among spirits of the plienomenal kind. But in the effort to avoid treating these spirits as other than phenomenal, we are in danger of go- ing to another extreme and doubting their of spiritual reality. In the most genuine sense they phenomena. ,, . iici* • ,.. belong to the world oi objective realities. While most persons are little disposed to believe in the table-rapping spirits of the seances, or the mahatmas of the theosophists, or the ghosts which figure in the reports of societies for psychical re- search, no healthy mind doubts the reality of spirits of this kind. No one is under suspicion of being a dupe who testifies that he saw the spirit of enter- prise in Chicago, or the spirit of John Wesley in a Methodist conference, or the spirit of Wall Street ojiposite Trinity Church. He may or not be in special sympathy with such spirits. He may be sensitive to them because of antipathy as well. Many who manifest a spirit do not guess of what manner of spirit they are. The spirit of Chris- tianity may be readily perceived by one who is in- different or even hostile to it. The reality of these spirits is not of subjective persuasion. It has all the marks of objective perception. Neither are these spirits abstractions. The name does not stand for ajnere g^uality. The sj^irit Not abstrac- ^^ ^^^ ^K^i ^^^ Spirit of Wcslcy, the sj)irit tions. ^£ ^j^g Christ, are more than qualities of the age, of Wesley, of the Christ. A quality does NOT ABSTRACTIONS. y not proceed from one thing to another, is not capa- ble of impartation, as heat from a stove or light from a lamp. The spirits of Wesley, of the age, of the Christ, proceed from and are imparted by- Wesley, the age, the Christ, as heat from the stove and light from the lamp. In a sense these last are independent things. The stove and the heat are two things ; the lamp and the light are two things. Heat and light are not qualities. They are modes of motion, and they may leave the stove or the lamp and go elsewhere, and they will not cease to exist in some form as modes of motion. In the same sense Wesley is one fact and the spirit of Wesley is another, the age one and the spirit of the age another, the Christ one and the spirit of the Christ another fact. The spirit holds the same kind of relation toward that of which it is the spirit that the physical forces hold toward the ma- terial things of which they are the modes of motion. They are modes of action,^ if we may use that word to designate something more highly organ- ized than simple motion, if not specifically different from it. As motion is motion and nothing else, and cannot be changed into matter or originated from matter, but can only be transmitted or trans- ferred to some other mode of itself, so spirit is ac- tion and not quality, and cannot be destroyed but only transmitted or transformed into some other mode of action. Hence, when we speak of a spirit 1 Lester Ward, Psychic Factors in Civilization, pp. 80, 130. 10 YET OF A SECONDAEY KIND. we do not speak of a mere quality or abstraction, but of that wvhicli possesses an mde^^enclent reality^. ^Yet, wliile not an abstraction or a quality, a spirit is always a reality of a secondary kind. It is always a spirit^ something, and never s(fcouda% "just spirit." The Wesleyan spirit is the spirit of Wesley, and if it existed be- fore him and merely took his name, still it was the spirit of some man or set of men or movement. The Zeit Geist is the spirit of the age. The Christ spirit is the spirit of the Christ. And though in many common modes of speech the preposition is used in a looser sense, merely by way of adding a descriptive term, yet strictly speaking there is no spirit which is not the spirit of something to which it is to be joined by the fullest force of the prepo- sition. When Matthew Arnold said that the spirit of lubricity ruled in French literature, he used the prepositional phrase for descriptive purposes only. But if one were to say that that same spirit is the spirit of French literature, and may be imparted by it to American literature and life, he is speak- ing in a strict sense. If that spirit were to leave French and come to American literature, it would still be the spirit of something ; it would have no existence except as the spirit of something. In this sense of dependence, as well as in that of in- dependence, therefore, the same relation exists between spirit and those things of which it is the spirit, as between material forces or modes of mo- BACON ON PLATO. 11 tion and material things, between motion and mat* , ter. Tlie failure to keep equally clear in our minds both the dependence and the independence of spir- itual phenomena will so far vitiate obser- B^con on vation as to throw us into one or the ^^^*°' other of the two errors above indicated, of regard- ing spirits as either simple abstractions, with no kind of independent reality, or as entities of some imperceptible type. And either of these opposite errors will cause a reaction to the other. Bacon, to whom more than to any other we owe the method of pure observation of phenomena, seems to accuse Plato of failing in this way to make the most of his great and fruitful doctrine of ideas, when he says : " It is manifest that Plato saw in his doc- trine of ideas that 'forms were the true object of knowledge,' though he lost the advantage of this just opinion by contemplating and grasping at forms totally abstracted from matter and not as determined in it : whence he turned aside to theo- logical questions and therewith infected all his natural philosophy." ^ That is to say, Plato, at- tempting to treat that as an abstraction which was actually more than an abstraction, fell through into the opposite extreme of mythology. In view of the similarity of relationship between material forces and material things, and spiritual forces and the things of which they are the spirits, 1 De Augm., iii, 4. 12 SPIRITUAL AND PEBSONAL. it is necessary to observe that that thing of which a spirit is a secondary phenomenon is al- aiT "^ ways either a person or that into which persona. personality enters as the determining element. The Zeit Geist is the spirit of that which is made np not of things but of persons. If the spirit of the Christ was manifest before Jesus it was in persons or societies or laws or literature or art, all expressive of personality. If the line of distinction between persons and things be hard to fix, equally hard will it be to fix the distinction be- tween spiritual and material forces. If on the other hand the chasm between persons and things be distinct and impossible to bridge over, equally impassable is the chasm between material and spir- itual forces. If language has acknowledged a de- batable zone between persons and things by using such expressions as " the animal man," likewise it has confessed a corresponding debatable zone be- tween material and spiritual phenomena by speak- ing of " animal spirits." If there be intercourse and inter-dependence between persons and things, so that personality may be nourished by the imper- sonal or may degenerate into it, so are spiritual and material forces mutually interconvertible. If a person can belong to the visible world only through alliance with matter, and enters into the unseen so soon as that alliance is broken, likewise spiritual forces can play a part in the visible order only by producing material action or motion. Even SPIRITUAL FOBCES SPECIFIC FORCES. 13 the spirit of the seances, though it is fancied to be an entity, is as though it did not exist unless it can " materialize " by producing some mode of motion. In spite, however, of the vagueness of the distinc- tion between persons and things, and the unsatis- f actoriness of the definitions which have been made, and the seeming impossibility of abolishing the debatable zone, no one doubts that the difference between persons and things is specific, if anything is specific. Correspondingly specific is the distinc- tion between spiritual and material forces. Not only are spiritual phenomena specifically dis- tinguished from material ; they may also, like ma- terial forces, be specific as distinguished from one another. The__spirit of the age fOTces"spe- is a sj jecific force, as electricity is, and like the latter is not transformed into other modes unless it finds obstacles to its transmission in kind ; and then it is likely to leave some mark of itself upon the new phenomenon which it produces. The success of a spiritual force in maintaining its spe- cific character must depend upon its finding per- sonal or social or literary or legal channels through which it can move without meeting too great resis- tance. It can indeed produce these things ; but only in obedience to the law by which the higher specific forces work upon the basis of the lower, by gradual and almost imperceptible changes. The vital functions undoubtedly develop structure, as structure does function, but not by great leaps. 14 SPIBITUAL SUBSTANCE. Apparent exceptions are to be accounted for as only apparent. It is, however, within the reahn of reasonable anticipation, that such permanent and suitable personal and spiritual embodiments will at length be evolved, that corresponding spiritual phenomena may therein find the opportunity to become persistent, so that indestructibility may be affirmed of their specific modes of action, as con- tinuity is affirmed of the action itself. If in spite of the flux in its physical basis, personality is able to achieve fixedness, a parallel fixedness will per- tain to the spirits which proceed from such person- alities. If several personalities become persistent and maintain an equally persistent social relation- ship, that will give rise to a social spirit also equally persistent. It may then even lay some claim to a right to be put under the category of substance. Says a Spiritual rcccut Writer, arguing that although life substance. isonly_a_mode of motionjt has as goo3" a right to be called a^suBstance as anything else : " What more can be affirmed of any substance . . . than that amidst its varying affections it constitutes an identical, individual, perdurable and self-sustaining focus of energy ? " ^ Thus, rea- soning in the other direction, Lotze, somewhere trying to show that the fact that the body is com- posed of a variety of monads does not make impossible the substantial individuality of the 1 E. Montgomery, Mind, vol. vi., p. 243. SPIRITUAL SUBSTjiNCE. 15 man, illustrates it by tlie relation between the Zeit Geist and individual men and women. There is, he says, " a Zeit Geist which is not any one man and yet exists in the consciousness of differ- ent individuals, weak in the stupid and unsym- A^ pathetic, and strong in those of opposite capacity, '• and thus the individuality of each shades off into the Zeit Geist, which is the universal behind them all." 1 The identity and individuality of a spirit- ual phenomenon of this class is like that which the Lutheran theologians in their doctrine of con- Bubstantiality affirm of the identity of the symbols of the sacrament with the body of Christ. They gay it is not a local but a definitive — we might Bay a functional — identity ; it performs the same office and is consequently the same in spirit. Or it might be compared to Herbert Spencer's " mov- ing equilibria," which, as he says, have a certain self -conserving power, shown in the neutralization of perturbations and the adjustment to new condi- tions ; and, he further says, " the penultimate stage of this process, in which the extremest degree of multiformity and completest form of moving equi- librium is established, must be one implying the highest conceivable state of humanity."^ Mr. Spencer cannot be suspected of speaking either at random or under the influence of any blind inspi- rational force. When he speaks of the " highest conceivable state of humanity," he has undoubt- 1 Mind, vol. i., p. 309. ^ j^ij-gf Principles, sec, 140. 16 SPIRITUAL SUBSTANCE. edly some mental vision of a perfect social state, and this " completest form of moving equilibrium " has something or other intelligible to do with it. It is in the same connection that he says, " The progressive change in the arrangement of mat- ter is accompanied by a parallel change in the arrangement of motion. Every increase in the structural complexity of things involves a corre- sponding increase in their functional comi^lexity ; " which, applied to his " highest conceivable state of humanity," would mean that social states of high grade have corresponding social forces or spirits of a high grade.^ It is one of the disadvantages in the study of spiritual phenomena, however, that not only are we trying to do something new to us, but the very facts we seek to investigate are mostly in an in- 1 " A time arrives in the progress of social development when societies of men become conscioits of a corporate existence, and when the improvement of the conditions of this existence becomes for them an object of conscious and deliberate effort. At what particular stage in human history this new social force comes into play, we have no need here to inquire. What I am concerned to point out is that it is a new social force.'' ^ J. E. Cairnes, Fortn. Rev., vol. xvii., p. 71 (New Series). It is not true, as this writer assumes, and as most writers on this siibjeet take for granted, that the social force or spirit is dependent upon or awaits the de- velopment of the social consciousness. This is where the school of Hegel commits the error of Plato above alluded to, and turns aside to mythology, " wherewith it infects all its natural philo- sophy." Consciousness is not a force. Social forces exist w^here there is no evidence of social consciousness. The science of social forces or spirits need take no account of consciousness. METHODS AND FACTS INCHOATE. 17 choate state. Comte remarked that the science of sociology was tardy in its development, , "^ . '^^ . r. . 1 Methods and not only because oi scarcity oi trained facts mcho- observers but because the phenomena themselves were yet embryonic, society not being old enough to manifest the laws of its organiza- tion; and Guizot felt that he must explain some of his vao^ueness on the score that " civilization is yet in its infancy." The astronomer sees some things as nebulae because of the imperfections of his instruments, and he sees other things as neb- ulse because they are nebulae. Some spiritual phenomena look cloudy because our powers of spiritual discernment are weak, and others because they are cloudy. " That was not first which is spiritual but that which is animal," ^ and we look J out into the youth of the world of spirits, where we find them in every stage of growth, imperfectly differentiated and integrated. So Van Oosterzee, . referring to the late appearance in history of the / Holy Spirit, says that " it is perhaps to be attri- buted to this fact, that the doctrine of the Holy Spirit cannot be presented with the same degree of clearness as others, and still, with the future development of the spiritual life of the church awaits its own full development." Few indeed are the spiritual forces or phenomena which can be clearly defined.^ 1 1 Cor. XV. 40. 2 " Intellectually considered, social differentiation lias always 18 FIELD WORTH INVESTIGATING. Yet so great is tlie promise of fruits from a study of tliese phenomena that it is worth while to face some discouragement in laying the iuvestigat- foundation for a better knowledge of them. Was it not concerning this sub- ject that Luther said, " The ore still lies half in the mine ? " When we measure the progress which material science has made both in the discovery and in the application of truth, since it ceased to treat the material forces as metaphysical entities and began to study them as only modes of motion although true forces, we are encouraged to ask whether a similar new era may not be in store for the science of sj)iritual things if it too should reso- lutely turn aside, for a time only it may be, to consider spiritual phenomena as mere modes of social action, as social forces. Perhaps it is too soon to say that such an analogy will hold. Mr. Spencer may or may not have had something of the kind in his thought, however, when he said: " Those familiar with the present aspect of science must suspect that inferences drawn from the ulti- been far in advance of social integration. As in tlie solar system the outlying members — the planets — have vastly exceeded the central mass — the sun — in the progress which they have made to- ward the dissipation of their inherent motion and the integration of their constituent matter, so, in society, while individual men have, at different times and in varying degrees, arrived at the full consciousness both of themselves and of the universe, the social mass, the supreme psychic centre of the social organism, still con- sists of a chaos of undifferentiated elements in the crude homoge- neous state." Lester Ward, Dynamical Sociology., vol. ii., p. 387. COMPLEXITY. 19 mate laws of force, will lead to the investigation and generalization of classes of facts liitherto un- examined." ^ And it may be that such a study may begin to remove the occasion for Professor Seeley's reproach that '' no adequate doctrine of civilization is taught among us." ^ Spiritual phenomena are not only largely incho- ate, they are exceedingly manifold in their forms, and interpenetrate and combine with one -^ . Complexity. another and with other phenomena m more ways than can be indicated. Frequently a vaguely defined spiritual phenomenon of wide dimensions finds its partial manifestation in the shape of some smaller and less generic spirit. As we reach a higher point of view spirits which ap- peared to be complete in themselves are seen to be but special forms of more comprehensive spir- its. The spirit of enterprise, or the spirit of un- trammeled inquiry, may be seen to be but a par- ticular manifestation of the spirit of the age. Smaller spirits are visible to some to whom the larger spirit of the age appears to be an abstrac- 1 First Principles, see. 144. 2 " The social forces only need to be investigated as tlie rest have been, in order to discover ways in which their utility can be demonstrated. Here is a vast field of true scientific exijloita- tion as yet untracked." Dynam. Sociol, vol. i., p. 43. " The great object was to show that all science is a progress from the sensible and material to the principle of Powers, and of a unity in Powers. . . . The conclusion referred to the discovery of a still higher identification between the God of nature and the God of the spirits." Biography of F. D. Maurice, vol. i., p. 323. 20 SPIRITUAL AND SOCIAL. tion. A spirit renders itself effective by continu- ally assuming these more specific forms. The spirit of anti - slavery was able to become tre- mendously efficient by taking on personal form in John Brown, and literary form in "Uncle Tom's Cabin." A spiritual phenomenon is essentially a soc ial phenomenon.^ In its simplest conceivable form Spiritual it is the interjilay of forces between two and social, ^j, j^-^Q^g persous. If it wcre possible to conceive of a solitary personality at all, that person could be thought of as spiritual only in some mythical or metaphysical sense. To say that a person is a spiritual being in the phenom- enal sense, that is, to say that he can be seen to be a spiritual being, is to say that he is a social being and cannot be discovered outside of social relationships. There may be an imperfect form of social relationship which is not spiritual, but there can be no true manifestation of spirit which is not social. There may be a spirit in literature, but that also is social. A spiritual religion is a social religion. Professor Toy rightly says that religion, like language and ethics, is a branch of sociology. " Man's thought," says he, " keeps pace, or is rather identical with social organiza- tion. . . . Religion must grow as society grows. ... A large social life is an essential condition of ^ " The social forces are the psychic forces as they operate in the collective state of man." Lester Ward, Psychic Factors, p. 123. SPlEITUxiL AND SOCIAL. 21 the development of a great religion. It is only out of a national organization that those large experi- ences spring without which religious systems are narrow and unfruitful." ^ It is one of the worst of falsehoods that religion is a matter of individ- ual concern. Even when one enters alone into the presence of God, if it is a spiritual approach, it brings him into a social relationship, and if he be without the true social nature he cannot so \ enter. Likewise spiritual worship is not possible unless God be conceived of as a social being. But if God be of a social spirit, and a worshiper of an unsocial nature come before him, he can hardly do otherwise than ask him " Where is thy brother?" Cardinal Newman seems to have re- garded it as a sign of his own deeply religious nature that it had always been to him as though he and God were the only two persons in the uni- verse. Manning, on the other hand, seems to have had as genuine a personal interest in the London dock laborer as in God ; and he was the more truly spiritual of the two. So we find that Abraham, the reputed father of spiritual religion, was the " friend " of God, and yet was at the same time so attached to his nephew that not only would he fight the king of Damascus in his be- half, but would stand up and argue that the judge of all the earth ought to do right by him, — so strong was the social spirit in Abraham.^ " I 1 Judaism and Christianity, pp. 1,2, 7. - ^ Gen. xiv. ; xviii. 28-33. 22 INDIVIDUALISM. have not called you slaves," said Jesus, "I have called you friends ; " and that is the secret of the religious worship of Jesus to this day. It is a development of social democracy. " The King- dom of God " is rightly modernized by Dr. Mul- ford m the phrase, " The Eepublic of God." Always complementary, however, to the fact of the social nature of spiritual phenomena, is the other fact that spiritual forces are dependent for Individual- their generation and focalization upon ^^^' special and individualized personalities. This is consistent with the self-evident fact that strong social relationships cannot exist between weak individuals. Society _rests upon self-asser- tion _as- much as upon self-surrencler ; and it is through the individual with more than ordinary powers of self-assertion that the spiritual force gains its effectiveness. Every social organism which has risen to the spiritual plane has been fruitful in great personalities. A popular move- ment which has no place for exceptional men, heroes rising above the average and guiding the currents of popidar interest, is the dream of the communist, and is doomed to failure ; as a reign of heroes without its impulse from the hearts of the people is the fallacy of the absolutist. Al- ways before a new step forward in the develop- ment of spiritual life is possible, some small group of men or some one man must concentrate the diffused spiritual influences and give to them a HISTORY. 23 new and more direct activity. A spiritual force is a social force ; but as no great man can succeed without a constituency, so no society can thrive without its great men. It lives in them. " As I take it," says Carlyle, '* universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones ; the modelers, patterns and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or attain ; the soul of the whole world's history, it may justly be con- sidered, were the history of these." ^ Social life cannot maintain itself upon a dead level. In- dividualism and socialism are mutually essential each to the other, and a spiritual force, because it is a social phenomenon, depends largely upon the genius of the individual. Professor Toy understates the fact when he says that the complete religious system depends upon a national organization of society. If a re- ligion would be truly ecumenical it must come indeed from a national organiza- tion, but from one which stands in organic rela- tions to universal history. ^ The completion of human development is dependent upon the nation as it is upon the family or the individual. A cosmopolitanism which is the mere result of the 1 Hero Worship. 2 Kuenen, Hibbert Lectures for ISSS, Lect. I. 24 CENTRES OF HISTORY. loosening of the ties of patriotism is no true cos- mopolitanism, as a republic is no true republic, though Plato devise it, which ignores the family tie. Only that history is worthy of the name which tends to the fulfillment of national organ- isms in international relationships. Such history is the flower of humanity, and hence of the uni- verse, and in connection with such a history the truly universal religion can flourish. The most important subject of investigation both for socio- logical and for theological purposes is universal history, if it can be discovered that such a thing exists : that is, if anywhere there has been a course of events which has had nationalities for its or- ganic units, and which has itself been an organism and maintained organic relations, past or prospec- tive, with the whole of mankind. Most nearly answering to such conception of an organic course of history is that which was being Centres of ©uacted about the shores of the Mediter- history. raucau Sea some two and three thousand years ago. All of that which has since reached the dignity of history is derived from that, and it is the manifest destiny of the whole to be brought into its current. While the geographical centre of history has left the Mediterranean, it did so in such a way as not to destroy the historical continu- ities, and the mind of man will never be permitted to forget that about those favored shores were be- ing prepared that spiritual wealth, the wealth of T]VO FACTORS IN HISTORY. 25 possible personal relationships, which is so rich a legacy to us. It is probable indeed that history- began elsewhere, and that its focal point traveled to as it has since traveled from the Great Sea. Its course may yet be successfully traced. It may be discovered that the many outlying and seemingly detached and half historical or unhistorical por- tions of humanity actually belong to one history as they belong to one race. What is of greater interest is that it may appear that there is to be but one universal historical movement, which is to sweep into its current and assimilate to its general type, and carry in its general direction, all those masses of humanity that now seem stranded, wait- ing for the tide of organic human life to rise high enough to lift them. If such universal historical organism is in exist- ence, with its possibilities for the future of the race, it is the one phenomenon in all the Two factors world most deserving of study. And i^^^^tory. those things in it most worthy of investigation will be of two kinds, personalities and spiritual, or, as they may with equal propriety be called, social forces. If any one personality or any one spirit- ual force outranks all the others, that person or that spirit will deserve to have the most considera- tion. It w^ould be strange, too, seeing how inti- mately interrelated individual persons and spiritual forces always have been, if such supremely impor- tant personage and such supremely important spirit 26 THE NEW SPIRITUAL FOBCE. did not occupy close mutual relations. If it be true, as may be here assumed, that the personality of Jesus of Nazareth has succeeded in putting itself into human history and winning a place of preeminence, so that from him forward and back- ward the world rightly dates its eras, it need occa- sion no surprise, if a spiritual factor be discovered closely identified with his personality, sharing with it the throne of power and the creatorship of the future. A remarkable event is said to have occurred soon after the final departure of Jesus, and to have signalized the entrance into history of a SirS specifically new agent, — his spirit. In ^''''''^* its essential features the story is credible and probable, both upon the basis of any fair esti- mate of what had just happened, and because from that day forward a spiritual force answering to the description of it is to be observed in active opera- tion. There is moreover a strong probability, upon psychological grounds, that that force would appear as a sudden irruption in the manner described. It would be almost as proper to date the era from that Pentecostal effusion as from the birth of Jesus. It is of equal importance and as essential to the founding of his kingdom in the world, as he in turn was essential to its appearance and operation. Yet it was not altogether a new thing ; for as one cannot write an adequate history of Jesus who be- gins only at his birth, so the operation of that spirit THE SPIRIT OF MOSES. 27 is to be discovered long before that occurrence. It is discerjiibly present throughout the whole of that specialized course of history which led up to and made possible the birth of such an one as the man of Nazareth. It is in fact the specializing element in that history. It is because of its presence and persistence that that history took and followed — and when it swerved from it for a time always re- turned to — its particular path, and so kept on until it eventuated in the way it did. Naturally in the earlier stages of that special history the appearances of the spirit are elusive, and the difficulty in tracing its opera- The spirit tions in chronological order is increased ^^ ^o^^- by the fact that the history itself of those early times was rewritten under its inspiration. It is not always easy to say how much of it which ap- pears in the history as written was in that history as acted. To determine that would require a more exhaustive critical investigation than can here be attempted. The loss of the advantage, however, which would accrue from such critical inquiry need occasion less regret, since the larger results of our study would not be much changed by taking an extreme position either way.^ It is significant that 1 In the absence of an independent determination, the lucid arrangement in Bruce's Apologetics has been adopted in a general way for this and the next lecture. Those to whom its conserva- tism is offensive may remember that others are still more offended by its liberalism. If it be true, as is here contended, that this spiritual force is the specific factor in Hebrew life and literature, 28 CONTRAST WITH THE EGYPTIAN SPIRIT. critics are more ready to admit the antiquity of the specific spirit of Hebrew history than of much that purports to be history itself. That Moses did the particular things in detail attributed to him might be denied by many who would readily admit that a hero of that name lived and imparted imperish- able spiritual qualities to that history. The one most characteristic work attributed to Moses, and which is insisted upon as his by many who are not disposed to insist upon much else, is the Decalogue. Yet there are many " who doubt or deny the Mo- saic origin of the Ten Words, while admitting that they reflect the spirit of the Mosaic religion." ^ We may, therefore, regard it as a moderately ten- able position if we assume that we know what was the spirit of Moses,^ and that that spirit exercised such specializing influence as was exercised in the beginnings of Hebrew history. As this brings us back to the period of contact with Egypt, we are led to note the contrast between Contrast ^^^^ Mosaic Spirit as manifested in the E'^ptiSTn Decalogue and the spirit of Egyptian re- spirit, ligion and life. The one appeals to man then the desired consensus of opinion upon these matters cannot be expected to antedate the scientific study of this force. From our point of view, therefore, it would be premature to attempt other than a tentative chronology. 1 Bruce, A2)ologetics, p. 209. 2 " We shall, therefore, at most be able to arrive at the spirit of Mosaism." " There is no doubt that he sought to impress his spirit upon the elect of his nation, and thus provide himself with successors in his work." Piepenbring, Tlieol. of 0. T., pp. 10, 11. ETHICAL TONE. 29 on his nobler, the other on his meaner side. The Decalogue makes no reference to rewards or pun- ishments after death. The omission cannot be due to ignorance of such a doctrine ; for Egyptian life was built wholly upon it, and there is no lack of evidence that the authors of Mosaism, whoever they may have been, were acquainted with Egypt. By this doctrine of future rewards and punish- ments the Egyptians had been brought into a futile and childish battle with, and a non-moral prepara- tion for death, and as a consequence an utter bond- age to priestcraft in its worst forms. The whole attitude of the Egyptian towards the subject was foolish, selfish, morbid, slavish : it smelled of the charnel house, and has perpetuated that taint to this day. It was a mephitic spirit like a miasm from the swamps of the lower Nile. The whole- some tone of the Hebrew reacted ao'ainst this. In- stead of saying, Do right for Osiris is to judge ^ you, it says. Do right for Jehovah has been good to you. The appeal is to gratitude. Moreover, / where elsewhere rewards are promised or punish- '^ ments threatened the Hebrew, they are not per- / sonal as in the Egyptian system, where the aj^peal is to selfishness ; they are national, and appeal to the generous spirit of patriotism. A similar contrast is noticeable in the contents of the Decalogue, as compared with, for Ethical instance, the precepts enjoined in the ^^^^' Egyptian " Book of the Dead." The fundamental 30 ETHICAL TONE. Hebrew law excludes everything of a merely ritual character, while the Eg-yptian mingles promiscu- ously the sins of uncleanness, perjury, injustice, inhumanity, with those of neglecting religious cer- emonies, trapping sacred birds, lifting sacred cat- tle, or letting the perpetual lamp go out. The Hebrew had mastered the distinction, as the Egyp- tian had not, between moral duties and technical religious ceremonies. ^ The God who is thought of as requiring only obedience to moral law is one who seeks men's own good and not his own. Such is the God of the Decalogue. That code is wholly moral, not only in the sense of being free from ceremonial elements, but in the sense that all of its provisions aim at the good of men themselves or their neighbors. The custom of distinguishing between the first and second tables as respecting duties to God and duties to men, is responsible for the frequent fail- ure to perceive this. All duties are duties to God, and all specific duties are owing to ourselves or our fellows. If the distinction between the two tables is to be maintained, it might with as much propriety be said that the first table consists of duties to ourselves, and forbids vices, while the sec- ond consists of duties to our fellows, and forbids crimes ; while all consist of duties to God, and forbid sins. The prohibition of i)olytheism is a charter of freedom from too much religion of low 1 Bruce, Apologetics, p. 217. ETHICAL TONE. Bl quality, and has its occasion in the evils which the worship of many gods had entailed upon Egypt. The fascinations of image-worship, and the vices and degradation which grew out of it, also stood out as a warning. In the same category was the use of the divine names as conjurors' catchwords, which degraded those names and robbed them of their value as vehicles of liigher aspiration and true religious worship. These prohibitions in the first three commandments were all for their own good and that of their neighbors and children. They were equivalent to the warning not to make a vice of religion, not to poison the fountain of true religious life, not to block the avenues of true personal intercourse between God and man, — not for God's sake so much as for their own.^ The institution or resuscitation of the Sabbath had a humanitarian rather than a ritual motive; the Deuteronomic edition of the code gives the truer insiaht into it.^ It was established as an offset to the life of slavery which had brought all days to the common level of unsanctified drudgery, and in spirit its chief emphasis was upon the enjoinment that dependents be permitted the privileges of the day of rest. If the distinction between the two 1 *' Is it not self-evident that the only motive God Ccan have in giving or making known a law is the well-being of man ? But as he does not impose any law for the mere sake of imposing it, so he does not impose or make known any law for his o\vn sake." Stanley Leathes, Foundations of Morality, p. 67. 2 Deut. V. G-21. 32 THE BITUAL. tables is to be emphasized, this fourth command- ment belongs rather to the second than to the first table. The universalistic character of the second table is acknowledged. The first is equally uni- versal when viewed from the moral side. The whole is characteristically human, and valid for all mankind. The humanitarian rather than religious charac- ter of the Decalogue is rather in its spirit than in Spirit rather wliat wc may Call its idea. Undoubtedly thau idea. '^g autlior was ruled by religious concep- tions, and spoke in the name of Jehovah, and put forth at least some of this legislation in what might be said to be Jehovah's interest. Perhaps the whole of it would have been justified to his own consciousness on the ground that Jehovah desired it for his own sake. Yet it is easy to jjerceive that while its purpose was religious, its sj^irit was hu- manitarian. The Mosaic religion differed from the Egyptian and prompted to the enjoinment of different duties in a different way from that of the Egyptian, because the Mosaic spirit was so dis- tinctly humanitarian. It humanized the religion. To say that the Mosaic legislation is distinc- tively non-ritual is not to deny that the ritual legislation of the Pentateuch may have been Mosaic in substance, or even to a great extent in detail. The substance of the ritual is probably not only as old as Moses, but much older. It would have been impossible, had it been FAITH IN THE PEOPLE. 33 wise, for him to abolish it. His legislation in such matters could only have been regulative and re- strictive. If ritual could be kept in its place it could be of great service as a means to the culture of genuine piety and righteousness. Even as re- gards the ritual, therefore, the Mosaic sj^irit is in it, whether his hand was there or not, and this is manifest by the effort, not to create or enjoin it, but so to bring it under control, that on the one hand it should not breed frivolity or licentious- ness, and on the other hand should be the servant and not the superior or the equal of the law of righteousness. Another noteworthy illustration of the humani- tarian spirit of the Mosaic movement appears in the fact that, whoever may have been re- p,jith in the sjionsible for it, it is marked by a break- p^'^p^^- ing away from the esoteric principle which kept the higher faith of that age the exclusive property of the few. Not only a benevolent regard for but a hearty faith in men was involved in that act by which the purer doctrine and morals in all their majesty and simplicity were given away to a body of escaped slaves. This has been well expressed by a recent story-writer who makes one of his characters, an Egyptian priest, speak to a Hebrew youth as follows : " In the days of the great Ba- rneses thy people were shepherds in Goshen. A child of the race, the son of Amram, was adopted by the daughter of the Pharaoh, and sat among the 34 SEMITIC SPIRIT. priests of the realm. At On and at Thebes he was taught, . . . and was initiated into the pro- foundest m3^steries of our ancient faith, truths known at any one time to but seven souls in all Egypt. In time he fled to Midian. There he pondered these mysteries, and the Soul of the Gods talked with him. Then he came and led out his people. At Sinai he told them all, brickmakers and herdsmen, what in Egypt was reserved for the innermost circle of the priesthood, . . . The future is with thy people. . . . Set free by that voice at Horeb, the son of Amram could make a nation of priests." ^ Here is no faint glimmer of the spirit of him who desired his disciples to keep no secrets but to proclaim from the housetops all that he had taught them in private, and who had more faith in the capacity for truth of outcasts, than in the high- est scholarship of the age if it was rided by pride. Another fundamental contrast which coidd not have failed to affect the mind of the creator of the Semitic Dccaloguc, is fouud in the fact that he spirit. confronted not only Egypt but also the Semitic peoples with their Baals, so conceived as to insure the prevalence of licentiousness and sa- cred prostitution. Semitic heathenism is stamped with immentionable vileness, and with the cruelty and treachery that always accompany sensuality. No true social relationship, and consequently no enduring civilization, could exist under the Baals. 1 The Son of a Prophet, G. A Jackson, pp. 323, 326. PROBABLY VERY ANCIENT. 35 The spirit of Mosaism revolted against the Semitic cult as it did against the Egyptian. Thus at the beginning of Hebrew history, what- ever else may be difficult of determination, the spirit is unmistakable. It is admitted where more material historical data are denied or doubted. It is not necessary, therefore, to enter the critical arena to vindicate its assertion. It is the kind of spirit too which we have agreed to observe, one of the purely phenomenal type. If any would affirm a spirit of another class, one which entered the world of phenomena from without, and produced effects whose causes could not be regarded as be- longing to the visible universe, it is neither nec- essary nor possible to dispute with him. He is simply engaged in another field of. research, by an- other method, perhaps as legitimate in its way as ours. In the world of observable phenomena, however, this Hebrew spirit is found, of undeniable reality, fairly distinguishable as an independent fact, a specific force or cause. It is a secondary phenomenon, to be sure, as all spirits of this class are. It is spirit o/* something. Precisely what it is the spirit of is as yet ^ . . 1 T Probably difficult to determme with exactness, and very an- in this lies the promise ot its further de- velopment. It is the spirit of Moses ; yet hints are not wanting that to Moses it came from per- sons or traditions, or possibly literary fragments, abeady well charged with spiritual energy. The 36 BETTERMENT BATHER THAN PERFECTION. story has the marks of triithlikeness which inti- mate that the specific influences came from the ancient Hebrew traditions, but that Moses was hos- pitable to spiritual tendencies from other sources ; so that in him may have been localized vague and diffused spiritual potencies to which his personal- ity gave a coherency and definite impulse, some- what analogous to that which was given in more perfect measure by that prophet " like unto him," who came at the end of the national develo23ment. In many respects the 023erations and manifesta- tions of this spirit were only inchoate. It touched life with meliorating rather than per- Betterment p. tttiit rathei than lectiug powcr. it declared that divorce and slavery should be under more or less beneficent restrictions. It attempted to secure for the poor and the stranger a fair measure of equity. It restrained religious extravagances, and sought to avoid making religion the pander to lust, or the in- strument of j)riestcraft. It could have gone no farther than this without wholly losing its touch with the peojile. As it was it kej^t far enough in advance of the age to be frequently lost sight of. It is not probable that this accommodation to the circumstances of the time was conscious on the part of the founder of the nation, and the framer of its legislation. It is more likely that his own vision did not extend nearly as far as may appear to us, that he was guided by a sjiirit of whose range he was unaware, and whose angle of curvature no SOCIAL FORCE. 37 mind had worked out, a spirit which, so far as ap- peared in the phenomenal world, was still less than half formed. Yet though but inceptive, as the embryo gives promise and seems to contain the potency of the full-grown organism, so this spirit has in spiritual it that which fulfilled itself in Jesus, ee^m. Its operations are manifold, and the illustrations of it here referred to are but a few among the many that might be adduced. It has been found, like all spirits of this kind, to be dependent for its manifestation upon special individuals. Those who deny to Moses the prominent place which tradition assigns him in the early history of Israel, simply on the ground of the tendency of antiquity to mag- nify the individual, forget that antiquity was not far wrong in regarding the biography of the few as the history of the many. Moses may not have performed all the deeds ascribed to him. But it is fairly certain that, with the help of a few others, he infused into Hebrew history that spirit which never afterwards ceased to characterize it. At the same time it was in the fullest sense a social spirit. That concerning which there is a complete consensus of opinion with re- c 1 TT 1 Social force. gard to the founder of the Hebrew state was his disinterestedness. He lived in and for others. And his interest was for men as such, so that he preferred a miserable mob of runaway slaves to the magnificence of court life. That at least 38 CREATIVE. is tlie spirit of Mosaism. The specific thing about the spirit of the Hebrew nation is that it sets to work to develop and better manhood in its true character, in its distinctively human possibilities. It is for the peoj)le. Its great men came from and live for the people. Its heroes always have a con- stituency ; it is not always, indeed, a very loyal or admirable one ; they are not always admirable themselves ; yet on the whole they are sufficiently representative, so that there will be those to keep their memory green and perpetuate their influence. They are sure of posterity at any rate. As a social force this spirit socializes religion, and imposes upon its conceptions and usages the laws of right human relationships. It Creative. , i p 'i f p ii i improves the family lite and begets the nation. What it is particularly concerned in when it first comes within the field of our observation is nation-making. At the same time it has in it elements of true universalism. It forms a nation out of most diverse elements, probably but a small proportion of the original components of the Hebrew state being pure-blooded Israelites. It welcomes the foreigner and permits him to amalgamate and gain citizenship. It refuses alli- ances with other nations for excellent reasons, one of which was that an alliance with one involved hostility toward all others. Cosmopolitanism in social and religious and political matters that involved sharing the vices and superstitions and CREATIVE. 39 feuds of outside peoples, it shunned. True cosmo- politanism in the way of genuine incorporation of strangers into its own life, fair diplomatic give and take, and religious universalism, it encouraged. Thus we are able to perceive at the beginning of the Hebrew national development a spirit at Avork, which, if it ever fulfils its promise, is des- tined to socialize all human relationships ; and, as a means to and a result of this, fully to socialize religion and thereby theology. This is the spe- cific factor in Hebrew history. II. In tlie anarchical independence which marked the period of the Judges in Israel, one would not Ageof disor- ^^ ^^'st rccognize the same spirit which gauization. operated in the creative age of Moses. Close observation, however, shows that these events are caused by the same spiritual influence adapt- ing itself to changed conditions. The age when each man did what was right in his own eyes was in fact one of the most distinctive products of the early Hebrew sj^irit, even that of Moses himself. For he had a spell of lawlessness growing out of an inherent disrespect for that law which was made for the benefit of the few and the oppression of the many. If that part of Moses' biography is a myth it is the work of an extraordinarily skillfid myth- maker. Moses' flight to Midian was caused by his characteristic and manly disinterestedness ; and when the Hebrew tribes refused for some centuries to settle down to civilized life they obeyed the promptings of the same spirit. The civilizations about them were artificial and moribund. A re- turn to nature and savagery was better than such civilization : and so these tribes, abiding the time when they could begin to evolve the elements of a THE SPIRIT AND THE LAND. 41 social order of their own, preferred to live in out- lawry, submitting occasionally, in an emergency, to rude arbitrators wlio showed native strenoth and instincts of justice. Such a policy was, of course, never consciously proposed ; but the spirit of him who defied Egyptian law, and fled from even the highest advantages of its culture, had imparted this instinct to them. There have been civilizations that were worse than nothing, and such would have been the best they could have borrowed. They must create one of their own. The Ked Indian cruelty and relentlessness, as Kenan calls it, of the Hebrews of that period were hardly exceptional, — they were but the birth pangs of a new civiliza- tion ; and all birth is cruel. " Nations at their birth are ferocious." ^ The very choice of a location for these tribes was in no small part prompted by that spirit. For they were on one of those spots of ^^^ gpi^j^ ground which nature had designed as the ^ud the land, refuge of those who could not live in harmony with any of the established orders. All creators of new civilizations must face outlawry from the old. A band of outlaws built imperial Rome on the worth- less section of rock and marsh, where deadly fevers and the triangular jealousies of three powerful states guaranteed to them a kind of turbulent se- curity ; and myth was doubtless not all myth when it attributed to them from the first somethinof of 1 Renan, History of People of Israel^ vol. i., pp. 19G-198. 42 EABLY MOVEMENTS. the spirit of empire-building, tliougli their ideas may have been narrow, and their motives sordid enough. Likewise Israel's position was not all of chance. The men chose the place as much as the place made the men. The two had an affinity. In an age of repression and hollowness and vice, when nothing genuine or free or progressive was tolerated, when dead and empty and corrupt con- ventionalisms were supreme throughout civiliza- tion, men could breathe deeply only on the frontiers. The strong, the natural, the unconventional rallied then, as they do to-day, upon the geographical or religious or philosophical boundaries, where as frontiersmen they laid the foundation of future empires whose superstructures they were not to see. Thus Israel found opportunity to begin to solve the problem of destiny in a land where he could remain barbarous as long as his best instincts required ; while yet he was in such contact with all civilization as to permit the exercise of his selec- tive spirit upon elements which might be desirable. It is not improbable that this spirit very early began to exert its influence in choosing the natural Early move- couditious uudcr which the Hebrew °'^"*^" nation was to spend its youth. The stream of spiritual impulse spontaneously flows, like other forces, along the lines of least resistence, and these lines had always led towards Palestine. Ever since the centres of civilization had begun to group themselves about the Mediterranean that CONSTRUCTION BEGINS. 43 land Lad held a place of strategic importance, and it is probable that, for ages bfefore the Hebrew exodus, it had been the goal of those who sought new scenes to live greater and more human lives than could be permitted elsewhere. That Abra- ham sought it from similar motives has an air of probability, as also that he found and reverenced others who had come before him under the guid- ance of the same spirit.^ The existence on Mount Moriah of a sanctuary whose priesthood was ex- ceptionally pure has been recently shown. ^ It is not incredible, therefore, that this spirit had been in Palestine long before the advent of the first of the Hebrews, that from time immemorial it had had one of its chief seats among these hills. This spirit, however, did not flee civilization and resort to anarchy because it was a spirit of an- archy, but because it was hostile to insin- construc- cerity. The existing civilizations were *ion begins. oppressive, cruel, corrupt, unspeakably abominable shams. After a time the very same spirit began to construct, and the Hebrew tribes are found de- manding a king ; and, through their allegiance to the prophet who stood most nearly for the same ancient Mosaic spirit, the choice fell upon one, Saul. Personally not up to the standard of that spirit, moody, gloomy, superstitious, ungenial, yet, with all his faults, Saul was not an oriental despot. He was distinctively a product of Hebrew life, and 1 Gen. xiv. 18-20 ; Heb. vii. 1-11. '^ A. H. Sayce, in S. S. Times, Dec. 13, 1890, and elsewhere. 44 DAVID. as a first step in the evolution of an original civil- ization he was a success, and the spirit acted un- erringly in his selection. In his successor, David, we have the Hebrew spirit embodied in another hero of almost the di- mensions of Moses. Peccable as he was David. personally, the spirit of David was so far the best expression of that of Hebrew nationality. He came at a crisis when a new hero was needed. Samuel had done much, both to bring on and to prepare for meeting this crisis, making progress in ethicalizing and nationalizmg the prophetic school and type of character. But Samuel's day had passed, and David, the warrior, poet, and con- structive statesman, took uj) the new task. With his long reign the work of unifying the Hebrew nation was for the time complete. Although the exten- sion of his kingdom served high ends, and was needed to give wings to the national imagination, and to set before it the idea of world conquest, afterwards so fruitful in undreamed-of ways, yet it approached the danger line. As a political unit the Hebrew power came into direct competition and comparison with other powers on the sides where it was certain to be out-measured, because its strength, unlike theirs, lay in its sjDirit. The temptation to introduce their methods and temper into Hebrew life proved too strong for David's successor, whose reign of seeming prosperity was but a preparation for a catastrophe. DISEUPTION A BLESSING. 45 Yet Solomon's cosmopolitanism was not wholly false. In some respects it was swayed by the Hebrew spirit; and though it brought .... ,-, , , Solomon. on a new crisis, it was on the whole a genuine and necessary contribution to the life of the nation. Had Israel not risked a premature universalism under Solomon, she might have been unready for a riper expression of her broad spirit later. But toward the close of the reign of the magnificent monarch the tide turned the other way. The kingdom had been orientalized. Re- ligion was becoming the cloak for vice and oppres- sion, which the Hebrew spirit would not endure. Taxation was growing unbearable, and resistance to it patriotism. Because Solomon's successor could not be made to understand with what an invincible spirit he had to deal, he went on blindly in his contemptuous disregard of its warnings, until the kingdom was rent in twain. Disruption was the most fortunate thing that could happen under the circumstances, and it alone saved the nation. It is not diffi- Disruption a cult to discover the Hebrew spirit or ^^^^^^"g- genius in it. Henceforth while the parts remained politically separate they were spiritually one, and it was easier for them to be spiritually one be- cause they were politically two. The fact led to a kind of distinction between the temporal and spiritual power. The spiritual organism was less liable to become identical with and to lose itself 46 ELIJAH THE PBOPHET. in the political organism. The political duality forced the prophets to emerge as a class of men outside official life, and with a personal indepen- dence which threw the best of them out of sym- pathy sometimes even with one another. While now there was always a certain substratum of j)olitical order in the lower affairs of life, in re- gard to the higher and more refined interests the prophetic spirit brought back a sort of anarchism much like that of the age of the judges. When in times of emergency they brought their moral influence to bear, they were stronger than the kings on the throne, so that they were feared and often hated by the representatives of the material- istic order for which the throne stood. They cared nothing for frontiers. To their minds there was but one nation. Wars between the two king- doms they regarded as civil conflicts. Hence through them the nation remained one in spirit ; and when the fortunes of war wiped one of the kingdoms out of existence, the other was the heir to that wealth of historical achievement and tradi- tion which could not be made sj^oil of, and the refuge of such of its citizens as escaped slavery and remained true to the genius of Hebraism. Of the line of prophets who revived the ancient spirit of Mosaism, and held the nation to it in the Elijah the ^^^^ ^^ corruption and danger, the first prophet. ^^^ Qj^g ^£ ^YiQ niost conspicuous is the hero Elijah. Although perhaps somewhat ob- AMOS AND HIS LINE. 47 scurecl or distorted by the liaze of distance, and with an outward success of but brief duration, Elijah is undoubtedly to be ranked among the great history-makers. His intolerant zeal for the sole service of Jehovah, against the foul and cruel worship of the Tyrian Baal, is easily explained, not by narrowness, but by depth and purity of religious and moral spirit. Jealousy is a just attitude in a worshiper of an ethical God like Jehovah, against a Phoenician deity. The key to Elijah's public conduct is found in his denun- ciation of Ahab in the matter of the forcible tak- ing of Naboth's vineyard, a crime, too, which the history faithfully traces to the demoralizing influ- ence of the Baal worship, and its corresponding moral tone. What is true of Elijah is equally true of the line of prophets beginning with Amos. Their attacks upon the established order all Amos and have an unselfish motive and an ethical ^''^'"^• basis. They are consumed with a passion for righteousness, and are firmly persuaded that the world is being governed by a power that makes for righteousness, a God who is as much in ear- nest about getting the right done as they are themselves, and who is nauseated by a mere rit- ual holiness. '' I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies. Though ye offer me burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them: neither will I 48 ETHICS OF THE PBOPHETS. regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts. Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs ; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But let judgment run down as waters, and righteous- ness as a mighty stream," is the language put by the spirit into the mouth of Amos.^ Even in Hosea, where the religious rather than the ethical is said to predominate, we find the declaration " I desired mercy and not sacrifice ; and the know- ledge of God more than burnt offerings."^ In thus exalting morality above ritual the prophets manifested their loyalty to the spirit of Mosaism. A further manifestation of this spirit is seen in their compassionate temper. They are every- Ethicsofthe where the champions of the oppressed, prophets. ^j-^g poor, and him that hath no helper. To them one of the fundamental divine attributes is "mercy," and when they speak of "justice" they mean by it the right doing towards those who are inferior in power to assert their rights. When they dwelt \ipon the divine justice, it was not to gloat over the punishment of the guilty, but to rejoice at his championship of the injured. " To do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly " was the sum of virtue, beside which ritual obser- vances counted for nothing. ^ " He judged the cause of the poor and needy ; . • . was not this to know me ? " saith Jehovah. * They are moreovei 1 Amos V. 21. 24. ^ Hosea vi. 6. 3 Mic. vi. 6-8. ^ Jer. xxii. 16. THEIR FAITH. 49 exquisitely sensitive on the matter of sincerity. Religion divorced from right conduct was to them one of the meanest forms of untruth : and still more abominable was vice masquerading under the cloak of religion. The habit of borrowing even true religious phrases, instead of learning their meaning by experience, was stigmatized by Jere- miah as a form of theft. ^ Yet this healthy and genial spirit, full of tenderness for all who suffer, and hostile to all vices and injustice, has in it no trace of asceticism. They say no word against the enjoyment of life according to one's opportunity. The contrast between their spirit and that of the Brahmans and Buddhists of India in respect to self- tortures and ascetic renunciations is most notice- able. With their moral intensity and their zeal for the betterment of the conditions of life, it was im- portant that they combine a strons: faith 7 ,, . 1 , p^^^- perhaps older than Moses. Parts had been nega- tively adapted to the Mosaic spirit by the lawgiver himself, curbing its excesses and pruning away its excrescences. Through the ages since it had suf- fered vicissitudes, now being demoralized by priest- craft, and now revised by reforming zeal. At last it is enriched and revised by a group of priest- prophets to serve a most important end. While suspiciously like the surrounding heathenism in the stress it lays upon the ritual, it is essentially different in its secret and its motive. Its secret kernel is a living seed of spiritual potency of un- known potentiality. In its motive it does not mean to identify ritual and morality. It merely lays emphasis uj^on ritual for the time being, as an instrument to hold Israel loyal to ancient Hebra- ism and to the hope for the future. "The pro- moters of this reforming movement," says Bruce,^ '' might very well have the feeling that they were true to the spirit of Moses, and doing their best to preserve intact the Mosaic religion." What they did may not have been the ideal thing. Yet what 1 Apologetics, p. 26G. 62 PBIEST-PROPHET AND SCRIBE-PROPHET. would have been ideal in the circumstances ? They were practical statesmen, and one of the elements of their ideal thing must be that it be workable. Can anything better be conceived in the circum- stances than to reconstruct the history and the re- ligious forms of Israel, and to cause them to min- ister to the education of the people in the living traditions of their race ? Ezra may have been a mere scribe ; but not the less he was an epoch- maker like Moses,^ and through him and methods which he began to devise and execute Mosaism was resuscitated and preserved and transmitted. We may complain of the slavish loyalty of these scribes to the letter of the sacred writings ; and then in the same breath inconsistently declare that they produced the writings themselves. In either case they are deserving of honor. For they either created, or selected and canonized the most remark- able set of writings the world had seen. No body of men could have performed either of these ser- vices to ancient Hebraism who had not become deeply imbued with the spirit of that Hebraism. 1 Ibid., p. 268. Driver, Introduction to O. T. Lit., p. xxviii. " There exists no ground whatever for questioning the testimony of the compiler of the Book of Ezra, which brings Ezra into con- nection with the Law. . . . Ezra, the priest and scribe, was in some way noted for his services in connection with the Law. . . . What these services were we do not certainly know, . . . but the term ' scribe ' and the form of the representation in Ezra iv. would sug- gest that they were of a literary character." The epochal char- acter of Ezra, like that of Moses, does not depend upon his hav- ing done all that tradition attributes to him, but upon his having made an important initiative. JUDAISM AND SIN. 63 Those sacred writings which are with most con- fidence attributed to the Judaic period are the greater number of the songs of the Psal- witness of ter. At any rate the Psalter is regarded t^^^^^it^^- as of post-exilic compilation. In it, therefore, should be seen the true spirit of these scribes and priests. Though the psalms advance no novel ideas as compared with the earlier prophets, they rise to a high level of spiritualism. Praising the temple and its ritual, they by no means indicate a slavish dependence upon it. They find in the law the soundest moral principles, and, with some ex- ceptions, are noted for their humanness. They strike out of the heart of Judaism, so often blamed for its narrowness, the note of cosmopolitanism. The compilers of the Psalter can have been no mean sort of men.^ One of th« complaints against Judaism is be- cause of the emphasis which it lays upon the idea of sin. It is charged with having de- Judaism and parted in this respect from the old Hebra- ^™* ism. This accusation cannot be made by those who have measured the real depth of the spirit of Hebraism. It is like the shallow criticism of those who think that the dancing of the Merrymounters gave better promise for the future of New Eng- land than the psalm-singing of the intolerant Puri- tans.2 It was because the spirit of Hebraism was profound enough to work out in time a serious 1 Bruce, Apologetics, pp. 272 f. ^ md,^ p. 208. 64 JUDAISM AND SIN. sense of sinfulness tliat it was so specifically dif- ferent from the spirits of other semi-civilizations. These could go on in the enjoyment of animal spirits, and without remorse permit corruption to grow until ruin was inevitable. Renan, though himself of the lightest Hellenic temperament, and wanting in enough depth or seriousness to compre- hend the Hebrew, was able to see something of it, when he said, " Greece had only one thing want- ing in the circle of her moral and intellectual ac- tivity; but this was an important void; she de- spised the humble and did not feel the need of a just God. Her philosophers, while dreaming of the immortality of the soul, were tolerant toward the iniquities of this world. Her religions were merely elegant municipal playthings." ^ It was a real step in advance, and one produced by the ori- ginal spirit of Hebraism, when the system of wor- ship was so adjusted as to emphasize and call out this sense of unworthiness. Many of the ceremo- nial specifications, those pertaining to uncleanness, for instance, seem trivial in detail. But they had their definite jDurpose in a studied antagonism to the impurities and licentiousness of the nearest paganisms. They were to be denounced, as Jesus denounced them, only when the spirit which had originally prompted them had entirely gone out of their observance. One of the great achievements of scribism, and ^ History of the People of Israel, vol. i., p. vii. THE SYNAGOGUE. %b one which is to be directly attributed to the demo- cratic Hebrew spirit, was the founding xhesyna- of the synagogues as centres of lay wor- ^°^^^' ship and education.^ When the people were called together by Ezra to hear the reading and expound- ing of the sacred books,^ he was obeying the same impulse as Moses when he gave to a horde of ser- vile brickmakers the esoterics of learned Egyjit. It was a recognition of popular claims for par- ticipation in religious knowledge and worship, which could not be answered by a single sanctuary with an exclusive priesthood. Hence the educa- tional side of Judaism began to develop itself. The Jew soon found in the synagogue all that was wanting in the temple, and it spread everywhere. It was because of the peculiar adaptability and superiority of its spirit that Judaism could go into all the earth without losing hold of its traditions. There was simply nothing in the paganisms it met which could compete with it. In a subtle way the Dispersion itself was instigated by the spirit ; and everywhere it carried with it that most democratic of institutions. Wherever a dozen Jews could be 1 " One further germ of spiritual life may, probably, be traced to the epoch of Ezra. If, in the long unmarked period which follows, the worship of the Synagogue silently sprang up, ... it must have originated in the independent, personal, universal study of the Law, irrespective of Temple or Priest, which Ezra had inaugurated." Stanley, History of the Jewish Church, vol. iii., p. 134. 2 Neh. viii. 1-8. 66 DEMAND FOB THE SCBIPTURES. found, they formed a group and met for prayer and discussion of the sacred writings. While the temple remained the ideal centre, and loyalty to it the coordinating principle of the national life, the actual unit of the Jewish commonwealth was the synagogue. It fulfilled the functions of a church, a public school, and a tawn meeting all in one. A great part of the work of the scribes consisted in multiplying copies of the Scriptures for the use of the synagogues. Hence the signifi- thTscrip-*'^ cance of scribism is not to be found alto- ^^^' gether in the character of the men, but also in the nature and extent of the popular de- mand for their work. To seek material for the history of Judaism by studying the scribes, is much as if one were to write the history of to-day on a basis of a study of type-setting machines and cylin- drical presses, rather than upon the nature of the writings they reproduce and the extent of the public demand for those writings. A Bible society may be managed by men of narrow or unworthy views. What we care for is the number of Bibles the public calls for. When we are told that the scribes ap- plied petty rules and methods, and measured their Scripture by the number of ems, we need not be of- fended. We can praise them as excellent copyists. What interests us is that the Jewish people fur- nished employment for so many copyists of such valuable matter. The result was that probably less than one Jew in a thousand was unfamiliar DEMAND FOR THE SCRIPTURES. 67 with tlie best parts of the literature into which the ancient Hebrew, Mosaic, prophetic spirit had poured itself in overflowing measure.^ The im- portance of this fact is beyond estimate. In the neighborhood of the schools, where the greater scribes were able to be not only copyists but ex- pounders, the Scripture was smothered under an abei^ glaube. But this could not be universal. Only a giant can effectually choke off the spiritual energy of this mighty literature. Away from the capital it had measurably free play. There must have been myriads to whom it was vital. Given these generations of a free people, — for the He- brew sj)irit always refused slavery and held to some of the chief elements of liberty ; let that people be educated into familiarity with the most remarkable and spiritually intense literature the world has known, and then call it an age of steril- ity and failure, because forsooth the official classes have failed, as they universally do, to keep pace with the people ! He who so judges is lacking in the historic sense. It is true that the external history of the period, 1 " Thus the synagogue was a true school for the nation, and Josephus hoasts with justice that by its means the law was made the common possession of all ; and that while among tlie Romans even procurators and proconsuls had to take those skilled in law with them into their provinces, in the Jewish household every servant-maid knew from the religious service what Moses had ordained in the law in every instance." Hausrath, New Testa- ment Times, vol. i., p. 89. 68 THE SPIRIT AND LEGALISM. from Malacbi to tlie Baptist, is at first appearance The spirit disappoiutino:. It has been called "tbe and legal- • i /. i t -t. ism. niglit of legalism. But vital spiritual forces also work in the night under cover of dark- ness, as well sometimes as in the day. Yet the external history is not wholly without the spir- it's presence. Developments of and additions to Hebrew doctrines, — by borrowing for instance from the Persians, — must be admitted. The He- brew spirit was never above taking spoils from its enemies or its allies, if they had anything worth taking. The idea of a world empire may have originated with David, but was more probably borrowed from the Assyrians, and then regenerated and spiritualized. The ideas of Satan, of angels and demons, and of a future life, may have come from Persia. If so they were much improved u23on. The Jewish Satan, great but not equal to Jehovah, is a nobler and truer mode of conception of the power of evil than the Persian Ahriman, the co- eternal and coequal antagonist of Ormuzd. If the Hebrew spirit borrowed, it transmuted also. As to the idea of a future life, that was never unknown to, but was only ignored by the Hebrew Doctrine of mi^d. The ignoring of it, however, served future ijfe. ^^^y a temporary purpose. If the belief in immortality be legitimate it must some day be reckoned with. By the time it had reached the Judaic period the Hebrew experience had been sufficiently prolonged, so that the true spirit of it, HEBBEW AND HELLENIC SPIBITS. 69 which had bidden it stand aloof at first from doc- trines of the unseen, now withdrew that prohibi- tion. The time comes when the moral advantage is no longer with those who live regardless of the thought of immortality. The party in later Juda- ism which denied angels and spirits and the future life was morally the inferior party. Those who affirmed, though they borrowed perhaps the forms of their affirmation from the Greeks,^ were mor- ally the better exponents of the spirit of the same ancient Hebraism which had ignored immortality. A noteworthy illustration of the ability of the Hebrew spirit to hold its own in the face of other strong spiritual potencies is seen in its ^he Hebrew conflict, on the whole triumphant, with HeUenfc "Hellenism, the spirit of the Greek '^'''''' race." ^ The Greek material civilization, like the Persian and the Babylonian before it, could con- quer the Hebrew. But when Alexander, having completed his conquests, halted and " revolved in his mind the great work of breathing into this huge but inert body the living spirit of Greek civilization," tradition says that he recognized in Rome arid in Judea spiritual peers of Greece. At any rate the Macedonian power did not overcome the Palestinian in the spiritual realm. In Alex- andria indeed the contest was doubtful, and may perhaps be called a drawn battle. But in the 1 Stanley, History of the Jeivish Church, vol. iii., p. 294. 2 Ibid., vol. iii., p. 207. 70 SECTARIANISM. ancient seat the Hebrew was victorious. Wliat of importance came to Judaism from Greece came as spoils. Even the language was captured for spirit- ual purposes. While the Septuagint translation, made in Alexandria, smoothed down some of the ancient anthropomorphisms, it did not succeed in making over the Hebrew Jehovah into the Greek Zeus. That translation made the Greek tongue the most effective agent for the extension of the Hebrew religion and morals and the universalizing of its spirit. Many Hebrews hellenized; more Greeks hebraized. Yet the rich treasures of Greek thought were not unappreciated by the Hebrew mind. They were worthy of the ancient Hebrew spirit, and in the genial recognition of their value that spirit became more fully aware of its own es- sential universalism. The sectarianisms which arose and the fiercest wars which were fought during this period sprang Sectarian- from the determination of the Hebrew ism. spirit not to yield to the foreign influence. The current fad of unity, regardless of all other interests, has caused us in this day to overlook the fact that the Pharisaic sect grew out of a strong progressive movement stimulated by the ancient spirit of Mosaism against a nominally conservative attitude, which had lost the spirit which alone had given value to the things which it sought to con- serve, while actually yielding itself to new and foreign materialistic forces. The progressive was THE MACCABEAN WAR. 71 loyal to the ancient spirit, and lience sought for it new and adequate forms. The nominal conserva- tive clung to the old forms because, being empty- now of the ancient spirit, he could use them for his new purposes. It is a history often repeated. It is a thoughtless error to condemn indiscriminately the sects of later Judaism. Like most sects they were the products of life forces. Differentiation and integration are life processes, and scarcely any vital spiritual movement has ever been able to produce a new shoot, without differentiating itself, budding, becoming a cutting or sect.^ The Maccabean struggle was an armed resist- ance to the conquest of Palestine by the Syrian type of Greek.2 While the Maccabees The Macca- tliemselves were for many of their best ^^'''" '^^^' characteristics indebted to Greek influence, while the particular form even of their patriotism was not without its Hellenistic coloring,^ yet that for 1 " In this way the national spirit gave expression to the whole of its rich subjectivity in a vigorous, manifold, and sharply de- fined individuality, which, flowing- through numerous schools and hundreds of synagogues, passed into the national life, and ulti- mately collected itself, out of this multitudinous seething diver- sity, into the higher and comprehensive unity." Keim, Jesus of Nazara, vol. i., p. 327. See also the rest of that most sugges- tive paragraph. 2 " The danger lay in the absorption of Judaism, not into the higher spirit of Athens or Alexandria, but into that basest and most corrupt form of heathenism of which the very name ' Syrus ' or 'Syrian' was the byword." Stanley, J/isfory of the Jewish Church, vol. iii., p. 289. 8 Ibid., vol. iii., p. 292. 72 THE MACCABEAN WAB. wliicli tliey fought was the integrity and the con- tinuity of the life which had been created and per- petuated hitherto by the ancient spirit of the race. In every essential particidar Judaism held its own and prepared for its culmination. III. Before proceeding to consider the final mar- shaling of all those spiritual forces which may be grasped together in the one conception of the Hebrew spirit, it will be necessary ture of the to go back and take account of that most remarkable product of the specific energies of Hebraism, its inspired literature. This is better treated separately, because it is so commonly re- garded as the chief production, up to this point, of Hebrew history, and because, in an important sense, that opinion is an eminently just one. If language is a branch of sociology,^ then is litera- ture, which is the highest development of lan- guage, one of the highest products of the social activities. Whatever rises to the level of litera- ture carries along with it into the history of the race the people who could give birth to it. On the other hand, no course of history has been able to endure and to continue to exercise an influence in the affairs of the race, which did not bring into existence a literature. Even a scrap or frag- 1 " As human thought is developed only m and through society, religion (like language and ethics) may be regarded as a branch of sociology." Toy, Judaism and Christianity^ p. 1. 74 GREEK LITERATUBE. ment, if it be genuine literature, has a certain power not only to survive, but to reproduce some- what the historical conditions under which it was itself produced. The adage about making the songs of a people and not caring who makes their laws, is a tribute to the reproductive power of literature. But what if the laws of a people can be put into their songs? Well equipped indeed is the nation whose laws have found literary ex- pression. A course of history which has contrived to secure some kind of literary embodiment for all Greek uter- o^ '^^^ primary elements, is fitted, if ^ it ature. q^^ prcscrvc thcsc documents, to survive even its extermination. Greece did this. The Greek states had long been dead, and the Greek blood and character were utterly weakened; but its long buried classic literature was brought to light, and Greece began again to live. At first this was in lands of alien blood, where through the literature there are perhaps to-day more repre- sentatives of the Hellenic type of character than ever lived at any one time in ancient Greece. At length, too, Greece bids fair, still through the stim- ulus of its classics, to recover something of its old glory on ancient soil and among a people of ancient lineage. Nothing in the world but litera- ture could have done this. One of the efforts of science which has attracted less attention than it deserves is the attempt to LITER ABY PSYCHOLOGY. 75 construct psychology by a study of language.^ Tlie nature of the mind is said to be best Literary known by the philologist. Language P^y^^oiogy. is treated as a species of brain or nerve matter, by the dissection and observation of which the character and growth of mind can be known. Now literature is this nerve matter in its larger ganglia and convolutions. Literature may be treated as the brain structure of history, of hu- manity as an organism distingTiished from men as a multitude. The child which learns another lan- guage and is imbued with another literature from that of his parents, passes over into another histo- rical group, — belongs to another civilization. It is not so unscientific to make ethnological classifi- cations upon the basis of language, for it counts for more than blood. The child that learns no language is hardly human, as in the case of chil- dren who have become the foundlings of wolves. To learn language but no literature is to be barely human, to be a non-historical man. Literatiu'e is specifically higher than language. It stands for a higher type of corporate life. It is the chief agency through which the higher historical forces are transmitted with least refraction or deflection or diminution of energy. It is therefore antecedently probable that along with such a course of history as the Hebrew will 1 Noir^, Der Ursprung der Sprache. Max Miiller, Science of Thought. 76 HISTORY AND LITEBATUBE. be developed a literature with corresponding History and specific Hiarks. Not all historical Hiove- literature. ments havc bccn prolific of enduring literatures. The purely selfish or materialistic civilizations have been barren in this respect. Egypt, with all her philosophy and applied science and elaborate religious system of sordid other- worldliness, has left hardly anything which can be called literature. Poetry was the first literature ; the rhythmic quality, which is essential to any kind of specific energy, is in some way a character of all literature deserving of the name. It is a question whether war may not have been the first stimulus to poetry .1 Mere fighting rises to the plane of war when comradeship, or the tribal or some other form of corporate interest, overpowers selfish interest, when society begins and men are animated by a common spirit. The commercial spirit seldom produces a literature. The commer- cial states of Phoenicia and Carthage, though they gave currency to the world's alphabet, left no literary records. The pathetic thing about Hannibal's splendid career is that it would have been foro'otten but for the literature of a hostile people, whom he failed to conquer for the signifi- 1 Montesquieu declares that " war takes simultaneous rise with society." *' As soon as man enters into a state of society he loses the sense of his weakness ; equality ceases, and then commences the state of war." Sinrit o/Laivs, Book I., cap. iii. Montesquieu imagines that the change was from peace to war. It is more prohahle that it was from a meaner to a nobler form of conflict. LITEBATUBE AND UEBBEW LIFE. 11 cant reason that his own people were so under the sway of mercantilism as to be unable to see be- yond their ledger accounts, and hated men who, like the son of Hamilcar, had any width of hori- zon. The mercantile civilizations have sometimes smoothed the paths of literature ; they have not stimulated its growth. Literature belongs to the large, the free, the humane. The Hebrew history was on the whole the laro-est, freest, purest, lustiest history -. . -. -r . T 1 • 1-1 Literature yet lived. It contained nothing morbid, and Hebrew weak, or hollow. Its faults were those of an excess of vigor. That law which requires the living being, without dissipating its strength or losing its individualism, to adapt itself to the largest and most diversified environment, and to carry on within itself the most varied functions, is remarkably exemplified in the course of this history. The balance between intensity of inter- nal action and extensiveness of relationships is well maintained, or, if lost, is speedily recovered. The power to assimilate the best and to reject the worst in the environment is well exercised. The upward and downward, the forward and back- ward, the inward and outward reaches of these life forces are unexampled. Its moral code, while fitted for universal legislation, is perfectly adapted to time and circumstances.^ Its balance of the 1 " These first men (the patriarchs), without ever having been followers or pupils of any one, and without ever having been 78 THE SPIRIT THE AGENT. individual, the family, the tribal, the national, the cosmopolitan, and the cosmic interests, vindicates itself in the outcome. It would be strange if such a history did not find or make for itself a corre- sponding literature. It did create such a litera- ture; and the same spirit which is found in the history has richly imbued the literature. The more the Hebrew national literature is studied by the best methods, the more clearly is The spirit it perceived that the Hebrew spirit had the agent. almost everything to do with its produc- tion and preservation. That spirit was an essen- tial factor in providing both the material and the stimuli for the exercise of the literary faculty. The words and phraseology of daily life had been coined under its guidance. As a consequence, words of moral import were more numerous and more forceful than in the cognate tongues.^ The ideas of duty were more natural and less fictitious. Expressions for hope or enterprise were more numerous, and had a wider connotation. Empty taught by preceptors what they ought to do or say, but having embraced a line of conduct consistent with nature, from attend- ing to their own natural impulses and from being prompted by an innate virtue, and looking upon nature herself to be, what in fact she is, the most ancient and duly established of laws, did in reality spend their whole lives in making laws." Philo. 1 See a series of articles entitled The Natural Basis of our Spiritual Language, by Dr. Wm. M. Thompson, author of The Land and the Book, in the Biblioiheca Sacra, vols, xxix-xxxiv. See also Murray, Origin and Growth of the Psalms, especially on the Korahite songs, pp. 193 f. THE SPIRIT THE AGENT. 79 terms of magic or metaphysics, on the other hand, were fewer; for witchcraft and the black arts were taboo, and wholesome realism was the rul- ing tendency.^ The word " spirit," for instance, though crude enough in its meaning, erred on the side of realism rather than on that of its mere negation, like the current conception of spirit among us. As it grew richer and more refined, it retained instead of abstracting from the realism of its original sense of "wind" or "breath," until it came to have much the signification we have been seeking to give to it, — "a specific force." ^ Living as these people did a genuine and un- usually well proportioned life, they had a vocabu- lary well balanced between realism and idealism, conservatism and radicalism, the sweetness of altruism and the vigor of egoism. Strength and beauty were in the sanctuary of their language. Writers have dwelt upon the " providential " 1 " A sort of deism without metaphysics was what the fathers of Judaism and Islamism inaugurated at that early period, with a very sure and unerring- instinct." Renan, History of the People of Israel, vol. i., p. 49. 2 Piepenbring-, Theology of the Old Testament, pp. 98, 1.56 f . " It is a plain truth of historical criticism that the conception corre- sponding' to the word iruev/xa in Biblical usage, like that corre- sponding to the word vovs in classic Greek, was developed from the physical and sensuous side. . . . And when the elements of freedom and boundlessness and spirituality came to be added to those of activity and power, the resulting conception of the divine spirit is that of a free and boundless spiritual energy." Ladd, Doctrine of Sacred Scripture, vol. ii., p. 3.57. 80 THE COUNTRY AND THE LITERATUBE. influence upon the Hebrew tongue of tlieir rugged and not over fertile hill country.^ As The country ^ o i • ••in and the ut- we saw beiorc, this was a spiritual rather erature. ^ • i • i »» • n than a " providential influence, since it was the Hebrew spirit which led to the choice of that country. When the Syrians said that the God of the Israelites was " a God of the hills," they had hold of a fact which had not come about by accident. The spiritual instinct had sought those hills. The literature likewise has been pro- foundly affected, in many ways, by the love of Israel for the holy city Jerusalem. " They shall prosper that love thee," they sang with good reason ; for Palestine worshij) and Jerusalem wor- ship had sprung from the promptings of the Hebrew spirit, and had more than once preserved the national existence. This fact was the source of many of the idioms and much of the literature of the Hebrew tongue. Every people has many current aphorisms, which invariably have their part to play in litera- Proverbiai turc, and may be collected into a liter- literature. ^^^^^ ^^ themsclvcs. Undoubtedly a good part of Shakespeare's wisdom is borrowed from or suggested by the proverbs which circulated among the people of his day. These aphorisms have the ring of the average social tone. One can guess at the tone of a community by the character of the sayings which are taken seriously. A spirit 1 See note 1, p. 78. TRADITIONAL LEGENDS. 81 largely prevalent in America is indicated by the currency of such proverbs as " Nothing succeeds like success," or "Money talks." The proverbs current in Israel show the hio^h averasfe of thought o o o and morals of the Hebrew spirit, and not a few of them its secret prophetic messianic instinct. Besides coining words or idioms, and giving currency to aphorisms, the Hebrew spirit seems to have had a dominating influence in Traditional determining the character of the tradi- ^^s®"'^^- tional narratives or heroic tales, which probably went long in oral form before they were reduced to writing. It is difficult or impossible at this distance to decide how far the literary form of these traditions is to be attributed to the people as a whole, and how far to the individual authors or redactors. It will be unnecessary, for our pur- pose, even to guess. But it will be worth while to note how specifically different are the literary results secured in the Hebrew editions of certain traditions as contrasted with those obtained else- where. It is " in the handling of the tradition," as Horton says,^ that the difference appears. This is made striking if they are placed in parallel columns like this : — '' At that time the heaven "In the begmning God above had not announced, or created the heaven and the the earth beneath recorded earth. And the earth was a name; the unopened deep waste and void ; and dark- ^ Eevelation and the Bible, p. 43. 82 TRADITIONAL LEGENDS. was their generator, Mummu Tiamat (the chaos of the sea) was the mother of them all. Their waters were em- bosomed as one, and the cornfield was imharvested, the pasture was ungrown. At that time the gods had not appeared, any of them, by no name were they re- corded, no destiny (had they fixed). Then the (great) gods were created. " Lakhmu and Lakhamu issued forth (the first), until they grew up (when) An-sar and Ki-sar were created. Long were the days, extended (was the time, and) the gods Anu (Bel and Ea were born). An-sar and Ki-sar gave them birth." 1 " Anu illuminated the Moon-god that he might watch over the night, and ordained him for the ending of the night that the day may be known (saying). Month by month, without break, keep watch in thy disk; At ness was upon the face of the deep : and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. " These are the generations of the heaven and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made earth and heaven. " And no plant of the field was yet in the earth, and no herb of the field had yet sprung up : for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground." ^ " And God said. Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night ; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years: and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to 1 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, pp. 384, 385. 2 Gen. i. 1-4, ii. 4-6. TRADITIONAL LEGENDS. 83 the beginning of the month give light upon the earth : kindle the night, announcing and it was so. And God (thy) horns that the heaven made the two great lights ; may know. On the seventh the greater light to rule the day, (filling thy) disk, thou day, and the lesser light to shalt open indeed (its) nar- rule the night : he made the row contraction."! stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth." 2 Without asking when either of these narratives received its present form, or which is the older, or whether either depends upon the other, it is clear that they both deal with the same raw material of leofend. It matters not to us whether one cor- rupted or the other corrected this material, or whether both of these things happened. AVe can- not fail to observe the difference between them, and the distinctively literary as well as Hebrew tone of the Biblical account. No translation seems to be able to put a spark of poetry into the Babylonian version. It is prosy. No exegesis can get any spark of true philosophy out of it. It is mere mythology. On the other hand, no rabbini- cal gloss can quite hide the poetry and philosophy in the Hebrew version.^ 1 Sayce, p. 389. 2 Gen. i. 14-17. 8 Because of this difference the Hebrew story has been able not only to survive, but to hold a place as a force in history which the other never could. Its advocates may throw down the gaunt- let on its behalf as Origen did on behalf of the Scripture com- pared with the Greek poets : " And challenging a comparison of 84 DOCTRINE OF GOD AND OF THE WORLD. It manifests the Hebrew sanity and spirituality of conception. It speaks of but one God, and lie was not begotten by nature, but was in Doctrine of , . . *^ God and of the begiunmo^ and created it. He so the world. . ° created it too that it needed no demi- gods to keep it going. As little did it need his interference. Nature was an automatism. The sun, moon, and stars were not persons but things, and ruled day and night and the seasons like clockwork. The animals and the plants also re- produced automatically after their kind. Man had a universe of law to live in, with only one book with book, say, come now, good sir, and take down the poems of Linus and of Musaeus and of Orpheus and the writings of Phereeydes, and carefully compare these with the laws of Moses, — historians with historians, and ethical , discourses with laws and commandments, — and see which of the two are better fitted to change the character of the hearer on the very spot, and which to harden him in his wickedness ; and observe that your writers display little concern for those readers who are to peruse them at once unaided, but have composed their philosophy for those who are able to comprehend its metaphorical and allegori- cal signification ; whereas Moses, like a distinguished orator who undertakes some figure of rhetoric, and who carefully introduces into every part language of twofold meaning, has done this in his five books ; neither affording in the portion which relates to morals any handle to his Jewish subjects for committing evil ; nor yet giving to the few individuals who were endowed with greater wisdom and who were capable of investigating his mean- ing a treatise devoid of material for specidation." We know in behalf of what erroneous doctrine Origen said these things. Yet the error of Origen grew out of the dim perception of the outlines of a great fact whose very existence most of his con- temporaries failed to discern. DOCTRINE OF GOD AND OF THE WORLD. 85 God to deal with, and that a God who was not forever capriciously intermeddling. "Law is king of all things." This God rules the imper- sonal universe by mechanism, and meets man more directly as God in the plane of personal, that is spiritual, intercourse alone ; man is the only demigod, the only lord of creation, under the one supreme and transcendent God. He is to subdue nature through his likeness to God, in knowing and conforming to her mechanical modes of proce- dure. The search for the agreement between Genesis and physical science has usually gone off on the wrong scent. That agreement is more fun- damental than is often guessed at. Genesis gives a solid basis for physical science by inventing a conception of an automatic material order, a nature governed by law. It invents this, however, not because it cares anything for science as such, but because its spirit instinctively shuns the fan- tastic, the unreal, the morbid. The same spirit which had put the thought of the future life aside, and banished witchcraft and necromancy, cleaned out of the legend of creation the whole brood of mythological abominations which stood in the way of a wholesome relationship between man and the natural order.^ 1 " ' In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth ' was like the cold mistral which cleared the sky, like the sweep of the broom which relegated from beyond our horizon the chi- meras which darkened it. A free will, as implied in the words, 86 DOCTRINE OF EVIL. The apparent exception to this is where the presence of evil is accounted for, in the Jehovistic Doctrine of document, by the retention of the legend ^''^^- of the serpent as a kind of jinn.^ In the same document is also what some think a vestige of a parallel effort to account for the pre- sence of evil by the intermarriage of the daughters of men with demigods. ^ One of the explanations offered is that this document is of great age, and that the Hebrew spirit had not yet gained enough ascendency to be able to refine away all mytho- logy. Yet the survival of the legend is not so discreditable to the spirit of the writer or editor. He was here confronting the one insoluble pro- blem of the ages, the one thing in this world that seems to be absolutely lawless, the presence of sin. Whether he borrowed the idea from the followers of Zoroaster, or discovered it himself, or carried it over from primitive traditions, here was the one sole obstacle to the coordination of the whole known universe under the rule of law. To ignore this enigma would have been unworthy of the * He created,' substituted for ten thousand capricious fancies, is a progress of its kind. The great truth of the unity of the world and of the absolute solidarity of all its parts, which polytheism failed to appreciate, is at least clearly perceived in these narra- tives." Renan, History of the People of Israel, vol. i., p. 67. " The Yahvist, or whatever else you may call this author, spoke and wrote under the instruction of a Holy Spirit of truth, and told the world what the world but for such teaching- mig-ht not recog- nize even now." Horton, Eevelation and the Bible, p. 40. 1 Gen. iii. 2 jii^i yi i_4. DOCTBINE OF EVIL. 87 moral seriousness and depth of the Hebrew spirit. To have solved it as the Persian did by two equal gods would have been to go back upon the splen- did Hebrew optimism. But here it was. Now the mythological creatures stood for lawlessness, caprice. He banished all of them but one. That one he employed as a temporary expedient in order to account for the introduction of lawless- ness into the human heart. Then he immediately degraded it to the position of a mere uncanny brute, reducing superstition concerning it to a minimum, and chanting over that a song of tri- umph.^ The ingenuity with which the subject is dealt with is admirable, and fully congruous with the Hebrew spirit. The realm of lawlessness in nature is reduced to the smallest possible area, with the promise of extinction, while the truth is emphasized that man is the real marplot, and hence that upon him rests the responsibility for undoing the wrong. Thus full force is given to moral obligation by locating evil henceforth in the moral sphere, and laying stress upon moral free- dom. Man is the only lawbreaker who needs to be taken into consideration. Here also is the basis for optimism, since evil is no longer a thing of physical necessity. Man can abolish it.^ 1 Ibid. iii. 15. 2 " The earliest patriarchs of the human race appear as simple men. They are endowed with no divine qualities. Between the God of Israel and the founders of human society, the division, according to the Hebrew narrative, is complete. This, of course, 88 GENEALOGY. It is not a part of our purpose to cover in detail the Hebrew literature, showing how it has been dominated by the Hebrew spirit. It is enough to hint at it. Other hints are found sometimes in the most unlikely places. Genealogies are dry reading, and those in the Book of the Genesis possess no authority to the ethnologist. But they are richly inspired in the sense that they were dictated by the Hebrew spirit, which was not content without affirming the unity of the race.^ It was not the scientific apprehension of the law of parsimony that gave birth to these genealogies, but the dawning of that sense of brotherhood which was to flood the world one day with new light. When we realize the motive for seeking not to omit any peoples from may have been the characteristic of the Hebrew tradition from the first. But it appears more reasonable to ascribe the exceed- ing purity and simplicity of the narrative to the prophetic writer, who, writing in the spirit and power of Jehovah, has moulded the traditions of his race into perfect harmony with the religious truths of which he was the inspired exponent." Ryle, Early Narratives of Genesis, pp. 66, 67. 1 " Wearisome as the list of names will seem, it is the more necessary for us to recognize its place and its true religious signi- ficance in the Hebrew scrijitures. It reminded the Israelites that God made of one blood all the nations of the earth, and that the heathen, who knew not Jehovah, were nevertheless brethren of Israel. It reminded him that his own nation was only one among the nations of the earth, by origin and descent in no way separated from them, but only, by the grace of God, selected and chosen, to be the bearer of His revelation to the world." Ibid., p. 123. PEOrUETIC GUILDS. 89 that table, tlie whole list begins to glow with some- thing like a spiritual warmth. Long catalogues of names, like those in Ezra and Nehemiah, need only to be read sympathetically in order to discern the spirit of nation-making and nation-saving in the minds of those who recorded them. As the blind bard of Greece rolled from his lips the names of the ships that went to the war against Troy, his listeners doubtless felt that without it the great epic would be incomplete as the bible of the Hellenic national life. Thus the members of a body of literature which seem to be more feeble spiritually, are necessary ; and those mem- bers which we think to be less honorable, upon them, after we have used spiritual discernment, we bestow more abimdant honor. The way in which the spirit influenced the writers varied indefinitely, according to the age and class to which they belonged, and prophetic their personal circumstances and idiosyn- ^"'^'^^* crasies. In earlier days, guilds or schools of pro- phets existed, allied to similar circles in heathen- dom. They engaged in divination, and went about in companies, speaking under ecstatic or trance conditions. These experiences were more or less contagious ; so that a person sensitively constituted, like Saul, with a strong nature not well disciplined, tainted with epilepsy or touched with superstition, was easily caught by the enthu- siasm. ^ In spite of the extravagances and the 1 1 Sam. X. 9-13. 90 THEIB CONQUEST BY THE SPIRIT. morbid character of many of tlieir performances, these guilds contained members of delicate and peculiar susceptibility, upon the choicest of whom the normal Hebrew spirit could work with much force ; and, since speaking was part of their trade, it could produce through them literary expressions of itself. The medium naturally speaks the senti- ments and uses the stock notions and phrases of his sect, and more faithfully in his trance than at other times. It is one of the peculiarities of trance speaking never to originate a new idea. But if new ideas from outside his sect begin to stir profoundly any member of it, he is still likely to seek to give expression to these ideas in trance, and to strain the inadequate set phrases, until the new wine bursts the old bottles, and he breaks away altogether from his sect. Then, though he may cease to submit to trance conditions, many of their characteristics still cling to him. It is not difficult to trace in the Hebrew litera- ture the gradual conquest or superseding of the prophetic guilds by the growing power queSbT of this healthful social force. As its the spirit. g^i-^jg^i nature gained more control, the trance gave way to moral exaltation ; and since communistic prophecy put certain hindrances in the way of a progressive spirit, which needed the freedom of individualism for its best expression, the prophets of power threw off allegiance to the schools,! which thus lost footing, declined and i Amos vii. 14. PEN-POINT INSPIBATION. 91 became extinct. They left their traces, however, upon literary style, and it is not always clear how far the writers of certain books employed their methods of expression in free allegory, or how far they were actually under conditions more or less trancelike. It is Clear, however, that but for the conquest of these guilds by the distinc- tively Hebrew spirit, none of the apparently trance prophecies which have come down to us would have been preserved or have deserved pre- servation. " The Jewish prophets," said Origen, *' instead of being made beside themselves, and frenzied and darkened when they prophesied, be- came more mentally lucid, and their souls were filled with a clearer light." It was this spirit which led to the use of writing by the prophets. Their specifically Hebrew faith and patience taught them to lift their voices for future genera- tions, when their own would not hearken. " And the Lord answered me," said Habakkuk,^ "and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it. For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak." In general the Hebrew writers were under no other kind of excitement than that which normally accompanies vigorous composition, and pen-point the spirit of their writings reflected the ^'^'^^'^^^^''^ ordinary spirit of the men themselves. " We see," 1 Hab. ii. 2, 3. 92 EAJRLIEST MANIFESTATION. to quote Orlgen again, " that the noble, earnest, and devout lives of these men were worthy of the inspiration of the Divine Spirit." When they ex- pressed more than had come to clear consciousness in their own minds, they did it as any one may who writes out of a rich and genuine experience. Occasionally there is in them what might be called a pen-point inspiration. A writer, hurried on by an occasion, throws himself into the current of a language whose genius leads in the direction of his own thought, and is carried beyond himself. The mutually supplementary spiritual tensions of the writer, the language and the occasion, issue, under the strain of composition, in a writing possessing in an exceptional degree the spiritual character. Since the genius of the Hebrew dialect had been profoundly affected from the earliest times by the Hebrew spirit, since the crises which produced these writings had also been brought about largely by the same spirit, and since the writers were es- pecially affected thereby, this phenomenon was likely to be of no uncommon occurrence. It is possible, and it would accord with certain tenaciously held opinions on the subject of inspira- tion, that the first distinctively spiritual manifesta- phenomenon may have appeared as the result of some such favorable conjunction of causes as above mentioned. It is possible that to Moses, or whoever it was who first set going in history the specifically Hebrew spirit as a force, LITERATURE IN CIVILIZATION. 93 that spirit may have come in the form of some bit of poetry, inspired folk-lore, surcharged with the spirit, which carried over from prehistoric life the saving force for the modern. The spontaneous generation of specific spirits, without the interposi- tion of spiritual causes, is not likely to happen fre- quently. Nature is sparing of spontaneous pro- duction of special effects where special causes are at all within reach. If the conditions are halfway favorable to the spontaneous production of these effects, they are so wholly favorable to the action of existing causes that the probabilities are over- whelming that these existing causes will find them out and anticipate spontaneity. The first specific ap- pearance of the Hebrew spirit must have occurred at some time, and there is at least some antecedent probability that it appeared in the form of pen- point or tongue-point inspiration. Its beginning is certainly lost in the twilight of the ages. Some of the literary constituents of the book of Genesis are apparently of prehistoric antiquity. Their in- spiration may have been equally ancient, and they may have started the fires that kindled the inspi- rational glow of history. It is according to psychology and actual history that the specific spiritual forces of civilization should operate in the form of literature. Literature in Whether at the very start the history <=i^'"==^ti°"- produced the literature, or the literature the history, would be hard to determine, — whether the mar- 94 LITERATURE A FORCE. tial spirit brouglit forth the war song, or the song lifted mere fighting into war. But in the course of centuries the literature is as much a cause as an effect. The forces of history find their embodi- ments and channels in literature. The writing of history has become a new science by the applica- tion of the literary sense to the pursuit of its data. Even professedly historical writings are treated no longer as history, but as literature out of which true historical data are to be smelted by the fires of literary criticism,^ by which means the results secured are much richer. The reason for this lies in the fact that literature possesses an elective affinity by which it lays hold of what is most char- acteristic of its age. " I would give," says M. Taine, " fifty volumes of charters and a hundred volumes of state papers for the Memoirs of Cellini, the Epistles of St. Paul, the Table Talk of Lu- ther, or the Comedies of Aristophanes." The im- portance of literature, he says further, is that, if it preserves documents, it preserves them not indis- criminately, but as monuments ; in other words, their value is not in what they say, but in that which lies behind what they say. But the value of literature in the rewriting of history is of minor account compared with its value Literature ^^ ^ rc-crcator of history. " The most a force. potcut and lasting influence in the civili- zation of generations is literature." History has 1 Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma. LITERATURE A FORCE. 95 been more tlian rewritten within the century. In many parts of the world it has been reenactecl. The lost threads of national and race continuities have been picked up, and seemingly dead nations have been resurrected, either by the renewal of the study of their ancient literatures or by the creation of new ones ; or more often the study of early literatures has imparted a new literary impulse, and through it has revived the national spirit. There is no more striking phenomenon in our day than the awakening or reawakening of national or race consciousnesses. They represent powers that are almost irresistible. No one cause has contrib- uted more to produce these awakenings than litera- ture. They are the later and more soundly ripened fruit of the revival of learning, as the French Revolution, with its travesty on brotherhood, was the premature and imperfect fruit. What Comte called " the spiritual reorganiza- tion of modern society " is largely traceable to the influence of literature. It is the mirror in which nations most commonly learn and the first to recognize their own features. It tionof is the memory in which this knowledge ^°^^^ ^* is sometimes covered out of sight for centuries, waiting a favorable opportunity to come back again to consciousness and activity. No other store- house can preserve spiritual forces fresh while un- used. Institutions change or let down their tone with that of the series of generations which must 96 LITERARY FACTOR ANCIENT. maintain and perpetuate them. Customs become shams, and can be reformed only by destroying tliem. Creeds become shackles. Codes and con- stitutions clog the wheels of progress when condi- tions change, and often have to be gotten rid of by revolution. Blood does not insure the transmis- sion of civilization. But literature possesses peculiar qualities of living persistency and power. It is the better and more incorruptible after it has become stereotyped. If it be true literature, it is then crowned as classic. It cannot be dragged down by the degradation of a people, but remains to reproach and call them to repentance. It neither rusts from neglect, nor wears out in use. It may be long buried in forgotten alcoves, or dead tongues, or deader traditional glosses, and yet it will come out as good as new. For this reason it is difficidt to exaggerate the power of literature as a working factor in the making of history ; in originating, conserving, and renewing institutions and customs ; in giving cumulative force to progressive tendencies toward righteousness, truth, or beauty ; in moulding and regenerating individual character ; in perpet- uating undiminished the power of individual in- fluence ; in performing the office of an almost plenipotentiary agent for spiritual forces. It is probable that during the whole course of Literary fac- Hebrcw history there were literary ele- tor ancient, j^gni^g operating as causes, helping to con- serve the best fruits of the spirit or to perpetuate LITER ABY FACTOR ANCIENT. 97 them in kind. The habit of quoting, which appears early, gives intimation of this. The fragment con- cerning the " mountain of the Lord's house," pre- served by Isaiah and Micah,i is an illustration. So is the fact that at least two independent ver- sions of the story of the creation and the flood were extant, both with the spirit's stamp upon them. The Decalogue, though probably originally a docu- ment, was preserved, not as a mere document, but in a literary setting, and thus with the peculiar energy of position which belongs to literature. These are hints that literary coadjutors were not wanting to the other agencies of the Hebrew spirit during any considerable part of the long course of history before the reorganization under Ezra. As a genius, seizing the opportunity which the Hebrew spirit and the occasion presented, Ezra holds a first rank, even though he may have done but a small part of that which tradition assigns to him. Such a crisis was upon the Hebrew people that there was no safe refuge for the national life and hope, for the spirit, except in a classic literature. This refuge Ezra and his com- panions and successors set to work to prepare. The gTcatest event since the Exodus was the be- ginning of a collection of sacred writings, and of the formation of the first framework of a canon. It was the one most essential thing. Had every- thing else been done and this omitted, failure 1 Isa. u. 2 f . ; Mic. iv. 1 f . 98 THE SPIBIT AND THE CANON. would have been certain. Had this been done and everything else omitted, success might still have been possible. In the final shape which this body of literature took, and the choice of what should and should not enter the canon, we are able to dis- The spirit i tt t and the ccm the Hebrcw spu^it exercising its cauou. . • T 1 most specinc energies, in the attempt to make a single narrative out of the several crea- tion documents, its presence is unmistakable. It writes with a purpose, an educational aim. As Macaulay's " History of England " was a political campaign document, and has had a good deal to do not only with bringing England up to Macau- lay's idea of what it should be, but with carrying it farther than he would have wished, so the Hebrew writings were collected and edited, and parts of them written or rewritten, as campaign literature for use in the final and successful strug- gle for the ascendency of the Hebrew spirit in the world's affairs. Ezra's school of scribes was the first campaign literary bureau, and their suc- cessors were true to their methods. This liter- ature was designed by its publishers not only to foretell the messianic era, but to bring it in. Its conservatism always had an eye out for the future. What it was conserving, though the individual writer did not always know it, was the progressive tendency. It represents Abraham as looking for- ward not only to its day, but to a day beyond it. CANONICITY OF ESTHEE. 99 It was tlie Hebrew spirit which wove the net of circumstances and sentiments and motives of various kinds, whose meshes caught and held the books which were fitted to become integral parts of a literature with the Hebrew aim, and let the rest fall through. The men who were consciously engaged in fixing the canon, if any such men ever existed,^ were but the secretaries of the spiritual powers of their age ; and while they obeyed, they did not understand the larger influ- ences which swayed them. They chose the books which spiritual causes, operating directly or in- directly, had already fixed upon ; and they gave such reasons for their choice as they were able to devise. As a consequence, there is no book in the canon which cannot be shown to have some place in a vital literary organism, whose life is the Hebrew spirit itself. The canonicity of the book of Esther is a case in point. It is an anonymous book of unknown date, of no historical authority, with a canonicity low tone of morality and no religion ; °^ Esther. and for this reason its canonicity has been in dis- pute. Yet it has not been dislodged, for the reason that it has a real and close relationship to ^ That such a body as the Great Synagogue of tradition ever existed is of course no longer believed. Yet the error in the tradition was due chiefly to a lack of imagination and perspec- tive. A spiritual selective power did begin to act with Ezra, and continue to exercise for centuries functions analogous to those attributed to the Great Synagogue 100 CANONICITY OF ESTHER. the work which that literature had to do at that time. Whether it is based upon a real event or is a pm^e romance, it is the literary embodiment of that peculiar form of national self-assertion which was characteristic of the Jews, and which rose to the emergency when it met the rich and brilliant and aggressive Persian civilization, and, gathering about it the mantle of national pride and self-sufficiency, came out of its tribulations with a more perfectly developed and indestructible national selfhood than it possessed when it went in. The national spirit of the Jew was not with- out serious blemish, as the story of Esther betrays. But that he continued a nation at all, and was able to thrive on adversity and to grow stronger in the presence of his conquerors, is due to the fact that the old Hebrew spirit had something to do with it. Take away from Jewish history what it owes to its triumphant encounter with Persia, and you have so far impaired it that it is a ques- tion whether it can live on to its culmination. And take away from Jewish literature the book of Esther, and with it the institution called the feast of Purim, for which it undertakes to account, and it is doubtful whether the memory of that contest with Persia would have been invigorating rather than debilitating. The Jewish attitude toward Persia and what Persia represented was an imperfect one, as the Jewish divorce laws were imperfect; but that both were not worse, and JOB. 101 that they opened the way to something better, was owing to the corrective power of the Hebrew spirit; and the same spirit kept Esther in the canon during the time when the Hebrew literature was doing its most distinctive work.^ As one of the partial and narrower forms of the Hebrew spirit is seen in the imperfect book of Esther, another widely different form is seen in the very different yet still imperfect book of Job. If the author of Job was a Hebrew, he concealed the outward marks of it with great success. The scenes and the characters are not Hebrew; the name for the Supreme Being is not the Hebrew national name, and references to Hebrew history are so wholly excluded that it was once supposed to have been written before that history began. As Esther belongs to the canon because of its specific con- crete and narrow Jewish history, Job is there for the opposite reason of its broad and universalistic ideas. But that also belonged of right to the Hebrew and Jewish spirit. The Jew was both intensely national and broadly cosmopolitan. He must work out his destiny through a narrow intensity, to the service of which even the cruel and vindictive temper of Esther was not wholly amiss. He must also be overshadowed and over- ruled by a large and strong or sweet and generous ^ Driver, Introduction to Literature of Old Testament, pp. 449- 457. 102 THE CANTICLES. universalism such as breathes in Job or Jonah. The genuine Hebrew spirit was not an exclusively religious or philosophical spirit. It was a spirit of life, to which nothing real, nothing ideal, nothing human or natural is foreign, or is to be called common or unclean ; and so while it chose Job for its idealism, it chose Esther and Ruth for their realism. Thus the national spirit held on to Esther, and the cosmopolitan to Job. The domestic spirit was The canti- ^^^^ Hcbrcw, and was elevating and en- ^^^^- nobling and sanctifying those tender and fundamental relationships which lie at the basis of the family ; lifting them out of the hardness and lust of the old civilizations, guarding them from hollowness on the one hand, and licentiousness on the other, and false asceticism on still another, and bringing into actual existence the ideal Jewish family. This spirit overruled all mistaken objec- tions, and preserved the tender and wholly non- religious idyl known as the " Song of Songs." ^ Such illustrations of the operation of the spirit Spiritual ^^ fixing what literature shall be ranked judgment, ^g g^cred are drawn from the doubtful cases, because in these cases the spirit, acting as 1 " A people who loved such songs celebrating an invincible love, — passionate, indeed, to the last degree, but perfectly innocent, — such a people cannot have been a prey to moral corruption." " However much there was to blame in the people, it was sound at heart, nor coidd any trace be found of fatal inward corrup- tion." Bible for Learners, vol. ii., p. 23G. THE LOGOS. 103 it were with an effort, can be more readily observed. The books that are unquestionably in the canon are unquestionably saturated by the Hebrew spirit, while those that are clearly outside of it are visibly wanting in the spirit. Of the so-called " wisdom literature," some found place in the canon and some did not, and a merely cursory examination makes it evident that what did so find place was that in which the alien elements were most thor- oughly dominated by the Hebrew spirit. The late apocalyptic writings were for the most part unwor- thy of that spirit, and were rejected. Some, like the book of Daniel, rose above the rest in this respect, and were admitted. In making up this canon, there was a continuous spiritual transaction somewhat like a literary day of judgment. Many books stood outside and said, " Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name, and in thy name related many marvelous things ? " And the Hebrew spirit answered and said, "Depart from me, I never knew you. Ye are alien to my spirit," while it admitted into the sacred number several wonder- fully human ones which are quite non-religious and do not contain the name of God. A more important observation concerning the sacred writings of the Hebrew spirit is that on the whole not only do they show the effects of the action of that spirit, but they have had imparted to them a spiritual energy, so that they constitute a body of highly dynamical 104 THE FINAL MUSTER. literature.^ The spirit which produced and selected them — acting as a religious, a national, an ethi- cal, a philosophical, a heroic, a social, a family, and finally as a literary and critical spirit — not only produced and selected them, but entered into and possessed and acted through them, making them its most effective agents for the mastery of the future. The Scripture, therefore, embodied the Hebrew mind, was the Hebrew nerve structure, its word, or Logos.^ The Hebrew spirit and the He- brew Scripture henceforth wrought together, " the Spirit and the Word," as the chief creative factors in the later Jewish history. We may now observe how the Hebrew spirit marshaled all its forces for its final effort. This The final great muster could not have been ob- muster. scrvcd in its true proportions had we not spent enough time in considering the origin and character of the Hebrew Scriptures to make clear how great a share of these forces were supplied with literary equipment. The institution or resto- ration of the religious festivities at the capital, 1 2 Tim. iii. 15. 2 " There is one word which I should like to see reintroduced into our philosophical phraseology, and that is 'Logos.' It meant originally gathering and combining, and so became the proper name for all that we call reason. But it has the immense advan- tage of also meaning language, and thus telling us that the pro- cess of gathering which begins with sensation, and passes on to perception and conception, reaches its full perfection only when it has become incarnate in the Logos, or Word." Max Miiller, Science of Thought, vol. i., p. 74. THE FINAL MUSTER. 105 which, as before seen, was the work of the spirit, served to maintain the corporate unity of a nation scattered to the four corners of the earth. The development of the synagogue and the revival of the Sabbath gave the opportunity to make the sa- cred literature the possession of the whole people. This literature came to be read and discussed in every considerable city of the world every week.^ It is impossible to overestimate the importance of these institutions in their influence upon the Jew- ish people, and hence upon the world. There was a sure instinct, born of the Hebrew spirit, in the fanaticism with which the Sabbath was maintained ; for without that the Jews would certainly have been reduced to the slave level of an Asiatic sub- ject race. It was because of their Sabbatarianism that the thousands whom Pompey sold into slavery proved unprofitable and were permitted to pur- chase freedom. What the lash of the overseer could not do, neither could the knout of the tax- gatherer ; the Jew would keep his Sabbath. When the economic strain became unbearable, and the nominally free peasant was actually a slave, let out by the year to the publican who bid highest, the Jew alone kept his manhood, because he kept a seventh of his time sacred to his higher life, and spent it in the worship of the God most nobly con- ceived of any divinity ever worshiped by man, and in the study of that marvelous national literature. 1 Acts XV. 21. 106 THE GBEAT CRISIS. So it could come to pass that a nation without a political life, to a great extent even without the occupancy of a soil, kept its unity and vigor, and for several generations had been the only nation in the world wherein all classes were educated, and educated too in a manner most effective and unique, in anticipation of and in preparation for a final fulfillment of the aim of the national spirit. In the mean time the world was approaching a crisis. Organic processes had so far fulfilled them- The great sclvcs in the ccutrcs of history which were crisis. grouped about the Mediterranean as to produce a general feeling that a cycle was drawing to a close, and that the conditions were such that a slisfht cause mio^ht determine the character of the future; that the future might, or even probably would, hinge upon one man. The immediate occa- sion, perhaps, of this crisis was the fact that war could continue no longer to play the part in his- tory which it had played hitherto. War had been the normal social state, and peace but a secondary one, a preparation for war. Civilization had been of the militant type. Idealists had dreamed of something better, but they had been put down as dreamers. The kingdoms of this world had been definable as those whose " servants fight." ^ One of these having made universal conquest, the only possible wars grew out of civil dissensions or barba- rian inroads, neither of which could be good schools 1 John xviii. 36. ISRAEL THE RESCUE. 107 of even military virtues. The genius for conquest did not involve genius for permanent, peaceful administration. The Caesar as a prince of peace was an ignominious failure. The Roman was not weeping because there were no more worlds to conquer; he was rotting. All men felt that his decline had begun, and that his fall was certain. And that fall would drown Western civilization in a deluge of barbarism, which would become in- fected with its vices, but would not be endowed with its virtues. What history now plainly reveals haunted the foreboding heart of that age, or pro- voked the visions of seers, — that a supreme crisis was impending. Where now could a power be found to take the helm and guide history in safety through this crisis? Far to the east slumbers the israeithe land of Confucius. But Confucianism ^«^<^"«- is a flowerless plant, and is running itself out. From it no fertile seed will be wafted to the West. The lethal gospel of the Buddha awakens no *^esponse in the ozone-breathing Occident. Greece had given birth, sporadically, to Socrates; but his name is barren, being alone. Greece had not herself had the moral vigor to preserve her own life. Home's hope, when realized, proved to be insufficient. Every jDromise had withered or aborted, — except one thing. The Hebrew spirit, sensitive as it always had been not only to inter- nal but to external impulses, had been making 108 PREPARATION. preparations for jiist this crisis.^ A political non- entity, Israel is, because of this spirit and what it has done for her, a power of the first class. She alone has carried over the truest ideals of prehistoric times. She borrowed all that was worth keeping of Egyptian civilization. She drained Babylon and Persia of their best. She alone knows how to . get the meat without the poison out of Greek culture. She, if any one, is fitted to solve the problem of the world's fu- ture. Now Israel had never yet failed to meet in some way of her own the requirements of a supreme hour ; and a history of the ex- igencies through which she had come would show that it was the Hebrew spirit which, in manifold ways, had brought about the inven- tions or adjustments necessary to meet them. What seemingly arbitrary interventions occurred would be discovered to be such accidents and coincidents as are common to all nations. The specifically Hebrew mark is readiness to take ad- vantage of these accidents, so that to those to whom spiritual causes are invisible they appear like interventions. Investigation would show that 1 " Hopes which formerly were confined to the soil of Judea . . . this time set the world in motion. For these hopes now coincided with a widely spread and energetic feeling, one that at that epoch thoroughly penetrated all nations alike, — the feeling that the present state of the world was absolutely untenable." Hausrath, New Testament Times, vol. ii., p. 94. MESSIANIC EXPECTATION. 109 the same causes which have been preparing this workl-wide crisis have been stimulating the He- brew spirit to the preparation for meeting it. For the spirit, with its cosmopolitanism, has kept the nation in organic relations with the historical movements of the times. If it appeared to even a non-Hebrew observer like Virgil ^ that the crisis was such as to demand a supreme hero, still more likely would it be that the Hebrew spirit, which had always carried its point in the face of emer- gencies by concentrating itself in some individual, would now be getting ready to meet this supreme crisis by that supreme expedient. Accordingly, we discover that that widely dif- fused expectation of a hero was not a circum- stance compared with the intense expec- Messianic tation which was beginning to bring the ^^pectation. Jewish mind into a state of alertness. It is not necessary to suppose that the outside hope was borrowed from Judaism. The better explanation is that the Jewish hope was founded upon an especially acute perception of the necessity of the case, which had come to the Hebrew mind centu- ries before, and had now, therefore, the cumulative force of both tradition and perception. What had long been known to the Jew was now becom- ing apparent to the rest of the world. It was because the Hebrew spirit was more than Hebrew, because it was a universal spirit, that it discovered ^ Eclog. iv. 110 THE FULLNESS OF TIME. in advance the thing which would one day be uni- versally seen, namely, the need of a Messiah.^ What is of more importance than the expecta- tion of the Messiah in the Jewish nation at this The fullness ^^^^^ IS the rcadiucss of that nation to of time. produce the Messiah. For while as an individual that personage must possess a certain element of originality and unaccountability, yet as fulfilling the demands of the age, and bringing to its culmination the long course of Hebrew history, he must, in another large sense, be born out of the fullness of that history. The expecta- tion of the Messiah was not only the manifestation of a sense of need, the advertisement of a want ; it was the expression of a semi-conscious fitness to produce him, a sensation of fullness, of preg- nancy.2 The previous history of Israel would bid 1 The law of parsimony would indeed suggest the likelihood that if that expectation is found elsewhere it is to be accounted for by the transmission from the Hebrew rather than by inde- pendent discovery. But other considerations would point the other way, and if we attempted to base the speculations of Virgil upon Isaiah, we could not but inquire also concerning Plato's indebtedness, which would lead us farther afield than our topic permits at this point. 2 " A peculiar atmosphere had gathered. . . . There was a con- fidence in this expectation which was very near akin to an at- tempt to accomplish it." " Moreover, a history of a thousand years had educated the people for this faith. It was the result of the whole previous development, and now there remained but this choice, either to give up the convictions of their fathers, or else courageously to hope that now, even at the eleventh hour, the promises would be fulfilled which had been held out to the THE FULLNESS OF TIME. Ill US look beyond the barrenness and sterility of official Judaism, to find the readiness for the coming event in some small nucleus. The pro- phets had long learned this secret, and in the midst of general and official apostasy had clung to their faith in the existence of a " remnant," though invisible. When Elijah was tempted to think he was alone in holding to the tradition and the hope, he was rebuked by the spirit, which affirmed that thousands were still loyal.^ Isaiah cherished the thought of a vital remnant.^ Many a time in the past would the historian of externals have declared that the Hebrew spirit had let go its hold upon the nation. If Josephus were to be trusted, the Israel of his day had lost its messianic potentiality, giving way to dilettante indifferent- ism on one hand, and ignorant fanaticism on the other. But he has read the prophets to no pur- pose who is misled by Josephus' picture of the barrenness of his age. He told what he knew, perhaps ; but he was as blind to the life and ex- pectation hidden under the surface as he was to the spiritual force embodied in the despised sect which has since created Christendom. people since the time of Joel." "The mould had long before been formed in which he, the greatest of his people, had to be cast ; and that one did come who gave contents to this form is a sacred sign that that which the people had been so long bear- ing in their hearts, as their beloved and best, was never merely a phantom of the imagination." Hausrath, New Testament Times, vol. i., pp. 201, 203, 204. 1 1 Kings xix. 18. 2 isa. i. 9. 112 THE BEMNANT. Were tliere no direct proof of it, the existence of a remnant endowed with the potency of the The Rem- Hcbrcw Spirit might be fairly suspected nant. from the circumstances of the case. It would be hard to believe that every man, woman, and child of a whole nation could have been, for some generations, familiar with the Pentateuch, the Prophets, and the best of the Psalms, and be as dead all through as Jewish life was on the surface. Given the Scriptures, the synagogue, and the Sabbath, and one may almost affirm such a remnant, saying, with the prophet, that such divine word could not return void, but must prosper in the thing whereunto it was sent. The existence and character of such a remnant, moreover, is to be known by what came out of it. Jesus has not the stamp of an article of magic manufacture. He is original; but he is also equally a growth and an outgrowth. Like most great men, he was markedly a mother's son. A mother means a home ; and since homes, like flow- ers, flourish only by cross-fertilization, one home means others of much the same species ; and this means a set of common motives and ideas, a social, moral, and religious environment. Jesus and his work undeniably came out of a more or less suit- able and specific environment. This specific envi- ronment may be called the " messianic remnant." Concerning this remnant, however, not only is there indirect evidence, but abundant and irref uta- PROOF OF IT. 113 ble direct proof lias been preserved by one of the biographers of Jesus. ^ The first two chaj^ters of Luke's Gospel have imbedded in their narratives — of whose historicity it is not necessary here to inquire — certain songs which bear internal evidence of having belonged to a pre- Christian circle which preserved the Hebrew spirit in its best form, and looked with an intense and significant longing for the coming of the promised one. Luke's narrative is undoubtedly founded upon some Hebraic or Aramaic source, and has a verisimilitude in its fitness to the poems which could not have been invented by Christian minds. These songs manifestly took their final shape be- fore the time of the personal activity of John and Jesus. They constitute a small but sufficient col- lection of the folk-lore of the remnant which gave birth to those two men. They afford data for de- termining with much exactitude the precise con- ditions which held in that inner circle where the necrosis of legalism and rabbinism had not pene- trated, and where the Hebrew spirit as embodied in the sacred writings was having its free course. These songs, which constitute material for a knowledge of the immediate environment out of 1 " More especially in the introduction to the Gospel of Luke, the fig'ures of whicli are genuine representations of those to whom at this time . . . the promise of the Messiah had been made by the Holy Ghost, . . . does a breath reach us of that spirit which inspired every Jewish household." Hausrath, New Testament Times, vol. i., p. 201. 114 FOLK-LOBE OF THE ''REMNANT:'' which John and Jesus came, are the "Magnifi- cat," 1 the " Benedictus," 2 the " Gloria the "Rem- in Excclsis," ^ and the "Nunc Dimit- tis."* These are clearly pre-Christian, yet not very ancient. They belong to somewhere about the time to which the evangelist assigns them. Both in wording and in conception they are re- markably Scriptural. They are broad, covering practically the whole of Scripture, while they are richest in the prophetic parts which were largely ignored by the scribes, and denied altogether by the Sadducees. Of the later rabbinism they show no trace. Both in tone and idea they fairly repre- sent the spirit of Hebrew history and literature. They seem to be part of a psalmody, and have been so used by the Christian church. Yet they were not sung in the synagogues. Their existence would appear to show that among the scattered rejjresentatives of those who cherished the messi- anic hope in its purity there was some kind of freemasonry, and that perhaps they met in private conventicles to cherish their more spiritual faith, away from the chill of officialism which had settled over even the synagogues in all considerable places. Hints of such meetings are found as early as Malachi,^ and probably these private groups rather than the more formal synagogue may have given the model for the early Christian gathering. 1 Luke i. 46-55. 2 jj/^. j. 68-79. » Ihid. ii. 14. * Ibid. ii. 29-32. 5 Mai. iii. 16. CATHOLICITY OF THE '' BEMNANT:' 115 The purely spiritual tone of this remnant would save it from becoming sectarian. Its members would keep up the external " means of grace," and estimate them for what they were worth, and they were worth much. Some frequented the temple,^ some the synagogue. Some continued to exercise the priestly functions.^ Some, like John, held relations, or halfway relations, with the Essene circle. The spirit of this circle did not necessarily lead to any break with the manifold external ex- pressions of Jewish life. It was not hostile to them, only more vital. These four songs alone, not to speak of the probability that they are only specimens, were enough, serving as cradle songs or hymns for social neighborhood meetings, to have created a set of conditions eminently fitted to give birth to such men as the Baptist and Jesus. And nothing is more clear than that they were caused by the specific and timely action of the Hebrew sj)irit. This remnant doubtless embraced the choicest souls of the nation,^ who were, as the tenderly beautifid expression is, " waiting for the catholicity consolation of Israel." ^ They were of ur^^. every class, from shepherds and journej^- "^"'•" man mechanics to men and women of culture and 1 Luke ii. 25-27, 36, 37. 2 Ibid. i. 5. 3 jiid, ii. 25. ^ " There is reason to believe that beside the Saddueean aristo- crats and the Pharisaic scribes and the extensive classes of people whom they spiritually influenced, and besides the worid-renoun- cing Essenes, there was at that time another circle among- the Jew- 116 CATHOLICITY OF THE '' REMNANT:' breadth of vision, like Simeon and Anna ; and tliere is truth-likeness in the story of the first Gospel that the interest of foreign sages was enlisted in this expected advent.^ What sage of that day who knew Isaiah and the Psalms could help dream» ing at least of a Messiah out of Israel ? The same spirit which had produced and preserved this expectation in Israel, and had drawn thousands of proselytes to external Judaism, would tend to gather into the fold of the secret remnant choice souls from without, spiritual descendants of those waiters for salvation who from prehistoric times had kept open lines of communication with the messianic nation. Thus while the circumstances of the time had driven the Hebrew spirit from publicity to privacy, it had there organized the nation's life energies, which, under the supremest tension, were travailing to bring forth nothing less than the final fruit of the spirit in a messianic per- sonage. So the Hebrew spirit, the specific energy of Hebrew history, was preparing to enter a career as a world force. isli people whose hearts were the abode of pious gratitude and trust, and of sincere obedience to the duties of faithfulness and love, nourished by a simple and upright searching of the Scrip- tures. Joseph and Mary were doubtless among this number." Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, vol. i., p. 93. 1 Matt. ii. 1-10. IV. Upon each member of the " messianic rem- nant," that inner circle where were being con- veraed the life forces of the Hebrew . . . The spirit race, the Hebrew spirit was able to and Hebrew . . womanhood. bring its power to bear, m conspiracy with personal or other idiosyncrasies. Particu- larly were the circumstances such as to bring the specific energy of this spirit to operate with pecul- iar force upon the spirit of Jewish womanhood. For centuries, in Israel, all the life energies of the sex most sensitive to ideal and emotional influence had been concentrating themselves, under the dominance of the Hebrew spirit, upon one ambition, — to be the mother or ancestress of the Messiah. Every other feminine instinct had been so directed as to minister to this craving. The joys of wedded love were forgotten or swal- lowed up in the hopes and possibilities of mother- hood, because of what motherhood might mean in the fulfillment of the prophecy. The roman- cer's picture of the development of the maternal instinct in a mythical century yet to come ^ is trivial compared with the actual facts of Jewish 1 Bellamy, Looking Backward. 118 THE MOTHER OF JESUS. ■womanboocl in tlie circles where the Hebrew spirit was having its perfect work in the development of the messianic hope. If ever a class of persons lived among whom general causes might ally themselves with individual peculiarities to produce effects out of the range of ordinary probability^ these Jewish women were such a class. The stimulus of the Hebrew spirit had made the history prolific in strong individualities ; so The mother ^^^^ t^® range of variation was great of Jesus. among the members of the nation at large, and would naturally be greater among the members of the messianic remnant. This rem- nant gave birth to the most extraordinary man the world has known. Since it is almost a law that the mothers of remarkable men should be remark- able, the presumption is that the mother of Jesus was a woman of no ordinary endowments. Now if it be true, as it admittedly is, that the thing her son has done for the world is to bring to its culmination the work of the Hebrew sj^irit, and, by identifying it with his own, to send it forth as a world force, a presumption arises that that which was extraordinary about this woman had something to do with a peculiar responsiveness, in her woman's way, — m her woman^8 way^ — to the specific activities of that spirit. The Hebrew spirit was that of the Hebrew religion as well as of the Hebrew nation and history and literature. It was therefore the spirit of the Hebrew God, STOIiY OF HIS BIRTH. 119 of Jehovah. To the woman's nature, always reli- giously inclined, that spirit would stand less for the specific energy of the national life than for that of the national God : it would be the spirit of Jehovah, the divine or holy spirit. The pre- sumption, therefore, is strong not only that the Hebrew spirit, but that that spirit in its religious form, as the spirit of the Hebrew God, played some important part in the ante-natal history of Jesus. In whatever manner the narratives of the first and second evangelists may have originated, they form altogether an absolutely consistent story of his story of perfect beauty and delicacy, in ^^'^^^• which no flaw can be found, — except the incred- ibility of the main allegation. Nothing is want- ing, nothing is redundant, nothing is out of place. Even the silence of Jesus concerning it adds to its consistency. The neglect of the synoptists to adjust other parts of their material to it is in its favor. The failure of the theologians, Paul and John, to make use of it after the manner of modern theologians allays suspicion of dogmatic interest. Psychological criticism explains away certain parts of it, but in so doing it brings out most strikingly the psychological truth-likeness of the whole. It would be easy to account for, as it would be easy to disprove, a vulgar myth. But if this is a myth it is no vulgar one ; and the diffi- culty of accounting for the unapproachable purity 120 STOBY OF HIS BIRTH. and delicacy, and, in every respect but one, the truth-likeness of it, on any other hypothesis than its substantial truthfulness causes denial to hesi- tate even in the face of incredibility. Belief is probably too much to ask of the mind which is under the sway of the modern spirit, at least until it be shown that the verdict of physical science is permissive of such belief ; concerning which it is not our pui'pose here to inquire.^ In view, how- ever, of the strange conflux of causes, never con- fluent before nor since, and the marvelous outflow of effects, some may be able without loss of men- tal integrity to maintain for the present a susj^ense of judgment. It is enough in this connection to have drawn attention to the fact that the Hebrew spirit in its most specific form, as the spirit of the Hebrew Jehovah, was certainly somehow a posi- tive element in the proximate pre-natal history of Jesus ; as it must have presided also, with its purity and delicacy, and, on the whole, sanity, in the literary creation of the stories which have been preserved concerning that birth.^ The environment out of which Jesus was born 1 It is sufficient to remark here that facts are beginning to be disclosed by biological science which tend to lessen the inherent incredibility of such an occurrence in such wholly exceptional circumstances. The part which the environment, acting as a whole through the agency of its forces, and particularly of its psychic forces, may play in biology, is something which will rejiay further study. ^ Weiss, Life of Christ, Book II., cap. ii. ; Keim, Jesus of Nazara, vol. ii., pp. 39 ff. SUEEOUNDINGS OF HIS CUILDIIOOD. 121 was also tliat into which he was born, and hence he is to be thought of as growing up in ° T • 1 1 Surround- the midst of home and social surround- ings of his childhood. ings in which the spiritual tension was high. The same poetical fragments which give us a glimpse of the messianic remnant before his birth show us upon what his young life fed. Picture a household in which the mysteries of life are made plain, and its commonplaces transfigured in the light which is shed from those four poems in Luke's Gospel. Given the home of a Jewish carpenter, poor but not pinched, in sunny, flowery, free Galilee, with its synagogues, its Sabbath, its Scripture, its annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem, its saturation to the point of precipitation with the ideas and sentiments which these institutions have been fostering for centuries. Give this family as its prime consciousness, no matter how come by, a conviction, perhaps not rare among pious house- holds in that day, that it had in its bosom him who was to fulfill the expectation of Israel ; and let this conviction find its specific modes of con- ception in the shape of this maternal song now ascribed to Mary, this paternal song ascribed to Zacharias, this heart-song of the shepherds as- cribed to the angels, and the sage words ascribed to the aged Simeon. Let the daily life be lived, the weekly Sabbath spent, the Scriptures repeated, the visits to Jerusalem made, and all these things find their interpretation, at least to the heart of 122 THE HOME AND THE NATION. yearning and brooding motlierhood, in the terms of sucli poems as these, and what an atmosphere must have been generated in that home ! The very presence of the Hebrew spirit, in its most religious and sacredest manifestation, as " the spirit of the holy gods," ^ of the Holy One of Israel, the Holy Spirit, must have reigned in that home, nurturing the messianic character, and pre- paring a basis for the messianic consciousness of Jesus of Nazareth. From this point it becomes difficult to avoid fol- lowing the history of Jesus himseK rather than that of the spirit. The Hebrew spirit The home .^. , (, ., , pi* and the now identifies itseli with that or his per- sonality, and when it has again become distinct it has that indelible stamp upon it. It is still possible, however, to trace the distinction at points during his life. It is noteworthy that the only one of the many legends of the childhood of Jesus which could hold its place in the canonical Scriptures is the only one that is wholly free from the marvelous, as though the fine instinct of early Christianity found itself unable to tolerate any- thing like monstrosity in a child.^ It is said that at the age of twelve the boy went with his parents to Jerusalem to the feast. It was one of the many wise Jewish customs, dictated by the Hebrew spirit, that at that climacteric period when nature demands a widening of the boy's horizon, when he 1 Dan. iv. 8, 9, 18 ; v. 11. ^ L^ke ii. 40-52. THE NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 123 begins to chafe under narrow restraints, he was treated to a first visit to the national capital, to a great national feast ; and then, if he had anything in him, he would at once awaken to a larger thought, and enter the current of the larger na- tional life. No longer satisfied with the bounda- ries of home or village, the broader horizon he was longing for he found in a conception of the nation. The national life was at this time repre- sented by conflicting elements and party ideas. In many respects, however, these were a sign of wealth rather than of poverty of spiritual and social materials.^ The boy who could not embrace all could serve his generation passably as a party man. The boy who could get above party could form a germ of a comprehensive conception. The necessity for and the difficulty in forming a com- prehensive conception of the national idea had both become very great, and the man who thought he had grasped it was tempted to believe himself the Messiah. Like other thoughtful boys, Jesus at this time found the germ of a national idea forming itseK in him : and since from that grew the mes- „ . , ' ^ . ° The national sianic idea with which he set out to con- conscious- , . neas. quer the world, the nature and origin of this germ is a matter of much interest. The story is probably true, since it is truth-like, and at the same time unlike what would have been invented 1 Keim, Jesus of Nazara, vol. i., p. 328. 124 THE NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS. by any one in that age. It is said that when the parents of Jesus were ready to return, he remained behind. It was what was to be expected of a nor- mal boy in the circumstances. Finding congenial surroundings, and conscious that he had a true place in Jerusalem and a true obligation thither- ward, there arose a conflict of claims between the narrow life of the home and the broader one of the larger environment. He simply forgot the family party, and, probably never before having given cause for anxiety, he was not missed for some time, when the parents sought him in vain, and in dis- may returned to discover him after some trouble in one of the temple schools. The boy must some day free himself from the leading-strings and live his own life. The mother must some day learn that the estate of infancy does not continue for- ever, and begin to let him have his own way even when it is contrary to her own judgment. No more thoroughly human relationship is anywhere de- picted than that of Jesus and his mother from henceforth. They never quite agree. Herself a woman of strong personality, she did not surrender it during his lifetime, nor allow her faith in him to become more than the loving allegiance of a mother to a son in whose character and future she persists in believing, though his actual career only dazes and confounds her. Mary always remained an Old Testament character. She gave birth to the Messiah, but she never understood him while ''MY FATHER'S HOUSE:' 125 he lived.i In answer to his mother's chiding, Jesus made his fii*st recorded utterance: "Wist ye not that I must be in my Father's house?" " Did it not occur to you that I had obligations in this direction as well as toward you ? " The lan- guage is that of explanation and self-justification. He felt that his range of right and duties had widened, that he was no longer a mere child whose life was to be limited by the ideas of his parents. This new and larger selfhood had to be asserted, and the assertion was not to his discredit, any more than it was to the discredit of his mother that she should record a protest against it. To the Jewish boy the claim of the larger envi- ronment was that involved in the awakening of the national consciousness. The specific form - . T » • 1 "MyFa- which this took m Jesus mmd was ex- ther's pressed in the term " my Father's house." The phrase was probably formed on the spur of the moment by way of making an exculpatory reply. It was therefore an instinctive formulation of what seemed to him to be the chief aspect of that larger world which now opened before him. Like a Jew- ish child he naturally saw its symbol, and seemed to himself to see its reality in the temple with its ritual and its schools. That identification of his larger relationships and responsibilities with the 1 It is far-fetched to explain this story and the Gospel charac- terizations of Mary and of her relations to Jesus by later dogmatic considerations. Everything is natural and consistent. 126 THE GERM THOUGHT. temple was inevitable and most fortunate ; for in later life it saved him, in spite of liis revolt against the established order, from the fatal error of Essen- ism, separatism. He broke finally with the temple only on that day when he crossed the valley of the Kidron, and, looking back, prophesied its destruc- tion. Long before this he had learned to find his Father in the busy haunts of common men and in the lonely mountains : but there were profound historical reasons why his thought should cling to the temple in Jerusalem ; why, through the years of awaiting his call to active messianic work, his eye should turn toward it ; why his ministry should always have had that goal in ^dew. Jesus was no uncoordinated professor of abstract religion or ethics. He was nothing if not a part of concrete history, fidfilling in every way the historical con- tinuities as they were being wrought out under the guidance of the concrete Hebrew spirit.^ The temple idea in Jesus' first utterance is fidly accounted for by the Hebrew spirit which was The germ cxcrcisiug its influencc upon the youth. thought. j3^^ ^jjjg ^j^g not the vital germ of his thought. That was rather that of the fatherhood of the God whose worship was the crown of the Jewish national system. Israel was a theocracy. Its national consciousness was religious, was a God- consciousness. But what kind of a God-conscious- ness? A Moloch-consciousness, or an Astarte- 1 Hausrath, New Testament Times, vol. ii., pp. 156-159. ORIGINAL, YET NOT SPORADIC. 12T consciousness, or a Jove-consciousness ? It was a Jehovah-consciousness. But the term " Jehovah " is not descriptive, appears to have almost avoided being descriptive. The Hebrew spirit seems to have brought it about that the conception of Jeho- vah had been partial, tentative, nascent, futuritive. It seems as though the Hebrew was awaiting the Messiah to stamp a worthy meaning upon his term for " God." If now this boy was to be the Mes- siah, and this was to be the occasion when he should beget the germ of his conception of Jeho- vah, it was an interesting crisis in his history and in that of the world. His own life and career, and through him that of the world, is profoundly modified by the fact that "fatherhood" struck him as the primary characteristic of Jehovah. This thought of the divine fatherhood was Jesus' great stroke of originality. It was creative. From that moment he stood forth as the des- original, yet tined redeemer of the world. Yet it -tsporadic. would be hard to point out just where the origi- nality came in. It woidd be unhistorical to think of his using such a term in such a connection unless the term already had, from its use in other connections, a meaning like that which he gave to it. And we learn, from its incidental uses through- out his life, that, as indicating ordinary home rela- tionships, he knew it in its ideal significance. It is therefore to be presumed that in his own home with Joseph and Mary he had known something 128 FATHERHOOD IN THE OLD TESTAMENT. of the meaning of ideal fatherhood. If he had, this was a product of the Hebrew spirit. Equally impossible is it to ascribe to him the first use of the term '' Father " as a name for God. In every nation it has been so employed. hiihfoJd*^ Most peoples thought of their national god as their natural progenitor. This often grew into a notion of God as holding a patri- archal or governmental relationship to the nation. Where less spiritual tendencies prevailed, it also gave rise to sensual notions, and often to licentious practices. In the Hebrew literature it occurs but rarely.^ In most of these cases the use is purely secondary and metaphorical. " It was by no means the customary and prevalent designation of God by the Israelites. Nowhere in the Psalms, which were the most direct expressions of reverence to God as taught in the Old Testament, was God ad- dressed as Father of the people of Israel or of in- dividual Israelites.2 The title in the Psalms was 'King.' In the utterance of the Prophet of the Exile, who reached the summit of messianic pre- diction, the designation is ' Servant ' rather than 'Son' of Jehovah. The idea of a divine father is nowhere the ruling conception in the Old Tes- tament. Jesus made it at once a ruling, almost 1 The word is applied to God not more than seven times in the Old Testament. See Ps. Ixviii. 5, ciii. 13 ; Isa. ix. 6, Ixiii. 16, Ixiv. 8 ; Jer. xxxi. 9 ; 1 Chron. xxix. 10. 2 In both the cases where it occurs in the Psalms, it is but a simile. See Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, vol. i., pp. 187, 188. ''LED OF THE spibit:' 129 an exclusive, and a purely spiritual conception." ^ This was his stroke of originality. The important thing, however, for us to observe concerning the coining, or at least the stamping as current, of this term for the Godhood, , . ' .11 11 Culmination is that it was precisely what was needed of the . . 1 spirit. to give full culminating expression to the spirit of all that was distinctively Hebrew. The most original things, the only ones that are of use, are they which, when once done, appear so neces- sary that we are surprised no one thought of them before. They are based, not upon pure invention, but upon keen perception. The moment Jesus uses the term "Father," it flashes out so that it can never again be obscured. Then it appears so ob- vious as to need no proof that the spirit which had been striving for its full development in the He- brew life was the filial spirit, the spirit of a divine- human sonship and brotherhood. It appears, there- fore, that in hitting upon this term for God, Jesus was obeying the promptings of the ancient Hebrew spirit, was at a single stroke fulfilling in poten- tiality every jot and tittle of the law of that spirit. Until the time of his baptism, it would appear as though Jesus lived under the promptings of the filial spirit, in his individual and family uLe^of the and village life, without receiving its full "p^"*" unction as an historical force carrying him into the currents of public affairs and marking him out for 1 Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, vol. i., pp. 18G-190. 130 THE PERSONALITY AND THE SPIRIT. a public career. Following its impulses, however, as it led him, with the other more sensitive of his countrymen, into the movement started by the Baptist, — upon whom had come a narrower and more specialized manifestation of the spirit, which could be described as "the spirit and power of Elijah," 1 — Jesus submitted to the ordinance which indicated his readiness to undertake whatever might be his share in the coming revolutions. At that moment he was aware that the spirit descended upon him in its fullest power, and rested upon him.2 Immediately afterward it drove or led him into the wilderness to be tempted. In this temp- tation, allowing for the necessarily pictorial modes of statement concerning what was an internal experience, there is the strictest likeness to life. The way he met it is precisely such as would be prompted by the filial spirit toward God, and the correspondingly fraternal one toward his feUow- men. When Jesus emerged from the wilderness after his temptation, and began his public life, the har- The ers ^^^J ^^ ^^^ Spirit and his personality was aiity and such that it bccomcs difficult to speak of the spirit. . ^ one without writing the history of the other in detail. It is henceforth easier to iden- 1 Luke i. 17. ^ " At his baptism he became conscious that that thing- which was specific to the messianic preparation, that is, the spirit of Je- hovah, had come upon him in full measure." Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, vol. i., pp. 99, 100. See also p. 101. THE PERSONALITY AND THE SPIBIT. 131 tify the spirit as his than as the ancient Hebrew spirit, although it is certain that it was that spirit which had entered into and had found its most perfect expression in him. Points are found, how- ever, where the operation of the spirit may be dis- cerned. The unity and the progressiveness in his career, for instance, is rather because of the con- sistency in his spirit than because of any compre- hensive grasp of idea. It is true that the thought which he hit upon at his twelfth year was capable of becoming a coordinating and constructive idea. It appears, however, that he is ruled less by the filial idea than by the filial spirit, which gave to him, without logical discursiveness, such ideas and such practical promptings as he needed under all circum- stances. When, therefore, he promised his disci- ples that the spirit which he would send upon them would teach them all things and bring to their minds all needed recollections,^ he was probably taking a leaf from his own experience. He had learned that the right idea would come when cir- cumstances demanded an idea, the right speech when speech was wanted, the right action when action was needed, and that the pervading power of the right spirit would keep these aU in right relationships with one another. The filial s]3irit could be depended upon to teach him unerringly concerning all the problems which presented themselves. When the question of 1 John xiv. 26. 132 THE SPIRIT AS INSTINCT. prayer was raised, he was ready at once with an The spirit answer of marvelous felicity, which set- as instinct. ^Iq^ ti^g ^yi^ole question in the light of the conception of divine fatherhood, the only concep- tion which can leave room for prayer. Even the limitations which he recognized to the effective- ness of prayer were prompted by the same spirit. " Father, I knew that thou hear est me always," ^ he says at one time. At another he prays, "If it be possible, let this cup pass." Then, acknowledg- ing the superior wisdom of the Father, he assents, " Not as I will, but as thou wilt." ^ He felt no hes- itancy about expressing his thought to his Father, because as a son with an independent life of his own he had a right to an independent opinion. " As the Father hath life in himself, so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself ; and hath given him authority to execute judgment also, be- cause he is the Son of man." ^ The sense of son- ship as the counterpart of fatherhood gave to his intercourse with the Father the largest and freest range, and took away from it every hint of servil- ity. It has been truly said ^ that religion does not begin until the sense of dependence is modified by that of relative personal independence. One does not pray who cannot say " I " as well as " Thou." 1 John xi. 42. 2 Matt. xxvi. 39 ; Mark xiv. 36. 8 John V. 26, 27. * Matheson, Messages of the Old Religions, p. 13. PROVIDENCE AND ANGELS AND DEMONS. 133 To such an extent did the filial spirit dominate Jesus that the whole external world was to him but the manifestation of the Father's love ^he objec- and thought. Hence his observations "^« ^^'^'^^'i- and meditations were colloquies with the Father. Every presentation of objective truth, in so far as it became intelligible, was the Father's voice. Yet in that the perfection of the filial spirit was not more manifest than in the complementary fact that he was never betrayed by it into mistaking subjective impressions or hallucinations for the di- vine voice. He and the Father were not only one : they were also two; and he never "confounded the persons." That is to say, he never had trances, as even men so sane as Paul and Socrates had. The emancipation of the God-vision from abnor- mal subjective conditions, which had been one of the triimiphs of tlie Hebrew prophetic spirit in its earlier evolution, was in him altogether complete. His perceptions were as sane and objective as though he received his truth, like the scientist, from purely impersonal sources. At the same time they were as warm and glowing as those of the mystic. The genuinely filial spirit of Jesus is illustrated in his attitude toward the idea of divine . T XT • • f Providence providence. He carries to its perfec- andangeis r»/^i» !• and demons. tion the thought or (jrod s relation to the world which is suggested in Genesis.^ While 1 See Lecture III. 134 PBOVIDENCE AND ANGELS AND DEMONS. he cannot be satisfied with a merely impersonal, clockwork universe, ruled by dead law, yet he has no use in this connection for the angels and demons which had crept into the later Jewish thought to take the place of the banished demigods of the earlier paganism. To him the Father is so near that he needs no mediators. The only mediator needed is one to bridge the moral chasm which has opened between God and all the race but himself, through the loss of the spirit of children. This office he finds it his mission to undertake. No angel is needed, or could do it half so well. As to demons, he experiences something of the same dif- ficidty as the authors of Genesis concerning the problem of evil. He doubtless regarded Satan and the demons as real persons, in much the same way as he did the Holy Spirit. That is, he was not so imhistorical as to transcend the mental habits of his age, and think of them in other than the theological way. Yet he was so sensitive to realities that he held no conceptions and used no language concerning them which was not easily translatable into thoroughly scientific terms. The prevalence at that time of spiritual phenomena, social forces of great and malign influence, pro- ducing mental and nervous disorders, cannot be disputed. They were an organic part of the age it- ielf. Their existence as important social elements is accounted for by the same set of spiritual causes which made the age in general what it was. In S ADDUCE AN DEISM. 135 recognizing the fact that he had spiritual antago- nists to contend with, Jesus utters a saying cor- responding to that of the Protevangelium ^ when he says, " I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven ; " ^ thus indicating that as the writer of Genesis had faith that the evil being would be banished from the physical universe, so he had no doubt that evil was to be banished from the spirit- ual universe. The same spirit which had produced the Protevangelium prompted this saying. While thus on the one hand Jesus had freed himself from the demonology and angelology of the Pharisees, on the other hand he stood sadducean out against the essential atheism of the ^®^^"^" Sadducees. Their denial of the intervention of the angels and demons was part of a materialistic deism which ignored the personality of the power behind phenomena, and used the religious factor in society as a mere political makeweight. He ac- cepted their doctrine of uniformity, but regarded it as the uniform kindness of a Father who with impartial love and forgiveness sends his rain and sunshine upon just and unjust, and who pitied not only the fallen monarch or saint, but the fallen sparrow. And so, in the same spirit, he improves upon Genesis, and, without interfering with physi- cal science, or pandering to the mythological ten- dency, he introduces the thought of what may be called a universal special providence. Only the 1 Gen. iii. 15. 2 L^ke x. 18. 136 THE UNSEEN WOELD. filial spirit at its best is able to grasp such a thought of God's relation to the world ; and yet it is but a carrying out of the spirit of the ancient Hebrew. While Jesus had no such use for the angels as the Pharisees had, since his God was not a God Tiie unseen ^f ar off , yct he was prompted by his spirit ^''^^^- to adopt the idea that the unseen parts of the universe were peopled by holy beings in- numerable who were full of interest in men. This was a necessary though unconscious corollary from the conception of God as a loving Father. Such a God could not be postulated as dwelling in an unpopulated vacuum. To do so would be a contra- diction in terms. Yet the saneness of Jesus kept him from imagining that he had any special infor- mation concerning these beings ; and hence when he goes farther it is evident that he is speaking pictorially ; as when, borrowing current notions, he puts the touch of color into his portrait of Lazarus being carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom. The combination of unfaltering faith with com- plete reticence as to detail concerning the future Immortal- ^^^ ^ ^^^^ himsclf and others is owing to his ity. prompting by the same spirit. As a Son of God he could not contemplate death as other than a sleep. To have convinced him that it ended all would have been to smother out his life. He could breathe no other atmosphere than that of divine sonship. His God was " not a God of the GOSPEL OF THE KINGDOM. 137 dead, but of the living." ^ As little could his spirit of brotherhood brook the idea that his relations to other men were merely transient. He was not the brother of the dead, but of the living. He could do no other than affirm that love is eternal, and hence that the persons without whom it cannot exist are immortal. Yet he stopped there. He attempted no revelation concerning the things that are be- yond. He respected the opacity of the veil that divides this world from the next, and he did not surrender the wholesomeness of his nature by any lapse into necromancy. He held only such things true as the spirit of divine sonship and human brotherhood required.^ It was this spirit which created for him his mis- sion, and gave him his gospel of the kingdom and his personal place in history. His assur- ^^ ^^ ance that he and all other men were sons the king- dom. of God gave him a wholesome attitude toward human society and history. He saw the evil that was in it as no one else had seen it ; but he also possessed in the highest degree the spirit of Hebrew optimism. He did not admit that evil was such a dominant element that it was hopeless to attemi3t to redeem society. He did not believe 1 Luke XX. 38. 2 The apparent exceptions in the cases of the transfiguration and of the resurrection are not overlooked. This is not the place to discuss them ; but psychologically they are wholesome uistead of morbid, and thus, in this respect at least, stand in a category by themselves. 138 SELF-OBLITERATION. that the courses of history led only to destruction, or that the sole salvation was to get out of the world. He did not desire that for his followers. For himself, he set to work to compass the world's redemption by entering into its history, deliber- ately choosing to identify himself with the course of events which had been preparing messianic pos- sibilities. The idea of a divine fatherhood in- cludes and legitimizes all history, and so it is emi- nently proper that Jesus take up the threads of national life and seek through it to realize his mes- siahship. Thus it was that he adopted the idea of the kino'dom of God as the burden of his first preaching. Instead of preaching the divine father- hood directly, which would not have been adapted to the mental readiness of his hearers, he met them part way by preaching the kingdom of God, and then interpreting it to them in the light of divine fatherhood. So he linked himself with the his- torical continuities.^ The fact that the expectation of Israel was still divided between that of a kingdom of God and that Seif-obiiter- oi a pcrsoual Messiah made it possible ation. £^^ j^-j^ ^Q j-^Q^j -^^i^ ^^j^iii near the end of his career the assertion of his personal messiah- ship. This reticence was partly because it was consonant with his spirit not to put himself for- ward unnecessarily. Only circumstances, moreover, could reveal to him how he was to figure in the 1 Wendt, Teachings of Jesus, vol. i., p. 97. NATUBAL UNITY. 139 affair. He knew that he was to hold a unique position ; but what that position was he could learn only by experience. He might easily have conceived that he was to be the unseen and unknown agent in bringing in that kingdom, and that all the glory of it was to go to God alone, or to other men ; and he would doubtless have been abundantly satisfied to have it that way. He received " not honor from men." The fact that he was to be the Messiah no more necessarily involved to his mind the fact that he was to be known or proclaimed as such than it did at first that he was to be known only to be despised and rejected and slain. Indeed, the duty of mak- ing his personal messiahship known probably came to him simultaneously with that of going to Je- rusalem to face death. So Jesus withheld the proclamation of his personal relationship to the kingdom he was proclaiming in the days of his popularity and prospective success, and brought it forward when a victim was demanded. This was like one who was animated by the spirit of the true sonship and brotherhood.^ To Jesus, looking at human society in the light of that spirit, the family and the circle Natural of friends, the nation and the church, ""^^'y- were seen to be of divine ordaining. He saw that the natural units and sub-units and all the nat- 1 Keim, Jesus of Nazara, vol. iv., pp. 256-281. Weiss, Life of Christ, Book V., cap. vi. 140 JESUS' COSMOPOLITANISM. ural relationships belonged, in so far as they were normal, to the divine order. He did not propose to break away from that order. His own society, in so far as it was necessary that his redemptive work begin through some nucleus, should be the most natural kind of thing ; for nothing artificial was as divine as that which was natural. His society, therefore, was based upon friendship : " I have called you friends." ^ Its model, if any- thing so natural needed a model, was probably, as has been remarked before, the " remnant," rather than the synagogue or the temple. Moreover, he chose to connect it with both the family and the nation, and with one of the profoundest of the national religious ideas, by borrowing its sacra- mental observance from the passover, which was at once a family, a national, and a religious obser- vance. And so, with unerring instinct, Jesus put himself into the j)osition of greatest advantage in ordinary life, in the family, national, and religious life, a position which he has held and strengthened until this day. It is impossible, in so condensed a sketch as this, to do more than illustrate the way in which Jesus, without doing anything magical or arti- cosmopoii- ficial, but by the supreme naturalness of a life ruled by the spirit of life, the spirit of divine sonshij) and brotherhood, took to himself all the offices in the gift of humanity, more 1 John XV. 15. JESUS' COSMOFOLITANISM. 141 skillfully and more spontaneously than Augustus had concentrated upon himself all the offices in the gift of the Roman people. One of the things often commented upon is that Jesus was ignorant of how great was the world he was undertaking to save, of how many millions were in it, of how many billions were yet to be born, of how great was its extent, what continents were yet unmarked upon its maps. Jesus never formed any notion of geographical areas. Yet he was truly cosmopoli- tan. Never was a shallower sneer than that of Renan at Jesus' provincialism, — as though be- cause he was not Parisian! Jesus was specially acquainted with the apocalyptic book of Daniel, of whose author Renan himself has well said that he was "the real creator of the philosophy of his- tory." 1 No Roman emperor or senator could have so wide an outlook or so deep an insight into the actual historical conditions of his age as could come to a young Galilean imbued with the Hebrew spirit and educated in the literature of that spirit. Jesus, indeed, saw only the symbols of Greek cul- ture and Roman power. But he had a key pos- sessed by neither Greek nor Roman with which to interpret the meanings of those symbols. The spirit took the things of Greece and Rome and showed them unto him. It was in accordance with the spirit of this his- torical movement into which Jesus entered that he 1 Vie de J4sus, cap. iii. 142 THE PHILOSOPHY OF OUTLAWBY. should choose the cross. A true philosophy of history recognizes the law of sacrifice, phy of ^ out- Jesus did not choose to identify his per- *^'^^' son and his name with the kingdom he was building until it became clear that a life must be given for it. More than a life was demanded. One was wanted who was willing not only to lay down his life, but to do it as an outcast, as of the offscourings of the earth, to go to an ignominious death. There is something more absolute than to become the sacrifice for sin ; that is, to become the offal of that sacrifice. So it is that the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews calls attention to the fact, not that Jesus became a victim on the altar, but that he was crucified without the gate,i where those parts of the victim not considered clean enough for the altar were disposed of. This was not a denial, but a superlative application of the law of sacrifice, — to be destroyed as unfit for regular sacrifice.^ The logic of the law of sacrifice requires that he who fulfills it to the uttermost should be rejected as unfit to fulfill it. A true philosophy of history, like that of the Prophet of the Exile, will discover the law of out- lawry, to which we have referred heretofore, by 1 Heb. xiii. 12. 2 Everett, Gospel of Paul Professor Everett believes that Paul's teaching concerning Jesus' relation to the law was that it made him an outlaw, that in fact this was its purpose. It is a question whether this view so much conflicts with as consum- mates the ordinary one. " THE ANOINTING TEACHETW 143 wliicli alone certain crises could be passed. The messianic movement was inaugurated and carried forward through its critical periods by men who faced outlawry.! Jesus in consummating it will- ii^gly g3,ve himself up as the world's Supreme Outlaw. The unerringness with which Jesus places him- self at the central point, and fulfills in every way the highest law of human life and his- " The tory, forces upon us the persuasion that anointing teacheth." it was done by the spontaneous impulses of his spirit rather than in obedience to any clearly worked out and prearranged plan. As above stated, it is exceptionally difficult: to distin- guish between the spirit and the personality of Jesus, because there is no conflict between them as in other men. It is only where it is natural for the spirit to act with a wider scope than the personality that we can mark the difference be- tween the two. Jesus, for instance, could not know that there was such a continent as America, and hence could not take it into accoimt in pro- viding for the future of his kingdom. The spirit did not need to know, but it acted with as much Ideological wisdom as if it had known. Person- ally, Jesus expected the end of the world to come within a generation. His spirit so guided him that that opinion involved no practical error of judgment ; and he acted as wisely as he could 1 For example, Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Jeremiah. 144 HEBREW HISTORY AND JESUS. have done had he foreseen the future. We can love him, because he is a man like ourselves, and no monster of a demigod. We can trust him, because he has the spirit of a God. As a man he was perfect. He would not have been a perfect man, but a perfect something else, if he had fore- seen all things. He needed no such non-human foresight, for the spirit of truth guided him. He was "Christus," '*the anointed one," because of the spirit which was poured out upon him; and it was through the anointing of this spirit that he was able to perform the offices of the Christ. After this attempt to throw upon the life of Jesus the light of the Hebrew spirit, it might be Hebrew his- wcll to rcvicw briefly Hebrew history in ofJesL"^''' the light of his spirit. We do not find spmt. 'j^ ^jj^^ history the idea of divine son- ship and human brotherhood expressed with any lucidity or consistency. Yet the spirit is in ad- vance of the idea. The spirit which rules in Hebrew history is that of right personal relation- ships. It is this which leads to reform in religion as well as in morals. Its instinct is that social and religious relationships are identical in nature. Canon Fremantle is in error when he assumes that it is only when one " comes to know the central unity as Father, as love, that the relation between him and that unity becomes personal, spiritual," and that " this extends to all parts of the world, and especially to the relations of men HEBREW HISTORY AND JESUS. 145 to one another." ^ The error is in conditionins^ such spiritual relationship upon knowledge. The knowledge is more likely to grow out of a per- ception of spiritual relationships already existing than to precede and form the basis of the relation- ships. Only by the utmost stretch of accommoda- tion of terms can the Hebrew be said to have had any inkling of the knowledge of divine fatherhood and hmnan sonship. Even Fremantle, when he comes to deal with the subject concretely, falls back upon the " spirit of the law." ^ The theo- cratic idea in Israel was softened and corrected by the spirit of something still nobler. Some- times that spirit lifted the idea near to that of a father. " Like as a father," said the psalmist.^ " I will be his father, and he shall be my son." * Yet the suggestion is always faint, while the spirit is indisputable. More, however, than in the occasional lift near to the idea is the spirit of this perfect relationship made plain by the nature of the claims which Jehovah is thought to make upon his people. " There is probably," says Fremantle, " in modern h3^mns, eighteen cen- turies after Christ, more of artificial religion than in the psalms written in the bosom of Judaism." " Almost every psalm appeals to the law of plain justice, public and private." ^ Jehovah is the ^ The World as Subject of Redemjition, p. 49. 2 Ibid., p. 51. 3 Psalm ciii. 13. ^ 2 Sara. vii. 14. fi The World as Subject of Redemption, p. 53. 146 SELF-BESTRAINT OF THE SPIRIT. champion of the widow and the fatherless, of the helpless and the weak. He delights in just rulers and judges, and in the festivals which foster and express the common life of the people and their mutual interests. Here we see the spirit of rela- tionship, of fatherhood and sonship. So much in accord with this spirit was the Hebrew law that it could afterward be said that he had fulfilled it who had loved his neighbor. The idea of divine fatherhood could have pro- duced no good results had it been broached. For the term was wrapped up with animal- straintof ism and sensualism, and the only way le spin . ^^ redeem it was to do without it for a time.i To think of Jehovah as the national God in the sense of a progenitor would have tempted to a conception of a non-moral favoritism, and so to a precluding of the idea of universalism. So the Hebrew mind was turned in another direction. It did not think of God as belonging to them, but of them as belonging to him ; and that not because he had begotten, but because he had ^ It is perhaps as well, on the whole, that mediaeval theology, existing as it did as the counterpart of so imperfect a political and social system and a false doctrine of the family, should have dwelt upon some secondary attribute of God rather than upon the idea of Fatherhood. To have used that name in the circum- stances would have been only to take it in vain. Indeed, the assumption of the title " Holy Father " by the head of the ecclesi- astical svstem made the term for the time an impossibility in a true theology. TUB PROFUNDITIES. 147 chosen them. On the other hand, he was regarded as the creator and ruler of all men. In this and in other ways many errors were guarded against. The true family had to be evolved by the oper- ation of the Hebrew spirit, before the time came when the term Father would not be misconstrued. Thus it was the very spirit of the higher spiritual relationship which Jesus meant by "Father " that had prompted to the temporary suppression of the idea of Fatherhood. It is possible to sum up all that was specific in Hebrew history, that which both differentiated it from and finally integrated it with other courses of history, as the spirit of Hebrew right relationships between all personal- ities ; which relationships Jesus exemplified and expressed in his own relationships towards God and man. The Hebrew community was a brother- hood in which human relationships were more truly realized than elsewhere, and the spirit of it gave birth to the promise of an all-embracing society, including the " whole range of human interests, and binding all men and classes and nations together in true relations ; " which " is the work and expression of the spirit of God." It is not the fault of the facts, but of want of skill in the presentation of them, if it is not now clear that this spiritual agency is a con- ^he profun- Crete element in the history of the He- ^'^'^^" brew nation and of Jesus, and that it is the one 148 THE PROFUNDITIES. continuous and specializing factor therein. Before passing to its further consideration, it is necessary to prechide misunderstanding by explaining that, while we have persisted in speaking of that which can be seen by any one possessing ordinary powers of discernment, we have not been unaware that all spiritual phenomena lie along the edge of the eternal mysteries. Every personal relationship has in it an element of the Infinite and the Un- knowable. It is not necessary to be always say- ing so, or to be obfuscating one's self with vain efforts to penetrate the mystery; yet it is neces- sary to bear it in mind, and not to permit our- selves to think of either the Supreme Person or of any fellow-man without some touch of that awe and sacredness which is akin to worship. Two persons never meet without looking over the abyss of infinitude and eternity. Worship is a factor in every true personal relationship. We are a holy nation, a royal priesthood, each giving and receiving homage. The spiritual, even when we refuse to enter the theological or metaphysical sphere, brings us face to face with the Insoluble Reality. But this is also true of physical phe- nomena. There also we come into the presence of infinitude and eternity. The atoms which com- pose the material molecules also attract or repel one another across unfathomable spaces. Physi- cal science is not paralyzed or distracted, or driven to mythology or metaphysics, by this fact. Spirit- ual science may maintain a like equanimity. JESUS AN ERA. 149 As remarked before, the Christian era might as well have been dated from Pentecost as from the birth of Jesus. Jesus was an era in j^g^^ ^^ himself. Our era began after he went ®^'*" away. While he was with his disciples his per- sonality absorbed them, and the incidents of it occupied their attention. They did not under- stand, still less were they swayed, by the spirit which characterized him. As a person he had monopolized their social and religious possibilities. He had become their world and their God, though they had been unaware of the processes by which it had come about. He had gathered to himself a great part of the attributes which in the mind of the pious Jew belonged to Jehovah, and his society had taken the place of the nation in their interests and affections. His removal had brought them to desolation. They were stranded and stunned. They were to all intents and purposes without a God and without a hope in the world. When questioned about the matter, all they could say was that they had "hoped that it was he which should redeem Israel." ^ The fixed idea of the prophets and psalmists that Jehovah was the Eedeemer of Israel had lost its hold upon them.2 They do not appear to have prayed. The sound of the Angelus is not heard from Good Friday to Easter. They could not say "Our 1 Luke xxiv. 21. 2 Psalm cxxx. 8; Isa. xli. 14, xliii. 14; etc., etc. 150 THE RESURRECTION. Father." They had learned from Jesus to pray to his " Father," and if he was not, his " Father " had been proved an ilkision. They huddled together or wandered aimlessly, like frightened sheep from whom the shepherd had been taken. Then came to them that group of experiences which had upon them at least the effect of an Theresur- objectivc appcaraucc of Jesus risen. rection. rpj^^^ belicved in and had visions. They believed that men's ghosts sometimes walked.^ But they did not believe that the ghosts were the men, and they not only declared that they had seen something else than a ghost, but to the end consistently acted as if they had. The effect, therefore, upon the disciples themselves, and through them upon the history of the world, has been as though Jesus actually rose from the dead. His personality has entered into the religious life of mankind in such a way as to give to the sub- jective persuasion that he rose, if it was subjective, all the energy and persistence of an objective perception. " The power of his resurrection " ^ at least is an objective phenomenon. But still the disciples were helpless and spirit- less. They could but wait for a new endowment Age of the of spiritual power. The renewed faith Bpint. -jj |.|^g personality of Jesus was essential to the impartation of that spirit ; but the exist- 1 Mark vi. 49 ; Luke xxiv. 37-39. 2 PhU. iii. 10. AGE OF TUE SPIEIT. 151 ence of tliat faith did not make it a foregone conclusion that the spirit would appear. That such a spirit did appear the testimony is ample. In spite of the hesitation of many critics, the accounts in the book of Acts must be admitted to have in their main outlines the air of historicity. Luke's own conception of the spirit and its modes of operation was so conventionally inadequate that he cannot be supposed to have invented these things. 1 It is historically probable that the dis- ciples would wait, no longer in their former hope- lessness, but engaged in nugatory administrative details and in rather aimless devotions, until there came upon them, like an earthquake or whirlwind,^ or, as the " Teaching of the Twelve " says, with a " strange, sweet odor," the power of a spirit which at once set them going with a spe- cifically different and higher kind of activity. It was fitting that when the spirit of Jesus mani- fested itself it should first bring the pent-up convictions and aims of the disciples to articulate exjiression, and that the impulsive Peter should be their spokesman. Then for the first time, as they always afterwards confessed, they began to understand Jesus, and his language and actions. 1 The name " Holy Spirit " appears some ninety-three times in the New Testament. Of these, fifty-two are found in Luke's writings. It was one of his literary " properties," and was gen- erally employed with little discrimination. 2 Acts i. 13-2G ; ii. 1 f . 152 GIFT OF TONGUES. What he had said and done came back to them fraught with the profoundest meaning and preg- nant with truths of immeasurable import. The spirit of Jesus has done more than any- other power to open the gates of human speech, Qjftof and to stimidate the interplay of those tongues. personal forces which find their channels in language. It was not only fitting, it was neces- sary that that which had now come into the world shoidd begin with something like "a gift of tongues." " Language," says Matheson, " is the first instinct of unselfishness. The earliest words uttered by the lips of childhood mark the tran- sition from the age of receiving to the age of giving; for words are the vehicles of thought, and speech is the gift of thought from man to man. We are not surprised when, almost imme- diately after the Pentecostal outpouring, we are told that these disciples had all things common. The age of brotherhood had begun. Hitherto the disciples had been divided against themselves by the recurrence of that question which had its source in personal ambition : ' Who shall be great- est in the kingdom of heaven ? ' But with Pen- tecost there woke into consciousness the reality of that great truth which as yet had been latent within them, that whosoever would be greatest must be servant of all. As the spirit of the new religion found vent in language, the disciple passed out of himself and entered into the heart of his CONTINUITY MAINTAINED. 153 brother. The joy of communion between soul and soul had its birth in that hour when thought responded to thought in the utterance of a com- mon speech, and the first bonds were knit of that mighty Christian union which all the powers of the world and all the vicissitudes of temporal history have been unable to break asunder." ^ Not only was the fact of speech appropriate ; equally appropriate was the substance and the manner of it. The speech imputed to continuity Peter is like him, but like him stimu- ---*--«•!• lated, intoxicated, informed by the spirit of Jesus, — of Jesus the man whom he loved, and of Jesus the official Messiah, the consummator of all that had been preparing itself in the ancient history of the Hebrew race. It was skillful oratory for him to assert that this strange phenomenon was a ful- filhnent both of prophecy in general and of that particular prediction of the descent upon the many of the spirit of prophecy .^ Moreover, it was an exact statement of the fact in the case. As the spirit of Jesus was the perfect expression of the ancient Hebrew spirit, and hence he was the ful- fillment of all that was specific in the national de- velopment, so this was not only his spirit, which he was said to have promised, but it was also the ancient spirit. In its appearance, novel and revo- lutionary as it assuredly was, the true historical continuities were being maintained. 1 Growth of the Spirit of Christianity, vol. i., pp. 83, 84. 2 Acts ii. lG-21 ; Joel ii. 28-32. As soon as the spirit had passed out of Jesus back into ordinary men, it found, as it always had found before, intractable material to deal again^S' with. Impracticable schemes were tried, ^^ ^^^' and there were delays and hitches in the launching of the regenerated society.^ Even with unity of spirit unity of effort was often difficult. The first division naturally came along the line of cleavage already existing between the Hellenistic and Hebraistic Jews. The necessary limitations of the apostles made them incapable of administer- ing a society so abounding in life and containing such diverse elements. The party of Stephen, which gave a hint of what afterwards became the Pauline school,^ was disposed to the universalistic policy ; while the party afterward known as that of James leaned toward a more exclusive national course. The former soon became the better organ of the 1 Acts iv. 34-37 ; Yi. 1 f . 2 The Pauline author of Acts, though his history may be partly idealistic, had undoubtedly more correct notions than his master as to the genetic continuity between the original Christian group and the Gentile type. The great apostle himself, fervent mystic that he was, was disposed to resent the suggestion of such rela- tionship. Gal. i. 16 f. VARYING TYPES. 155 spirit, and gave to the gospel an interpretation througli wliich it could enter the larger life of Asia and Europe. The solitary literary monument, however, of the Jewish party, the Epistle of James, is enough to dispel any doubt that the spirit was as fully pre- sent with that party as it was with the other. Corroborative evidence of this is seen in varying the attitude of James toward the Pauline ^^^^^' party when issue was joined among their follower s.^ Yet it is not difficult to see that the spirit could not fulfill itself within that circle. Judaism was the shell, originally secreted by the spirit, and under which it had best worked for some gen- erations. Now that it was no longer needed for protection, it became a prison. Peter characteris- tically vacillated between the two courses, and man- aged to be of some service and disservice to both. On the whole, however, the spirit found him an effective organ, and his Epistles, written later in life, reveal his final rather hesitating conquest by the Paidine ideas. We cannot fail to note also a party which took a middle course, and stood ready to give an account of itself, — the party to which belonged the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, attempting to reconcile Judaism and Christianity without breaking so obviously as Paul did with the former, and yet without surrendering the supremacy and finality of the latter. Here was 1 Acts XV. 1-29. 156 DIFFERENTIATION NEEDED. perhaps tlie germ of the Alexandrian type, which for some centuries was predominant, and is again contesting the modern supremacy of Paul. When we mention the Johannean type, of a little later origin, but also a bright tro23hy of the spirit in a most important province of religious thought and life, we are able to understand how manifold from the beginning was the organism which the spirit began at Pentecost to create. It was necessary to the survival of the spiritual movement that variations of type should quickly Differentia- Spring up. A uuity of exclusivencss tion needed, ^^^j^ ^^^^ defeated the mission of the spirit at once. Its life was of too high an order to be represented by a monocotyledonous germ. Differentiation is a primary life function. Had Christianity failed to produce a more or less tena- cious Jewish type, it would have lost touch with Judaism before it coidd absorb its best elements. Had it failed to develop a Gentile type, it would have failed to enter into the greater world, where was the culture of the age and to which belonged the future. Had it failed to produce coalition types, it could have obtained no foothold with those large and important groups of eclectics who were seeking to combine all the elements of truth and culture. Had the Christian spirit not been as broad and hospitable and in the best sense oppor- tunist as it was, it would have been untrue to its old self, the Hebrew spirit, which never let go an ORGANIZATION. 157 occasion to make spoils of the spiritual wealth of its neighbors. Nothing of the life of that day which could be made to enter the life of the future escaped the aggressive, conquering power of the new spirit. '' How Christianity could adapt itself to all earthly relations, and while it allowed men still to remain in them, yet by the new spirit which it gave them, the divine life which it breathed into them, how it was enabled to raise men above these relations, is distinctly set before us by a Christian living in the early part of the second century, who thus describes his contemporaries : ' The Christians are not separated from other men by earthly abode, by language, or by customs. They obey existing laws, and conquer the laws by their own living.*" Yet this same loftier spirit, which could merge it- self in all the forms it found at hand while it coa- lesced with all the purely human, came into conflict with all the ungodly nature of men. It announced itself as a power aiming at the regeneration of the world."! In these efforts to capture the future the spirit had a noteworthy success. Following the channels prepared for it by the pre-Christian He- organiza- brew spirit in the Dispersion, its energies *'^"' flowed into every region of the world. Enlisting 1 Neancler, History of the Christian Religion and Church, pp. 09, 70. " In the first century we may say that the spirit of Christ was the pure fount of the knowledge of the truth for all his church." Van Oosterzee. 158 ORGANIZATION. able and enterprising men, sons of their age, it entered into alliance with the spirit of the age itself, and pushed its movement into the world's capitals and along all its great highways. Begin- ning without formal organization, it invented or borrowed, first from the synagogue, and afterward from the Roman metropolitan system, until at length it was more perfectly organized than the empire itself. At first an imioerium in imj^erio^ its stability and efficiency outgrew that of the political power which was nominally over it. Whereas the organization of the empire was weak- ening, because it had almost ceased to fulfill its end of caring for the interests of the many, in its default that of the church began to cover and pro- tect almost every province of life. It was new, and could respond with the more freedom to the needs of the hour. It had a loyalty which the empire was no longer able to command. Its members were Romans, but they did not hesitate to declare on proper and sometimes on improper occasions that they were Christians first. Hence the authority of this organization could appeal, as that of the empire no longer could, to internal sanctions. Murder, fraud, adultery, cruelty, idle- ness, were forbidden, not by external law, but by the exercise of a new set of motives.^ Presently the laws of the Christian communities began to win the authority of custom even outside those ^ Lecky, European Morals, vol. i., p. 4G8. THE SPECIFIC ELEMENT. 159 communities, and hence before they came to be embodied in statutes they had already produced wide effects. It was the spirit of this Christian organization, rather than its conscious or avowed aims, which gave to it its power as a creator of public jj^g specific sentiment and custom. The public did ^i^'^^"*^- not understand its doctrines. Its own understand- ing of them was very imperfect. But its spirit excited wonder and admiration. "Behold how these Christians love one another," was the senti- ment of the heathen. It became apparent after a little that they had love to spare also for others. Undreamed-of charitable movements originated among them. One of the first of these concerned the treatment of children. The horrors involved in the Koman practice of the exposure of children need no detailed description here. What is to be observed from our point of view is that the refor- mation in these matters, to which Christianity was the chief stimidus, did not grow out of any specific teaching of Jesus or his apostles, but only out of the operation of the spirit of that teaching and of the life that underlay it. Writers on the subject continually refer to this fact. "Nothing," says Brace, " could be further from Christianity's spirit than such enormities." "Under Constantine the spirit of Christianity began to affect legislation on this point." ^ Lecky also speaks of the abolition 1 Gesta Christi, pp. 76, 77. 160 CHARITY. of infanticide as a triumph of the " spirit of Chris- tianity."^ It was through the exercise of charity in the establishment of foundling hospitals that the sentiment was created which afterward found ex- pression in effective legislation. Some legislation had been enacted before, but it had been futile, because it did not represent the spirit of society. Much of the charity which was prompted by the Christian spirit was open to criticism. It was purely alleviative. But the fearful des- Charity. . .*' ^ . , . , ., , titution and pauperism which prevailed called for emergency relief, while the circmnstances of the times made anything but palliative measures appear hopeless. As the spirit of humanity grew, and with it the legal restrictions to child murder, the foundling hospital where no questions were asked was doubtless the occasion for great evils. But the day for effective social reconstruction had not yet arrived. The best thing possible as yet was to cultivate the spirit of humanity and charity, and prepare a soil out of which might spring some- thing better in the future. Lecky, who thinks that the share of Christianity in the protection of infant life has sometimes been exaggerated, declares that it would be amuse- difficult to ovcrratc its influence in the suppression of gladiatorial shows. " This feat must be almost exclusively ascribed to the Christian church." " Comparing the Fathers with 1 European Morals, vol. ii., p. 36. SLAVERY. 161 the most enliglitened pagan moralists in their treatment of this matter, we usually find one most significant difference. The pagan, in the spirit of philosophy, denounced these games as inhuman, or demoralizing, or degrading, or brutal. The Chris- tian, in the spirit of the church, represented them as a definite sin, the sin of murder, for which the spectators as well as the actors were directly re- sponsible to heaven." ^ Thus, as Jesus* is said to have predicted, the spirit reproved the world of sin. The influence of the spirit of Christianity upon the prevalence of suicide was most marked. In the ancient world this had been regarded as at the most a venial crime, which might sometimes become a virtue. It is one of those evils upon which legislation has never had any noticeable deterrent effect. The spirit of Chris- tianity, by putting a more wholesome tone into life in general, by bringing to those in despair a sound consolation, and by impressing upon men a sense of the sanctity of life and of the awful responsi- bility for rushing unbidden into the presence of God, succeeded in largely reducing the practice. No institution has been so prolific of evil to the race as slavery. Its effects upon master and slave alike have been only degrading. Upon none is its demoralizing influence more clearly marked than upon those who have been so far debauched by it as to imagine that they can 1 European Morals, vol. ii., p. 37. 162 THE CHURCH AND SLAVERY. find redeeming features in it. The apologist for slavery, chattel, political, agrarian, or industrial, is one of the worst products of slavery. And slavery never existed in a worse form or to a greater ex- tent than in the Roman Empire in the time of Jesus.^ It ruined the family, it loosened every tie of morality, and insured financial wreck. It is not likely that Jesus came into contact with many of its worst evils. He nowhere says a word in condemnation of it. It was not for centuries that the incompatibility of slavery with his teachings was openly declared. The apostles were as silent as their master. Yet in the church bond and free were treated alike, a most signal innovation, since the Roman slave was not permitted to engage in patriotic worship. As the church became more and more the source of ruling ideas and sentiments, " the spirit of Christianity began immediately that long contest with human slavery, which, under changing fortunes and with many defeats, has been waged now for eighteen centuries, and may be said only to have won its final victories in the middle and latter half of the nineteenth century." ^ The church has often been the apologist for slavery. Her record on this matter has been, as The church B^ace says, " by no means consistent with and slavery. ^^ ^ development of tlic Spirit of her founder." ^ The influence of this spirit upon legis- 1 European Morals, vol. i., p. 277. 2 Gesta Christi, p. 45. ^ Ibid., p. 46. THE CHURCH AND SLAVERY. 1G3 lation was inconsiderable ; little more at first than might have come about by the growth of humane sentiment among the pagans. But by introducing slaves upon perfect equality into the church, and l^ermitting them to hold all offices, thus giving a moral dignity to men as men, regardless of their servile condition, and recognizing the value of ser- vile virtues like humility, gentleness, patience, re- signation, obedience, it introduced an element that could not but at length work a revolution. ^ More- over, it was regarded as an act of piety to manu- mit slaves, and thus the number of freedmen was largely increased. Nevertheless, it was fully ten centuries before slavery ceased to exist in Europe. Many material changes had first to occur, and the occasion had to be awaited for the final conquest of the spirit of Christianity in this matter. On this continent the conflict was prolonged until our own day. Our own recent history makes it indisputable that it was the spirit of Christianity which rendered it intolerable to the moral sense even of those who, because of ecclesiastical apostasy, were alienated from the name of Christ. Some rejected the Bible because of the false gloss which had been imposed upon it in respect to this matter. Yet it is clear that the spirit which refused to deny the manhood of any man, and saw a brother in the slave, was the spirit which came by immediate descent from one 1 European Morals, vol. ii., p. 72. 164 PROPERTY. who himself never said a word nor did an act directly against this sum of all villainies. The abo- lition of slavery in Christendom was distinctively a conquest of the spirit of Jesus. The problem of the distribution of property could not be grasped until slavery was disposed of. It would have been as unhistori- Property. i j* t cal tor J esus to have comprehended the modern property question as to have understood the political problems of the nineteenth century. He avoided personal error, and instinctively so dealt with the cases which came before him as to illustrate those fundamental relationships be- tween man and man, and between man and ma- terial things, which the spirit could apply to the solution of property problems in later times. It is clear that the heart of Jesus was inclined toward the poor. But no remedies were then within reach on the large scale, nor had he the ear of those who held power. There is sufficient reason to believe that had circumstances placed him in a position where he could have been rightly asked for a deci- sion concerning systems of wealth distribution, he would have been as unerringly guided by the spirit as he was in other matters. He inculcated the application of the principle of brotherhood to the use of wealth. He could do no more. The com- plications which would arise in the practical appli- cation of even so simple a principle he was not in a position to see. The reconstruction of the pro- PROPEBTY. 1^5 perty system at that time was out of tlie question. It remained so ; and all that the early church could do was to try to alleviate the distress which grew out of it, by the distribution of charity. Yet Jesus laid no special emphasis upon cha- rity ; 1 as though he had an inspiration to the effect that one day it might stand in the way of justice. In answer, however, to the charge that the Chris- tian spirit of charity has encouraged dependence and cultivated improvidence, it should be said that the world witnesses no such pauperism to-day as it did when Christianity came into history. If it ever does again witness it, it will be not so much because charity will foster pauperism as because it will be used to debauch the consciences of those who ought to and who are able to remove all pau- perizing tendencies from the social system. As the worst effects of slavery have been upon the masters, so the worst effects of unwise charity have been not upon the recipients, though these have often been very bad, but upon the givers.^ Concerning the influence which the spirit was able to exert upon the character and status of 1 Gesta Christi, p. 101. 2 One form of charity which began early in the history of Christianity, and was surely prompted by its spirit, caused little if any harm and measureless good to both givers and receivers, because it dealt with those who were the victims rather of un- avoidable accidents than of moral or social wrongs. This was the founding and support of hospitals. Here was an expression of the purest and truest sympathy, which has never ceased to thrill the heart of Christendom. 166 WOMAN. woman and of the family relationships, it is diffi- cult to speak without entering into the controversy as to whether it was Christianity or the Woman. „ mi leutons that contributed most to this end. It may be permitted us, therefore, to fall back upon the authority of Lecky, who is not partial to Christianity, and who speaks of a vast change having " passed gradually over the world, under the influence of Christianity, assisted by the barbarians." ^ It would appear from this that in his estimate Christianity had the larger share in this change.^ Doubtless the Germans were, as Tacitus ^ and Salvian ^ claimed, far superior to the degenerate Eomans. But Koman virtue had in the early days been as high, and had deteriorated instead of improving as civilization grew more complex. The Germans also were unable to resist the contagion of corrupt civilizations, and would doubtless have been utterly lost but for Christi- anity, whose virtue was not, like that of the Ger- mans, of the savage type, but had been developed in the soil and atmosphere and in the face of all the temptations of civilization. 1 European Morals, vol. ii., p. 364. 2 A certain nameless vice which had been eating- out the vigor and character of civilized men was so thoroughly eradicated, not by the barbarians, but admittedly by the spirit of Christianity, that its very existence has become inconceivable to the modern mind. " Our Lord himself,' ' observes Brace, ' ' never speaks of unnatural passions. The very spirit of his personality would banish even the thought of them." Gesta Christi, p. 36. ^ Germania, ix., xviii-xx. ^ De Gubernattone Dei. THE FAMILY. 167 The church made some disastrous errors in re- gard to the idea of those relationships which are at the basis of the family. But even in -^ . The family. those errors it was gropmg alter pro- found truths, and it is a question whether the conditions were such that it was possible to make progress much faster or by less circuitous routes. The exaltation of celibacy was an extreme reaction against the prevalence of a sensuality unimaginable to modern Christendom ; and the spirit of Chris- tianity was no more responsible for the excesses in the direction of asceticism than for those in the direction of sensual indulgence. Jesus himself was no ascetic ; and his apostles leaned no farther that way than the circumstances of the times re- quired. Their theories were sound. As the questions of property distribution covUd not even be fairly stated until chattel slavery had been so generally abolished that slave labor ceased to be a factor of imjjortance, so the very compre- hension of the problem of the family, and of the many virtues and vices which grow out of its imderlying relationships, has to await the complete emancipation of woman. The apostle Paul was not far out of the way when he was disposed to embrace the whole problem of redemption under the single category of emancipation. When men and women are free, and have learned to know the meaning of it, and to make the right use of it, the final act is ready to begin. 168 THE CHBISTIAN FAMILY. Although the solution of the problem of the family is incomplete, owing, among other causes, to the incomplete emancipation of woman, The Chris- „ ., . . . , ^ j. , i tian famuy. y^t the family as it is is already one oi tlie monuments to the redemptive and creative power of the spirit of Jesus ; and this, too, although Jesus himself lived a celibate life, and felt it necessary to deprecate too strong an insistence upon mere family relationships. It would appear, however, that his own early home, and others in the circle out of which he came, were responsive to high ideals. In the group of disciples that gathered about him, women held a place of high considera- tion. That they did not engage in aU the activi- ties of men was not because of any want of recog- nition of their essential equality. They came into the church on practically equal terms with men. In enumerating the distinctions which had been abolished, the apostle could say not only, '' there is neither bond nor free," but also, " there is neither male nor female." ^ Doubtless from the beginning of the era until now there have always been homes approaching near to the ideal. To-day the number is largely multiplied, and in many large areas of Christen- dom the average home is worthy to be charac- terized as a Christian institution. The Christian home is often more or less independent of nominal Christianity. The spirit of Jesus is evident in 1 Gal. iii. 28. NATIONALISM. 169 many homes where his name is not mentioned, and it is absent from many where that name is professed. The ideal,, indeed, is seldom reached. Even where it is attained in the internal strnctiire of the home, it is often lost in the case of the rela- tion of the home to the larger community. " It may be said," writes Fremantle, " that the family has been definitively won for Christ, so far as Christian love is self-renouncing ; but so far as Christian love is universal, it still needs the processes of redemption." ^ It is devotion to the family rather than to the narrower self which is the motive for the apparently selfish struggles in the world of business. Thus the combatants on the fields of the fiercest and most ruthlessly fought battles are commonly animated by a species of imperfect unselfishness. It is not a part of our plan to make any extended analysis of contemporary histouy, in order to show how the spirit of Jesus has made itself f, 1 . \ ■,. I. »/. , T Nationalism. felt m modern life. A few words only must suffice in addition to what has been said about the conquest of the family. The spirit has been influential in starting and giving character to na^ tional movements, which are among the important phenomena of these times. Only in Christendom is there to-day such a thing as a national life.^ 1 The World as Subject of Redemjjtion, p. 308. 2 A nation is a spiritual, a race, an animal organism. Outside of JCliristenclom are races. In Christendom, the tendency, as yet imperfectly wrought out, is to nationalities. 170 NATIONALISM. The formation of our own nation can be distinctly traced to the Renaissance, and the consequent resurrection of the spirit of Christianity through the translation and diffusion of the Scriptures. The men who formed the nation were themselves formed by the Scriptures, so that it may almost be said that the spirit created this nation through the agency of its specific literature. The stimulus to the revival of nationalism in Europe has come largely either through the same set of causes, or less directly through the example of this nation. The movement for Irish renationalization, while it does not spring so obviously from the Bible, has been kept alive by enthusiasm borrowed from America, so that in a secondary way, at least, it is dependent even upon Scripture ; and it is a safe prediction that before many years the Irish will take to the study of the sacred writings of Chris- tendom, as the Italians have already done so deter- minedly that the papal power has been constrained to give it a tardy approval. It is the spirit rather than the letter of Christianity that contributes to patriotism. The early Christians were not patriots, and one of the true charges against them was that, while they made excellent soldiers or officials, they had no attachment to the government. There was the same reaction against patriotism that there was against the family. Yet the spirit of Christi- anity arrested both those reactions, and renewed both the family and the nation. INTERNATIONALISM, 171 Instead of the revival of patriotism jDroducing fiercer international antagonisms, as tlie thought- less would predict, the growing sentiment i„teruation- is one in favor of peace and mutual inter- *^'^"^* change of benefits between nations. Wars have arisen from race rather than national antagonisms, or from the ambitions of the few working upon the animal instincts or passions of the many. In the nation mere animal passions are subordinate to spiritual motives, and the ambitious few must have more respect for the will of the many. It is less than a generation since the first international arbitration was attempted, in the face of universal skepticism. To-day it would be next to impossible to goad the English-speaking peoples into war with one another. The mightiest armaments the world has seen are held in check, no one daring to give the signal for conflict, lest he bring against himself the enemy he fears more than any armies or navies, — the peace sentiment of the world. It is true that many considerations of a calcu- lating selfishness have influence in favor of peace. But the data which turn the result of such calcula- tions in that direction are more numerous and more weighty than they ever were, because of the opera- tion of the spirit of Christianity. The spirit of brotherhood, generated by migration and by the help of the international workingmen's conventions and the socialist propaganda, is becoming so power- ful among the millions who must recruit and sus- 172 INTERNATIONALISM. tain these armies that the time seems not distant when they will decline to fight at 'the command of any leader. If they were to fight to-day, it would be in a merely mechanical way, and with no mutual hatred ; and the strongest motive that would animate most of their officers would be scientific curiosity as to the working of recent in- ventions. No body of men ever entered ujion a great enterprise with more promise of success than those who are to-day undertaking to formulate measures for universal arbitration. The people are coming to the front. The people are already under the sway of the spirit of brotherhood ; and in proportion as their power grows will the will of that spirit be obeyed in national and international concerns.! We call politics corrupt ; and it is, measured by ideals. But the ideal was never so high as it is to- ^ " These armaments of all nations, these continual menaces, this resumption of race oppression, are evil signs, but not signs of bad augury. They are the last convulsions of what is going to dis- appear. The social body resembles the human body, the malady being only a violent effort of the organism to throw off a morbid and noxious element. These millions of armed men who are diill- ing every day in view of a war of general extermination have no hatred toward those they may be called upon to fight, and none of their leaders dare declare war. An agreement is inevi- table within a given time, which will be shorter than we suppose. I do not know whether it is because I am not much longer for this life, and that the light from over the horizon already affects my vision, but I do believe that our world is about to witness the realization of the words, ' Love one another.' " Alexandre Dumas. TUB CHURCH. 173 day. We have not fallen from a democracy to a plutocracy. We have not yet been an actual democracy, except temporarily in times of crisis. Even then it is a question whether it was the democracy so much as a spasm of virtue in the oligarchy that saved us. It is probable that we are more of a democracy than we ever were ; a plutocratic democracy, indeed, a democracy in which the many are ruled by the money motive and have their own poor way.^ But that is a step forward. If men could be freed, even to do wrong, there is hope for them. The spirit of Christianity can do little until it has set men free. A man had better have a vote to waste or sell than to have no vote at all. Disfranchisement is a denial of manhood, and produces the meanest vices. The spirit of Christianity, which secures men the ballot, will not cease until it has taught them how to use it. Concerning the right of the spirit of Jesus to make conquest of social and business relationships, the conscience of Christendom is quick- ^^ ^ ^ mi 1 1 ^^*® church. ened as it never was before. Ihe church is waking up to ask with a new seriousness whether she has not come near to apostasy because she has been so slow in insisting upon the application of the gospel to all spheres of life. Her official re- presentatives and organs are somewhat disposed to resent the promptings of the spirit of penitence. But it is a rare thing in history for the official 1 W. D. Howells, in North Amer. Rev., February, 1894. 174 BUSINESS. part of the cliurcli to be tlie living part of it. The church cannot do without its organization. But it creates and carries and uses this organiza- tion if it can, or rejects and renews it if it must : it is not created or carried or used or retarded, ex- cept temporarily, by the organization. The life of the church is not to be estimated by the saplessness of the dead wood with which it houses itself or makes its tools. That living minority, growing larger with each age, which is to create the church, and the world, too, of the future, is not infallible, has not kept pace with the demands upon it for the Christianization of social institutions ; but it is not guilty of the fatal error of imagining itself infalli- ble ; it is penitent because of its failures, and is sincerely asking how it may atone for past neglect, and find the right path for the future. The fact that the church fears she is on the brink of apos- tasy is itself the work of the spirit, and is the best promise that she will turn back from that brink. While in business relationships that partial self- ishness which seeks the family rather than the general interest is still supreme, its su- premacy is more in question. Moreover, common honesty is far less uncommon than it once was. The value of a salesman is less commonly reckoned in his ability to overreach, and more commonly in his ability to serve both seller and buyer. The seller, both at wholesale and retail, EXCEPTIONS. 175 finds it to his interest to be the best guardian of the interests of his customers. Fewer bargains are made over the wine-glass. The commercial traveler is the friend of his customers, and is trusted by them. The tradition that he is a hard case is destined to go the way of other traditions which have ceased to represent facts. Nowhere outside of Christendom do men trus,t one another in trade. Nowhere else can a child be sent to trade, or goods be safely ordered on sample. The spirit is making marked progress. The apparent exceptions to this are accounted for. In new businesses, where standards have not had time to be fixed, unfair dealin"^ is ,., , 1 <• 1 A 1 • 1 Exceptions. more likely to be round. A new kmd of manufacturing business always shows a lower average of morals than an established one. That form of commercial transaction which pertains to the exchange of stocks and bonds, futures, options, and such like, rather than tangible and actually transferable wealth, is most backward in the de- velopment of the spirit of common honesty. The unscrupulousness and gambling, which once reigned in the actual goods market, now hold high revel in speculation. When this form of commerce shall have had time to be brought under regulative con- trol, and instinctive honesty shall have come to have as fair a field in it as instinctive and often self-de- ceptive dishonesty now has, a change will appear. The men engaged in it are generally above suspi- 176 INDUSTRIALISM. cion in otlier walks of life, and when dealing with tangible wealth. The nature of the transactions, rather than the characters of the men, removes this department of business from the sj)here of influence of the Christian spirit. For much the same reasons the industrial rela- tionship is still backward in the manifestation of Industrial- *^^ spiHt of Christianity. The growth ^^^' of the Christian spirit of manly indej^eii- dence among employees has put an end generally to tlie old relationship of patron and client, in which the employer offset tyranny and underpay by charitable aid; a relationship which was a legacy from the days of chattel slavery or serf- dom.^ The employee is disposed to resent the sub- stitution of charity for justice, and the employer in turn to resent this resentment and call it in- gratitude. He thus often gets out of touch with his help, and thinks ill of human nature, because he is no longer thanked for bestowing with one hand what with the other he has taken — taken, it ^ The absence of high standards of honesty in the real estate business also grows out of the fact that the systems of land-hold- ing which are intrenched in law and custom had their origin in feudalism, and have been evolved Avith no regard to moral prop- erty rights, and only incidentally conform to such rights, when they do so at all. When the emancipation of land shall have been added to that of men and of women, this antinomianism in real estate matters Avill come to an end. The work of the spirit of right human relationships in this sjihere may have to be de- structive before it can be constructive, but it will surely accom- plish its ends. CORPORATIONS. 177 is true, without any realizing sense of its injustice, since he happens to have custom and law on his side. Some pursue the old precedent of injustice, and cease to offer charity. Others, and their number is increasing, attempt to do the fair thing, so far as permitted by the tyrannous condi- tions under which they themselves live and work. On the other hand, the employee is continually tempted to carry his suspicions of injustice to an extreme, and to assert his independence with great unwisdom. The case is bad, and the worst crisis has not yet come. Yet it is a good thing that the old relationship could not endure, and it was the operation of the spirit of Christianity that brought it to an end. It is certain yet to yield the peace- able fruit of right relationship. Another thing which has brought new and diffi- cult problems with it is the unprecedented growth of corporations. These have been made corpora- necessary by the changed conditions *^°"^" brought in by the material inventions and dis- coveries of this last century. These corporations give us stockholderism, which is a species of absen- teeism, especially liable to moral irresponsibility and cruelty. But the corporation, as the crea- tion of the people, with special privileges of lim- ited responsibility, should be correspondingly lim- ited in its liberties. When the public realizes, as it is now being compelled to realize, that it has more rights and responsibilities for control in the 178 LITERATURE. case of corporations tlian in that of individuals, it will be found that the corporation will become the best employer, because it will be in a large sense the agent of the public. The very permission to incorporate is a public franchise. The public is, therefore, a partner in every corporation, and en- titled to know its secrets and share in its man- agement. The sense of this is being quickened, and the new social spirit is leading society to claim its own. Where that spirit cannot rule it strives. Where it cannot bring peace it brings a sword. Its final victory is certain. The creative spirit will breathe the breath of life into corporations, and they will become living souls. In literature the spirit of Jesus exerts a wider and more powerful influence than it has ever had since the formation of the sacred canon ; Literature. . . , and whereas that was intensive and specialized, this is extensive and generalized. Even the realism that is in some respects so scan- dalous is one expression of the spirit which counts nothing common or unclean which pertains to human nature ; and the idealism which judges it does so on the score that it is itself the truest realism. The spirit is taking possession of learn- ing. The passion for verifiable truth is one mani- festation of the spirit which saved Hebrew life from the mythological extravagances of its con- temporaries, which kept Jesus from pretending to make any revelations concerning the future or SCIENCE. 179 the unseen which were not founded upon data as accessible to all as to himself, which prevented the apostolic writers from giving way to grotesque fancies. The saneness of that spirit was enough akin to the scientific spirit among the Greeks, so that the two brought forth results in affiliation. The motives were different. The Greek sought truth. The Christian was more ethical, and sought the right. Yet they could pursue together, and the moral enthusiasm of the Christian spirit car- ried forward the application of the Greek scienti- fic method. Unfortunately the scientific spirit had to do battle for its rights with nominal Christianity, and even to find its best agents for a Sci6nc6 time among the followers of Mohammed. But Mohammedanism, it is to be remembered, es- pecially in that hostility to mythology and idola- try which cleared the way for science, was an outgrowth of Hebraism and Christianity, and was in some respects more Christian than the Chris- tendom of its day. In so far as the representa- tives of nominal Christianity were mistaken in their conflict with the scientific spirit, they have been defeated. In so far as they were in the right in holding the pursuit of truth a means of service, they are being vindicated. A dozen years ago educational institutions might have been divided between those who encouraged learning for its own sake, and those who sought it as a 180 THE SACBED LITERATUBE. means of establishing foregone conclusions, which it was sui3posed the good of men required estab- lishing. To-day, foregone conclusions go a-begging for supporters in Christian institutions. On the other hand, truth-seekers no longer keep full peace with their own consciences unless they recognize some obligation to impart truth, or to use it as a means for the service of their fellows.^ On one side is a larger faith in the inherent healthfulness of truth ; on the other a deeper regard for human- ity. No chairs are being founded to-day to discuss the relations of sacred and secular truth. There is no longer any question as to their relations ; the distinction between them has vanished. The most important, perhaps, of all the crea- tions of the spirit of Jesus we have passed by. The sacred ^^^ ^^^ Same rcasous that the Hebrew literature, gacrcd literature merited a separate con- sideration, that of Christianity should also be treated apart from the other phenomena of the spirit of Jesus. By universal consent the New Testament writings are esteemed worthy to stand as the superstructure to the foundation laid in the Old. The unity of this Christian sacred literature is found in its centring about the person and being infused with the spirit of Jesus. No one ^ Science is in far less danger to-day from religious a-jjriori- ism, than from the desertion of the fields of pure truth-seeking for hasty application of scientific results to those services which promise commercial rewards. THE SACRED LITERATURE. 181 of tlie miscellaneous bits of writing which have found their way into it is without these marks.^ The New Testament literature is indeed an inci- dent, in that no man dreamed of producing- a body of writings which should rank with those of the Old Testament. Paul's epistles were business letters ; even that to the Komans, which came nearest to a treatise, being still a letter with im- mediate practical aims. It was only by accident that they were preserved. The Gospels and Acts had more the character of books, but they were for contemporary rather than for far future readers. The theory which gets rid of the fortuitous in the formation of this literature by the idea of an overruling Providence is not one which , , Till 1 Neither for- can here be adopted, because, however tuitousnor true the theory may be, the " Provi- tiai, but of dence " which it postulates does not belong in the category of genetic causes, and is not therefore the object of scientific perception. Instead of a providential interposition, however, 1 The most insignificant of them perhaps, the third epistle of John, does not mention Jesus. Yet it uses the expression "For His name's sake " in such a way as to indicate the supremacy of that name in the writer's interest ; and the spirit of Jesus breathes throug-h the whole letter. Wliatever may be thought of the authenticity of Jude and 2 Peter, it cannot be denied that they bear this mark. Even rabbinism, whicli was in general such a foe to spirituality, and which finds so large a place in James and Hebrews, and even creeps into Paul's writings, is there thoroughly mastered to spiritual uses. 182 SUFFICIENCY OF THE SPIRIT. we may fully account for this literature by the creative, selective, and preservative action of the spirit of Jesus. This spirit, while it belongs to the world of phenomenal cause and effect, oper- ates, like every life force, as a species of provi- dence. It is to be remembered that Jesus antici- pated the intervention, not of a providential but of a' spiritual cause to produce some sort of result like this : ^ precisely what result he doubtless did not himself foresee. The sufficiency of the New Testament Scrip- tures for the end which they serve in history and Sufficiency ^^ individual experience is vindicated of the spirit, ^iigj^ it ig understood that the action of the spirit is not directed to the preservation of all the material for a complete biography of Jesus or a history of the beginnings of Christianity. What this literature does is so to embody and transmit spiritual potencies and the spiritual likeness of Jesus that future ages never fail of a literary source for a renewal of spiritual energies or a correction of ideals. For this purpose too much literature would be as bad as too little. An un- wieldy mass of writings would weigh down the Christian movement like Saul's armor. " The sword of the spirit " ^ must not be too heavy to swing. For the use which it serves the New Tes- tament literature is abundant. To fulfill its spirit Christianity must be a popular, not an esoteric 1 John xiv. 26. 2 Eph. vi. 17. OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS. 183 movement; it must belong to the many, and not only to the few, the learned. To have overloaded it, as Confucianism was overloaded, with canon- ical literature, would have been to defeat that purpose, though all of it had been indited by the spirit. It would have been too much of a good thing. The continuity between the Old and the New Testaments, constituting them practically one body of literature, should here be remarked. oidandNew While the Bible does not possess the ^estameuts. character of a single book, as thoughtless zealots sometimes imagine, it is on the other hand no mere collection containing some of the more important literary " remains " of the Hebrews and early Christians, as others might say. Nor is its unity simply that of its grouping about the common subject of the messianic hope and its fulfillment. There is a continuity, both historical and literary. Not only does the same course of history run through both, but the Old Testament itself was the agent which formed a good deal of the history which gave rise to the New. The whole literature rests solidly upon a series of historical events, send- ing its roots down into history and drawing up in- spiration therefrom. It makes and is made by history. The literary continuity is somewhat as though a series of writers passed along the torch of literary inspiration from one to another down the ages. There is a sort of contagious literary 184 SPIBITUAL CONTINUITY. atmosphere from one end of the Bible to the other. This becomes the more apparent the nearer we ar- rive at a true chronological order for these writ- ings. The later writers wrote, and wrote in the way they did, partly because their predecessors wrote, and wrote in the way they did. So marked is this literary continuity, and so strong is the unity it has produced, that it has not been so difficult as it otherwise might have been to make a plausible pretense of calling it one book. The language and literary tone and force of the Old saturated the writers of the New, and largely determined its literary quality. The translation of the Seventy was the connecting link through which the Hebrew thought learned to make an effective use of the Greek tongue ; and thus, though in two languages, the Bible is one literature. But the Bible is one literature for the same rea- son that Hebrew and Christian history are one : Spiritual bccausc they are caused by the action of continuity. ^^^ ^^^^ g^j^,-^^ rj^j^^ q^^ TcstamCUt was, as has been seen, created by that spirit. The Greek translation of it was instigated by that spirit.^ The Christ was born and nurtured through the spirit, and lived his life under its guidance, and could not be understood until that spirit was poured out upon his disciples ; the historical Chris- tian movement only began after that event, and ^ No other literature has ever exhibited such a power to secure its own translation. MORAL TONE. 185 could not have begun but for it ; the occasions for writing the New Testament books were brought about directly or indirectly by that spirit; and the writers when they wrote, the redactors when they revised or edited, the compilers when they compiled, the people when they demanded, and the canonizers when they selected and rejected, were all under the influence of that spirit. The Bible is preeminently the product of the Hebrew and Christian spirit, the spirit of him who is called the Christ. In whatever other ways besides its remarkable unity the Bible is superior to or distinguished from other literatures, it is also for these in- . . X 1 floral tone. debted to the same spirit. Its moral superiority to the other literatures does not consist in a strained mechanical infallibility. Its moral maxims may be matched from Confucius or the Talmud. Its writers do not always maintain the absolute moral standard, but vary downward from it toward the standard of their times. The moral issues of slavery and polygamy, modern forms of intemperance and gambling, and the problems con- nected with complex political and industrial life, are not adequately met. Considered as a prose document, to be legally construed, the Bible is un- equivocal upon scarcely any point of morals ; and has been and is likely again to be quoted upon the wrong side. So long as it is supposed to be the repository of a complete code of morals, it is an 186 SPIBIT OF ACCUEACY. arsenal of proof texts for that class of reactiona- ries wlio resist moral reform and blockade moral progress. Yet as a moral agent the Bible has been without a rival, because in it is the spirit of perfect moral relationships. Its specific moral maxims have their value in the fact that they are cast in such form as to be vehicles for the trans- mission of that spirit. As regards the reliability or accuracy of the Bible in history or science, the case is precisely Spirit of tl^6 same. It is foolish to think to sur- accuracy. render the inerrancy of Scripture in this respect, and still cling to it in respect to moral and religious matters. The two cannot be so separated. In both cases the Bible is to be judged in compar- ison with its contemporaries, and by its spirit and the success of that spirit in affecting the matter and in making the literature an instrument for its further aims. As to the relation of Scripture to history and science, the remarkable thing is that it is so little at odds with them as it is. No other set of ancient writings could have stood the test of attempted harmonization as it has done without losing all dignity. The Scripture shows in these departments not so much less ignorance as less error than its contemporaries. Its writers do not know so much more than the others, but, as the humorist says, they know less that is not so. The Scripture is not overloaded with masses of incon- gruous details, the product of a riotous and super- FILLED WITH THE SPIRIT. 187 stitious imagination rather than of observation. It avoids glaring and grotesque blunders. It is the most fruitful of ancient literatures in reliable data for history. No other literature sends down such strong, thick taproots into the soil of history ; and where other means of verification are wanting, these roots themselves testify to the depth and quality of the material into which they once struck. Truth is as much greater than accuracy as poetry is greater than proof-reading. For its age the Bible is exceptionally accurate. It is still more exceptionally truthful : and this it owes to that spirit which is rightly characterized as " the spirit of truth." The Bible, however, is far more than an effect of the operation of the spirit. It is full of the power of the spirit, which flows from it ^nied with as from an infaUible reservoir. Unlike '''''^''''^ the scribes, it needs no credentials, but speaks with authority inherent. It can be let alone to do its own work. The missionaries in Madagascar, see- ing the cloud of persecution lowering, hurriedly translated the Scriptures ; and though they were murdered or expelled, the Bible Christianized Mad- agascar. If it be sown broadcast over the earth, a harvest is assured; and it has the power to get itself sown broadcast. Next to the Bible itself, perhaps the most remarkable literary phenomenon in the world is that of its crowding itself into all languages, even where it has to invent an alphabet 188 THE BIBLE AS A FORCE. and grammar, creating literatures where none be- fore existed, and thereby bringing a historical life to many tribes that appear to have never before had any other than that natural history which be- longs to them in common with other animals. The Bible is a conquering and creating power ; and it is the spirit of it which gives it this power. The Bible has been one of the chief actors in many of the world's most important historical The Bible as movcments. As the Old Testament had a force. niuch to do with the completion of He- brew history and the bringing in of the Messiah, so the whole Bible has functioned as an imperial power in subsequent history. A revival of straight- forwardness and reality, as against hypocrisy and fraud, has always been connected in some way with a translation or other rehabilitation of the Scrip- ture ; and then this newly won Bible, and the men who owed their strength and stimulus to it, led the forces of reform. All of those revolutions in which the Bible played an important part were the up- risings of strength and truthfulness and freedom, against unreality and enthroned falsehood and emp- tiness. This was true of the attempted Polish and Bohemian reformations, of the Wickliffian move- ment, and the Huguenot and the Lutheran. It was true of the Genevans and Scotch Covenanters and English Puritans. It is true of the effort to- day to emancipate the Bible from the bondage of dogma. Whatever criticism may be passed upon BIBLIOLATRY. 189 any one or all of these movements, or upon tlie men who led them, they were worldmakers, and the Bible was the source of their strength . The specific work of the Bible as an historical factor has been to reproduce, in other and later circumstances, courses of history having Reproduc- the same fundamental characteristics as ^'°"" those with which its own production was first as- sociated, to put the same creative spirit into his- tory. Thus the several marks which distinguish that original history, in so far as they were caused by that spirit, also distinguish these movements. They have been popular and human. Their springs have been in the common life of the peo- ple, and they have looked to the betterment of that life. Moreover, they. have been heroic, both in the nature of their achievements and in the characters of the leaders they have raised up for themselves from among the people. They have not been spo- radic, unrelated to other courses of history before and after them. They have been, like the Bible history itself, parts of the organic and progressive history of redemption. With all their lesser aims and heroes, they converge toward one aim and one Hero. So important a place has the Bible held in the higher movements of modern life that it is not stranoje that the reQ:ard for it should . - . ° . . Bibllolatry. sometmies be almost superstitious, or that it should appear to many to be the sole chan- 190 BIBLIOLATBY. nel through which the spiritual force of Christian- ity flows. Such a belief has in it at least the truth that literature is fitted to hold a transcendently important place in human life. If ever the time is to come when the corporate mind shall be a con- crete thing, a reality instead of an abstraction or generalization, when the Logos or Articulate Rea- son shall have become incarnate, there must be two chief modes of its manifestation ; and it is a question whether the one mode be not as essential as the other. One of these is an individual man, and the other is a literature. If Jesus be entitled to the name of the Christ, the Word, that is, if his reason was the Z/ogos, the supreme reason, com- mon to God and man, and if he was at the same time an historical personage, subject to the neces- sary limitations of a genuine manhood, then that Logos could not so far universalize itself in him as to be entitled to the name of the Eternal Word, until it had found its incarnation also in something more than an individual man, in something in which the limitations of the individual are tran- scended, and he becomes an element in the world mind. That something is literature. Upon the basis, therefore, of the newest science of mind, it may be assumed as a psychological necessity that the incarnate Logos must be embodied in a litera- ture as well as in a person. Moreover, in the light of the part which the written word has played in the history of Christen- SPIBIT AND LETTER. 191 dom, it is hard to imagine how the personality of Jesus could exercise the sway it does to- spirit and day if it had not had a literary embodi- ^^"^'^■ ment at least as nearly corresponding to its per- sonal perfection as its physical embodiment ever was. The Christ of the text-books may be a meta- physical figment. But the Jesus who is worshiped by the people is a literary personage if he is no- thing else. They are not so far wrong, there- fore, who speak of the Scripture as the " Word of God " in a sense nearly synonymous with that in which they apply that term to Jesus. It is a large truth which is perverted by the bibliolater. The spirit needs a letter. The revolt against literalism overreaches itself when it is too anxious to break down the letter in order to escape its bondage. The science of physical forces began to make pro- gress only after it had become an axiom that these forces were modes of motion of something, and that their material embodiment was coextensive and coterminous with themselves. The science of biology was held back many years because it was thought blasphemous to teach that the physical basis of life is complete, that all life is something living. The science of pneumatology, if the term may be allowed, must equally insist upon a com- plete material, or literal, basis for its spiritual phe- nomena.i There is no such thing as a disembodied 1 Locke's tenet, "Nihil est in intellectu quod non simnl sit in sensu," might be paralleled thus: "Nihil est in spiritu quod uou simul sit in litera." 192 PLENARY INSPIRATION. spirit of patriotism, existing without patriotic acts, or men, or laws, or literature, or something. If the spirit of Jesus be a real fact among facts, there must be, besides other embodiments, a literature of it. And there must be literature enough ; the lit- eral basis of the spirit must be commensui-ate with the spirit itself. If the Bible be, as is so generally contended, an infallible, that is, inexhaustible, source of spiritual power, the secret of its infalli- bility may well be sought, not in anything mystical or magical, but in the actual detailed facts con- cerning its books, sentences, phrases, words, and even roots of words. Language is rich enough in garnered suggestiveness, the heritage of history, to furnish a material or literary basis for any spirit which can operate effectively in human experience.^ In the presumption that the literal and the spiritual are coextensive in Scripture is the apology pieanry ^^^ ^^^ dogma of plenary inspiration, inspiration. ^|^-^|^ f^^^^ j^^ ^^^^ Satisfactory form m the Lutheran teaching that the written word is it- self, for its purj)ose, a sufficient instrument of a spiritual power inherent in it. The superiority of this over later Protestant statements is that while they are meant to affirm more, they actually affirm less, in that they rest their emphasis upon the idea that the Scripture is an effect of sj^iritual power ; and by stopping there, or by introducing the notion of an extramundane agency cobi^erating with the 1 See Max Miiller, Science of Thought, IMPOBTANCE OF SCBIPTUEE. 193 Scripture, using it as an instrument, they leave the impression that it is a mere inert effect. The Lu- theran teaching, on the other hand, is, that it is not only an effect but a reservoir of spiritual power, needing no extramundane assistance to enable it to do its work. Such recognition of the plenary power of Scrip- ture as an embodiment of the spirit of Christian- ity is the warrant for the concentration importance upon it both of religious interest and of «* scripture. all the resQurces of scholarship and culture. Were the Bible merely an inert or passive product of spiritual activity, such interest might pall or ex- haust itself. Were it less fully commensurate with its own spirit, the emphasis laid upon it might be overdone. So far, however, it has repaid all the labor and justified all the rational faith which have been expended upon it. The apostolic age would have failed had it not produced such a liter- ature. It might have succeeded if it had done nothins: else. Modern civilization could recover from the loss of everything else which the Hebrew and Christian spirit has done for it. It could not survive the loss of the classic literature of that spirit. This consideration, however, need cause no dread ; for that literature is the most impregnable fact in the world. Its loss is inconceivable. A good part of the aim of these lectures has been secured if they have succeeded in evoking the power of spiritual discernment and leading it 194 BECAPITULATION. to perceive this spirit as a part of the phenomenal Recapituia- worlcl, especially of that more important ^^°^' side of it which pertains to human so- ciety and develojiment. Before leaving this part of the subject, however, it will be worth while to rehearse again the main characteristics of spirits of the phenomenal type, and observe how closely this adheres to that type. To say that it is a phe- nomenon is not to deny that it may be more than that. It is simply to affirm that it is at least that, and hence that it is a proper object of investigation of phenomenal science, that it can be coordinated with other phenomena, that its causal action be- longs to the general category of cause, and that its presence and potencies in no way interfere with the historical continuities. It therefore comes within the range of scientific research to precisely the same extent that the personality of Jesus comes within that range. If scientific and critical study of the life of Jesus has added to the knowledge of him anything of value, likewise a purely scientific and critical study of this spirit ought to be of value. In treating it as a pure phenomenon we have endeavored to avoid the error of regarding it as an abstraction. It is a fact as objective as is the per- son of Jesus. It is not a quality of Hebrew life, or of Jesus, or of Christianity. It is a force oi3er- ating in and proceeding from them, as heat from a stove or light from a lamp ; and it is a different RECAPITULATION, 195 tiling from tliem, as heat is a different thing from the stove and light from the lamp. It is imparted from person to person, from person to book, from book to person, from person or book to nation and backwards again : its embodiments and manifesta- tions are innumerable, but it is in its own proper and real sense distinct from them all. Yet it is never so distinct from them but that it is dependent upon them. There is no more of the Christian spirit in the world than there is of the Christ. As life is a living thing, as fire is a burning thing, so spirit is a spiritual thing. This spirit is a manifestation of the relations of personalities. It has to do with things other than persons only so far as these things are the instru- ments of the interrelations of persons. Whatever pertains to persons therefore pertains to it. If the boundaries of personalities be vague, so are the boundaries of this spirit. It is not always easy to distinguish the spirit of Christianity from mere animal spirits, the fruits of good digestion or san- guine temperament. And as personality is but vaguely determined on the side toward the brutes, so it is not limited upward toward possible person- alities in the unseen, of whose existence one may have guesses without being able to surmise as to their nature. And as this spirit ministers to the normal interplay, not only between persons, but between persons and things or sub-persons, it also ministers to the guidance of persons in their atti- 196 RECAPITULATION. tude toward the lowering or smiling firmament of the unknown. That is to say, it creates or modi- fies not only man's animal and other material rela- tionships, but also his religious attitudes. It is a social force. It exalts the individual that he may be a better unit for society. It controls society that it may be a better environment for the individual. As the spirit which characterized and proceeded from the normal man, it is the spirit of normal social relationships, and appears to be des- tined to establish and universalize such relation- ships. It will do this, not by bringing persons to a dead uniformity, but rather by developing ex- ceptional individuality, in truth, by so fostering individuality that there can be no one who is not exceptional. It is of such units only that the per- fect society can be made. When, reasoning from the character and history of this spirit, we seek to learn what promise is contained in it as the ruling element or force in the world, the answer is " the perfection of personality and of personal relation- ships, and the subordination of everything else to that end." YI. The end of the operation of the Christian spirit, the spirit of Jesus, will be the establishment of perfect personality, involvino^ perfect per- 1 1 • T . <> n 1 • T mi 1 The goal Of sonal relationships oi all kinds, ihe hu- the spiritual 1 1 T -, T CI movement. man person holds three classes oi rela- tionships: that toward nature, the physical; that toward other men, the social ; and that toward the unseen world, concerning which it is impossible to know in the same way as regards the others whether it is most nearly a physical or most nearly a personal relationship. This relationship to the unseen world, if it be personal, is the religious relationship. The Hebrew spirit entered into history as a so- cial, or, as it is more generally called, an ethical force. It concerned itself with conduct, -rjje gpi^jt a which, as Matthew Arnold used to love ""^'^^ ^^"''• to iterate, is three fourths of life. It demanded that this three-fourth interest, as it were, should dominate, and that the relation to nature and to the unseen should be determined by it, that the so- cial relationships should ride both the physical and the religious. This was no usurpation in the sphere of the religious, for it had to reform religious atti- 198 THE SPIBIT A MORAL FORCE. tildes, which had themselves actually been deter- mmed neither by social nor religious, but by physi- cal or animal considerations, or by social conditions which themselves were so determined. It was the interest of conduct rather than of truth that ban- ished mythology from nature, and condemned witchcraft and necromancy, and ignored the pseu- do-sciences, and taught the best Hebrew mind to look upon nature as a mechanism undistracted by the caprices of personalities. The desire for wholesome human relationships brought about an exceptionally wholesome attitude toward nature. The Hebrew spirit, being one of normal personal relationships, produced an instinct of purity which looked upon the intercourse of human persons with demi-gods, or with those who had passed out of the sphere of the visible, as uncanny and unclean.^ It was felt that man was in no sense the companion of nature, or of those parts of it which had not risen to the personal plane. He was its lord, and his proper companionshi}) was only with his own species, and sin came in when he held converse or ^ The mythological gods were monsters growing out of primi- tive chaos, and hence part of nature itself. There is no reason to think that the beings called " sons of God," in Gen. vi. 2, were thought of as different from them. The serpent of Eden was probably a mere animal divinity or jinn. The Hebrew God was conceived of as in a wholly different category, like Plato's God. In this sense Philo was right when he identified the thought of Plato and Moses. Only Plato was ruled by the truth-seeking and Moses by the right-seeking spirit ; one was scientific, the other ethical, and they reached much the same goal. A RELIGIOUS FORCE. 199 commerce with the lower animals or with demi- gods. The Hebrew attitude toward nature, so much like that of modern science, was produced by the sense of the fundamental importance and rightful supremacy of human personality, and the value of human relationships, to which nature was to minister. Thus it was the social spirit which determined it, declaring that the known universe belonged to man and not man to it. Buckle clas- sifies humanity into the European and the Asiatic. In Europe, he says, man has power over nature ; in Asia nature has power over man. The Hebrew spirit of lordship over nature developed in Asia as a protest against the prevailing tendency, and through Christianity it has secured to the Euro- pean man his ascendency. But the same spirit limited itself in its affirma- tion of the superiority of man. Man could become lord of nature, but not of the Power be- ^ religious hind nature, from which both man and ^^^^^' nature came. For it cannot be denied that man is a derived and dependent being; and to have depersonified wholly the non-human would have been to give to man an impersonal origin, like the mythological gods, and to make him dependent upon an impersonal power from which he came and to which he must return. This the Hebrew spirit could not tolerate, because it was inconsistent with the dignity and importance attributed to human personality. It therefore wrought out the thought 200 A BELIGIOUS FORCE. of one God, whose nature was, like man's,i personal and capable of personal relationships, who was the author of nature and of man, and who had ordained nature for man's use. Whatever other gods might exist had no proper relations with men, and their worship was a species of uncleanness. Thus it was the spirit which exalted personality, and personal relationships which produced Hebrew henotheism,^ and then further evolved it into monotheism. There came to be for them^ but one God, the almighty and immutable creator of all things visi- ble and invisible, between whom and man nature was a mere medium of intercourse, itself only an inert and unconscious thing. While on one hand nature was wholly depersonified, on the other hand it was made the organ for the expression of a su- preme ideal personality. Without any knowledge of or any interest in physical science, prompted only by the spirit of the right human relationships, the Hebrew came to hold an attitude toward nature which cannot be impugned by science ; for it is not the one immutable God* of the Hebrews which science quarrels with, but conflicting gods, or one God who is fickle and overturns his own plans. 1 Anthropomorphism was justified, since the alternative was to think God as less noble than man, against which the social inter- est would protest. See Piepenbring, Theology of Old Testament^ pp. 96-99. 2 Ihid., pp. 92-96. ^ 1 Cor. viii. 5, 6. * Moral immutability seems to have been the fundamental attribute of Jehovah. Piepenbring, Theol. of O. T., pp. 101, 102. MIRACLES. 201 The characteristic thing in the Hebrew literature is not that there are a few instances where the principle of divine transcendence and natural uni- formity is not consistently carried out, 111 1 p T • • 1 • Miracles. but that there are so tew. It is m this that the influence of the spirit is shown. More- over the cases in which the best of that literature permits the occurrences of interventions is where some national crisis or the appearance of some great personality gives it a plausible excuse in the social interest. The sacred writers would not have objected on scientific or philosophical grounds to any number of miracles. Yet as a matter of fact the only point at which any considerable number of them are recorded in the Scriptures is in con- nection with the personality of Jesus. It is in accordance with the emphasis which is placed upon personality, and especially upon a personality which stands at the head of the race, that he should have a greater mastery over nature than others. It is a trite observation that the miracles of Jesus all have an ethical motive. They, therefore, if any, would come under that law of the Hebrew spirit which declares the supreme importance of human interests and the subordination of nature. Yet here the question wiU be asked whether it is ethically good that Jesus should mas- ter nature, even for the benefit of others, mastery of by disobeying laws which all other men have to reach their ends by discovering and 202 SPIRITUAL MASTEBY OF JESUS. heeding. The spirit seems to have taken that also into account ; for, on his own witness, he, guided by the spirit,^ declined to found his king- dom uj)on any such mastery, and deprecated the disposition of men to make his miracles the basis of belief in him ; while the best attested of these miracles, those of the cure of the demoniacs and of diseases which have a nervous or psychical origin, are explained by the power of a strong and symj^athetic personality to touch in such cases the secret sjDrings of natural causation. It was the mastery which Jesus had in the realm of sj^irit, that is of personal relationships and character, which gave him his chief wonder-working power. While he himself seemed to be unaware of a limit to his power to work miracles, except his own choice, and, significantly, in some cases the faith of the subjects, yet he was withheld from the mistake of unduly testing that power because he was so unerringly guided by the spirit. It was not because he thought he could not, but because he thought he ought not, that he did not go further in the attempt to interfere with nature. The social spirit produced a sanity very similar to that which might have been produced by the scientific spirit. When men come to be guided as unerringly as was Jesus by the spirit of right human relationships, they will come to act much as he did toward nature. Moved by pity and 1 Matt. iv. 1 ; Mark i. 12 ; Luke iv. 1. SCIENCE AND THE SPIRIT. 203 love, they will make otherwise impossible con- quests over nature. This is the spirit which so continually prompts physicians and nurses to al- most superhuman efforts or risks or endurances. " Greater works than these shall he do," said Jesus, "because I go to my Father," ^ that is, " because I leave men to the guidance and stimu- lus of my spirit." It is not to be overlooked that a great part of the scientific conquest of nature has found its incentives in the Christian spirit. In science and the progress of medicine and surgery the ^^^ '^'"*- spirit of pure science has doubtless often pre- vailed, as well as that of worldly ambition or avarice at times; yet even here comparatively little would have been accomplished but for the pressure of demand upon these sciences by the spirit of human affection .2 Most persons employ a physician more quickly for those they love than for themselves; while the founding and support of hospitals, which have contributed so much to the advancement of scientific healing, is very notably a work of the Christian spirit. Foremost among explorers and pioneers have always been 1 John xiv. 12. 2 " It is not mind, except within the narrow limits of this defi- nition, that achieves the vast results which civilization presents, and which, it must be admitted, could not be achieved without it. It is the great social forces which we have been passing in review that have accomplished all this." Lester Ward, Dynamical Sociology, vol. i., p. 698. 204 KNOWLEDGE THE SERVANT OF LOVE, missionaries, and they have contributed largely to geography, geology, meteorology, archaeology, philology, ethnography, in fact to all the sciences.^ Imj)ortant among explorers and pioneers also is the home-seeker who is animated by the Christian spirit. In the pursuance of the social rather than the scientific aim the Hebrew and Christian spirit tended to turn away from mythology and to seek pure knowledge, because it was found to be more effective for purposes of mastery over nature. While it has thus made knowledge a means rather than an end, and hence cannot be called scientific, it has served the cause of science by bringing man into a wholesome attitude toward nature, by making science a trained servant. Where it is plain that science is a servant, that it is better suited than anything else for the furtherance of ends sought by the s^^ner- Knowledge . . . ,. ° . . . tiie servant ous mstmcts, prcjudicc agaiust it gives way. Persons will unite in the suj)port of a hospital where the strictest scientific methods are applied, and will insist upon such methods ; yet these same persons will not support a school where scientific methods are used in the study of the Bible, until it becomes evident to them that these methods will serve better than others the social aims which they cherish, usually aims that have to do with the supposed good of their chil- dren. That the scientific spirit should be subor- 1 See Missions and Science, Thomas Laurie. KNOWLEDGE THE SERVANT OF LOVE. 205 dinate to the social, that knowledge should be sought for other than its own sake, is regarded by the scientific man as a most dangerous doctrine. Yet, dangerous or not, " truth for love's sake " is the law of the spirit of Christianity. He who is thoroughly swayed by that spirit will seek truth and avoid error as earnestly and as skillfully as though he sought truth for its own sake. He will have a supreme faith in truth as more wholesome than error. He will discern indeed that error is deadly. Nominal Christianity has gone wrong in this respect less for want of love of truth than for want of faith in it. It has been afraid of truth, has thought it safer at times to follow error and do untruth that good might come. It has also gone astray through an excess of zeal for particular statements of truth, " The Truth," as it has been called. The lapses into superstition and mythology and obscurantism, however, have been in spite of rather than because of the spirit of Christianity. It may usually be questioned whether these evils would not have been far worse had Christianity had nothing to do with the eras when they prevailed. On the whole, humanitar rianism has gone hand in hand with intelligence and with the encouragement of true learning.^ 1 Out of the difficulty of finding a right adjustment in this matter grew that sad controversy between Charles King'sley and Father Newman, in the course of which the former accused the latter of want of sincerity, saying- that " Truth for its own sake had never been a virtue of the Roman clerg^y. Father Newman 206 immobtjLlity. In banishing mytliology and outlawing necro- mancy, the Hebrew S23irit went none too far. Yet Immortal- ^^^re again, as in the depersonifying of **^' nature, there was a limit. Wholly to informs ns that it need not be, and on the whole ought not to be." The inference was that Newman justified the tolerance or fostering of error or the use of prevarication, the sin which is expressed to the Protestant mind in the term "Jesuitism." All the world loves Kingsley, and refuses to think that he was not the sincerer and completer man of the two. His indignation against what he honestly believed to be the coixrse of Newman was righteous and noble. Yet Newman was logically right in saying that truth for its own sake ought not to be the distinctive virtue of the Koman or any other clergy. The clergy exist not primarily for scientific but for redemptive purposes. To them truth is "in order to salvation." Dangerous indeed is such a principle. Error is liable to be protected by it or truth post- poned " in order to salvation ; " and salvation is liable to become identified with the interests of the church or the society of Loyola, and truth made the servant of these. Now truth cannot be made the servant of any institution, of church or state or family. The only thing more sacred or more powerful than truth is love, not as represented in any institution, but as repre- sented in the spirit of di^dne sonship and human brotherhood. Newman failed to see that, as very many men to-day outside the Roman communion fail as utterly to see it. Kingsley, royal lover as he was, while he did valiant battle for " truth for truth's sake," himself has fallen imder condemnation of his own descen- dants for having, as the charge was, loved his faith and his children so much that he taught them that faith after it had lost its hold upon his own reason. It is a bitter arraignment, and certainly unjust as well as vmfilial. At the most, Kingsley had lost sight of the foundations. He had never been convinced of their non-existence. The spirit of right human relationships held him faithful to that which he could not scientifically verify. It was an unconscious application of Newman's dangerous but necessary principle. SPIRITUAL PURITY, 207 ignore the hope of immortality was, even from its own point of view, an extreme ; for was not this hope founded upon an assertion of the value of personality and the inherent sacredness and permanence of the personal relationships? The taboo, however, placed upon this doctrine in the earlier Hebrew history is abundantly justified as a practical measure. The hope had been de- bauched, and, instead of resting upon and minis- tering to sound personal characteristics and rela- tionships, was but the pander to vicious animal tendencies or the instrument of intimidation in the hand of priestcraft. Man needed to be ethi- calized and socialized in his tangible character and relationships before the imagination could be trusted in the realm of faith. For one thing, it was necessary to establish the principle that it is a realm of pure faith, not of knowledge, that the dead do not, so far as can be known, come and go or send communications between that realm and this. True to its character as ethical rather than scientific, the Hebrew spirit stamped such inter- communication as unwholesome rather spiritual than unreal, and forbade it as it had for- ^^^^y- bidden polytheism, as a species of impurity. It is probable that the Hebrews never came to think of it as unreal, as indeed it is questionable whether many of them ever became thorough- going mono- theists, or gave up a lurking notion that the 208 SPIBITUAL PUBITY. heath eu gods had some sort of demoniac existence at least.i But the brand of uncleanness was put ujjon polytheism and intercourse with the dead, and thus for practical purposes the doors of intercom- munication between the two worlds were closed. Jesus never denied the possibility of such inter- course, yet he did not engage in it.^ It is a remarkable fact that to-day the attitude of Christendom toward the question of intercourse with the dead is one of disapproval rather than of very positive denial. The feeling of incredulity is less obvious than that of uncanniness ; and the air of uncleanness about spiritism and theosophism has had more than anything else to do with limit- ing their spread. The work of a scientific commis- sion, a few years ago, proving the dishonesty of leading mediums and the fraudulent character of their alleged communications from the other world, produced scarcely a ripple of effect.^ About all that science can do is to verify the suggestions of the wholesome Christian spirit, which looks upon such things with something of the disfavor it does upon information secured by eavesdropping or 1 1 Cor. X. 20. ^ The transfiguration and resurrection phenomena appear to contradict this statement. They belong-, however, in a category by themselves. The former would lose nothing of its significance if it were explained on psychological grounds. Yet concerning it Jesus desired silence. The resurrection ai^pearances w^ere asserted to differ wholly from those of an ordinary ghost, — and they came to a summary end. ^ See Beport of the Seyhert Commission. FBIENDSHIP. 209 secrets extorted by priestcraft. In the warfare against superstition, the scientific is on the whole less effective than the social spirit. This last acts upon the rule that the world is better off, human character and relationships are better off, for let- ting such things alone. Whether they are real or unreal, they are anti-social. While the motive of the. Christian spirit in for- bidding rather than denying the reality of inter- course with the inhabitants of the unseen . . 'Ill The supreme world IS because it is a social rather than spiritual re- . . , latiouship. a scientific spirit, yet perhaps it comes as near the truth as that science which is so unscien- tific as to venture a universal negative. In this, however, it is still true to its social character. For, being the spirit it is, it establishes such rela- tionships between persons that it cannot without self-annihilation let go the hope and faith that such relationships shall be independent of the circum- stance of death, which appears to belong to the purely physical order. The Christian spirit is not content with affirming brotherhood, a common origin and nature. It uses this as a basis only, out of which to develop a community of end. Perhaps the term which most nearly describes the highest fruitage of the social spirit is friend- ship, " the master passion," as it has been ^ — , 1 1 . . 1 IT' Friendship. called.^ Friendship is that purely disin- terested relationship which may spring up out of 1 Trumbull, The Master Passion. 210 FRIENDSHIP IN HISTORY. the soil of other relationships, but which transcends them all. It is so much more easily observed in those whose other interests do not coincide that it is sometimes thought not to exist elsewhere. Yet it is probable that by far the greater share of friendship in the world exists in family relation- ships, where it is so interwoven with other inter- ests that it cannot be isolated for examination. As only small quantities of aluminium have been reduced to the metallic state, although it forms a large proportion of the substance of common clays and slates ; so, while friendship unalloyed is ex- ceptional, a great part of healthy common life is made up of it in combination. It is the one purely spiritual relationship. Friendship has played a great part in history. But for the friendship of David and Jonathan, He- Friendship brew history could never have flowed in in history. ^^^ channels it did. But for the friend- ship of Alexander and Hephaiston, Macedonian civilization would almost certainly not have over- spread the Orient as it did, and hence all subse- quent civilization would have been different from what it was and is. Galilee and Judea would have had a different history, and Jesus would therefore have been a different man. There would have been no Saul of Tarsus with his cosmopolitan mind, no John with his profound mysticism, no Alexan- drian Origen following in the steps of the Alexan- drian Philo. But for the friendship of Octavius FBIENDSIIIP IN HISTORY. 211 and Agrippa, no Augustan age would have given the necessary lull for the nourishing of a new vital civilizing agency before the forces of anarchy broke loose. Charlemagne was fitted to found in western Europe only a blind military despotism, no better than that which now blights its eastern plains. But he had a friend, Alcuin, a scholar and a Christian, through whose influence he was led to found schools, encourage learning, publish humane laws, and make western Europe the pio- neer in the only civilization that has the promise of perfection in it. That William the Silent was able to check the extension of Spanish tyranny to- ward the north, where it would have hemmed the Reformation into central Germany and shut the gates whence poured the liberty-loving spirit of the Netherlands on to the shores of Massachusetts, was because of an early and cherished friendship with Charles the Fifth. Thus many if not most of the luminaries of history are double stars re- volving about each other under the constraining influence of this spiritual force. There is no such thinjr as a materialistic civilization. What some- times seems like the carcass of history is alive, thrilling and throbbing with spiritual energies, and whenever it rouses itself and does anything of ac- count, some spiritual cause, in many cases friend- ship, is at the bottom of it. It is no occasion for surprise, therefore, to dis- cover that friendship is the most descriptive term 212 THE BASIS OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. for the formative element in the kingdom of Jesus. The love of Jesus for men was of the Christian friendly as distinguished from the patron- socie y. iziug type. He met all men on the plat- form of unassumed friendliness. He cherished sacred and particular friendships. The idyl of his intimacy with the household in Bethany is un- surpassed in literature. His relations with his dis- ciples matured as time went on, until, as he was about to leave them, the intercourse of master and follower was transfigured into the tenderer and stronger relation of friendship ; for, as he said, he had told them all he knew, and put the key to all the secrets of his kingdom into their hands.^ The answer to the whole problem of how his kingdom is to be built is contained in the friendshij) that existed between him and them ; ^ a friendship) which it would be interesting to compare with that which was at the basis of the Roman peace during which 1 John XV. 15. 2 " We lay aside the pen of criticism at a moment when the Social Question stirs all Europe, a question on whose wide do- main all the revolutionary elements of science, of religion, of poli- tics seem to have found the battlefield for a great and decisive contest. Whether this battle remains a bloodless conflict of minds, or whether like an earthquake it throws down the ruins of a past epoch with thunder into the dust, and buries millions be- neath the wreck, it is certain that the new epoch will not conquer unless it be under the banner of a great idea which sweeps away egoism and sets human perfection in human fellowship as a new aim in the place of restless toil that looks only to the personal." Lauge, History of Materialism, last page. THE BASIS OF CHBISTIAN SOCIETY. 213 he was born. The kingdom of Jesus is a spiritual kingdom, not so much because it affirms a unity of origin for the race, saying, " God hath made of one blood all nations of men," ^ not because it says that men are brothers, but because it gives prom- ise that this unity of origin and nature shall be crowned by the unity of the spirit. Paul, who made such a fight for the spirit against the dead letter, was a famous friend. Dean Stanley has somewhere said of him that he '^ had a thousand friends and loved each of them as though he had a thousand souls." It is not strange that he claimed that the true descendant of Abraham, " the friend of "God," was a spiritual descendant. The law of friendship is the supreme constitutional law of the empire of Jesus. The spirit of friendship is the supreme manifestation of the spirit of Jesus in society. It contains in it, as it had in his case, the elements of true fellowship, of vicariousness, and of sovereignty. " I have called you friends," he said, " because all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you ; " and " Greater love hath no man now than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends ; " and " Ye are my friends if ye do whatsoever I command you." As prophet, as priest, as king, Jesus is swayed by the motive, ruled by the law, of friend- ship.^ He was no patron ; he never acted in a 1 Acts xvii. 26. 2 Whether these conversations recorded in the fourth Gospel 214 MOTIVE FOR MATERIAL BETTERMENT. condescending manner. He was the friend, in the most genuine sense, even of publicans and harlots. His kingdom cannot make progress through patron- age, however kindly intentioned.^ Friendship can- not rest upon patronage. It is contrary to its spirit. The improvement of the material bases of life and the equitable adjustment of conditions are of exceedingly great importance, because for material Only thus may they be fitted for the growth upon them of disinterested friend- ships. The chief opportunity for the growth of such relationship is the family; but where the struggle for bare subsistence is too severe, or where ignorance is besotting, that end is not reached, and the family fails of its main purpose. Extremes either of poverty or of wealth interfere with the transfiguration of physical into spiritual relation- ships ; and it is because of this that the social spirit is preparing to put an end to the curse of those extremes. The ideal society which that spirit will create will be one where every other relation- ship, while serving inferior though necessary ends, actually took place or not, they represent the facts concerning Jesus' relations to his disciples, as abundantly confirmed by the other sources. 1 A public bathroom in one of our cities used to have a placard conspicuously posted, announcing that it was maintained by the " Society for Improving the Condition of the Poor." It is not strange that the enterprise is not solving the social enigma very rapidly. The poor, it seems, with pardonable ingratitude, would rather go dirty than bathe under that sign. GEORGE FOX, 215 shall minister the best opportunity for the forma- tion and cherishing of friendships. Jesus con- ceived of the inhabitants of the celestial world as having become independent of the necessity of the inferior and material, and hence as living in re- lationships purely spiritual.^ Says Professor See- ley : " This eternal question of a livelihood keeps us on a level from which no ideal is visible : " but in the true society every one would " be alive ; the cares of livelihood would not absorb the mind, taming all impulse, clogging all flight, depressing the spirit with a base anxiety, smothering all social intercourse with languid fatigue, destroying men's interest in one another, and making friendship impossible." The idea that the fundamental relationship be- tween Jesus and his followers, namely, friendship, is the formula for the spiritualized soci- ety, was grasped by those disciples of the spirit who went to the rather pardonable extreme of emphasizing the spirit as the only permanent and real thing in Christianity, the followers of George Fox. They tried to let go all institutional- ism, metaphysics, dogma, and all other instrumen- talities, and to open their minds for the direct ac- tion of the spirit. They were perhaps the first to read Scripture for the sole and conscious purpose of imbibing its spirit. And they called themselves " Friends." Whatever other errors they may have 1 Luke XX. 34-36. 216 GEORGE FOX. made, they appear to have been infallibly guided in the choice of that term as the best expression of the spirit of Christianity. The early history of this movement, before mannerism on one hand and fanaticism on the other had begun to obscure the real spirit of the founder, shows unmistakably that it had realized the social mission of the gos- pel at the start, and had been led to propose re- forms far in advance of the times. Thus it is said that "Fox, soon after his conversion, began to speak to judges to do justice, to liquor-sellers not to let people have more drink than would do them good. He petitioned Parliament not to allow more public houses than were needed for bona fide trav- elers, and to do away with mere drinking-houses. He saw that the land mourned because of oaths, adidteries, drunkenness, and profaneness. He saw the enormity of capital punishment for theft, also the evil of tardy trial and long association in the evil company of the jails." Fox himself was not a quietist. He used phrases in the sense in which af- terward Wesley used them, but his followers stere- otyped them and used them to express the empty mysticism of Madame Guyon. The movement be- gan with the primary aim of social betterment, and its spirit was truly described in the term " friend- liness." Could it have succeeded, the world would have been to-day a full century farther along in its social development. But Fox lived before his day. An individualistic revival had to take precedence FRIENDSHIP AND IMMORTALITY. 217 of the social, and spiritual forces turned their ener- gies into the channels of Wesleyanism. But Fox, sensitive to the whisperings of the spirit, foresaw and coined the formula for that social organization which is to be the final product of the creative and recreative energies of the spirit of Christ. That formula is " friendship." A society, however, whose organic law is friend- ship cannot be an irreligious society. For the spirit of friendship will not brook the Friendship confinement of human interests to the Ja^h^uim- sphere of the visible, where death is cer- "mortality. tain at some time and liable at any time to inter- rupt the closest fellowships. Friendship is not of the dead, but of the living. Thus the final social law sets infinite value upon the individual.^ There is an absolute incompatibility between the cher- 1 " With the advance of civilization a higher value has been set upon the individual life. . . . As communities have left be- hind their brute inheritance and emerged into the light of reason and humanity, and in precisely the degree of their jirogress, have they set the stamp of preciousness upon man as man. ... In earlier times individuals were worth more to society than they are to-day. . . . Now the thing to be noted is, that, along with this growth of the unessentialness of the individual, society has set upon his existence a higher estimate. He has taken on a new utility, a moral essentialness. The farther we get from animal- ism, and the nearer our approach to a full humanity, two things become plainer, — the decrease of the individiial as a physical and temporal utility, and his steady increase as a moral and eternal. . . . Where this movement will end no one can foresee ; but there is an amazing inspiration in the fact." Gordon, Witness to Im- mortality. 218 LIFE AND IMMORTALITY ishing of even the memory of a friendship, and the notion that death is the end of all. The feud between death and friendship can end only with the complete conquest of one of the combatants. The epic of this war, one of the world's few great philosophic poems,^ is the picture of the triumph — in the mind of one fully alive to all its difficulties — of the hope of immortality over the seeming victory of death. It is not an argument, but a his- tory of the struggle. Its construction, therefore, is hardly set forth in propositions, yet some of its assertions give out the faith of which it lays hold, as the following : — " That each, who seems a separate whole, Should move his rounds, and fusing all The skirts of self again, should fall Remerging in the general Soul, *' Is faith as vague as all imsweet : Eternal form shall still divide The eternal soul from all beside ; And I shall know hira when we meet." ^ When, therefore, the spirit of friendship shall have established itself as the organic social law, it Life and ^^ ^ scicutific Certainty that it will have bToughtlo^ generated a faith in the survival of ligiit. friends ; ^ and since, in such a society, all ^ Tennyson's In Memoriam. 2 Canto xlvii. ^ In canto cvi. of In Memoriam, the third Christmas hymn in the poem, ending " Ring in the Christ that is to be," Tennyson BROUGHT TO LIGHT. 219 are either actual friends or possible ones, to which the spirit will go out spontaneously in friendly de- sire, a general faith in immortality will arise. The stimulus of this faith, seeking its verification, will lead to the most eager search for evidences which can chano^e it into knowledo^e. Most of the efforts to prove the doctrine of immortality have had this kind of personal motive.^ Though the search for shows that he realizes that the problem of immortality, which his personal friendship brings to him, involves the solution of the social problem. If he could only have been true to the inspira- tion of the hour when he wrote that ode ! he might have been to the emancipation of man what Whittier was to that of the American black. But he let the very reputation it brought him ensnare him into the toils of the Philistinism of the British aris- tocracy, which condemned him henceforth in blindness to grind verses for its innumerable royal weddings. It was a thousand pities. ^ " The proper function of intellect is the service of the social sympathies." (Comte, System of Positive Policy.) Comte's un- balanced but stupendous intellect grasped at the truth that a true sociology cannot be constructed without dealing with social forces in the form of sympathies, which demand the right to hold an attitude of some kind toward the region beyond death. It was under the influence of this dimly apprehended truth that he pro- posed that the citizens of his positivist state should worship the dead. It is true that he saw this only under the influence of a certain personal experience of which he said that but for it his system would have been " purely intellectual," that is, notional, but that " the necessary complement of the system was now sup- plied by an angelic inspiration too soon developed by death." In estimating Comte, it is customary to eliminate this as a part of his unfortunate and abnormal personal equation. The fact, however, is that that experience was normal and typical, and not universal only, because society itself is abnormal. Let society become what by its very nature it ought to be, and Comte's experience of 220 " ARTICLES " OF FAITH. evidence fail, tlie realm will not be deserted, but will continue as one of pure faith, concerning which it shall be said, " We have but faith : we cannot know ; For knowledge is of things we see." ^ Though " I found Him not in world or sun, Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye ; Nor thro' the questions men may try The petty cobwebs we have spun ; " ^ though when ..." Faith had fallen asleep, I heard a voice, ' Believe no more,' And heard an ever-breaking shore That tumbled in the Godless deep ; " A warmth within my breast would melt The freezing reason's colder part, And like a man in wrath the heart Stood up and answered, ' I have felt.' " ^ That is to say, the spirit will produce a faith which is not born of science. But although this faith will be of a different logical and psychological complexion from know- ledge, the degree of its certitude will be as great as that of any knowledge can be. Science will have a personal friendship confronting and defying death will become a social factor no longer negligible. ^ In Memoriam, Prologue. 2 Ibid., canto cxxiv. Referring evidently to the Bampton lec- tures. ^ Ibid., canto cxxiv. ''ARTICLES'' OF FAITH 221 to deal not with the legitimacy of this certitude so much as with its history and nature "Articles" as a fact. " Articles " of religious faith °^^^^*^' have not been created, nor have they often been ably defended, by the scientific method. They have been created by interests of various sorts, at the best by those of the affections.^ A case which illustrates this fully is the modern faith in the universal salvation of those who die in infancy. It is a faith of recent origin, without that founda- tion in the language of Scripture upon which Pro- testants always profess to build, with no organic place in any of the official theologies or theodicies, so incongruous with them, in fact, that where it comes it reduces their structures to ruins. Yet not only can it not be kept out, but no one dare bring upon himself the penalty of uttering a pro- test against it. Neither Scripture nor theology nor science support it. Yet there it is, — because the spirit of Christendom demands and commands it. Kant founded the faith in immortality upon 1 We have come into being through a long course of Christian culture, and so find in ourselves a faith tendency, with something of the movement and certainty of natural forces." Gordon, Wit- ness to Immortality^ p. 13. " One thing only can finally bring humanity to an ever endur- ing peace, — the recognition of the imperishable nature of all poesy in art, religion, and philosophy, and the permanent recon- ciliation on the basis of this recognition of the controversy between investigation and imagination." Lange, History of Materialism^ vol. iii., p. oGO. 222 KANT. a moral imperative, wliicli did not investigate or reason, but spoke cateo'orically. Perhaps Kant. T- ^ 1 • ^ 1 • • i- Kant, worknig as a metaphysician, dis- covered the same fact which we here find in history under the more vital form of an actual spiritual force. Perhaps his abstract categorical imperative is nothing else than our concrete and irresistible spiritual potency. Certain it is that the faith in immortality has survived and does survive in spite of the lameness of its evidences. Two forces have kept it alive. The selfish desire or dread of con- tinued existence has debauched men with sordid and sensual otherworldiness. But, on the other hand, it has been sustained by the holiest as well as the most powerful sentiment which can gain pos- session of the human mind, a sentiment without faith in the consummation of which human society is impossible. If human society lives, the faith in immortality will not die. If society fulfills the promise of the spirit, that faith will kindle all life into a glow of holy anticipation, because friendship wiU be the social law.^ But it is a pure and a sane spirit, and hence it will not deny the opacity of the veil that shuts off Ho e and Communication with those who have gone dread. hcucc ; and it will not permit the religious relationship to the unseen to stand in the way of or to compete with proper relationships with the ^ See a beautiful paragraph to this effect in Howells' Utopian A Traveller from Altruria. HOPE AND DREiiD. 223 living.^ The dignity of personality will become so generally recognized that personal relationships or their want will be assumed to extend into the un- seen. It will be seen to be a serious matter for Dives and Lazarus to grow apart, since the spell of estrangement is liable to continue, and the gulf to widen and deepen forever ; and it is in the nature of human personality that a single guilty aliena- tion, if given time for its development, is capable of producing the tortures of perdition. Thus the faith in an unseen world, where blessed friendly relationships shall survive and consummate them- selves, will involve a corresponding dread lest evil relationships or evil no-relationships may also en- dure, and work out their moral consequences. It is apparent that the spirit is likely to maintain a substantially orthodox " article " upon the sub- ject of eschatology. Since the faith in the unseen world will have its cause in the imperative character of the actual personal relationships which exist in the visible world, it will inevitably assign to Jesus a place in the unseen corresponding to that which he has 1 " My old affection of the tomb, A part of stilluess, yearus to speak : ' Arise and get thee forth, and seek A friendship for the years to come.' " In Memoriani, canto Ixxxiv. It should not be overlooked how stalwartly " sound in head," to use his own expression, Tennyson remains in all his assaults upon the gates of death. This sanity is a large part of the strength of the poem. 224 JESUS KING OF IMMORTALS. come to occupy in the seen. To those to whom Jesus had become the supreme Friend ofimmor- in this life, he became and remained by faith the supreme Friend in the other life. Jesus gained a place in the world of his dis- ci2)les which he never lost, a social relationship, that of friendship. It remained friendship, and became a religious relationship only because one term of it was transferred to the unseen. They were careful to affirm that to their faith it was the same Jesus.^ Now the position which Jesus had won in the disciples' lives, while thoroughly human, was very remarkable. In a way he had become a God to them. He had absorbed, without their knowing it, a good share of the functions of the Hebrew Jehovah. They had fallen into the com- mon habit of calling him " Lord," in the sense of " Master." But that happened to be the term also applied to Jehovah, and after he was taken from them they continued to use it, giving to it, with seeming unconsciousness, the sense of " Jeho- vah," while, so far as the New Testament writings show, they did not afterward use the term "Jeho- vah " except in quotations. The Hebrew concejDtion of the divine being con- tains two elements, which are difficult to grasp to- gether, but both of which were modified and pre- served if not created by the spirit of true social relationships. The first, which belongs more spe- 1 Acts ii. 36. JESUS AND GOD. 225 cificallyto the notion of "Elohim" or "El,"i is that of transcendence. He is the Inscru- j^g^g ^nd table, separate from and outside the world, ^^'^^ whom no man hath seen or can see. The other grows out of the conception of a national deity, and more properly belongs to Jehovah, though patriotism led to the ascription to the national God of all divine attributes. According to this latter notion God is the king, the ally, the friend of his people. The worship of a national God may have grown out of that of a deceased patriarch or sheik. Yet the Hebrew conception rose above the ordinary one, in that it thought of a chosen rather than of a merely natural relationship. The Hebrew notion of a covenant lifted the idea of a national God out of the natural into the moral plane. It was the influence of this that led them to think of the founder of the race as the friend rather than the son of God. It was not easy to avoid abusing the idea of a national God ; and it was equally difficult to combine it with that of the divine transcendence. No final success had been attained in the matter. Instinctively — for we find no proof that they ever reasoned it out — the disciples resolved the diffi- culty by giving to Jesus those more secondary and human attributes of the national God, and then ascribing the more transcendental characteristics, which did not fit him, to the God whom he wor- 1 This statement needs qualifications which cannot be intro- duced here. But see Oehler, Old Testament Theology, sec 41 f. 226 APOTHEOSIS OF JESUS. shiped, the heavenly Father, " the God and Father of then* Lord Jesus Christ." ^ In taking this religious attitude toward Jesus, and investing him with the more human attributes Apotiieosis ^^ their national deity, the disciples were of Jesus. acting under the promj^tings of the spirit of friendship which bound them to him ; and that same spirit has brought a good part of the world, and is manifestly destined to bring the whole of it, into a similar religious relationship to Jesus. For the prevalence of friendship as the social law gives no sign of coming in the form of a general diffused and pervasive influence. It promises to accomplish itself in the future, as it has done in the past, by the enthronement on earth and in heaven, in the seen and unseen, of the personality of Jesus. The spirit of friendship as a world force is the spirit of Jesus, in the nineteenth century as it was in the first ; and there is no hint that it is likely to be divorced from the personality of Jesus. The con- quest of the world by the spirit of friendship means, therefore, not merely a religious faith in immortality; it means that among the immortals Jesus is to hold a rank preeminent as he does among the mortals, — a man, but a man exalted to the right hand of the Ineffable Majesty. It is one of the continental facts of modern life that ^ It must not be supposed that the processes were as simple as this brief outliae would make them appear. It is believed, how- eyer, that this states the salient facts. APOTHEOSIS OF " THE FATHEB:' 227 Jesus, thougli for centuries absent from the visible world, is in relations of abiding- and redeeming friendship, through their religious natures, with millions, who are thereby coming into newness of life.^ Not only is this relationship of friendship not incompatible with one of worship ; it is the basis of the worship of Jesus. It is because of it that it is true, as Professor Bruce says, that " Jesus has for the Christian consciousness the reli- gious value of God. He is the Lord Jesus, and as such the object of devoted attachment and rev- erent worship." 2 The apotheosis of Jesus, however, is not enough to satisfy the religious demands of friendship. Jesus himself is essentially a derived be- , CI T^ Apotheosis mg, dependent upon the oupreme r^ower. of " the^^ Man is not, Jesus is not such master of nature, that he can afford to affirm the reality, and hence the eternity, of friendship, unless he at the same time affirm that the Supreme is enlisted in its behalf. To affirm that God the Transcendent is the guarantor of the reality and eternity of hu- man relationships is a supreme act of faith ; and the consummation of the work of the spirit of friendship, which is the spirit of Jesus, is to lead to the universality of such a faith with all that it involves. The parturition of friendship in giving 1 See in this connection the late Professor Stearns' Evidence of Christian Experience. 8 Apologetics, pp. 398 f. 228 APOTHEOSIS OF " THE FATHER.'' birth to such a mighty faith is portrayed in Brown- ing's " Saul : " "And oh, all my heart liow it loved him! but where was the sign ? I yearned — ' Could I help thee, my father, inrenting' a bliss, I would add, to that life of the past, both the future and this ; I would give thee new life altogether, as good, ages hence. As this moment, — had love but the warrant, love's heart to dispense ! ' Then the truth came upon me. . . . Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift. That I doubt his own love can compete with it ? Here the parts shift ? Here, the creatures surpass the Creator, — the end, what Be- gan? Would I- fain in my impotent yearning do all for this man. And dare doubt he alone shall not help him, who yet alone can ? I believe it ! 'T is thou, God, that givest, 'tis I who receive : In the first is the last, in thy will is my power to believe. See the King — I would help him, but cannot, the wishes fall through. Could I wrestle to raise him from sorrow, grow poor to enrich, To fill up his life, starve my own out. I would — knowing which, I know that my service is perfect. Oh, speak through me now ! Would I suffer for him that I love ? So woiildst thou — so wilt thou! So shall crown thee the topmost, ineffablest, uttermost crown — And thy love fill infinitude wholly." It is to be noted that in this case also as in that of immortality the spirit produces the faith rather than the evidence upon which knowledge may be based. It stimulates to the search for KANTS CATEGORICAL IMFEEATIVE, 229 knowledge, but it does not postpone tlie faith or condition it upon the acquisition of know- ledge. Here is another of the points goVicaiim- " where Kant appeals to the categorical imperative. The three assertions of Kant's moral imperative, Freedom, Immortality, and God,^ com- pare with the three articles of faith which the spirit of friendship will assuredly create, namely, the worth of personality (Freedom), its deathless- ness, and the guaranteeing of these other two in the very nature of the Eternal.^ The covert sneer which Renan meant to convey can be overlooked, and the truth which he only haK believed recog- nized, when he says of the survivals of faith in spite of apparent contradictions : " the reasoning of Kant remains as true as it ever was ; moral affir- mation creates its object." ^ The " categorical im- perative " is the metaphysical formula correspond- ing to the actual experience-creating spiritual force, which keeps humanity in a healthy relation- ship both to that which is the object of possible knowledge, and that which can never be the ob- ject of other than either faith or unfaith.^ If the ^ Kant, Practical Eeason (Abbott's trans.), pp. 220 f. 2 " But souls that of his own good self partake He loves as His o«^l self ; dear as His eye They are to Him ; He '11 never them forsake ; Wlien tliey shall die, tlien God himself sliall die ; Tliey live, they live in blest eternity." (George Herbert.) ^ History of the People of Israel, Preface, p. xxvii. * " But it is more important that we shall rise to the recogni- tion that it is the same necessity, the same transcendental root of 230 AN ADEQUATE GOD. spirit of friendship fulfills itself, faith in a benefi- cent God will prevail. If it does not, then the al- ternative is the equally unverifiable yet inevitable conviction that ' ' Earth is darkness at the core, And dust and ashes all that is." This spirit will create belief not only in a God, but in a God adequate to the situation. Almost An adequate ^^^ ^^^^t act of the Hebrew spirit when ^°^' it began the spiritualization of history was to improve upon the idea of God. It kept on until, through Jesus, it seemed to complete the work by giving to God the name " Father." Yet what seemed to be the final stroke was only the introduction of a profounder problem. For " Fa- ther " is a relative term, and an eternal and tran- scendent Father is meaningless unless there be an- other eternal and transcendent term. To the dis- ciples of Jesus the Transcendent was his Father. They knew the Father only as related to Jesus. When Jesus passed into the invisible, he was thought of as having gone to his Father, as he had said he would, as being exalted to the right hand of the Eternal. Thus psychologically Jesus had become identified in their minds with the eter- our human nature, which supplies us through the senses with the idea of the world of reality, and which leads us m the highest function of nature and creative synthesis to fashion a world of the ideal in which to take refuge from the limitations of the senses, and in which to find again the true Home of the spirit." Lange, History of Materialism, Preface to Book II. AN ADEQUATE GOD. 231 nal and transcendent " other-term," and tliey could not help it. There was a psychological constraint upon them to assert his preexistence, and all the problems of Christology grew up. The temptation to mythologize was very great, and it is strange that the aher-glauhe was not more dense and wild than it was. The spirit urged them on even through those dangerous paths, requiring faith in an eternal Father and hence in an eternal correlative, a Son standing in such relationship to the Father that he was never other than Son, an eternally begotten Son. And because the history of their faith in divine Fa- therhood was what it was, they could not distinguish — unless it might be metaphysically, and they were not metaphysicians — between Jesus of Nazareth, whose heavenly Father was now theirs because He had been his, and that " Eternally Begotten Son " of their faith. So they frankly identified the two, one an object of historical knowledge, the other of pure faith, and accepted the enigmas which such identification involved. It was a remarkable trans- action, but not so remarkable as the fact that it has been able to repeat itself in human experience from that day to this ; for it is not the dogma con- cerning Jesus which has produced the experience, but the experience which has produced and pre- served and many times revitalized the dogma.^ ^ In constructive tlieolof^y " thought starts with the data and the beliefs, the consciousness and the principles, of a religion and the religious society. God is a being whose existence is accepted 232 APOTHEOSIS OF THE SPIBIT. The spirit of devotion to Jesus works through him up to faith in the divine Father ; but not without placing the personality of Jesus in a thoroughly unique position both with reference to God and to man. While it cannot be predicted that the terms of statement of this attitude of mind toward Jesus may not vary much from the traditional because of changes in the metaphysical or philosophical organon ; yet it is apparent that, because of his actual historical position, which is an object of positive knowledge and not of faith or opinion, he is destined to occupy to the faith of the future a peculiar relationship to the mysterious "other- term " of that divine Fatherhood in which the world will never cease to believe. The spirit, however, which is conquering human- ity is not satisfied with a faith in an eternal Fa- Apotheosis tlierhood and Sonship. It affirms these of the spirit. ^^Yj as basal relationships. It insists with equal imperativeness on affirming that these basal relationships have been eternally transcended in the spiritual one of friendship, that friendship which is typified in the mature relationship of the father and son after mere animal and material and assumed ; He has been an object of worship before He be- came a subject of thought. . . . And the world theology has to interpret is as concrete as the God. It is not the abstract nature of Theism, but the world of actual men, with all that lies as his- tory behind and all that lives as passion, sin, belief, hope, and reason within them." Fairbairn, Place of Christ in Modern The- ology, pp. 402, 403. APOTHEOSIS OF THE SPIRIT. 233 interdependence lias been swallowed up in per- sonal interdependence. That highest conceivable relationship of friendship is not only spiritual, it is a spirit, a quasi-independent thing, a force, pro- ceeding from the persons in whom it inheres. Faith, therefore, in its determination to serve the interests of friendship by affirming a God adequate to the situation, will insist upon the assertion of an eternally existing spirit, a force, proceeding from the Father and from the Son. And since a spirit of personal relationship cannot exist with- out a complete distinction of personalities, it will hold that the distinction between Father and Son in the Godhead is eternally equivalent to a per- sonal distinction. By the same token the spirit, although in one sense wholly dependent, is in an- other sense, and in proportion to its perfection as a spirit, independent and distinct. There is a dis- tinction between a person and a society and the spirit of that person or society, a distinction which is nowhere better expressed than in the old theo- logical term " hypostatic." Hence concerning this eternally proceeding spirit, which belongs to the internal structure of the Godhead, faith will affirm an eternal hypostasis. This will not stand for per- sonality in the same sense as the others ; but, as the spirit of personal relationships, it will be in a sense equally high and important. Indeed the affirmation concerning the distinction between Fa- ther and Son will be that it is at least equivalent 234 THE HOLY TRINITY. to that o£ persons. It may be more : it cannot be less. So of the spirit it will be that it is corre- spondingly personal, in its way, as spirit.^ Such a faith in an Eternal Father, an Eter- nally Begotten Son, and an Eternally Proceeding The Holy Spirit, onc God, and yet with these eter- Tnnity. ^^^ hypostatic distinctions, is the faith which the social spirit, when it has consummated itself and universalized its power, will cause ; because no other is adequate to the situation. It will cause it to be held with a certitude equal to the supremest certitude with which friend believes in friend, a certitude different in kind but not in degree from that of knowledge. Will cause? Nay, will universalize ; for among the other marvels which occurred at or near the beginning of our era, one of the most astonishing is the creation and definition of precisely that article of faith which unassailable logic shows must one day be created and defined if the spirit of right relationships between man and man fulfills its po- tentiality. It is true that the Greek mind pre- pared the formal statement of this faith. But it ^ Augustine, who for ecclesiastical reasons desired to harmon- ize the fundamental notions of Christianity with Roman imperi- alism, took the first step toward that devitalization of the trini- tarian conception, which has heen so serious a matter for all western theology. Thus he apologized for and minimized the terms of it, among other things declining to call the Holy Spirit alius than God, but only saying that it was aliud. See De Fide Gt Synibolo. THE HOLY TRINITY. 235 was the Christian spirit which produced the faith and enlisted the Greek genius in the analytic determination of its contents. For the Nicene and Athanasian symbols are but an effort to render explicit what was implicit in the religious attitude of the Christianity of that day. It is true that, following the perverse polemical method of that age, the dogma — itself the effect rather than the cause of the redemptive movement — was put forward as though its speculative adop- tion were necessary in order to enter the sphere of influence of that redemptive movement. The " Qidcumqiie vult " is not easy to defend. It is not true that whosoever will be saved must begin by holding the creed of Athanasius. But the resentment against that statement usually dis- credits itself by a far more shallow inconsequence. That was but a reading backward, metaphysically, as in a mirror reversed, the truth that whosoever is saved, and lives to work out the logic of his salvation, will end by worshiping what would be accurately described, as " one God in trinity, and trinity in unity." Guided by his religious in- stincts, he would " neither confound the persons nor divide the substance ; " for he would regard the Father as one hy^Dostasis, the Son as another, and the Holy Spirit as another. But " the god- head of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit " he would hold to be " all one, the glory equal, the majesty co-eternal." Such as he 236 THE HOLY TRINITY. tliouglit tlie Father, such he would think the Son, and such the Holy Spirit ; "the Father uncreate, the Son uncreate, the Holy Spirit uncreate; the Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehen- sible, and the Holy Spirit incomprehensible ; the Father eternal, the Son eternal, and the Holy Spirit eternal ; yet not three eternals but one eternal; as also not three incomprehensibles nor three uncreated, but one uncreated and one incom- prehensible : the Father almighty, the Son al- mighty, the Holy Spirit almighty; yet not three almighties but one almighty : so the Father God, the Son God, and the Holy Spirit God ; yet not three Gods but one God : likewise the Father Lord, the Son Lord, and the Holy Spirit Lord ; yet not three Lords but one Lord ; the Father made of none, neither created nor begotten ; the Son of the Father alone, not made nor created but begotten ; the Holy Spirit of the Father and the Son, neither made nor created nor begotten, but proceeding." ^ Thus in all things, as afore- 1 The term " proceeding " exactly describes the mode of de- pendence of the kind of spirit we are here investigating. In any other sense it is but a lame expression. This is strong proof that under the guise of metaphysics the framers of the Nicene dogma were endeavoring to describe the actual phenomenon of religious history to which we allude. The coincidence is too striking to be accidental. The ^'Jilioque " controversy is also suggestive. The fact is that in history the spirit which is reli- giously denominated the Holy Spirit proceeds from Jesus, and hence from the purely historical point of view the doubt would be concerning not the "y?7/ogwe" but the ^^ ex patre.'' But the Church never was able to take the purely historical point of THE HOLY TRINITY. 237 said, the unity in trinity and the trinity in unity will be worshiped, and it will be worshiped with a loving adoration ; for it will not only be believed in with a certitude equal to that with which friend believes in friend, but by the same token it will be portrayed with an adorable per- fection which will win the deepest and holiest affection of the heart.^ view. The Eastern Church missed it altog-etlier, and, taking- only the religious or pietistie and metaphysical standpoint, af- firmed accordingly the " ex patre " but denied the ^^Jilioque^^^ — in substance denying that the spirit was a genetic factor in the world's unfolding history. The Eastern Church, not because it denies the "^//ogue," but as a result of the same causes which led to that denial, has remained stagnant ; it has no liistory. The Western Chui'ch, as a result partly of the same causes which led it to affirm the ^^Jilioque,''^ is the church of history and of progress. The denial or affirmation have indeed been contribut- ing causes as well as concomitant effects in the history. The trinitarian doctrine, however, has never been permitted to play a part as a constructive cause at all commensurate with its possi- bilities as compared with other doctrines of the Godhead, as for instance that concerning sovereignty. The church was able to produce it, and has shown a remarkable instinct in conserving it. But it has not been allowed to germinate. It has not however been sterilized ; and the day for it to display its wonderful vital- ity and varied powers may perhaps be at hand. 1 '' ^till I believe they (reformation and unity) will come, and that they will come through an unveiling to our hearts of the ohl mystery of the Trinity, in which our fathers believed, but which they made an excuse for exclusion and persecution, not a bond of fellowship. . . . The preaching of the Trinity in its fullness Avill, I conceive, be the everlasting Gospel to the nations." F. D. Mau- rice, Autobiography , vol. ii., p. o.~)4. " That one Face, far frfun vanish, rather grows, Or cleconipises but to recomi>o.e. Become my universe that feels and knows ! " B.ovvning, The Epilogxie. 238 LIFE TRANSFIGURED. In the light of that conception of God human life and history will undergo a grand transfigura- Life trans- t^^^^' ^lic rcligious will uo lougcr be figured. attained only by way of the social, but the social will be approached from the higher level of the religious. Whereas men knaw in order to believ^e, they will now know also because they believe. The relative importance of the two certitudes, that of faith and that of knowledge, will be interchanged. Those relationships which are founded upon faith will be so valued in com- parison with those founded upon knowledge, and the instincts of faith will be so trusted, that it will be almost as though knowledge had served its day and could be allowed to vanish, while faith and hope and love abide. Then it will be per- mitted to turn from the order of causation and view phenomena with reference to the order of divine purpose. To be sure, this is not only some- thing that will be. The back light of transfigu- ration has always shone, has in fact been the brighter, if not the whiter light in which events have been viewed. Men have always preferred to read the world of phenomena in the light of tele- ology rather than of genesis. The prevailing intellectual vice has been the mechanical mixture of the two. Science insists upon the genetic alone, and rightly excludes teleology from its sphere. The religious mind, which will be the product of the perfect social evolution, will respect PROVIDENCE AND THE SPIRIT. 239 the integrity of science in this as in everything else, and yet will employ it as a means to smooth the way for a true teleology. It will look at events in the light of its faith in a divine purpose ; it will believe in Providence. It will not ask science to stultify itself, however, by taking account of providential dealings.^ The divine in history cannot be a discovery providence of science as such. It is an article of Jpfr"uot faith, which affirms it in two by no *^"'^*'"^^- means identical propositions. These are a general divine providence, and a specific divine incarna- tion. The specific divine operation in history is not a series of providential interferences, but a spiritual and personal force, which science dis- covers and describes as an integral part of history, fulfilling the continuities, and concerning which faith affirms that it is divine. That which distin- guishes the Hebrew and Christian development is not a set of special providential interventions, but a special spiritual potency, producing and in turn proceeding from an unique personality. It is by this spirit and this person that that history is marked off from all other history ; and it is because of these that faith affirms that it is speci- fically divine. Hence although an exceptional it 1 " To say that Providence is the guide and ruler of history is to say absohitely notliing unless one makes clear the necessary relation of that power to human progress." F. A. Henry, Princeton Review. 240 ''DIVINE ORDERING'' AND CONTINUITY. is a tlioroiiglily normal history ; as an individual is most wholesomely religious, not because he can relate the greatest number or the most striking of " special providences," but because, while, like Jesus, he regards all things as providential, he is swayed by a spirit which causes all events to work toward the best ends. Whether or not God inter- venes in behalf of a man or a course of history is of small account; whether or not the sj)irit of Jesus dominates that man or that history makes all the difference in the world. That is divine, says faith, where that spirit rules; that is not divine, however miraculous, where that si^irit is not,i What is to be called, therefore, a divinely or- dered life or history need not be conceived of by the most religious mind as one in which " Divine or- . *-" dering " and material events as such are ordered dif- continuity. ferently from what they are elsewhere ; but rather as one in which the spirit is present, either giving to material events a special signifi- cance, or so guiding men that such events as are deiDcndent upon their actions are really determined by the action of the spirit. Lotze means much the 1 " My firm conclusion, in which every day of fresh thought, reading, and prayer strengthens me, is that the voice of the Spirit must always lord it over the voice of Providence where they seem to be in contradiction ; and that in fact without the first we have no means of understanding the other, so that if our ears are too deaf for that, we are bound to wait and not fancy we can obey the other." F. D. Maurice, Biography^ vol. i., p. 138. ''DIVINE OIWEEING'' AND CONTINUITY. 241 same thing when he says: "However specially we may imagine the history to be guided from the loftier standpoint of divine wisdom, from a higher plane than natural evolution, we may be quite sat- isfied if this guidance takes place through action and reaction between God and the spiritual nature of man, in such a way that the thoughts, feelings, and efforts thus aroused and developed also alter the external position of mankind, to the same lim- ited extent to which our action is able to change the physical conditions of our existence. Thus within the realm of nature, with its uninterrupted coherence, there is certainly a possibility of his- tory." ^ Thus while the religious attitude requires faith in both special and general divine care and interest in man, that attitude may be held without denying the continuity and uniformity of natural law. When science establishes the presumption of such uniformity and continuity, the religious mind responds, not with contradiction, but with a faith in a correspondingly uniform, continuous, and im^^artial divine Providence, sending its favors and enforcing its laws upon just and unjust, not- ing the fall of a sparrow, having no respect of persons, — not because of indifference, to all, but because of indifference to none. Science again discerns the profoundly specific character of a cer- tain man and of a certain spiritual force ; and the religious mind responds again by declaring that 1 Microcosnius, Book VII., cap. i. 242 ''DIVINE ORDERING'' AND CONTINUITY. these two elements are the historical aspects of God acting as a special agent in human affairs. Thus the scientific and the religious, both when they generalize and when they specialize, move in exact parallelism. An absolutely general Provi- dence gives no clew to the meaning of the world, and will not satisfy the religious craving. A spe- cial Providence, interfering with the genetic contin- uities, is obnoxious to the scientific mind. Jesus, however, and the spirit of Jesus are specific factors which science can acknowledge as such while faith apotheosizes them. Thus when the work of the spirit shall have been so far perfected that it shall have secured the worship of Jesus as the incarna- tion of the mysterious Second Person of the God- head, and of itself as the manifestation of the Spirit of the Father and the Son, the religious mind will be satisfied with the intelligibility of the world while yet the right of the scientific mind will not have been infringed.^ 1 A merely generic godhood gives no starting point to religion. The current supernaturalism is an effort to attach a saving amend- ment, m the interest of religion, to the deism of the last century or the pantheism of the early part of this. The transcendental and immanent theisms are simply deism and pantheism under the control of religious moods ; but they are really impotent in reli- gion, because both wholly generic. The modern effort so to com- bine them as to escape from the closed circle is not a success. When they seem to be interlinked, it is but a trick of logical legerdemain. Two generics do not make a specific. The peace between the scientific and the religious interests will not be made in that way, but will come tlirough tl)e revitalizing of the trini- tarian conception. And however successful logic might be in bringing that about, it is the social spirit which actually will do it. SENSE OF SIX. 243 But when this time conies, and the promptings of that sj^irit shall have been interpreted as the yearnings of God, men will be, as never before, concerned about the relationship between themselves and that God. They will see that they have been alienated from Ilim ; and in the light of the conception which will then prevail that alienation will be realized as an awful tragedy. Such realization will be the sense of sin. All of the long and but meagrely successful struggles of this spirit to gain possession of the hearts of men will be interpreted as the pathetic efforts of a di- vine Father to rescue and reconcile to himself and to their own best selves his wayward children. The general unresponsiveness of men will be inter- preted as a revelation of race sin. Then this inter- pretation will be applied to explain all the un- brotherliness in the world, and the element of tragedy which runs through all history will be ex- plained. Not only will men see this, but they will be overwhelmed by shame and sorrow and remorse, and they will repent and seek to be reconciled to God as penitent children. This sense of sin and the need of repentance, science cannot bring because it cannot reveal God. It can only reveal evil, mal- adjustment. The interpretation of this maladjust- ment in the form of the belief that man is a fallen being, an estranged child of God, belongs to the sphere of faith, because the sense of divine child- hood itself belongs to that sphere. It is one of the 244 ATONEMENT. doctrines of grace, because by its radical diagnosis of the cause of evil it places man in a position where a radical cure is possible. Thus the spirit will convince the world of sin. To interpret the mission of Jesus and of his spirit as the work of God seeking to restore sinful man is to think of God as suffering for Atonement. i i • ». • ny-i t • • the taking away oi sm. Ihe solicitations of the spirit are thought of as God's solicitations, the sacrifice of Jesus as his sacrifice. To the re- ligious mind the ke}^ to history is that God is deal- ing redemptively with the world. It is not possi- ble to think of the estrangement of God's children as affecting Him otherwise than with inconceivable anguish. Nor can He be thought of as escaping that anguish by pardoning sin outright. More- over, God is the champion of all those who have suffered through the sins of others. As such it is impossible not to think of Him as moved by an aw- ful yet a holy anger as He looks at the wrongs and outrages which curse this earth. It is as axiomatic in morals as in physics that action and reaction are equal. If God withholds his anger and turns his vengeance into forgiveness, it is a moral cer- tainty that He must be thought of as himself suf- fering the equivalent of the penalty He would have inflicted. Now science says that the spell of hu- man unbrotherliness loas broken by the sacrifice of Jesus, — it is passing and is destined to jmss away under the influence of the stronger spell which his SUJ^TMARY, 245 cross has cast upon the world. Faith, interpreting this in the light of its deification of Jesus, declares that it is a hint of the divine mystery of love by which the sin of this world was washed away in the suffering of the Second Person of the God- head, — which suffering through sympathy was that of God himself. Thus the remedial kinsfdom of Jesus is, religiously viewed, the kingdom of a divine forgiveness and sacrifice. The interpreta- tion which faith will place upon the world's re- demption will not fall short of the essential doc- trine of the atonement. Thus the whole catalogue of great dogmas which have played their part in religious history will be revived, restated, and vindicated, as hav- orthodoxy ing originally been dictated by the social ^^^g^'"®*^- spirit. The doctrine of divine sovereignty, which has so affected men's minds as to become an im- portant historical factor, will appear to have been instigated by the spirit in response to peculiar de- mands of the times ; and when it has been revised and refined in the light of maturer apprehensions of the meaning of divine Fatherhood in its govern- mental relations,! it will become a part of the faith of the future. In short, we discovered a spiritual force, operat- ing from the first in Hebrew history, and strangely differentiating and integrating it, maintaining in it a marked individuality and 1 See such restatement in Faiibairn's Place of Christ in Modern Theology. 246 SUMMARY. exclusiveness, while at the same time it kept it in organic relationships with world history. We found it equipping that history with a literature quite the most remarkable in the world, freighted with spiritual wealth and thrilling with spiritual vitality. A Man was produced, evidently through the quickening of that spirit, fitted to stand at the centre and summit of the world's development, and able to take and hold his place there, and to com- pel history henceforth to revolve around him. This spirit became his spirit, and has been his chief agent in mastering men. It has created an- other literature, and institutions, and a social at- mosphere, founding for him a spiritual empire un- like any other empire that ever existed, an empire whose fundamental aim is the spiritualization of all human relationships. It has kept this Jesus on the throne of that empire, and has exalted him in men's religious conceptions to the right hand of the Ineffable Conception. So far has this imperial movement now gone that its destiny is within reach of scientific prediction ; and it is manifest that it will recreate humanity, will make friendship the supreme law of human relationships, will cause men to regard such relationships as more enduring, for good or ill, than their physical frames or the visible universe itself, and will cause them to be- lieve in, to worship, and to love a God whose very nature is the home of the supremest personal rela- tionships. In the light of such a thought of God SUMMARY. 247 it will reinterpret the world, history, and human nature, it will assert a universal and beneficent Providence, an incarnation of God in Jesus and in his spirit, a fall but also a redemption of man, and the gathering together of the whole redeemed household of the Eternal Father in bliss unthink- able. Such a consummation will this sj^irit bring about. Whether or not this faith is or ever will be scientifically verified or verifiable is not here said. What is affirmed is, that it is scientifically certain that such faith will prevail. One final word : I have endeavored to conduct this dissertation within the strictest limits of the scientific method as most narrowly defined, believ- ing that by so dealing with this topic I could do the best service to my generation. If I have failed in this, no one so desires to know it as my- self. I have been forced into skepticism as to my processes by astonishment at the conclusions which unfolded themselves as the subject ripened under the glow of investigation, but have been unable to detect errors either of perception or of reason. I never dreamed when I entered this path what a revelation would break uj)on me when I had climbed its steeps to the end. " I spoke as I saw. I report, as a man may of God's work — All 's love, yet all 's law. Now I lay down the judgesliij) he lent me. Each faculty tasked To perceive Him, has gained an abyss Where a dewdrop was asked." INDEX. Abraham, friend of God, 21 ; seeks Palestine, 43, 213. Arts, Book of, its historicity, 151 ; its purpose, 181. Alexander the Great, G9, 210. Alexandria, Hellenic and Hebrew- spirit in, 69-70. American nationalism and the Scrip- tures, 170. Amos and his line of prophets, 47-48. Angels, Jesus' idea of, 133-13G. Anna and the "remnant," 116. Antislavery, spirit of, 20. Apotheosis, of Jesus, 226-227 ; of the Father, 227-230 ; of the Spirit, 232-234. Arnold, Matthew, and French litera- ture, 10 ; " Literature and Dogma," 94 n. ; and conduct, 197. Asceticism in the early Church, 167. Assyrian power and the Hebrew spirit, 51, 68. Athanasian Creed, 234-236. Atonement, the, 244-245. Augustine, St., "De Fide et Sym- bolo,'' 234 n. Baal-worship, 34 ; and Elijah, 47. Babylonian Captivity and Judaism, 58. Babylonian traditions and Hebrew compared, 81-83. Bacon, F., criticism of Plato, 11 ; "Z?e Angmentis S'cientiarum,'''' 11. Ballot. See Franchise. Baptism of Jesus, 129-130. Bellamy, E. W., "Looking Back- ward," 117. ^^ BenecUefii.t,'' the, 114, 121. " Bible for Learners," 102 n. Biy)le, historical basis of, 183 ; conti- nuity of, 184 ; product of the spirit, 185 ; morality of, 185 ; accuracy of, 186 ; translation of, 187 ; a force, 188-189; as "Word of God,'" 189- 192 ; inspiration of, 192 ; impor- tance of, 193. See also Canon; New Testament ; Old Testament ; Scriptures. Bibliolatry, 189-190. Brace, C. L., '' Gesta ChrisH,'' 159, 162, 165. Briggs, C. A., "Messianic Prophecy," 51. Brotherhood, Jesus' idea of, 137 ; after Pentecost, 152 ; and property, 164; and war, 171-173. Brown, John, and spirit of anti- slavery, 20. Browning, Robert, "Saul," 228, 247; "The Epilogue," 237 «. Bruce, A. B., "Apologetics," 27 n., 28,30, 60»., 61,63n.,227. Buckle, H. T., on man in Europe and Asia, 199. Buddhism, 107. Business and the spirit of Christian- ity, 174-176. Cairnes, J. E., article in Fortn. Rev., 16 n. Campaign literature and the canon, 98. Canaan. See Palestine. Canon, the Hebrew spirit manifested in, 98-104. Canticles, canonicity of, 102. Carlyle, T., " Hero-Worship," 23. Carthage lacking in a literature, 76. Charities, of the early church, 159 ; and pauperism, 160, 165. Charlemagne and friendship, 211. Cheyne, T. K., on Isaiah, 56. Chicago, its spirit of enterprise, 8. Christianity, spirit of, its reality, 8 ; its adaptiveness, 156-li")7 ; and fo- cinl customs in the Roman Empiric, 159-169; and proi)erty, 1C4-1G5; 250 INDEX. and the family, 1GG-1C9 ; and na- tionalism, 1G9-171 ; and war, 171- 173; and the franchise, 173; and the church, 173-17-i; and business, 174-176; and industrialism, 176- 177; and land ownership, 176 7i. ; and corporations, 177-178 ; and lit- erature, 178-179 ; and science, 179 ; and the New Testament, 180-183. See also Spirit, the. Christoloory of the disciples, 230-231. Christ-spirit, the, and the Zeit Geist, 7, 10, 12. Church, the early, 154 ; varying types in, 155-157 ; and the Dispersion, 157 ; and charities, 159 ; and slav- ery, 162 ; and the family, 167. Church of to-day, the, and the spirit, 173-174. Comte, Auguste, observation on three stages of thought, 1 ; his method, 2; fails to apply scientific method to spirit, 5 n. ; on vagueness of so- ciology, 17 ; and modern society, 95 ; and immortality, 219 ??. ; " Sys- tem of Positive Policy," 219 ??. Confucianism, 107 ; literature of, 183 ; and the Bible, 185. Consciousness not a force, 16 n. Continuity, law of, and faith, 240-242. Corporations and the spirit of Chris- tianity, 177-178. Cosmogony of the Hebrews, 84. Creation, legends of, 81-85 ; their an- tiquity, 97 ; and formation of the canon, 98. Creative force of the Hebrew spirit, 38. Creeds, Athanasian and Nicene, 235. Crisis, the supreme, in the world's history, 106-109. Cross of Jesus, 142. Crucifixion of Jesus, its effect on the disciples, 149. Daniel, Book of, its canonicity, 103 ; Jesus' acquaintance with, 141. David, second King of Israel, spirit of, 44 ; and Jonathan, 210. Death, Jesus' idea of, 135. See also Future life. Decalogue, 28- 32, 97. Deification. See Apotheosis. Deism, of Sadducees, 135 ; and imma- nent theism, 242 n. Demons, Jesus' idea of, 133-135. Disciples, effect of crucifixion on, 149 ; Christology of, 230-232. Dispersion, the, and the Sjaiagogue, 65 ; its preparation for Christian- ity, 157. Driver, S. R., " Introd. to 0, T. Lit.," 62 n., 101. Dumasj, A., and war, 172. Eden legend, the, and the Hebrew spirit, 80. Egyptian literature scanty, 76. Egyptian spirit, and Mosaism, 28-30, 32-34. Elijah, a great history-maker, 46 ; and the "remnant," ill. Elohim and Jehovah, distinction be- tween, 225. Equilibrium, moving, Spencer's defi- nition of, 15, 16. Essenism, and John the Baptist, 115 ; and Jesus, 120. Esther, Book of, its canonicity, 99. Ethics, of the Hebrew and of the Egyptian, 29-32 ; of the prophets, 48-53, 90 ; of the Hebrews a grad- ual growth, 36 ; of the Bible, 185- 186 ; dominant in history, 197 ; and mythology, 198; and the imseen world, 207-209. Everett, C. C, "Gospel of Paul," 142. Evil, doctrine of, 86-87 ; Jesus' idea of, 134-135. Ewald, H., "Revelation," GOn. Ezekiel and the ritual, 54. Ezra, an epoch-maker, 62 ; and the synagogue, 65 ; and beginning of the canon, 97-98. Fairbairn, A. M., "Place of Christ in Modern Theology," 3-4 «., 231 w., 245 n. Faith, of the prophets, 49-50; and immortality, 217-222 ; produced by the spirit, 228-230 ; in the Trinity, 234-235 ; and knowledge, relative importance of, 238 ; and the law of continuity, 240-242 ; and the atone- ment, 245. Fall of man, account of, in Genesis, 86 ; doctrine of, 243-247. Family relationship, in Jewish thought, 147 ; and the spirit of Christianity, 166, 168-169; and friendship, 210, 214. "Father," Jesus' use of, 125-129, 132-133. Father, the, apotheosis of, 227 ; and Jesus, relation between, 230-232. Fatherhood of God, in the 0. T.. 128 ; Jesus' idea of, 138, 230; Hebrew knowledge of, 145; and mediaeval theology, 146 n. Filioque controversy, 236-237 n. INDEX. 251 Folk-lore of the " remnant," 113-115. Fox, George, and his followers, 215- Franchise, and the spirit of Christian- ity, 173. Fremantle, W. H., "World as Sub- ject of Redemption," 144, 145, 1G9. French Revolution and the Renais- sance, 1)5. "Friends, the," and George Fox, 215-217. Friendship, between Jesus and his disciples, 140 ; highest fruit of the social spirit, 201) ; in history, 210- 211 ; basis of Christian society, 212- 214 ; and material betterment, 214 ; and George Fox, 215-217 ; and im- mortality, 217-220, 222 ; and Jesus, 22G-227 ; and the Trinity, 232-233 ; the supreme law, 240. Future life, doctrine of, and the Egyptians, 29 ; tabooed in early Hebrew history, 85, 207 ; in later Judaism, 08 ; Jesus' idea of, 13G, 208. See also Immortality. Genealogies in Hebrew literature, 88. Genesis, and science, 85 ; genealogies of, 88 ; and Jesus, 135. German races and early Christianity, 1G6. " Gloria in Ezcelsis,^'' the, 114, 121. God, the guarantor of human relation- ships, 227 ; in history, 238-242 ; and the sense of sin, 243 ; fatherhood of, see Fatherhood. God and the world, doctrine of, 84; Jesus' idea of, 133-138 ; Hebrew idea of, 199-200, 224-226. Gordon, G. A,, " Witness to Immor- tality," 217 n., 221 ?i. Great men and opportunity, 57. Greece, civilization of. See Hellen- ism. Greek language helpful to Hebraism, 70. Greek literature, 74. Guizot, F., " History of Civilization," G ; on vagueness of sociological re- search, 17. Guyon, Mine., and the " Friends," 21G. Hibakkuk, frankness of, 50. H mnibal and literature, 76. Hansrath, A., "N. T. Times," 67 n., 108 »., 110 ?i., 113 H., 126 ?(. H ^braism, and Judaism compared, 56, G3 ; and the Messianic ideal, 59 ; and the scribes, 62 ; and sin, 63 ; and its literature, 73 ; and Hellen- ism after Pentecost, 154. See also Hebrew spirit. Hebrew cosmogony, 84. Hebrew ethics, compared with Egyp- tian, 29-32; a gradual growth, 3G. Hebrew history, individualism in, 56 ; characterization of, 77 ; and Jesus' spirit, 144-147 ; key to, 147. Hebrew literature, and the scribes, 62 ; in general, 73, 78 ; and Pales- tine, 80 ; proverbs current in, 80 ; heroic legends in, 81 ; genealogies in, 88-89 ; early fragments of, 9G- 97 ; and Ezra, 97 ; and establish- ment of the canon, 104 ; and the Sab- bath, 105. See also Bible ; New Testament ; Old Testament ; Scrip- tures. Hebrew nation, the, orientalized, 45 ; disruption of, 45 ; the chosen peo- ple, 55 ; and Persia, 100, 146-147 ; characterization of, 108 ; its con- sciousness a God-consciousness, 126. Hebrew spirit, the, antiquity of, 28 ; a specific force, 35 ; a social force, 38 ; a creative force, 38 ; and tlie Assyrian power, 51 ; and Messianic anticipation, 58 ; latent in Judaism, 59 ; and Persian mytliology, Q>9i ; and Hellenism, G9 ; and heroic legends, 81 ; and the doctrine of evil, 86- 87 ; and genealogies. 88-89 ; in the prophetic guilds, 89-90 ; and the canon, 98-103 ; and the encoun- ter with Persia, 100 ; and the su- preme crisis of history, 106-109 ; and the " remnant," 111-113 ; and the Messianic personage, 116, 122, 126; and the fatherhood of God, 129 ; and John the Baptist, 130; a moral force, 197-199. See also Hebraism ; Mosaism ; Mosaic spirit ; Spirit, the. Hebrews, Epistle to, and the early Church, 155-156. Hellenism, and the Hebrew spirit, 69- 72 ; to-day, 74 ; and Hebraism after Pentecost, 154. Henry, F. A., Article in Princeton Rev. 239 n. Herbert, G., quotation from, 229 n. Heroes, and opportunity, 56-68 ; tra- ditions of, in Hebrew literature, 81. Historical basis of the Bible, 183, 18G- 187. History, its importance to sociology. 252 INDEX. 23-26; centres of, 24-25, 42-43; personalities and social forces fac- tors in, 25 ; and literature, 70-77, 93-95 ; the great crisis in, lOG ; ci-eative force of the Bible in, 189 ; friendship in, 210-211 ; God in, 238-242. Holy Spirit, the, van Oosterzee on doctrine of, 17 ; in the home of Jesus, 122 ; Luke's use of the term, 151 ; and doctrine of tlie Trinity, 232-237 ; procession of, 23G-237 n. ; descent of, see Pentecost. See also Spirit, the. Home, a Christian institution, 1G8- 109. Homer, " The Iliad," 89. Horton, R. F., " Revelation and the Bible," 81, 80 w. Hospitals and the spirit of Christian- ity, 105?!., 203. Howells, W. D., Article in i\". Avjer. Bev., 173 n. ; "Traveller from Al- truria," 222«. Humanitarian spirit, of Mosaism, 32 ; of the early Church, 159-1C5. Humanity of Jesus, 143-144. Hymuology, modern, and the Psalms, 145. Idol, punishment of, 50 n. Ihering, R. von, " Spirit of Roman Law," 5 72. "Iliad, The," its catalogue of names and Hebrew genealogies, 89. Immortality, 20C-207 , hope of, based on personal relationships, 209 ; and friendship, 217-220, 222. See also Future life. Imperial power of Jesus, 246. Incarnation, the, 242, 247. Individualism, spiritual forces depen- dent upon, 22-23, 37 ; stress upon in Hebrew history, 50 ; development of, 190; relation of to friendship and immortality, 217. Individuality of a spiritual phenome- non, 15. Industrialism and the spirit of Chris- tianity, 170-177. Infant salvation, 221. Inspiration, "pen-point," 91-92 ; and the Bible, 180-193. Internationalism, 171-172. Irish nationalism and the Scriptures, 170. iF^aiah, frankness of, 50 ; and the " remnant," 111. Israel. See Hebrew History ; Hebrew Nation, etc. Jackson, G. A., "The Sou of a Pro- phet," 33. James, pai-ty of, 154 ; Epistle of, char- acterized, 155. Jehovah, significance of, 127, 225 ; functions of, ascribed to Jesus, 224. Jeremiah, frankness of, 51 ; and the ritual, 54. Jerusalem, and the Hebrew literature, 80 ; visit of the boy Jesus to, 122- 124. Jesus, as a pure phenomenon, 2, 3 ; spirit of, a distinct phenomenon, 3, 20 ; spirit of, a factor in history, 2(i, 242 ; personality of, 20, 130-132, 240 ; and the Messianic remnant, 112 ; story of his birth, 119-120 ; childhood of, 121-128; home o% 122 ; national consciousness of, 123 ; firtt utterance of, 124-129 ; baptism and temptation of, 129 ; and the unseen world, 133-137, 208; and the Messiahship, 138-139 ; cosmo- politanism of, 140-141 ; and out- lawry, 142 ; human limitations of, 143-144 ; life of, an era, 149 ; res- urrection of, 150; manifestntion of his spirit in the disciples, 151-153; and slavery, 162; and property, 104 ; ard charity, 165 ; and asceti- cism, 1G8 ; in the N. T., 180-182, 224 ; a literary personage, 191 ; and miracles, 201-203 ; and friendship, 212-214- still the Supreme Friend, 224-227 ; apotheosis of, 226-227 ; a derived being, 227 ; and the Fa- ther, relations between, 230-232; worship of, 242 ; imperial power of, 240. Jews, the, and Persian civilization, 100. See also Hebrew Nation ; Ju- daism. Job, Book of, its connection with Jeremiah, 51 ; its canonicity, 101. John the Baptist, and the Essenes, 115 ; ministry of, 130. Jonah, Book of, its universalism, 102. Joseph and the home of Jesus, 127- 128. Josephus and the Hebrew spirit. 111. Judaism, rise of, 58-59 ; and Hebraism, 59-02; and sin, 03-04; and the synagogue, 04-60 ; sects of, 70-71 ; danger to, from Syrian heathenism, 71 ; and the Messianic anticipation, 109-111 ; angels and demons in later, 134 ; and the early Churcl , 155-150. Judges, period of, in Hebrew historv, 40. INDEX. 253 Kxnt, I., and immortality, 221-222, 229 ; " Practical Reason," 22U. Keiui, T. "Jesus of Nazara," 71 n., VlOn., 123?i.,139n. Kingdom of God, Jesus' preaching of, 137-138. Kingsley, C, controvery with New- man, 205-206 n. Knenen, A., " Hibbert Ijcctures," 23 n. Ladd, Gr. T., "Doctrine of Sacred Sci-iptures," 4 n., 79 n. Land-ownership and the spirit of Chi-istianity, 17G n. Lange, F. A., " History of Material- ism," 212 n., 229-230 71. Language, and literature, 75 ; and the spirit of Jesns, 152 ; and the Bible, 184 «., 187-188, 192. Law and the early Church, 158-159. Lawlessness, period of, in Hebrew history, 40 ; of Moses, 44. Leatlies, S., " Foundations of Moral- ity," 31 n. Lecky, W. E. H., " European Morals," 158 n., IGO, 161, 162 n., 163 n., 166. " Legalism, Night of," 68. Legends. See Traditions. Literature, liigliest product of social activity, 73 ; and language, 75 ; and psychology, 75 ; and history, 76, 93-94 ; a force, 94-96 ; and the spirit of Christianity, 178-179 ; and tlie Logos doctrine, 190. Locke, John, illustration from, 191 n. Logos, the, and the Hebrew mind, 104 ; two manifestations of, 190. Lotze, H., and the " Zeit Geist,'' 14 ; " Mici'ocosmus,''^ 241. Luke, his gospel and the " remnant," 113; his use in Acts of the term " Holy Spirit," 151 n. Luther, Martin, and study of spirit- ual forces, 18. Macaulay, T. B., "History of Eng- land," 98. Maccabean War, 71, 72. Madagascar, and the Bible, 187. Magi, visit of, 116. " Magnificat,'' the 114, 121. Manning, H. E., and Newman, com- pared, 21. Miry, the mother of Jesus, 112, 118- 119 ; characteristics of, 124-125. Material forces and spiritual, distinc- tion between, 13 ; analogies be- tween, 148. Matheson, G., "Growth of the Spirit of Christianity," 5 7i., 152-153; "Messages of tlie Old Religions," 132 n. Maurice, F. D., Biography of, 19??., 237 n., 240 n. Messiahship, Jesus' idea of, 138-139. Messianic anticipation, its creation, 58 ; and the canon, 98 ; and the fullness of time, 109-111. Messianic ideal and Hebraism, 59. Messianic remnant, the, 112. Miracles, in Hebrew tliought, 201 ; and Jesus, 201-203. Missionaries and science, 203-204. " Missions and Science," referred to, 204. Mohammedanism, 179. Monotheism of tlie Hebrews, 200. Montesquieu, C. de, " Spirit of Laws," 5?i., lQ>n. Montgomery, E., article in Mind, 14. Morality. See Ethics. Moriah, Mt., sanctuary on, 43. Mosaism, spirit of, 28 n. ; Egyptian influence on, 29 ; humanitarian, 32; and ritualism, 32-33; social, spirit of, 37-38 ; revived by the prophets, 46-48 ; revived by Ezra, 62 ; and the Pharisees, 70. See also Hebraism ; Hebrew spirit, the. Moses, historicity of, 28 ; spirit of, more ancient than Moses, 35 ; spirit of, in time of the Judges, 41 ; lawlessness of, 44 ; spirit of, in later prophets, 55 ; ethical teacli- ing of, 198 n. Mulford, E., "Republic of God," 22. Miiller, F. M., " Science of Thought," 75 n., 104 w., 192 n. Murray, T. C, " Origin and Growth of the Psalms," 78 n. Mythology, Persian, 68, 87 ; Bab}'- lonian, 81-83 ; and ethics 198 7i. ; and Christology, 231. Nationalism, and religion 23-24, 38 ; literature a force in, 94-95 ; and the spirit of Cliristianity, 169-171. Natural law. See Continuity, Law of ; Science. Nature and Man, Hebrew idea of, 199- 201. Neander, J. A. W., "History of the Cliristian Religion and Church," 157. New Testament literature, 180-184. Newman, J. H., and Manning, com- 254 INDEX. pared. 21 ; controversy with Kiugs- ley, '205-20G n. Niceiie Creed, 235, 236 n. Noire, L., " Ursprung der Sprache,^^ 75 n. " JVunc Dimittis;' the, 114, 121. Objectivity of spiritual phenomena, 8. Oehler, G. F. " Theology of the Old Testament," 228. Old and New Testaments, interval between, 67-G8 ; continuity be- tween, 183-185. Oosterzee, J. J. van, on the Holy Spirit, 17 ; on the spirit of Christ in the first century, 157 n. Opportunity and the man, 57. Optimism, of the prophets, 51-54 ; of the Hebrews, and Persian dual- ity, 87 ; of the Hebrews, and Jesus, 137. Origen, on Scripture and the Greek poets, 83-84 n ; on the prophets, 91, 92. Orthodoxy regained, 245. Outlawry, at beginnings of national life, 41-42 ; philosophy of, and Je- sus, 142-143. Palestine, the spirit and the land, 41- 42 ; its influence on Hebrew lit- erature, 78-80. Pantheism and immanent theism, 242 n. Passover, sacramental rite borrowed from, 140. Patriotism. See Nationalism. Patronage and friendship, 214. Paul, and trance conditions, 133 ; party of, 154 ; epistles of, 181 ; and friendship, 213. Pauperism and charities, 160, 165. Pentateuch, ritual of, 32-33. Pentecost, 26, 59, 149, 151. Persian civilization and Jewish self- assertion, 100. Persian mythology, influence of, on Hebrew doctrines, 68, 87. Per.son and spirit, relations between, 11-12 ; in Jesus, 130-131, 143, 193- 195, 239. Personal relationships. See Right personal relationships. Personality, expressed in spiritual forces, 12, 195 ; ability of, to achieve fixedness, 14 ; a factor in history, 25 ; and prayer, 132 ; importance of, in Hebrew thought, 199 ; and the Trinity, 233. Pessimism met by Isaiah, 54. Peter, at Pentecost, 151 ; and the early Cliurch, 155. Pharisees, 70 ; their ideas of angels and demons, 135. Phenomena of the spirit. See Spirit- ual phenomena. Phenomenon most significant in the universe, 3. Philo, on the patriarchs, 77-78 ; iden- tifies thought of Plato and Moses, 198 w. Phoenicia lacking in a literature, 76. Piepenbring, C, " Theology of Old Testament," 20 w., 55n., 79 ??., 200. Plato, criticised by Bacon, 11 ; and Messianic expectation, 110 71. ; and Moses, 198 n. Poetry the first literature, 76, 93. Politics and the spirit of Christianity, 173. " Poor, the. Society for Improving Condition of," and patronage, 214 n. Positivism, method of, 2. Prayer and the spirit of Jesus, 132. Priest-prophet and scribe-prophet, 61. Property and the spirit of Christian- ity, 164. Prophetic guilds, 89 ; extinction of, 90 ; literary expression of, 91. Prophetic literature overlooked by scribes and Sadducees, 114. Prophets, line of, a spiritual power, 46-47 ; ethics of, 48 ; faith of, 49 ; frankness of, 50 ; opitimism of, 51 -54 ; post-exilic, as priests and scribes, 61. Proverbial literature of the Hebrews, 80. Providence, divine, Jesus' idea of, 133-138 ; not an object of scientific perception, 181, 239. Psalter, the, and the scribes, 63 ; and modern hymnology, 145. Psychology and literature, 75. Purim, Feast of, 100. Real estate, 176 n. Redemption, 244, 247. Relationships. See Right personal re- lationships ; Social relationships. Religion, a branch of sociology, 20 ; and nationalism, 23, 28 ; and ethics in the prophets, 47-49 ; and right social relationships, 144; and sci- ence, 240-242. "Remnant," the, 111-116; folk-lore of, 114; catholicity of, 115; and friendship, 140. Renaissance, the, and the French INDEX. 255 Revolution, 95; and bep;inning of American nationalism, 170. Renan, E., " History of the People of Israel," 5-0 n., 41, SO n., G-i, 79 n, 85-8G/i., 229 ; " Tie dc Jesus,'' 141. Resurrection of Jesus, 137 n., 208/1. ; power of, 150. Right personal relationslups, leading to reform, 144 ; in Hebrew history, 147 ; industrialism, 177 ; goal of the spiritual movement, 200 ; and na- ture, 202 ; and Kingsley's faith, 20G n. ; and future life, 223 ; and the Trinity, 234; and friendship, 246. Set also S )oial relationships. Ritual, of tlie Pentateuch, 32-33 ; and morality contrasted, 48 ; and the prophets, 54 ; post-exilic, Gl. Raman power, decline of, 107 ; and the early Clmrch, 158. Roman social life and the early Church, 159-1G9. Rome built by outlaws, 41. Ruth, Book of, its realism 102. Ryle, H. E., " Early Narratives of Genesis," 87, 88. Sabbath, the, its revival after the exile, 105. Sacrament, the, borrowed from Jew- isli Passover, 140. Sacrifice, Jesus as, 142, 244-245. Sadducees, 70 ; deny prophetic por- tions of Old Testament, 114 ; deism of, and Jesus, 135. Salvian, " De Gubernaiione Dei,''' 1G6. Samuel, work of, 44. Satan, compared with Persian evil deity, G8, 87 ; Jesus' idea of, 134. Saul, king of Israel, clioseu, 43-44 ; and the prophets, 89. Sayce, A. H., 43 7t.; " Hibbert Lee- tures," 81. Science and Genesis, 85 ; and Christian- ity, 179-180 ; and the Bible, 18G, 204 ; and the spirit, 203 ; served by missions, 204 ; and faith, 238-242 ; and the sense of sin, 243. Scientific method, applied to spiritual phenomena, 5, 194. Scribism, 59, Gl ; and the Synagogue, C4-G5 ; and the Scriptures, GG-G7 ; and proplietic literature, 114. See also Judaism. Scriptures, demand for, 66-07 ; em- body tlie Hebrew mind, 104 ; and nationalism, 169-171. See also Cinon ; Bible ; New Testament ; Old Testament. Seeley, J. R., on doctrine of civili- zation, 19 ; on ideal society, 215. Semitic spirit, contrary to Mosaism, 34-35. Septuagint, 70, 184. Serpent, the, in the Eden legend, 86, 198 n. Seybert Commission, report of, 208 n. Sliakespeire and proverbial litera- ture, 80. Simeon, and the "remnant," 115, 121. Sin, concept of in Judaism and in Hebraism, 63; the problem of in Genesis, 86-87 ; and personal re- lationship to God, 243-245. Slavery, and the spirit of Cluistianity, 1G1-1G4 ; and tlie Bible, 185. Social force, of the Hebrew nation, 37-38 ; of literature, 73-78, 94-96 ; of the early Church, 158. Social forces, definite entities, 16 n., 19 7i., spiritual 20-23, 25-26,194- 196 ; in history, 25, 197. See also Ethics. Social relationships, persistence of, 14 ; in worship, 21 ; right, effecting reforms, 144 ; of the Hebrew na- tion, 147 ; and the spirit, 196 ; and superstition, 209. See also Right personal relationships. Sociological and spiritual phenomena compared, 17, 20-23, 25. Socrates, 107, 133. Solomon, premature universalism under, 45. Song of Solomon. See Canticles. Sonship, as interpreted by Jesus, 131- 133 ; Hebrew idea of, 145 ; and Fatherhood in the Trinity, 230-237. Sorcery. See Witchcraft. Spencer, H., fails to apply scientific method to spirit, 5 ; on " moving equilibrium," 15; "First Princi- ples," 18-19. Spirit, a reality of a secondary kind, 10, 35 ; growing significance of the term, 79. Spirit, and person, relations between, 11-12, 148; in Jesus' case, 130-131, 143, 193-195, 239. Spirit and spirits, classification and definition, G. Spirit, the, and legalism, 68 ; litera- ture of, 73, 78 ; and the canon, 98- 104 ; self-restraint of, 146 ; age of, 1,50 ; after Penteoost, 154-155 ; -. religious force, 199 ; and scienc, 203 ; apotheosis of, 232-234 ; O" 1 Divine Providence, 239-242. See 256 INDEX. also Christianity, Spirit of ; Jesus, Spirit of ; Hebrew spirit j Holy Spirit, the. Spiritism, 208-209. Spiritual forces, specific, 13, 14, 147 ; dependent on individualism, 196. Spiritual phenomena, in general, 4-5 ; real objectivity of, 8, 194 ; not ab- stractions, 8-9, 147-148 ; inchoate, 17 ; complexity of, 19-20 ; as social forces, 20-23, 25-2(3, 194-190; in age of Jesus, 134-135. Spiritual substance, 14-15. Stanley, A. P., " History of Jewish Church," G5 ?«., G9 n., 71 n. Stearns, L. F., " Evidence of Chris- tian Experience," 237 n. Stock exchange, 175. Substance, 14. Suicide, influence of Christianity on, 161. Synagogue, foimded by scribism, 64- 65 ; The Great, existence of, 99 n. ; development of, 105. Syrian heathenism, Judaism rescued from by Maccabees, 71. Tacitus, " Germaiiia,''^ 166. Taine, H., on importance of literature, 94. Talmud, the, and the Bible, 185. " Teaching of the Twelve," 151. Temple, the, its meaning for Jesus, 125-127. Temptation of Jesus, 130. Ten Commandments. See Decalogue. Tennyson, A., "In Memoriam," 218, 219, 220, 223, 230; characterized, 218. Theism, immanent, compared with Deism and Pantheism, 242 n. Theosophy, 208. Thompson, W. M., " The Natural Basis of our Spiritual Language," in Bib. Sac, 18 n. Toy, C. H., " Judaism and Christian- ity," 20, 23, 73ra. Traditions, Hebrew and Babylonian, compared, 81. Trance conditions, not originative, 90; and Paul, 133; and Jesus, 133. See also Spiritism. Transtiguratiou, 137 n., 208 «. Trinity, doctrine of, 232-237. Trumbull, H. C, " The Master Pas- sion," 209. Truth for truth's sake vs. truth for love's sake, 205-206. Uncle Tom's Cabin and spirit of antislavery, 20. Unseen world, the, 135, 197 ; com- munication with, 207-209. See also Future life. Utopias of the prophets, 53. Virgil, "Eclogues," 109-110. Wall Street, spirit of, 8. War, spirit of, 171-173. Ward, Lester, " Dynamical So- ciology," 5 71., 17-18 «., 19, 203n. ; " Psychic Factors in Civilization," 5n., 6«., 20 ?i. Weiss, B., "Life of Christ," 120, 139. Wendt, H., " Teaching of Jesus," 115- 116 «., 128-129, 130 w., 138 71. Wesley, John, spirit of, 8 ; and George Fox, 216, 217. Whittier, J. G., and Tennyson, 21971. William the Silent and friendship, 211. Wisdom literature and the canon, 103 ; Witchcraft, tabooed by the Hebrew spirit, 79, 85 ; and morality, 198. Womanhood, and the Hebrew spirit, 117-119 ; and Christianity, 166-168. Word of God. See Logos. Worship, social character of, 21 ; in personal relations, 148 ; friendship as basis of, 227. Zacharias, 121. Zeit Geist, the, and the Christ-spirit, 7, 10, 12 ; a spirit of persons, not things, 12. Zoroaster and the doctrine of evil, Princeton Theoloqical ,Sem\narv Libraries 1012 01245 1458