[6] How purified? And if it should be answered, through and under
Christianity, the fool in his heart would scoff and say: 'What woman
thinks of religion in her youthful courtship?' No; but it is not what
she thinks of, but what thinks of her; not what she contemplates in
consciousness, but what contemplates her, and reaches her by a necessity
of social (? ideal) action. Romance is the product of Christianity, but
so is sentiment.
_III. WHY THE PAGANS COULD NOT INVEST THEIR GODS WITH ANY IOTA OF
GRANDEUR._
It is not for so idle a purpose as that of showing the Pagan
backsliding--that is too evident--but for a far subtler purpose, and one
which no man has touched, viz., the incapacity of creating grandeur for
the Pagans, even with _carte blanche_ in their favour, that I write this
paper. Nothing is more incomprehensible than the following fact--nothing
than this when mastered and understood is more thoroughly
instructive--the fact that having a wide, a limitless field open before
them, free to give and to take away at their own pleasure, the Pagans
could not invest their Gods with any iota of grandeur. Diana, when you
translate her into the Moon, then indeed partakes in all the _natural_
grandeur of a planet associated with a dreamy light, with forests,
forest lawns, etc., or the wild accidents of a huntress. But the Moon
and the Huntress are surely not the creations of Pagans, nor indebted to
them for anything but the murderous depluming which Pagan mythology has
operated upon all that is in earth or in the waters that are under the
earth. Now, why could not the ancients raise one little scintillating
glory in behalf of their monstrous deities? So far are they from thus
raising Jupiter, that he is sometimes made the ground of nature (not,
observe, for any positive reason that they had for any relation that
Jupiter had to Creation, but simply for the negative reason that they
had nobody else)--never does Jupiter seem more disgusting than when as
just now in a translation of the 'Batrachia' I read that Jupiter had
given to frogs an amphibious nature, making the awful, ancient,
first-born secrets of Chaos to be his, and thus forcing into contrast
and remembrance his odious personality.
Why, why, why could not the Romans, etc., make a grandeur for their
Gods? Not being able to make them grand, they daubed them with finery.
All that people imagine in the Jupiter Olympus of Phidias--_they_
themselves confer. But an apostle is beyond their reach.
When, be it well observed, the cruel and dark religions are far more
successful than those of Greece and Rome, for Osiris, etc., by the might
of the devil, of darkness, are truly terrific. Cybele stands as a middle
term half-way between these dark forms and the Greek or Roman. Pluto is
the very model of a puny attempt at darkness utterly failing. He looks
big; he paints himself histrionically; he soots his face; he has a
masterful dog, nothing half so fearful as a wolf-dog or bloodhound; and
he raises his own _manes_, poor, stridulous Struldbrugs.
Vainly did the ancient Pagans fight against this fatal weakness.
They may confer upon their Gods glittering titles of 'ambrosial,'
'immortal'; but the human mind is careless of positive assertion, and of
clamorous iteration in however angry a tone, when silently it observes
stealing out of facts already conceded some fatal consequence at war
with all these empty pretensions--mortal even in _the virtual_
conceptions of the Pagans. If the Pagan Gods were really immortal, if
essentially they repelled the touch of mortality, and not through the
adulatory homage of their worshipers causing their true aspects to
unsettle or altogether to disappear in clouds of incense, then how came
whole dynasties of Gods to pass away, and no man could tell whither? If
really they defied the grave, then how was it that age and the
infirmities of age passed upon them like the shadow of eclipse upon the
golden faces of the planets? If Apollo were a beardless young man, his
father was not such--_he_ was in the vigour of maturity; maturity is a
flattering term for expressing it, but it means _past youth_--and his
grandfather was superannuated. But even this grandfather, who _had_ been
once what Apollo was now, could not pretend to more than a transitory
station in the long succession of Gods. Other dynasties, known even to
man, there had been before his; and elder dynasties before _that_, of
whom only rumours and suspicions survived. Even this taint, however,
this _direct_ access of mortality, was less shocking to my mind in
after-years than the abominable fact of its reflex or indirect access in
the shape of grief for others who had died. I need not multiply
instances; they are without end. The reader has but to throw his memory
back upon the anguish of Jupiter, in the 'Iliad,' for the approaching
death of his son Sarpedon, and his vain struggles to deliver himself
from this ghastly net; or upon Thetis, fighting against the vision of
her matchless Pelides caught in the same vortex; or upon the Muse in
Euripides, hovering in the air and wailing over her young Rhesus, her
brave, her beautiful one, of whom she trusted that he had been destined
to confound the Grecian host. What! a God, and liable to the pollution
of grief! A Goddess, and standing every hour within the peril of that
dismal shadow!
Here in one moment mark the recoil, the intolerable recoil, upon the
Pagan mind, of that sting which vainly they pretended to have conquered
on behalf of their Pantheon. Did the reader fancy that I was fatiguing
myself with any task so superfluous as that of proving the Gods of the
heathen to be no Gods? In that case he has not understood me. My object
is to show that the ancients, that even the Greeks, could not support
the idea of immortality. The idea crumbled to pieces under their touch.
In realizing that idea unconsciously, they suffered elements to slip in
which defeated its very essence in the result; and not by accident:
other elements they could not have found. Doubtless an insolent Grecian
philosopher would say, 'Surely, I knew that immortality meant the being
liberated from mortality.' Yes, but this is no more than the negative
idea, and the demand is to give the affirmative idea. Or perhaps I shall
better explain my meaning by substituting other terms with my own
illustration of their value. I say, then, that the Greek idea of
immortality involves only the nominal idea, not the real idea. Now, the
nominal idea (or, which is the same thing, the nominal definition) is
that which simply sketches the outline of an object in the shape of a
problem; whereas the real definition fills up that outline and solves
that problem. The nominal definition states the conditions under which
an object would be realized for the mind; the real definition executes
those conditions. The nominal definition, that I may express it most
briefly and pointedly, puts a _question_; the real definition _answers_
that question. Thus, to give our illustration, the insoluble problem of
squaring the circle presents us with a good nominal idea. There is no
vagueness at all in the idea of such a square; it is that square which,
when a given circle is laid before you, would present the same
superficial contents in such exquisite truth of repetition that the eye
of God could detect no shadow of more or of less. Nothing can be plainer
than the demand--than the question. But as to the answer, as to the
_real_ conditions under which this demand can be realized, all the wit
of man has not been able to do more than approach it. Or, again, the
idea of a _perfect commonwealth_, clear enough as a nominal idea, is in
its infancy as a real idea. Or, perhaps, a still more lively
illustration to some readers may be the idea of _perpetual motion_.
Nominally--that is, as an idea sketched problem-wise--what is plainer?
You are required to assign some principle of motion such that it shall
revolve through the parts of a mechanism self-sustained. Suppose those
parts to be called by the names of our English alphabet, and to stand in
the order of our alphabet, then A is through B C D, etc., to pass down
with its total power upon Z, which reciprocally is to come round
undiminished upon A B C, etc., for ever. Never was a _nominal_
definition of what you want more simple and luminous. But coming to the
_real_ definition, and finding that every letter in succession must
still give something less than is received--that O, for instance, cannot
give to P all which it received from N--then no matter for the
triviality of the loss in each separate case, always it is gathering and
accumulating; your hands drop down in despair; you feel that a principle
of death pervades the machinery; retard it you may, but come it will at
last. And a proof remains behind, as your only result, that whilst the
nominal definition may sometimes run before the real definition for
ages, and yet finally be overtaken by it, in other cases the one flies
hopelessly before the pursuit of the other, defies it, and never _will_
be overtaken to the end of time.
That fate, that necessity, besieged the Grecian idea of immortality.
Rise from forgotten dust, my Plato; Stagyrite, stand up from the grave;
Anaxagoras, with thy bright, cloudless intellect that searched the
skies, Heraclitus, with thy gloomy, mysterious intellect that fathomed
the deeps, come forward and execute for me this demand. How shall that
immortality, which you give, which you _must_ give as a trophy of honour
to your Pantheon, sustain itself against the blights from those
humanities which also, by an equal necessity, starting from your basis,
give you must to that Pantheon? How will you prevent the sad reflux of
that tide which finally engulfs all things under any attempt to execute
the nominal idea of a Deity? You cannot do it. Weave your divinities in
that Grecian loom of yours, and no skill in the workmanship, nor care
that wisdom can devise, will ever cure the fatal flaws in the texture:
for the mortal taint lies not so much in your work as in the original
errors of your loom.
_IV. ON PAGAN SACRIFICES._
Ask any well-informed man at random what he supposes to have been done
with the sacrifices, he will answer that really he never thought about
it, but that naturally he supposes the flesh was burnt upon the altars.
Not at all, reader; a sacrifice to the Gods meant universally a banquet
to man. He who gave a splendid public dinner announced in other words
that he designed to celebrate a sacrificial rite. This was of course.
He, on the other hand, who announced a sacrificial pomp did in other
words proclaim by sound of trumpet that he gave a dinner. This was of
necessity. Hence, when Agamemnon offers a hecatomb to Jupiter, his
brother Menelaus walks in to dinner, [Greek: hachlêtost], without
invitation. As a brother, we are told by Homer that no invitation was
required. He had the privilege of what in German is beautifully called
'ein Kind des Hauses,' a child of the house. This dispensation from the
necessity of a formal invitation Homer explains, but as to explanation
how he knew that there was a dinner, that he passes over as superfluous.
A vast herd of oxen could not be sacrificed without open and public
display of the preparation, and that a human banquet must accompany a
divine sacrifice--this was so much a self-evident truth that Homer does
not trouble himself to make so needless an explanation.
Hence, therefore, a case of legislation in St. Paul's Christian
administration, which I will venture to say few readers understand. Take
the Feast of Ephesus. Here, as in all cities of Asia Minor and Greece,
the Jews lived in great numbers. The universal hospitality over all
these regions was exhibited in dinners ([Greek: dehipna]). Now, it
happened not sometimes, but always, that he who gave a dinner had on the
same day made a sacrifice at the Great Temple; nay, the dinner was
always part of the sacrifice, and thus the following dilemma arose.
Scruples of eating part of sacrifices were absolutely unintelligible,
except as insults to Ephesus. To deny the existence of Diana had no
meaning in the ears of an Ephesian. All that he did understand was, that
if you happened to be a hater of Ephesus, you must hate the guardian
deity of Ephesus. And the sole inference he could collect from your
refusing to eat what had been hallowed to Diana was--that you hated
Ephesus. The dilemma, therefore, was this: either grant a toleration of
this practice, or else farewell to all amicable intercourse for the Jews
with the citizens. In fact, it was to proclaim open war if this
concession were refused. A scruple of conscience might have been allowed
for, but a scruple of this nature could find no allowance in any Pagan
city whatever. Moreover, it had really no foundation. The truth is far
otherwise than that Pagan deities were dreams. Far from it. They were as
real as any other beings. The accommodation, therefore, which St. Paul
most wisely granted was--to eat socially, without regard to any ceremony
through which the food might have passed. So long as the Judaizing
Christian was no party to the religious ceremonies, he was free of all
participation in idolatry. Since if the mere open operation of a Pagan
process could transform into the character of an accomplice one who with
no assenting heart ate of the food, in that case Christ Himself might by
possibility have shared in an idolatrous banquet, and we Christians at
this day in the East Indies might for months together become unconscious
accomplices in the foul idolatries of the Buddhist and Brahminical
superstitions.
But so essentially were the convivial banquets of the Pagans interwoven
with their religious rites, so essentially was a great dinner a great
offering to the Gods, and _vice versâ_--a great offering to the Gods a
great dinner--that the very ministers and chief agents in religion were
at first the same. Cocus, or [Greek: mageirost], was the very same
person as the Pope, or presiding arbiter in succession to a Pope. 'Sunt
eadem,' says Casaubon, 'Cocus et Pope.' And of this a most striking
example is yet extant in Athenæus. From the correspondence which for
many centuries was extant between Alexander the Great, when embarked
upon his great expeditions, and his royal mother Olympias, who remained
in Macedon, was one from which we have an extract even at this day,
where he, as we learn from the letter quoted, had been urging his mother
to purchase for him a good cook. And what was made the test supreme of
his skill? Why, this, that he should be [Greek: thysihôn hempeirost], an
artist able to dress a sacrificial banquet. What he meant is this: I do
not want an ordinary cook, who might be equal to the preparation of a
plain (or, what is the same thing, secular) dinner, but a person
qualified or competent to take charge of a hecatomb dinner. His mother's
reply addresses itself to that one point only: [Greek: Peligua ton
mageiron labe hapd thêst mêtrost], which is in effect: 'A cook is it
that you want? Why, then, you cannot do better than take mine. The man
is a reliable table of sacrifices; he knows the whole ritual of those
great official and sacred dinners given by the late king, your father.
He is acquainted with the whole _cuisine_ of the more mysterious
religions, the Orgiacs' (probably from the neighbouring Thrace), 'and
all the great ceremonies and observances practised at Olympia, and even
what you may eat on the great St. Leger Day. So don't lose sight of the
arrangement, but take the man as a present, from me, your affectionate
mother, and be sure to send off an express for him at your earliest
convenience.'
* * * * *
[Professor Robertson Smith in his latest work has well pointed out
that even with the Hebrews the sacrifices were eaten in common till
the seventh century B. C., when the sin-offerings, in a time of
great national distress, came to be slain before Jehovah, and 'none
but the priests ate of the flesh,' a phase of sacrificial
specialization which marks the beginning of the exclusive
sacerdotalism of the Jews.--ED.]
_V. ON THE MYTHUS._
That which the tradition of the people is to the truth of facts--that is
a _mythus_ to the reasonable origin of things. [Transcriber's Note: three
dots in a vertical line above a tiny circle] These objects to an eye at
[Transcriber's Note: low tiny circle] might all melt into one another, as
stars are confluent which modern astronomy has prismatically split. Says
Rennell, as a reason for a Mahometan origin of a canal through Cairo,
such is the tradition of the people. But we see amongst ourselves how
great works are ascribed to the devil or to the Romans by antiquarians.
In Rennell we see the effects of synthesis. He throws back his
observations, like a woman threading a series of needles or a shuttle
running through a series of rings, through a succession of Egyptian
canals (p. 478), showing the real action of the case, that a tendency
existed to this. And, by the way, here comes another strong illustration
of the popular adulterations. They in our country confound the 'Romans,'
a vulgar expression for the Roman Catholics, with the ancient national
people of Rome. Here one element of a _mythus_ B has melted into the
_mythus_ X, and in far-distant times might be very perplexing to
antiquarians, when the popular tradition was too old for them to _see_
the point of juncture where the alien stream had fallen in.
Then, again, not only ignorance, but love, combines to adulterate the
tradition. Every man wishes to give his own country an interest in
anything great. What an effort has been made to suck Sir T. R. back into
Scotland!
Thus, it is too difficult without a motive to hold apart vast distances
_or_ intervals that lie in a field which has all gathered into a blue
haze. Stars, divided by millions of miles, collapse into each other. So
_mythi_: and then comes the perplexity--the entanglement. Then come
also, from lacunæ arising in these interwelded stories, temptations to
falsehood. By the way, even the recent tale of Astyages seems to have
been pieced: the difficulty was to find a motive for Cyrus, reputed a
good man, to make war on his grandfather. Kill him he might by accident.
But the dream required that he should dethrone his grandfather.
Accordingly the dreadful story is devised; but why should Cyrus adopt
the injuries of a nobleman who, if all were true, had only saved himself
by accident?
Impossible as it would seem to transmute Socrates into a _mythus_,
considering the broad daylight which then rested upon Athenian history,
and the inextricable way in which Socrates is entangled in that history
(although we have all seen many a Scriptural personage so transmuted
under far less colourable pretenses or advantages), still it is evident
that the mediæval schoolmen _did_ practically treat Socrates as
something of that sort--as a mythical, symbolic, or representative man.
Socrates is the eternal burthen of their quillets, quodlibets, problems,
syllogisms; for them he is the Ulysses of the Odyssey, that
much-suffering man; or, to speak more adequately, for _them_ he is the
John Doe and the Richard Roe of English law, whose feuds have tormented
the earth and incensed the heavens through a cycle of uncounted
centuries, and must have given a bad character of our planet on its
English side. To such an extent was this pushed, that many of the
scholastic writers became wearied of enunciating or writing his name,
and, anticipating the occasional fashion of _My lud_ and _Your ludship_
at our English Bar, or of _Hocus Pocus_ as an abbreviation of pure
weariness for _Hoc est Corpus_, they called him not _Socrates_, but
_Sortes_. Now, whence, let me ask, was this custom derived? As to Doe
and Roe, who or what first set them by the ears together is now probably
past all discovery. But as to _Sortes_, that he was a mere contraction
for _Socrates_ is proved in the same way that _Mob_ is shown to have
been a brief way of writing _Mobile vulgus_, viz., that by Bishop
Stillingfleet in particular the two forms, _Mob_ and _Mobile vulgus_ are
used interchangeably and indifferently through several pages
consecutively--just as _Canter_ and _Canterbury gallop_, of which the
one was at first the mere shorthand expression of the other, were at one
period interchanged, and for the same reason. The abbreviated form wore
the air of plebeian slang at its first introduction, but its convenience
favoured it: soon it became reconciled to the ear, then it ceased to be
slang, and finally the original form, ceasing to have any apparent
advantage of propriety or elegance, dropped into total disuse. _Sortes_,
it is a clear case, inherited from Socrates his distressing post of
target-general for the arrows of disputatious Christendom. But how came
Socrates by that distinction? I cannot have a doubt that it was strength
of tradition that imputed such a use of the Socratic name and character
to Plato. The reader must remember that, although Socrates was no
_mythus_, and least of all could be such, to his own leading disciple,
that was no reason why he should not be treated as a _mythus_. In Wales,
some nine or ten years ago, _Rebecca_, as the mysterious and masqued
redresser of public wrongs, was rapidly passing into a _mythical_
expression for that universal character of Rhadamanthian avenger or
vindicator. So of Captain Rock, in Ireland. So of Elias amongst the Jews
(_when Elias shall come_), as the sublime, mysterious, and in some
degree pathetic expression for a great teacher lurking amongst the
dreadful mists.
_VI. DAVID'S NUMBERING OF THE PEOPLE--THE POLITICS OF THE SITUATION._
You read in the Hebrew Scriptures of a man who had thirty sons, all of
whom 'rode on white asses'; the riding on white asses is a circumstance
that expresses their high rank or distinction--that all were princes. In
Syria, as in Greece and almost everywhere, white was the regal symbolic
colour.[7] And any mode of equitation, from the far inferior wealth of
ancient times, implied wealth. Mules or asses, besides that they were so
far superior a race in Syria no less than in Persia, to furnish a
favourite designation for a warlike hero, could much more conveniently
be used on the wretched roads, as yet found everywhere, until the Romans
began to treat road-making as a regular business of military pioneering.
In this case, therefore, there were thirty sons of one man, and all
provided with princely establishments. Consequently, to have thirty sons
at all was somewhat surprising, and possible only in a land of polygamy;
but to keep none back in obscurity (as was done in cases where the funds
of the family would not allow of giving to each his separate
establishment) argued a condition of unusual opulence. That it was
surprising is very true. But as therefore involving any argument against
its truth, the writer would justly deny by pleading--for that very
reason, _because_ it was surprising, did I tell the story. In a train of
1,500 years naturally there must happen many wonderful things, both as
to events and persons. Were these crowded together in time or locally,
these indeed we should incredulously reject. But when we understand the
vast remoteness from each other in time or in place, we freely admit the
tendency lies the other way; the wonder would be if there were _not_
many coincidences that each for itself separately might be looked upon
as strange. And as the surgeon had set himself to collect certain cases
for the very reason that they were so unaccountably fatal, with a
purpose therefore of including all that did _not_ terminate fatally, so
we should remember that generally historians (although less so if a
Jewish historian, because he had a far nobler chain of wonders to
record) do not feel themselves open to the objection of romancing if
they report something out of the ordinary track, since exactly that sort
of matter is their object, and it cannot but be found in a considerable
proportion when their course travels over a vast range of successive
generations. It would be a marvellous thing indeed if every one of five
hundred men whom an author had chosen to record biographically should
have for his baptismal name--Francis. But if you found that this was the
very reason for his admitting the man into his series, that, however
strange a reason, it had in fact governed him in selecting his subjects,
you would no longer see anything to startle your belief.
But let me give an interesting case partly illustrating this principle.
Once I was present on an occasion where, of two young men, one very
young and very clever was suggesting infidel scruples, and the other, so
much older as to be entering on a professional career with considerable
distinction, was on the very point of drinking-in all that his companion
urged as so much weighty objection that could not be answered. The
younger man (in fact, a boy) had just used a passage from the Bible, in
which one of the circumstances was--that the Jewish army consisted of
120,000 men. 'Now,' said he, 'knowing as we all do the enormity of such
a force as a peace establishment, even for mighty empires like England,
how perfectly like a fairy-tale or an Arabian Nights' entertainment does
it sound to hear of such monstrous armaments in a little country like
Judæa, equal, perhaps, to the twelve counties of Wales!' This was
addressed to myself, and I could see by the whole expression of the
young physician that his condition was exactly this--his studies had
been purely professional; he made himself a king, because (having
happened to hurt his leg) he wore white _fasciæ_ about his thigh. He
knew little or nothing of Scriptural records; he had not read at all
upon this subject; quite as little had he thought, and, unfortunately,
his conversation had lain amongst clever chemists and naturalists, who
had a prejudgment in the case that all the ability and free power of
mind ran into the channel of scepticism; that only people situated as
most women are should acquiesce in the faith or politics of their
fathers or predecessors, or could believe much of the Scriptures, except
those who were slow to examine for themselves; but that multitudes
pretended to believe upon some interested motive. This was precisely
the situation of the young physician himself--he listened with manifest
interest, checked himself when going to speak; he knew the danger of
being reputed an infidel, and he had no temper for martyrdom, as his
whole gesture and manner, by its tendency, showed what was passing in
his mind. 'Yes, X is right, manifestly right, and every rational view
from our modern standard of good sense and reflective political economy
tends to the same conclusion. By the reflex light of political economy
we know even at this hour much as to the condition of ancient lands like
Palestine, Athens, etc., quite unrevealed to the wisest men amongst
them. But for me, who am entering on a critical walk of social life, I
shall need every aid from advantageous impression in favour of my
religious belief, so I cannot in prudence speak, for I shall speak too
warmly, and I forbear.'
What I replied, and in that instance usefully replied--for it sufficed
to check one who was gravitating downwards to infidelity, and likely to
settle there for ever if he once reached that point--was in substance
this:
Firstly, that the plea, with regard to the numbers as most
extraordinary, was so far from affecting the credibility of the
statement disadvantageously, that on that ground, agreeably to the logic
I have so scantily expounded, this very feature in the case was what
partly engaged the notice of the Scriptural writer. It _was_ a great
army for so little a nation. And _therefore_, would the writer say,
_therefore_ in print I record it.
Secondly, that we must not, however, be misled by the narrow limits, the
Welsh limits, to suppose a Welsh population. For that whilst the twelve
counties of Wales do not _now_ yield above half-a-million of people,
Palestine had pretty certainly a number fluctuating between four and six
millions.
Thirdly, that the great consideration of this was the stage in the
expansion of society at which the Hebrew nation then stood, and the
sublime interest--sublime enough to them, though far from comprehending
the solemn freight of hopes confided to themselves--which they
consciously defended. It was an age in which no pay was given to the
soldier. Now, when the soldier constitutes a separate profession, with
the regular pay he undertakes the regular danger and hardships. There is
no motive for giving the pay and the rations but precisely that he
_does_ so undertake. But when no pay at all is allowed out of any common
fund, it will never be endured by the justice of the whole society or by
an individual member that he, the individual, as one insulated
stake-holder, having no greater interest embarked than others, should
undertake the danger or the labour of warfare for the whole. And two
inferences arise upon having armies so immense:
First, that they were a militia, or more properly not even that, but a
Landwehr--that is, a _posse comitatus_, the whole martial strength of
the people (one in four), drawn out and slightly trained to meet a
danger, which in those times was always a passing cloud. Regular and
successive campaigns were unknown; the enemy, whoever he might be, could
as little support a regular army as the people of Palestine.
Consequently, all these enemies would have to disperse hastily to their
reaping and mowing, just as we may observe the Jews do under Joshua. It
required, therefore, no long absence from home. It was but a march, but
a waiting for opportunity, watching for a favourable day--sunshine or
cloud, the rising or subsiding of a river, the wind in the enemy's face,
or an ambush skilfully posted. All was then ready; the signal was given,
a great battle ensued, and by sunset of one anxious day all was over in
one way or another. Upon this position of circumstances there was
neither any fair dispensation from personal service (except where
citizens' scruples interfered), nor any motive for wishing it. On the
contrary, by a very few days' service, a stigma, not for the individual
only, but for his house and kin, would be evaded for ages of having
treacherously forsaken the commonwealth in agony. And the preference for
a fighting station would be too eager instead of too backward. It would
become often requisite to do what it is evident the Jews in reality
did--to make successive sifting and winnowing from the service troops,
at every stage throwing out upon severer principles of examination those
who seemed least able to face a trying crisis, whilst honourable posts
of no great dependency would be assigned to those rejected, as modes of
soothing their offended pride. This in the case of a great danger; but
in the case of an ordinary danger there is no doubt that many vicarious
arrangements would exist by way of evading so injurious a movement as
that of the whole fighting population. Either the ordinary watch and
ward, in that section which happened to be locally threatened--as, for
instance, by invasion on one side from Edom or Moab, on another side
from the Canaanites or Philistines--would undertake the case as one
which had fallen to them by allotment of Providence; or that section
whose service happened to be due for the month, without local regards,
would face the exigency. But in any great national danger, under that
stage of society which the Jews had reached between Moses and
David--that stage when fighting is no separate professional duty, that
stage when such things are announced by there being no military pay--not
the army which is so large as 120,000 men, but the army which is so
small, requires to be explained.[8]
Secondly, the other inference from the phenomenon of no military pay,
and therefore no separate fighting profession, is this--that foreign
war, war of aggression, war for booty, war for martial glory, is quite
unknown. Now, all rules of political economy, applied to the maintenance
of armies, must of course contemplate a regular trade of war pursued
with those objects, and not a domestic war for beating off an attack
upon hearths and altars. Such a war only, be it observed, could be
lawfully entertained by the Jewish people. Mahomet, when he stole all
his great ideas from the Mosaic and Christian revelations, found it
inevitable to add one principle unknown to either: this was a religious
motive for perpetual war of aggression, and such a principle he
discovered in the imaginary duty of summary proselytism. No instruction
was required. It was sufficient for the convert that, with or without
sincerity, under terror of a sword at his throat, he spoke the words
aloud which disowned all other faith than in Allah and Mahomet his
prophet. It was sufficient for the soldier that he heard of a nation
denying or ignoring Mahomet, to justify any atrocity of invasive
warfare. But the Jews had no such commission--a proselyte needed more
evidences of assent than simply to bawl out a short formula of words,
and he who refused to become a proselyte was no object of persecution.
Some nations have forced their languages upon others as badges of
servitude. But the Romans were so far from treating _their_ language in
this way, that they compelled barbarous nations on their frontier to pay
for a license to use the Latin tongue. And with much more reason did the
Jews, instead of wishing to obtrude their sublime religion upon
foreigners, expect that all who valued it should manifest their value by
coming to Jerusalem, by seeking instruction from the doctors of the law,
and by worshipping in the outer court of the Temple.
Such was the prodigious state of separation from a Mahometan principle
of fanatical proselytism in which the Jews were placed from the very
first. One small district only was to be cleared of its ancient
idolatrous, and probably desperately demoralized, tribes. Even this
purification it was not intended should be instant; and upon the
following reason, partly unveiled by God and partly left to an
integration, viz., that in the case of so sudden a desolation the wild
beasts and noxious serpents would have encroached too much on the human
population. So much is expressed, and probably the sequel foreseen was,
that the Jews would have lapsed into a wild hunting race, and have
outworn that ceremonial propensity which fitted them for a civil life,
which formed them into a hive in which the great work of God in Shiloh,
His probationary Temple or His glorious Temple and service at Jerusalem,
operated as the mysterious instinct of a queen bee, to compress and
organize the whole society into a cohesion like this of life. Here,
perhaps, lay the reason for not allowing of any sudden summary
extirpation, even for the idolatrous tribes; whilst, upon a second
principle, it was never meant that this extirpation should be complete.
Snares and temptations were not to be too thickly sown--in that case the
restless Jew would be too severely tried; but neither were they to be
utterly withdrawn--in that case his faith would undergo no probation.
Even upon this small domestic scale, therefore, it appears that
aggressive warfare was limited both for interest and for time. First, it
was not to be too complete; second, even for this incompleteness it was
not to be concentrated within a short time. It was both to be narrow and
to be gradual. By very necessity, therefore, of its original appointment
this part of the national economy, this small system of aggressive
warfare, could not provide a reason for a military profession. But all
other wars of aggression, wars operating upon foreign objects, had no
allowance, no motive, no colourable plea; for the attacks upon Edom,
Midian, Moab, were mere acts of retaliation, and, strictly speaking, not
aggressive at all, but parts of defensive warfare. Consequently there
remained no permanent case of war under Divine allowance that could ever
justify the establishment of a military caste; for the civil wars of the
Jews either grew out of some one intolerable crime taken up, adopted,
and wickedly defended by a whole tribe (as in the case of that horrible
atrocity committed by a few Benjamites, and then adopted by the whole
tribe), in which case a bloody exterminating war under God's sanction
succeeded and rapidly drew to a close, or else grew out of the ruinous
schism between the ten tribes and the two seated in or about Jerusalem.
And as this schism had no countenance from God, still less could the
wars which followed it. So that what belligerent state remains that
could have been contemplated or provided for in the original Mosaic
theory of their constitution? Clearly none at all, except the one sole
case of a foreign invasion. But as this, if in any national strength,
struck at the very existence of the people, and at their holy citadel in
Shiloh or in Jerusalem, it called out the whole military strength to the
last man of the Hebrew people. Consequently in any case, when the armies
could tend at all to great numerical amount, they must tend to an
excessive amount. And, so far from being a difficult problem to solve in
the 120,000 men, the true difficulty would lie the other way, to account
for its being so much reduced.
It seems to me highly probable that the offence of David in numbering
the people, which ultimately was the occasion of fixing the site for the
Temple of Jerusalem, pointed to this remarkable military position of the
Jewish people--a position forbidding all fixed military institutions,
and which yet David was probably contemplating in that very _census_.
Simply to number the people could not have been a crime, nor could it be
any desideratum for David; because we are too often told of the muster
rolls for the whole nation, and for each particular tribe, to feel any
room for doubt that the reports on this point were constantly corrected,
brought under review of the governing elders, councils, judges, princes,
or king, according to the historical circumstances, so that the need and
the criminality of such a _census_ would vanish at the same moment. But
this was not the _census_ ordered by David. He wanted a more specific
return, probably of the particular wealth and nature of the employment
pursued by each individual family, so that upon this return he might
ground a permanent military organization for the people; and such an
organization would have thoroughly revolutionized the character of the
population, as well as drawn them into foreign wars and alliances.
It is painful to think that many amiable and really candid minds in
search of truth are laid hold of by some plausible argument, as in this
case the young physician, by a topic of political economy, when a local
examination of the argument would altogether change its bearing. This
argument, popularly enforced, seemed to imply the impossibility of
supporting a large force when there were no public funds but such as ran
towards the support of the Levites and the majestic service of the
altar. But the confusion arises from the double sense of the word
'army,' as a machine ordinarily disposable for all foreign objects
indifferently, and one which in Judæa exclusively could be applied only
to such a service as must in its own nature be sudden, brief, and always
tending to a decisive catastrophe.
And that this was the true form of the crime, not only circumstances
lead me to suspect, but especially the remarkable demur of Joab, who in
his respectful remonstrance said in effect that, when the whole strength
of the nation was known in sum--meaning from the ordinary state
returns--what need was there to search more inquisitively into the
special details? Where all were ready to fight cheerfully, why seek for
separate _minutiæ_ as to each particular class? Those general returns
had regard only to the ordinary _causa belli_--a hostile invasion. And,
then, all nations alike, rude or refined, have gone upon the same
general outline of computation--that, subtracting the females from the
males, this, in a gross general way, would always bisect the total
return of the population. And, then, to make a second bisection of the
male half would subtract one quarter from the entire people as too young
or too old, or otherwise as too infirm for warlike labours, leaving
precisely one quarter of the nation--every fourth head--as available for
war. This process for David's case would have yielded perhaps about
1,100,000 fighting men throughout Palestine. But this unwieldy
_pospolite_ was far from meeting David's secret anxieties. He had
remarked the fickle and insurrectionary state of the people. Even
against himself how easy had it been found to organize a sudden
rebellion, and to conceal it so prosperously that he and his whole court
saved themselves from capture only by a few hours' start of the enemy,
and through the enemy's want of cavalry. This danger meantime having
vanished, it might be possible that for David personally no other great
conspiracy should disturb his seat upon the throne. None of David's sons
approached to Absalom in popularity; and yet the subsequent attempt of
Adonijah showed that the revolutionary temper was still awake in that
quarter. But what David feared, in a further-looking spirit, was the
tenure by which his immediate descendants would maintain their title.
The danger was this: over and above the want of any principle for
regulating the succession, and this want operating in a state of things
far less determined than amongst monogamous nations--one son pleading
his priority of birth; another, perhaps, his mother's higher rank, a
third pleading his very juniority, inasmuch as this brought him within
the description of _porphyrogeniture_, or royal birth, which is often
felt as transcendent as _primogeniture_--even the people, apart from the
several pretenders to the throne, would create separate interests as
grounds for insurrection or for intestine feuds. There seems good reason
to think that already the ten tribes, Israel as opposed to Judah, looked
upon the more favoured and royal tribe of Judah, with their
supplementary section of Benjamin, as unduly favoured in the national
economy. Secretly there is little doubt that they murmured even against
God for ranking this powerful tribe as the prerogative tribe. The
jealousy had evidently risen to a great height; it was suppressed by the
vigilant and strong government of Solomon; but at the outset of his
son's reign it exploded at once, and the Scriptural account of the case
shows that it proceeded upon old grievances. The boyish rashness of
Rehoboam might exasperate the leaders, and precipitate the issue; but
very clearly all had been prepared for a revolt. And I would remark that
by the 'young men' of Rehoboam are undoubtedly meant the soldiers--the
body-guards whom the Jewish kings now retained as an element of royal
pomp. This is the invariable use of the term in the East. Even in
Josephus the term for the military by profession is generally 'the young
men'; whilst 'the elders' mean the councilors of state. David saw
enough of the popular spirit to be satisfied that there was no political
reliance on the permanence of the dynasty; and even at home there was an
internal source of weakness. The tribe of Benjamin were mortified and
incensed at the deposition of Saul's family and the bloody proscription
of that family adopted by David. One only, a grandson of Saul, he had
spared out of love to his friend Jonathan. This was Mephibo-sheth; but
he was incapacitated for the throne by lameness. And how deep the
resentment was amongst the Benjamites is evident from the insulting
advantage taken of his despondency in the day of distress by Shimei. For
Shimei had no motive for the act of coming to the roadside and cursing
the king beyond his attachment to the house of Saul. Humanly speaking,
David's prospect of propagating his own dynasty was but small. On the
other hand, God had promised him _His_ support. And hence it was that
his crime arose, viz., upon his infidelity, in seeking to secure the
throne by a mere human arrangement in the first place; secondly, by such
an arrangement as must disorganize the existing theocratic system of the
Jewish people. Upon this crime followed his chastisement in a sudden
pestilence. And it is remarkable in how significant a manner God
manifested the nature of the trespass, and the particular course through
which He had meant originally, and _did_ still mean, to counteract the
worst issue of David's apprehensions. It happened that the angel of the
pestilence halted at the threshing-floor of Araunah; and precisely that
spot did God by dreams to David indicate as the site of the glorious
Temple. Thus it seemed as though in so many words God had declared: 'Now
that all is over, your crime and its punishment, understand that your
fears were vain. I will continue the throne in your house longer than
your anxieties can personally pursue its descent. And with regard to the
terrors from Israel, although this event of a great schism is inevitable
and essential to My councils, yet I will not allow it to operate for the
extinction of your house. And that very Temple, in that very place where
My angel was commissioned to pause, shall be one great means and one
great pledge to you of My decree in favour of your posterity. For this
house, as a common sanctuary to all Jewish blood, shall create a
perpetual interest in behalf of Judah amongst the other tribes, even
when making war upon Jerusalem.' Witness if it were but that one case
where 200,000 captives of Judah were restored without ransom, were
clothed completely, were fed, by the very men who had just massacred
their fighting relatives.