WHY THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES IGNORE THE FUTURE LIFE.
Veritas filia temporis.—BACON.
It is impossible to become familiar with the monumental, and other,
evidences of the position, which the idea of a future life held in the
religious system, and in the minds and lives of the Egyptians, without
finding one’s self again and again occupied with the inquiry—Why the
Mosaic Dispensation rejected it?[5] To pass over a matter of this kind
is to reject it. If a code makes no reference whatever to the idea of
inheritance, but provides for the appropriation and distribution of
the property of deceased persons in such a manner that the idea of
inheritance does not at all enter into the arrangement, as, for instance,
appropriating it all to the State, or distributing it all among the
inhabitants of the neighbourhood, it is clear that the author of the
code rejected the ordinary, and natural ideas of inheritance. In this
way the Mosaic Dispensation rejects the idea of a future life, an idea
which was the backbone of organized thought in Egypt, and among all Aryan
people. It does not reject it in the sense of saying that it is false,
but in the sense of omitting it as unsuitable for the purposes it has in
view. It adjourns the consideration of it to another day, and to other
conjunctures of circumstances.
But this is only a part of the wonder. Solomon, one of whose wives was
an Egyptian princess, and who possessed so inquiring a mind that it is
absolutely impossible he could have been unacquainted with the idea,
nowhere in what has survived of his ethical, philosophical, religious,
poetical, or practical writings, thinks it worth even a passing
reference. On the contrary, like his father David, he emphatically speaks
of death as the end. The former had asked whether God shows His wonders
among the dead? Or whether the dead shall rise up again and praise Him?
Shall His loving kindness be showed in the grave, or His righteousness
in the land where all things are forgotten? The wisdom of the latter
promised length of these subsolar days only.
Our surprise, already great, is carried to a still higher point on
discovering that, for the six centuries which followed the time of
Solomon, the Hebrew prophets, men of the profoundest moral insight, and
whose very business it was to put before their countrymen’s minds every
motive which could have power to induce them to eschew evil, and to do
good, pass over in their teaching, just as Moses, David, and Solomon had
done before them, this paramountly influential, and to us morally vital
idea.
If one had been called upon to give an _à priori_ opinion on the
subject, it would have seemed, I think, utterly impossible that such an
omission could have been made at the beginning, considering the nature of
the work that had to be done; or, if for some exceptional, but decisive,
reason it had been made at first, that it could have been maintained
throughout. We must remember that the word throughout here applies to the
whole course of a national literature, embracing history, legislation,
philosophy, poetry, morals, and, above all, religion through a range of
a thousand years. The idea was all that time all about the people, and
those who contributed to their literature, in Persia, in Egypt, and in
Asia Minor. In Europe every tribe of barbarians, and of semi-barbarians,
and every civilized people, possessed it. It was the source of their
respective religions. It made them all what they were. But in this
all-embracing, vigorous, and long-sustained literature of the Hebrews it
has no place. It might, for some special reason, have been excluded at
one epoch, but why through all? It might, for some special reason, have
been ill-adapted to some departments of Hebrew thought, but why to all?
And the manner is as singular as the fact of the rejection. It is simply
passed over in silence. No reference is made to it. It is not discussed.
It is not denounced. It is not ridiculed. It is not insisted on: that is
all.
Here, then, is an historical problem than which few can be more curious
and interesting. We may not yet be in a position to answer it completely,
but it is evident that the first step towards doing this is to set down
all the reasons that appear to us possible, and to weigh each with
reference to the mind, and the circumstances, of the times. We may not be
able to divine all the reasons, or, indeed, the right one, but still this
is the course that must be pursued.
The right answer will depend to a considerable extent on dates, that is
to say, on the preceding and contemporary history; on ethnological facts;
and on a right appreciation of the mental condition of the people. We
shall have to ascertain the date of the Exodus; who the Hebrews were, or,
to be more precise, who the Israelites were; and what were the popular
beliefs, and forms of thought, that bore on the question before us.
With respect, then, to the date of the Exodus, we shall, if we confine
ourselves to the Hebrew accounts, find the inquiry beset with great
difficulties. It is evident, from their character, that those accounts
were intended primarily for religious, and not for historical, purposes.
Had history been their object, we should have had some Egyptian names;
the absence of which, however, from the records, alone throws some light
on their purpose. The name, for instance, of the Pharaoh under whom
the Exodus took place is not given, nor the name of the Pharaoh, whose
minister Joseph was, nor that of the Pharaoh, who reigned when Abraham
came down into Egypt, nor, indeed, of one of the kings, who reigned
during the sojourn of the Israelites in Egypt. Nothing is told us of
the internal condition of the country, with the single exception of the
success of Joseph’s plan for enabling Pharaoh, in a time of famine, to
become the actual proprietor of the whole of the land of Egypt, save
what was held by the priests; nor is anything told us of its external
history, notwithstanding that that was its most eventful and important
period: for Egypt happened, just at that particular time, to be—having
recently culminated in the very zenith of its power—the wonder, the
terror, and the glory of the Eastern world. It was the period, which had
seen the conclusion of the long struggle between the Egyptians and their
Semitic invaders; a struggle in which the latter, having at first been
victorious, had overthrown the native dynasty, got complete possession
of the country, and ruled it for some centuries, but had in the end
been expelled. This struggle, which had terminated when the connexion
of the Israelites with Egypt commenced, was followed by a period of
unexampled greatness and prosperity. To it belong the reigns of Sethos,
whose minister Joseph was, and of Rameses II., the son of Sethos, and
the oppressor of the children of Israel. These two greatest of Egyptian
conquerors, both of them, overran Syria, and the neighbouring countries:
the latter carrying his devastations even as far as Persia and Asia
Minor. They had permanently occupied positions on the Euphrates; and were
keeping open their communications with them through the sea-side plains
to the west, and through the countries to the north, of the district the
Israelites conquered, and took possession of. Sethos had been a great
builder, but Rameses was the greatest builder the world has ever seen.
All the chief structures at Karnak, Thebes, Abydos, and in a multitude of
other places in the Delta, as well as in Upper Egypt, and even in Nubia,
were his work. What he had done in this way was so far in advance of
all that had ever been done before, that it must have been the talk of
all that part of the world. Of all these great names and great events,
no mention whatever is made in the Hebrew Scriptures, although, during
the sojourn, Egypt was actually the scene of the sacred history. The
omission is very similar to that which is the subject of this chapter,
and almost as difficult to explain. If, then, we were confined to the
Jewish accounts, it would be impossible for us to assign to the date of
the Exodus its place in the history of Egypt. There is, however, one
name occurring incidentally in the account of the oppression, which, in
conjunction with monumental evidence, enables us to fix precisely this
indispensable date—so precisely as that we are sure that it took place in
the reign of Menephthah, or Menophres, the son of the great Rameses, and
the grandson of Sethos. I shall reserve the demonstration of this till I
have occasion to mention the Canal of Rameses.
I said that the date of the Exodus has an important bearing on the
inquiry of why the doctrine of a future life was excluded from the Mosaic
Dispensation: it has this importance, because it enables us to know what
had been going on in that part of the world for some time immediately
preceding the promulgation of that Dispensation. Knowing the date, we
know that reciprocal barbarities, such as this age can fortunately
form but a feeble conception of, had for centuries been the order of
the day between the Egyptians and the Semites. At last the Egyptians
had got completely the upper hand, and had driven out the main body
of the Semites from their country, had devastated in a most sweeping,
and ruthless manner neighbouring countries, and most frequently and
most completely those parts of Syria which soon afterwards fell into
the hands of the Israelites. If we can form but a feeble conception of
the barbarities of those times, we can perhaps form only a still less
adequate conception of that which prompted them—the gluttonous hatred
that animated these two races towards each other. No amount of blood,
no form of cruelty on any scale, could satiate it. There is nothing in
the practices, the history, the religion, of the modern world which
enables us to understand their feelings. We see much evidence of them
on the Egyptian monuments, and some indications of them in the Hebrew
Scriptures; and these, of course, must be translated, not in accordance
with our ideas, but with the ideas of those times. Every shepherd was
an abomination to the Egyptians. The Hebrews took the opposite view,
and regarded the first tiller of the ground as the first murderer. The
Hebrews might not eat with the Egyptians, for that was an abomination to
them.
It is the date, which enables us, in some measure, to understand the
feelings that underlie these statements.
The next question is, who were the Israelites? We are now regarding the
question singly from the historical point of view, just as we should
the question of who were the Lydians, the Etruscans, the Dorians, or
any other people of antiquity? There is no question but that they were
substantially a Semitic people, mainly of the same race, and of the same
dispositions and capacities as the other branches of the Semitic stock,
as for instance, the Phœnicians, and the Moabites of the old, and the
Arabs of the modern world. It is clear, however, and this is a point of
some importance, that they were not of unmixed Semitic blood. Abraham
came from Ur of the Chaldees, and was therefore a Chaldean, whatever
that appellative stood for at that time. The Hebrew Scriptures describe
him as a Syrian. He can, therefore hardly be regarded as of pure Semitic
descent. Furthermore, when the people left Egypt they must have had
in their veins a large infusion of Egyptian, that is old Aryan blood,
somewhat mixed with Ethiopian. This must have been the case, because
during their sojourn in Egypt there had been no disinclination among them
to intermarry with Egyptians. Joseph had had for his wife a high-caste
Egyptian woman, Amenath, the daughter of Potipherah, priest of On; and
the wife of Moses is called a Cushite, or Ethiopian woman. Besides this,
we are told that when the people—their blood being already mixed in this
way with that of the semi-Aryan Egyptians—went up out of Egypt, there
went out with them a mixed multitude, which can only mean Egyptians, who
cast in their lot with them, or a remnant of the Hyksos, who had stayed
behind at the time of the expulsion of the main body, or the descendants
of the Asiatic captives of Sethos and Rameses, and their predecessors. I
need not go to the Egyptian accounts. The above facts will be sufficient
for our present purpose. They enable us historically to understand
the people. They were of mixed descent, of very composite blood. The
preponderant element was Semitic, but that had been enriched by large
additions of better blood; still, however, not to such an extent as to
efface, or even to any decisive degree alter the Semitic characteristics.
The mental capacity and vigour, the apprehensiveness and receptiveness of
the people, had been increased, but still they were in the main Semitic;
in language, in sentiment, in cast and direction of thought.
At that particular juncture, then, in the history of that part of the
world to which our attention has just been recalled, Moses had to deal
with the material we are examining. Still limiting our inquiry to
historical objects, historically investigated, what he had to do at that
time was to make these mixed and unpromising materials into a people—a
work that was from first to last entirely a moral one: as hard a task as
was ever undertaken, the very idea of which has no place in the minds of
us moderns. He was thoroughly aware of the difficulty of his task. Had it
ever been heard before, and, after some thousands of years, we may add,
has it ever been heard since, of a nation taken out of another nation,
and, according even to the Hebrew accounts, the object of which is not
historical, taken chiefly from the servile class of another nation, and
yet welded into a true people, with the strongest, the most enduring,
and the most distinctive characteristics? What material was ever more
unlikely? And yet was ever success more complete? A scion, not a vigorous
and healthy offset, but a bruised sprout, was so planted, and surrounded
with such influences, as that it took good root, grew vigorously, sent
forth strong and spreading branches, and bore, and even still bears, its
own peculiar fruit. Nowhere in Europe in these days, except it may be
to some extent in northern Germany, is any attempt made to fashion in
this way the mind, and sentiments, and instincts of a people, which, and
not the amount of population, or of wealth, is what truly constitutes a
people.
Why, then, did Moses, in this great attempt, omit entirely the one
thought we consider the most potent of all? His object was to make a
people. It was not primarily to reveal a religion. We come to this
conclusion from an observation of the facts, from an analysis of the
Dispensation, and from taking into account the principle, that religion
is for man, and not man for religion. But a nation, especially such a
nation as he contemplated, is made only by moral and intellectual means.
The revelation, therefore, of a religion was not at all an accident,
or in any sense something which might be, according to circumstances,
included in, or excluded from, his plan. It was a necessity—a necessary
part of the one means for the one object. These materials could not have
been made into a people without a code, nor could there have then been a
code without a religion. The question, then, before him was not simply—as
is generally supposed—to promulgate a religion, but to make the mass
of living integers before him into a nation by a code, sanctioned by a
religion. The religious part of the question, therefore, was limited to
the consideration of what form of religion would best effect this?
One indispensable requisite was that it must be a religion that would
never take them back in thought and heart to Egypt. With Egypt he must
break utterly and for ever. This was a most difficult task. The thoughts
of the people went back to the flesh-pots of Egypt. They remembered the
fish, and the leeks, the onions, the cucumbers, and the melons they had
eaten in Egypt; but, more than all this, they remembered the palpable
and intelligible religion, the magnificent and touching ceremonies and
processions, the awe-inspiring temples—all that had satisfied at once
the eye, the heart, and the thought, while they had sojourned in, and
served the gods of, Egypt. They even recurred to the worship of the
bull Mnevis, the divinity of Heliopolis—Joseph’s On—at the very foot of
Sinai. Everything, therefore, that could recall Egypt and its religion,
everything that might present a point of contact between the thoughts,
the worship, the lives of the new people and of their old masters, was
to be studiously avoided. The dividing lines must everywhere be deep and
sharp—there must be no bridges from one to the other. So it must be. But
the doctrine of the future life was the very kernel—the heart itself—of
the religion of Egypt. There was, therefore, no choice; this must be
utterly abandoned and excluded: to admit it would be to admit Osiris,
the judge of the souls deceased this world, his assessors, and his array
of avengers, and the whole apparatus of the lower world. As to Heaven,
too, or the place of the blessed, the Egyptians had already appropriated
the sun, which, in that material age, must have appeared as the
best—indeed, the only suitable—_locus in quo_. That was already peopled
with Egyptians; and it could, therefore, be no heaven for the Hebrews—for
Semites. Or, if they were, in the end, to inhabit the same heaven,
sympathy for the Egyptians, and for their ideas, would be kept alive;
and, if so, then the design of forming a peculiar people, separate and
distinct from all other people, must be abandoned. It would be impossible
to carry it out.
This view of the reason for the omission of the great doctrine has in it,
I think, some truth, though it is far from being the whole truth. Moses
may have seen clearly that it would have been impossible to carry out
his paramount object if this doctrine was allowed a place in his system;
but this view falls short of what is required. It does not account
for the whole of the fact. It does not account, for instance, for the
doctrine not having been admitted into the system in after times—and no
explanation can be complete, or satisfactory, which does not include
that. We know, also, that Moses did not reject absolutely everything that
was Egyptian. He retained, for instance, circumcision, and the Egyptian
division of the lunar month into four weeks of seven days each, etc.
Another conceivable supposition is that, if the doctrine of a future
life had been admitted, it was foreseen that the priestly caste, instead
of remaining the ministers and servants of the congregation, would have
become its masters, as in Egypt; and that the law would then have been
wrested into an instrument for giving them undue power and domination. It
would have given them the lever for moving this world at their pleasure,
and for their own behoof; and so its primary object, which was a moral
and political one, would have become only secondary to the maintenance
of a dominant privileged class. This supposition, when applied to those
early times, is not, as the history of Egypt shows, altogether an
anachronism; and it is evident that dangers of this kind were foreseen,
and, to some extent, provided against. We see an indication of this
in the intentional absence, during the earlier periods of the history
of the nation, of monarchical institutions, which, in those times,
were, externally and politically, almost necessary, and, consequently,
almost universal in the outside world. We trace, also, this thought in
the comment made on their adoption, when it had become impossible any
longer to dispense with them. And, again, in the fact that the Prophets,
who were the authorized expositors and maintainers of the law, were
not Priests. But of this supposition, also, we must say that it does
not explain the whole of the phenomenon—for there were periods when,
notwithstanding the amount of truth and force contained in the reason it
suggests, the great doctrine might have been, but was not, introduced.
Or was it, and this I propose as a third conjecture, that the Hebrews
were too unimaginative a people to realize in thought the conception of
a future life? And, therefore, was this one instance, amongst others,
of the progressiveness of the Revelation, which had spoken in one mode
to the fathers, and which spoke afterwards—of course, within certain
intelligible limitations—in a diverse manner to their descendants? This
progressiveness every one is aware of; but I do not think that the Hebrew
was quite so unimaginative as the supposition implies. The Semitic race
is imaginative in its way. It is, and was, a gross race; which, of
course, implies grossness of imagination; but we can hardly suppose that
the Hebrew of old would have been less capable of imagining a future
Paradise than the modern Arab; though, we may be sure, it would have
assumed, like his, very much of an earthly character; and that earthly
character would not have been of the highest and most refined kind.
Feasting, for instance, would have been an ingredient in the future bliss
of a healthy and hungry people, who, in this world, had very little to
eat. And here it would be interesting to ascertain what, on this subject,
was the belief of the Phœnicians, Canaanites, Moabites, and ancient
Arabians. It is to the point, also, to remember that the Hebrew system
had a Paradise. It was, however, one which came at the beginning, and not
at the end, of all things. It was, also, an earthly Paradise. In this I
see implied contradictions to the Egyptian doctrine on this subject. And
I believe that there are other similarly implied contradictions without
direct references; and that there are such points of allusive protest,
and of intended contrast, is of importance. For instance, I am disposed
to think that the comment on the Ten Commandments—‘these words ... and
no more’ is an implied contradiction of the Divine authority of the
Forty-two Commandments, with reference to which the Egyptian believed
that he should be tried at the Day of Judgment; an article of Egyptian
faith, with which Moses, and the people who were listening to him, must
have been quite familiar; and which could hardly, at that moment, have
been absent from their minds. But as to the supposition before us, I
think, to whatever extent we may be able to allow it to be true in
itself, we shall still be unable to accept it, just as was the case with
the two others we considered before it, as a sufficient cause for the
phenomenon we are now investigating.
But I have not yet exhausted all the light that can be brought to bear
on this difficulty. I can see a fourth solution. It occurred to me at
Jerusalem. I there said to myself, ‘Let us endeavour to look at it in the
form in which it appears to have presented itself to the Divine Master.
He “brought life and immortality to light” to His countrymen, and, in
the highest sense, to us. He must, while engaged in this work, have seen
clearly the very difficulty that is now before us. It was, in fact, the
difficulty that directly, or in its logical consequences, stood up before
Him on all occasions of His teaching. How, then, did He meet it? How did
He deal with it?’ I will now proceed to propound the answer, that this
way of contemplating the difficulty evolved in my mind.
I assumed that the first step towards finding the way to the true answer
to our question was to ascertain what was precisely the work Moses had
been called to do, and what were the conditions under which he had to
do it. In order to reach a right understanding of these matters, it was
necessary to know the date at which his work was done. Without that we
should have been quite unable to reconstruct in our minds the conditions
under which he had done his work; the very chief of which were the nature
and composition of the human materials, out of which he had to form a
people, which was his great task. A similar process must here be repeated
with respect to the work of Christ: we must now make out distinctly what
it was that He had to accomplish, and what were the obstacles in the way
of His accomplishing it.
Hitherto we have been endeavouring to make out what had to be done at
the first establishment of, and throughout, the old Dispensation; and
we have summoned before us, successively, three reasons, which might
be imagined, and alleged, for the omission in that Dispensation of one
particular doctrine we might have expected to find in it. This we did
with a constant reference to the times, circumstances, and conditions of
the work. We saw, however, that not one of those reasons is sufficient
and admissible. Not one explains all the phenomena. What, therefore,
we are endeavouring to get sight of is still in obscurity. The answer
sought has not yet been found. What we now propose to do, still for the
purpose of obtaining this answer, is to recall what He taught, and what
arguments He used, Who ‘brought life and immortality to light;’ and how
in doing this He dealt with what Moses had taught, and with what he had
not taught; and how He dealt with the thoughts that were in the minds
of the people He was addressing. If this inquiry shall enable us to see
that it was, precisely, the doctrine of the future life (what Moses had
abstained from teaching) which overturned the old Dispensation (what
he had taught); and at the same time to see how, and why, it had this
effect, then we shall know why Moses, and the Prophets, had not taught it.
Fifteen hundred years had elapsed since Moses’s day. What we have to set
before our minds, now, is the conditions under which the new work had
to be done. It was new, because it cancelled, or supplemented, what was
old. It did both. How did it do it? What were the difficulties it had to
contend with? What were the obstacles that stood in its path, and had
to be surmounted? Of course, they must have been the creation of the
foregoing state of things. Let us, then, be sure that we understand the
antecedent times and events.
The object of Moses had been to form a people, in the ordinary sense
of these words; a people, that is to say, who would be well-ordered
at home, and able to hold their own among their neighbours. For this
purpose a code was the first necessity, and, indeed, it might effect all
that was required. But even a somewhat superficial acquaintance with the
history of those fifteen centuries shows us that this code must come
from God. That was a necessity. A law from man would, at that time, have
been useless, and even inconceivable. There was, however, no difficulty
about a law from God. In the spontaneous apprehensions of the people,
at that time, God was the source of all law, directly and immediately,
as distinctly as He is to our apprehensions the source of all law,
mediately and ultimately. We must make out the effect of this difference.
Theirs was the case in which the intervention of God is not confined to
principles, it being left to human legislators to apply those principles;
but it was the case in which He gives, necessarily, the letter of the
statute. Of this it is the natural, and logical, sequence, that He should
be the administrator and executor of His own law, even of what we call
civil and criminal law. Human agency, when employed, was employed only
mechanically, in the same way as a famine, or pestilence. There was
nothing in the mind of the people that could dispose them to reject this
conclusion, for they had already accepted the premises. They saw God
standing behind the law—which is regulative of society; and dictating its
letter; and, because they saw this, they could not, also, but see Him
standing behind the course of events, and bringing about the rewards and
punishments the law required.
But, furthermore, it is evident that law, civil and criminal, must be
executed here in this life. This is a concern of existing human societies
that must be attended to. The more instantaneously punishment overtakes
the offender the better. The more completely, then, will the very object
of the law be carried out, that which is the whole of its _raison
d’être_. It always has been so all over the world. To be effective, to
answer its purpose, to do what it aims at doing, its action must be
certain, speedy, visible. Punishment has two political objects, to rid
society of those who are disturbing it, and to strike terror into, and
so deter, those who might be disposed to disturb it. The object of law,
therefore, can not be attained without present, immediate punishment. The
more immediate the better. It has been so everywhere, and always. Moses’s
law, therefore, required the sanction of direct, immediate, mundane
rewards and punishments, just like any other code.
We see, then, at once, that there was no absolute need for future rewards
and punishments. We can even already imagine that they would have had
a weakening and disturbing effect upon the system: at all events, we
shall eventually find that they were, precisely, as a matter of fact and
history, the very solvent that was used, designedly, for the very purpose
of disintegrating and destroying it. As it was a system of statute law,
what was needed was that the offender should be punished here at once.
Moses had no concern with the world to come, or with the unseen world
at all, excepting so far as it could further his great object. No code
of civil and criminal law, that ever was heard of, could be maintained,
if it relegated the punishment of the offender to a future life. And,
furthermore, as God was the primary giver of the law, and the actual
source of it, so must He be the actual executor of it: it was His own
law. This was intelligible, and logical. And furthermore, it was in
perfect harmony both with the physics and the metaphysics of those
ages, among the learned and the unlearned alike. To their apprehension
everything good in nature, in society, and the mind of man, came direct
from God. God’s arm, therefore, was ever bared, and visible. Every
offence had its penalty, whether the offence of an individual, or of
the nation; and that penalty was visibly exacted at the time, that
is to say, in this life. The idea of future rewards and punishments
would have been antagonistic to this. It would have been an element of
confusion and weakness. There was no place for it. It was practically and
logically and philosophically excluded. The one thing that was paramount,
and indispensable, was thoroughly attended to. What would have acted
injuriously on that imperious necessity was set aside.
All this is clear abstractedly. And in the concrete history it comes out
with perfect distinctness. During the fifteen hundred years the law is
in force, we have not one syllable about a doctrine of a future life.
It was so, because it was absolutely logical, and quite natural, that
it should be so. Nothing else could account for the fact. It was just
what ought to have been the case. It was excluded not so much designedly
as spontaneously. There was no more place for it in the teaching of the
Prophets than there had been, originally, in the code itself, because
it would have been destructive of the system they were expounding and
enforcing. It could not, therefore, have occurred to them to teach it.
But at last, for certain reasons, the time has come for teaching it.
What now, therefore, we have to do is to mark the way in which the law
was dealt with in order that it might be taught. The object of the Light
of the World was not, as that of the code of Moses had been, to form
a people, in the ordinary sense of those words, that is, to make and
maintain in the world that political organism we call a nation, but to
form a peculiar people, that would belong to all nations. His kingdom
was not to be as the separate kingdoms of the world, but an universal
kingdom, constructed out of all the kingdoms of the world. It would
differ from the ordinary kingdoms of the world in the source, in the
purview, and in the object of its law. It would reject everything,
however necessary for national purposes, which conflicted with the
idea of the universal brotherhood of mankind, the only conceivable
principle for an universal voluntary society; and its law, for obvious
reasons, would not be a written law. It would not require that its
members should pay taxes, though it would require that they should tax
themselves to satisfy the claims of fraternity. Nor would it require
that they should fight. God would not be to them the Lord of hosts,
but the universal Father. The working of the community would give no
occasion for the use of arms. It would be composed of Jews, Greeks, and
Scythians; of bond and free; of all peoples, kindreds, and languages.
Nothing could bind together this unlocalized society but their morality.
And the only sanction, looking at mankind generally, for the morality
of an unlocalized society, would be the rewards and punishments of a
future life. The principles, therefore, of an universally applicable
system of morality, binding together a people taken out of all
nations, must be made the law of this peculiar people, this unworldly,
universally-diffused community; and they must believe in the rewards
and punishments of a future life. Their law must find both its source,
and its sanction, in themselves, that is to say, in what they felt, and
believed: whereas both the source and the sanction of the old law had
been _ab extra_.
We can see no way in which this could have been done except by
terminating that part of the old system which made the letter of every
statute, that is to say, the whole organization of society, and every
provision of every kind for the maintenance of that organization, of
Divine institution; and which, therefore, required that God should
execute His own law Himself, here, in this life. Here were two ideas,
distinct, but necessarily connected, and now they must be annulled,
both of them. Both the legislation, and the enforcement of it, must be
transferred from God to the State. Indeed the State—it had been Greek,
and now it was Roman—had already got them absolutely into its own hands.
The old law had now no existence, except on sufferance, and that only
to a limited extent. Legislation could never again be got out of the
hands into which it had fallen; and it was, in itself, far better that
it should remain in them. Of course it could not have been so with God’s
people of old time: but for the future it ought not to be, and it could
not be, otherwise.
Henceforth God would be the source in men’s hearts of the principles
only of right. Legislators must, themselves, apply those principles
to the varying circumstances and needs of their respective times and
countries. They must also themselves provide means for enforcing the
observance of their applications of these principles. But, of course,
though this might answer roughly the purposes of human societies, it
would be altogether imperfect and inadequate as a machinery either for
fairly and completely rewarding and punishing individuals, or for making
men good, or for keeping the heart pure, and gentle, and loving. All this
must still result from the relation in which man feels that he stands
towards God. Man could have little to do with these matters in his fellow
man. This world, in which ‘some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall,’
was clearly not the place for the perfect adjustment of compensations
and retributions. The balance for weighing the things that are seen
cannot be exactly trimmed here. How, then, could there be any pretence of
weighing the more important things, those that set in motion the whole
life, that cannot be seen? This necessitated a future life. The world
had passed into a state in which heaven-sent, heaven-administered codes
were impossible. But religion itself had not become impossible. It would,
however, be obliged henceforth to address itself to what God has willed
should be the general conscience of mankind, and to find its sanction
in what God has enabled man to anticipate of a life to come. This was a
higher form of religion. It belonged to higher conditions of humanity.
What was now required was not that law, or that the principles and
foundations of law, should be overthrown; but, on the contrary, that
those principles of morality, that are universal, and are commonly
recognized among mankind, should be made, with the most searching and
binding force, the law of the new society; and that the sanction of this
law should be changed from the present to the future life. Much that had
necessarily been incorporated in the Mosaic Dispensation, because needed
for its limited, national, mundane purpose, must now be held to have
answered its purpose, and to be terminated as far as the new, universal,
society was concerned. Everything that was special belonged to this head;
and, _à fortiori_, everything that was exclusive, and so conflicted with
the universal law, which was, above all things, a law of brotherhood.
It could be nothing else. In this view, the mother idea of Christianity
is the substitution, as the rule of individual life, of the universal
natural law for the positive written, municipal law of the Hebrews, and
of every other people. It has no written law of its own. It appeals to
the unwritten law, which is inscribed not on tables of stone and brass,
but on the fleshly tables of the heart; that is to say, to what is in
man. And this, we may observe in passing, it is, which enables it to live
and grow, and to develop, and accommodate itself to every increase of
knowledge, and to the advancing conditions of society.
Still local mundane governments must be maintained; and this also would
require a law. Law was, therefore, henceforth divided into two parts:
that which is universal, natural, unwritten, which God reveals to
men’s hearts, and for the observance of which they will hereafter be
accountable to God; and that which is shaped by the wisdom and the folly,
the knowledge and the ignorance, the necessities, the circumstances,
and the interests of human legislators, and of separate, often hostile,
nations. For this latter men would be accountable, primarily, to the
State. The State would enact, and must administer and execute it. Only
in cases in which the State was Christian (none such then existed, but
the time might come when the kingdoms of the world would be the kingdoms
of Christ and of God), would the principles of the municipal law not
conflict with the principles of the divine, universal law. But even in
cases where they were in conflict, the Christian, as human society is
ordained of God, would, as a matter of conscience, even when not of right
and reason, submit to it. This, however, would be understood as having
its limits, for there would be cases in which we must obey God and not
man.
(These ideas, by the way, neither condemn nor commend to us the principle
of the establishment of national Churches. That is a question of times,
of circumstances, and of expediency. We can imagine conditions under
which the advantages of such an arrangement, and others, under which
the disadvantages would preponderate. Of course, at the time of the
promulgation of the religion, the idea of anything of the kind was
impossible. What has been before us has, however, obviously a bearing on
the questions of what establishments, where they exist, should teach, and
of how they should enforce their teaching.)
As to the law, for which a man would be accountable to God, that would be
taught him by God. The knowledge of it and the desire to fulfil it would
result from the working of a Divine Spirit within his heart. The teaching
of that Spirit would be always in harmony with the knowledge to which man
had been enabled to attain, and with the social conditions to which he
had been raised. That knowledge and these conditions are progressive. So,
therefore, would be the teaching of this Spirit. We know in what mode it
spoke, in old times, through prophets and holy men; and what it was, at
a later period, in the words of Christ, Whom God sent. Under the Mosaic
Dispensation it had promulgated municipal law, which requires in all
cases, and had required, in an especial degree, in the case of so rude a
people as the Hebrews, immediate rewards and punishments; and this, under
the circumstances, the most important particular of these being that God
was Himself executing the law, here and now, had excluded the doctrine of
a future life. Under the Christian Dispensation it promulgated natural,
universal, unlocalized law, and so required the doctrine of a future
life; and this necessitated the abrogation of the doctrine that God is
Himself executing the law, here and now.
The argumentative position and aims of the Divine Master can not be
understood, unless these differences are attended to. He taught that
His kingdom was not of this world. It could not have been so taught by
them of old time. He taught that men must render unto Cæsar the things
that are Cæsar’s. Formerly it could only be taught that God was all in
all. When these, and many other similar statements of Christ and of His
Apostles are interpreted in accordance with the then existing condition
of the chosen people and of the world, we see that they involve the
entire abandonment to the civil power of the whole domain of positive
legislation, and of the entire and unqualified right of maintaining
such legislation; of course, without at all exempting legislators or
magistrates from obedience, in the exercise of their legislative or
executive functions, to the principles of right, and from ultimate
accountability to God. The authority of the old civil and criminal code
having thus been transferred from God to man, that of the ceremonial code
followed the same rule: though, indeed, these are distinctions which were
hardly recognised in early times. The law was not hereby absolutely and
necessarily abrogated, but only the idea that it is imposed, enforced,
and maintained by God in this life. That was the idea which had given
its form and character to the old Dispensation, and upon which it
had been founded, and to which the multitude, learned and unlearned,
clung, because they could not understand either how polity, religion,
or morality could be maintained without it, or how, in these matters,
there could be any advance. What, therefore, the promulgators of the new
Dispensation had to show was that the abandonment of these old ideas
about law was not tantamount to the abandonment of law itself. Man did
not cease to be accountable, and accountable to God. The old form of law,
as a heaven-originated code, and for that reason containing religion,
was abolished; but a higher and better form of law was substituted for
what had been abolished. The thing intended could now be fulfilled
more completely than before. An expansion and elasticity were given
to it, which might enable it to keep pace with every enlargement of
our moral consciousness, and of our purest and loftiest aspirations.
It was exalted, perfected, and made of universal application. What,
though necessary in its day, had, all along, been crippling, distorting,
and obscuring it, was now annulled. What was abolished was the old
letter, and its sanction; the old heaven-sent, heaven-administered,
heaven-executed code. Life and immortality could not be preached, nor
understood if that were maintained. What was not abolished, but to
which a freer and more enlarged course was given, was the living and
life-giving Spirit: the consciousness of right that is in man. That
had been in bondage under the old letter. It must now be emancipated:
otherwise it would die altogether. There was now, in the observance
of that old letter, a veil over their hearts. That must be torn away,
and then life and immortality would become distinctly visible. True,
henceforth, man would not have to give an account here, in this life, to
God, receiving his punishment or reward in this life very imperfectly:
the perception, however, of this would make visible the necessity of
his having to give an account in the world to come, in an after life,
when not a few overt acts, which are all that can be attended to in this
world, and those few only very inadequately either rewarded or punished,
but when even every word and every thought, as well as deed, could be
called into judgment; when everything could be fully revealed and known;
and exact recompense and retribution assigned.
In this way were things revealed, some of which had been kept secret from
the chosen people throughout the whole of their national existence, and
some of which had been kept secret from all people from the foundation
of the world. In this way would every scribe, who was fully instructed
unto the kingdom of heaven, bring forth out of his treasures things new
as well as old. This was the connexion and the opposition of the two
Dispensations. Divine wisdom was justified in both.
We have now before us the very pith and marrow of His teaching. It is
not in this world, as it had been taught by them of old time, that God’s
assize is held. It was not because those Galilæans, whose blood Herod
had mingled with their sacrifices, had been greater sinners than other
Galilæans, that they had suffered those things; nor had those eighteen,
on whom the Tower of Siloam had fallen, been sinners above other men that
dwelt in Jerusalem. Then follows the Parable of the Unfruitful Fig-tree,
which, instead of being destroyed, was spared again and again. God’s arm
is not now ever bare, and visible, to execute judgment on the evil-doer.
The Parable of the Wheat and the Tares is to the same purpose, only more
explicitly. What! does not God punish now as of old? Is the Almighty’s
arm shortened? Can He allow the wicked to prosper in the earth? The
answer is the end, the day of account and settlement, is not now. The
meaning of the prosperity of the wicked is not that they are being set in
slippery places, in order that they may be suddenly and fearfully cast
down. For the present God does allow the tares to grow together with
the wheat. There was more in this than met the ear. Let him whose ears
have understanding hear it. For them it had an inner, an historical,
and in the religious order, both a destructive and a reconstructive
meaning: and so we might go on with other forms of the great lesson. The
affliction the poor blind man laboured under was not a judgment—neither
he nor his parents had sinned. This is not the life for judgment. And so
does God make His rain to fall on the land of the just and of the unjust,
and His sun to shine on the good and on the bad indifferently. The rich
man, though most undeserving, had possessed, and enjoyed, undisturbed,
and to the full, all of good that this world can give; while Lazarus,
though most deserving, had suffered, without any mitigation, all of
evil this world could inflict. The balance of condition and desert had
not been adjusted in any sense, or degree, here, but was completely and
thoroughly in the after-life. It had not so been taught by them of old
time, nor could it have been. Such teaching was directly subversive
of—and, as a matter of historical fact, did subvert—the old doctrine, for
the indispensable sanction of that law was its immediate execution here
in this world. Then God could only make His rain to fall, and His sun
to shine, on the land of the just; and must withhold them from the land
of the unjust. It could have been maintained by no other teaching. But
now that the complete execution of the law was removed from this world,
a foundation was thereby laid for the establishment of the great, but
omitted, doctrine; and, together with it, of its corollary of time and
motive for repentance being in God the reason, and for man the use, of
this forbearance and of this even-handed goodness.
The above statements contain, I submit, the fundamental governing
ideas of Christ’s teaching, as it is set before us in the Gospels. No
surprise need be felt at finding that these ideas are not presented in
the sacred documents categorically. The reasons for their not having
been so propounded were quite insurmountable. It is enough that they are
the substance of them. That we should clearly apprehend that it is so,
is necessary to a right understanding of the documents, of the religion
they offer to the world, and of the history of the religion. They will,
also, often show, by an easy and sure test, what doctrines of particular
Churches are excrescences on the religion of Christ, and what are
contradictions to it.
So also was it with the teaching of St. Paul. He made the enlightened
moral consciousness of man the source of the law of religion, as
distinguished from municipal law; and he taught that the sanction for
this heart-inscribed law exists in the rewards and punishments of a
future life. For this reason the resurrection was his cardinal doctrine;
for, if there be no resurrection, he had but little, in what would be
the sentiments and opinions of the mass of mankind on these subjects, to
support and enforce his teaching. It is evident that he could not have
maintained either of these two points, if he had maintained that the old
Dispensation was of perpetual obligation. With respect to it, all he
could maintain was, that, morally and practically, it had its legitimate
issue in what he was teaching. Logically and implicitly, its requirements
had necessitated its contradicting both his two above-mentioned great
points. At all events, with respect to both, it had taught something very
different from what he was teaching. To the conjoint consideration of
what it had formerly taught, and what he had to teach now, he addressed
himself; and we find that all that he said upon these subjects was in
perfect accord with what had been said, and implied, by his Divine Master.
II. And, now that we have collected our facts, let us proceed to combine
them into a regular and synoptical argument. If, in my endeavour to
establish them, I may have been too concise, I beg the reader to call to
mind the title of this work. These are matters which, here, I can neither
pass over altogether, nor yet treat as fully as I might think desirable.
For the purpose, then, of his great work—that of forming a people,
the municipal law (this we must endeavour to separate in thought from
the religion) had occupied in the mind of Moses the first place. The
subordination of the religion to the law is evident, because the object
and use of the religion were to sanction and enforce the law. Law is
nothing, unless there be force to maintain it. In ordinary cases, the
requisite force is found in the majority, or in the strongest class, or
in an individual stronger than the community. In this case it was sought
_ab extra_: the religion was to supply it. In the dispensation that was
to be the place, and the use, of the religion. It had no ulterior, nor
collateral, objects; because it did not include in its purview the future
life. These ideas belong to an early stage of knowledge, and of thought,
in which municipal law and religion are inextricably entangled. We, at
this time, are able to disentangle them; and, while keeping them in
thought distinct from each other, to make out, in any case that may be
before us, in what relation they are standing towards each other.
But municipal codes have always required, and must, from their very
nature and purpose require, immediate rewards and punishments. This is
common to them all. Moses, as a legislator, had little, or no, concern
with anything else. His code, however, required them in a somewhat
greater degree than others, because it was to be applied to a singularly
rude and intractable people; and where the code is in advance of the
general manners and sentiments of a people, as was his, speediness and
severity of punishment are needed especially. So would it have been with
his code had it been merely as others are. On that supposition he would
probably, just as other legislators have done, and for the same reasons,
have abstained from putting forward the sanction of future rewards and
punishments. As far as his business and object were concerned, they would
have introduced considerations which, while they were irrelevant, would
also have been confusing; and must have weakened the appropriate sanction
of his law, which was so essentially his main reliance, that he could not
afford to risk its being at all weakened. Indeed, we see that it was a
great object in the code to intensify the sense of the severity, and of
the speediness of its punishments.
So it would have been, if the code he delivered had been as other codes.
On that supposition, he would, probably, have confined himself to the
rewards and punishments of this world. There was, however, one supreme
peculiarity which distinguished his from all the municipal codes of
civil and criminal law people in this part of the world have ever had
to do with; that was that it came direct from God. And it came in such
a manner and sense, that it required that God should see, more or less
immediately, to its execution. It was His law in such a sense that He
must be its executor. This meant that God did actually superintend the
distribution of the rewards and punishments it required.
This was a structural necessity. At all events it was recognized as such,
and was logically carried out in the system.
It will enable us to see this more clearly, if we consider in what way,
and on what footing, could have been introduced the doctrine of future
rewards and punishments, had they been superadded to these immediate
ones, the distribution of which was superintended by God, and which Moses
was compelled to insist on. It could, as far as we can imagine, have been
done only in one or other of the two following ways. Either he, and the
Prophets after him, must have said, and this was what they did say: ‘This
is God’s law; and God rewards and punishes all violations of it here in
this world; so that you get, here and now, the rewards and punishments
He Himself assigns to your actions, and which He Himself actually
apportions. But,’ they must then have gone on to add, ‘you will have the
same process repeated in a future world.’ Had this been announced, it
would have been equivalent to saying, that the Omniscient and Omnipotent
Judge having, according to His own law, unerringly tried, and adequately
compensated, every act, would repeat the process a second time. That is
to say, that every case, having been already adjudicated upon, without
any possibility of error, or of insufficiency of award, or of miscarriage
of any kind, would be adjudicated upon again by the same Judge, who had
in the first instance known every particular, and had, in accordance with
His own law, thoroughly dealt with it. No man in his right mind could
have propounded such a system: and in these matters Orientals, down to
the very bottom of society, are far more logical than ourselves. Jesus
precisely, because He taught that the transgressor is not tried by God
in this world, could teach that he would be tried by God in the world
to come. But this was just what Moses, and the prophets, could not say,
because their system rested on the opposite assumption.
Or, and this is the only alternative, they must have said, ‘This is
God’s law; and He executes it here. But though it is God’s business,
and in God’s hands, still, notwithstanding, it is executed in a very
incomplete and insufficient way. Many escape punishment; and many do not
get rewarded at all. And those who are rewarded and punished here, are
rewarded and punished in very inadequate measures. In every instance
there may be, indeed there is, more or less of a miscarriage of justice.
But there will be future rewards and punishments, which with set all this
right.’ Suppose this had been what had been said; and then see what would
have been the consequences. It would have suggested to every man the
thought, even the hope, that he might escape in part, perhaps altogether,
in this life, the punishment of any crime he was contemplating. But
what was most vitally needed was, that is should be seen, and felt, by
the people, that punishment would be quite unerring, and as severe as
unerring. This way of introducing the doctrine would have been thoroughly
illogical; and not more illogical than, morally and politically, bad in
its effects. It would have been illogical, because it would have been
in direct contradiction to the idea, that it was God who was seeing to
the execution of His own law: a point that was as clear to the people
as that intelligence governs the universe is to us; and which was the
very thought that gave authority and force to the law. And it would
have been morally, and politically, bad in its effects, because the
vicious, and the ill-disposed, and the would-be criminals of all kinds,
are not withheld from doing evil so much by the fear of punishment in
the world to come as by fear of punishment here in this world. Nothing
encourages them so much in their evil courses as the expectation of
present impunity. And this was peculiarly applicable to the people for
whom Moses legislated. They were, throughout the whole of the earlier
part of their history, ever ready to forget and abandon God; and their
temper required, in the highest degree, immediate punishments. Neither,
therefore, could the doctrine have been introduced by Moses in this
fashion.
Looking, then, at the circumstances, I cannot imagine how the two
systems, of present and of future rewards and punishments, could have
been taught together under the old heaven-given, heaven-administered,
heaven-executed law. A choice had to be made between teaching, on the one
hand, what was logical and in conformity with the instinctive beliefs of
the people, and might prove to be politically sufficient; and, on the
other hand, what, equally in whatever way it might have been put, would
have been glaringly illogical and full of contradiction, and could only
have caused confusion of ideas, and enfeeblement of the system. This
brings me to the conclusion that it was the doctrine that God was seeing
to the execution of His own law, in this world and in this life; this law
being also, at the same time, a code of municipal law; which in the main
decided Moses in making his choice, that is, in leading him to restrict
the sanction of his law to what was mundane and immediate.
The three other conceivable reasons we at first examined, and rejected as
being inadequate to account for all the phenomena, might have had, and
perhaps had, some weight in influencing his decision; but that decision
was, I believe, arrived at mainly on the ground of the reasons I have
just now been pointing out. No legislator could have overlooked them; and
they must have presented themselves with peculiar force to the mind of
Moses. They were reasons, too, the force of which was never at all abated
as long as the Dispensation continued in existence: just as they had
affected the teaching of Moses, so did they the teaching of the Prophets.
So was it at the origin of, and so was it throughout, the old
Dispensation. It is the object and the character of the Dispensation
which explain to us the omission. If, then, we were to conclude our
inquiry at this point, we might feel pretty well satisfied that we had
discovered what we were in search of. But we will proceed farther,
because by so doing we shall find what will confirm our discovery.
At last the time came when the old Dispensation, though still apparently
maintained, and in force, had, in reality, through the progress of
events, been completely worked out, both in respect of its moral effects
and of its sanction. It had been intended for a certain condition of
things; the world had advanced into a totally different condition; and
the spontaneous teaching of the new condition of the world brought
conviction to every enlightened mind, that the old state of things could
never be reverted to any more than manhood can revert to childhood.
The old Dispensation had been worked out morally, because it had issued
in a narrow and dead formalism. Another reason was, that the human
heart had begun to repudiate exclusiveness, which had been one of the
requirements of the old Dispensation, and to catch glimpses of, and
to yearn for, universal fraternity. A higher form of religion and of
morality could now be imagined, indeed was suggested by the condition and
the circumstances of the world, and was seen to be within men’s reach—a
morality, and a religion, which would take their start from the idea and
sentiment of the brotherhood of mankind. And in morality and religion, as
soon as anything better begins to appear, that which is not so good, _ex
rerum naturâ_, and _ex vi terminorum_, begins to lose its hold, to decay,
and to cumber the ground.
And as respected its sanction, as well as its morality, had the old
Dispensation been worked out. Centuries of foreign domination, and that
of Rome was now the apparently immovable order of the world, had rendered
impossible the supposition that the law was being executed, here and now,
by God. For that supposition national independence was the primary, and
one absolutely indispensable, condition. But God was no longer supreme,
administratively and executively, among His own people. That position
was now occupied by the Roman Governor. Under these circumstances, a
new religion, in the old form of statute law, and supported by the old
sanction of immediate rewards and punishments, the execution of which
was superintended by God, might conceivably have been at that time
promulgated, though with certainty of failure, from Imperial Rome, but
not from subject and provincial Jerusalem. That was inconceivable. For
these reasons, then, it was that the new Dispensation could not be cast,
as the old had been, in the mould of, and be made dependent on, statute
and municipal law. The same conclusion resulted also from the fact that
it was foreseen that it must be of its very nature and essence that it
should embrace all people, whatever their statute and municipal law might
be. That this feeling was springing up, coupled with the fact that the
old Dispensation was evidently worked out, both morally and in respect
of its sanction, is the meaning of the statement that the fulness of
time had come. It was evident, therefore, that no further use could be
made, either at the present, or, as far as could then be seen, for the
future, of the sanction of immediate rewards and punishments, which fall
entirely within the sphere of statute and municipal law. The only rewards
and punishments the new doctrine could resort to, as sanctions, must be
those of a future life.
It was to this state of things that the teaching of the Saviour was
addressed. And as His teaching grew out of, was founded upon, and was
logically deducible from, the existing state of things, to see this will
also be to see why what He taught had not been taught fifteen hundred
years earlier.
The old Dispensation could not be revivified. It was indeed the very
reverse of desirable to revivify it. It could not even be maintained.
If it was not dying, it was because it was dead. It had been good for
its own day; but it was now an anachronism that was both undesirable and
impossible.
The new doctrine, then, not being able to cast itself into the form of
municipal law, must appeal to the enlightened consciousness of man.
Neither could it have any municipal sanctions. The only sanction at
that time, and thenceforth, imaginable was that of future rewards and
punishments.
Still the old Dispensation stood in the way. It was, without being at all
adapted to existing requirements, occupying the ground, and hindering the
erection of the structure that was to take its place. It must, therefore,
be got rid of.
Under the conditions of the case, that could be done only
argumentatively. But what process of reasoning would serve the purpose?
We cannot see any way in which it could have been done, except the one in
which it was done. The Author of the new Dispensation addressed Himself
to the establishment of the proposition, that God is not, here and now,
the Executor either of the municipal law, or even of that which would be
the law of the new Dispensation. The end is not yet. It was a corollary
to this, which did not escape observation, that the municipal law is
Cæsar’s concern, that is to say, that it falls within the sphere of the
State.
Everything Jesus said in establishment of His main proposition, and
by implication of its corollary, was in direct contradiction to the
fundamental ideas of Mosaic Dispensation. In fact, the direct opposites
of His proposition, and of its corollary, were the old Dispensation
itself in its simplest expression: the whole of that Dispensation, just
as it stood at work amongst God’s people, and just as it is presented to
us in its authentic documents, being only the concrete enlargement, or
organized embodiment of these opposites, with a view to the maintenance,
under existing conditions, of the order of society.
The reason why Christ denied and disproved the proposition that God is
the Executor, here, in this life, of His own law—the proposition of which
the old Dispensation was an expansion—was that it hindered the perception
of, and barred Him from teaching the doctrine of future rewards and
punishments. Moses had seen precisely the same point, only reversely: for
he had seen that the doctrine of future rewards and punishments would
have barred him from teaching that God is the Executor here, in this
life, of His own law. He, therefore, and the Prophets after him, had
not taught it. Christ was restricted to the promulgation of a law which
is not directly, but mediately, from God; the mediate stage being the
moral consciousness of man; and, therefore, if we may so put it, He had
no choice but to insist on the demonstration of the fact that God does
not Himself directly execute the moral law here, for His not executing
it here is the only logical basis of the doctrine of a future life. And
He had no choice but to establish the doctrine of a future life, for the
rewards and punishments of that life are the only sanctions of the law
written in the heart. And, again, He had no choice but to promulgate
that unwritten law, for it alone could be the law of His kingdom—of the
kingdom of heaven as distinguished from the kingdoms of the world.
First, then, an examination of the position and aims of Moses, and of
the means at his disposal, or, at all events, which he was led to adopt
for effecting his work, tells us why he did not teach the doctrine of
a future life. And then we see that Christ could not logically teach
this doctrine, till He had undone that part of the work of Moses which
had been a bar to his teaching it. The work of Moses, when analyzed and
questioned, gives, itself and alone, the answer we are in search of. The
work of Christ, when similarly analyzed and questioned, confirms the
answer the work of Moses had already given. It makes clearer what was
clear enough before.
In order that the intellectual, or scientific structure of morality and
of religion might stand, instead of collapsing, and be enlarged, and
rendered more commodious, and be made suitable to the new conditions
and requirements of the world, Christ had to take out a part of the
foundations of Moses, and to substitute other foundations for them. The
foundations He took out were what had hindered Moses from teaching the
great doctrine. Having taken these out He could, as He did, insert the
great doctrine in their place as a foundation for the new religion. He
abrogated the two ideas, that God does, in this world, give and execute
the municipal law. Those two ideas being indispensable for the work Moses
had to do, contain the reason why the Hebrew Scriptures ignored the
future life.
The supersession of the old by the new Dispensation is, at all events,
an historical fact; and if our explanation of that fact is satisfactory
in the historical, it cannot be unsatisfactory in the religious,
order; because all truth, which is only the ascertained order of the
world, or sequence and relation of things and of events, is coherent
and beneficent. The following are the particulars of the fact, and all
of them appear to be sufficiently intelligible:—The law of the old
Dispensation had been regarded as given and executed by God. Under
the mental conditions of the times, it could not have been regarded
otherwise; and that view of it was true in a general and absolute sense,
because everything in the universe and on this earth is a link in the
order of things, which is aboriginal and external to man. The existence
of the material universe itself, of this world of ours, of all natural
phenomena, of man, of the order of society, and, therefore, of law, and
of the execution of law, are all, in this sense, from God. It was true
also in a relative and particular sense, because the human mind was then,
and especially was it so throughout the East, in that state in which no
conception has as yet been formed either of the existence and action of
general laws in nature and in human society, or of the spontaneity and
freedom, within certain limits, of human action. Everything, therefore,
is unavoidably and honestly referred to God, and in an especial degree
the giving and execution of the law. And so did it continue in after
times, so long as the Dispensation stood, with respect to everything that
was said or done on its behalf, or that in any way bore upon it. Every
word that every prophet uttered in exposition, enlargement, or support of
it, was regarded by the congregation, and, too, by the prophet himself,
as coming from God; and every event also that occurred in connexion with
it was brought about by God. At that epoch—we have in our hands the
evidence for the period of the Homeric poems—it was so in Greece. And,
doubtless, it was so then in Italy and all over Europe. Such ideas belong
to a certain stage in mental progress, the stage in which the world was
then. This was the natural philosophy, this was the metaphysics of those
times.
But to go on, in chronological order, with the particulars of the
general fact: at last advancing knowledge and the progress of events
began to give form to the ideas of order in nature, and of spontaneity
and freedom, within certain limits, in man. The collapse of their
own Theocracy, and their long subjection to Greeks and Romans, had
obliged the Hebrews to understand the latter of these ideas. For those,
therefore, among them who could understand facts it was an impossibility
any longer to suppose that God was the sole, immediate, originator and
executor of the law. In the minds of all such, the intellectual supports
upon which that idea had rested had been completely cut away from
beneath it. Still there was, but now removed back a step, an Originator
and Governor of the universe, and of all that it contains, and of the
moral sense among its other phenomena. This moral sense, therefore, must
henceforth be the ground of religion; for that could not be found any
longer in municipal law, which had become to their enlarged experience
only a human manifestation of the divinely-ordained working of society.
There was a Divine purpose and element in it; but in the results were
blended so many elements of human error and wrong, especially when men
were legislating, not for, or through inspiration from, the idea of God,
but for themselves, and through the inspiration of their own supposed
interests, as was the case with the heathen, that those results could not
be accepted as the frame of religion. The moral sense must, therefore,
be recognized, called forth, instructed, enlightened, purified,
strengthened, and appealed to; and all this with a constantly understood
reference to the knowledge of the day and to the existing conditions of
society. But there could be no sanction for this moral sense excepting
that of future rewards and punishments. They, therefore, must be
recognized. They must be brought to the front. Belief in them must be
laid in men’s minds as a foundation—the only foundation, with the mass of
mankind—for the desired structure.
This implied that the idea that God gives and executes here the law must
be abandoned. And with it must go the idea of His maintaining by any
means of this kind a kingdom of this world, such as the old Jewish polity
had been. Thenceforth God’s kingdom would be within. Its law would be
found, in the moral sense, in the conscience, in the moral consciousness
of the God-respecting, and so of the God-taught, individual. The old
kingdom had been external; the new would be internal. It would come
without observation. Its citizenship would not be of this world. This is
the interpretation of those chapters in the history of religion which are
contained in the whole range of the old, and in the inception of the new,
Dispensation.
God has ordained progress in human affairs. We are sure of this, for
history demonstrates it. Those affairs mean ultimately, in their
highest form, morality and religion, towards the perfecting of which
further approximations are ever from time to time being made; and
these successive approximations are the steps of true progress. The
most conspicuous instance of this progress, in the historical period,
is Christianity itself. Progress means, when we look backward, a lower
precedent condition of things just as much as it does, when we look
forward from any point, a higher subsequent condition. Of any particular
time, it means what was, in the progressive order of things, possible
under the circumstances of that time. That was what was ordained for
that time. The Mosaic Dispensation, therefore, was just as much ordained
of God as the Christian, and the Christian as much as the Mosaic. Each,
looking at the contemporary condition of the world, was from God in the
same sense, and on analogous grounds. Moses was not wrong in allowing
facilities for divorce. Under the circumstances, polygamy was one of
them, he was right. Just so with his abstention from using the sanction
of the rewards and punishments of the future life. The promulgator of
the old Dispensation, we may suppose, felt and understood that mankind
would attain, in some coming time, to a higher law than that which he
was himself delivering, when he spoke of a Prophet like himself, that
is, a moral legislator, who would some day arise, and to whom it would
be the duty of God’s people to hearken. Christianity did not contemplate
the abolition of slavery. Yet its abolition was a logically and morally
right deduction from, and evolution of, Christianity. It was done rightly
on Christian principles. If (for argument’s sake) the world should ever
grow to a higher moral condition than that apparently contemplated by
the first promulgators of Christianity, that would be no proof that
Christianity had not been ordained of God as a step in the foreseen and
appointed progress of humanity. Just the contrary. It was necessary for
that condition, which would not have been possible without it. So was it
with the old Dispensation.
* * * * *
It may, in passing, be noticed that the foregoing argument appears to
throw some light on the much-vexed question of the historical relation
of the New Testament to the Old. It, also, almost brings one to suspect
that there must be some error in that teaching which supposes that in
respect of the doctrine of a future life, and of the closely connected
doctrine of Divine Interposition, particularly of a retributive
character, in the ordinary course of human affairs the two are in perfect
accord. Of course, they are in accord, though, it would seem, not in
the way popularly taught. Their accord consists in the fact that each
treats these doctrines in the way that was logically necessary for its
own objects. Its own requirements, which were very much those of the
knowledge and circumstances of the times, is the point of view from which
each regards them.
Here I would ask leave to remark that doctrines, or different ways of
stating some particular doctrine, which, from some points of view, or to
some minds, appear discordant and contradictory, may, from other points
of view and to other minds, appear quite the reverse: that is to say,
in a higher and profounder sense they may be eminently accordant. It is
so, for instance, I believe, with the doctrines, or doctrine, for it may
be only the same idea stated reversely, of a Particular Providence and
of General Laws. Our popular theologians on one side, and our men of
science on the other, speak of the two as irreconcilably hostile, and
exclusive of each other. But is there not an eminence, higher than that
occupied by either of these two classes of expositors, from which the
two doctrines are seen to be identical? Does not, in fact, the doctrine
of general laws imply, and necessitate prevision of, and provision for,
every particular case that has ever arisen, that is now arising, and that
ever will arise? If so, then, it contains implicitly the doctrine of a
Particular Providence. And does the doctrine of a Particular Providence
at all imply that God ever acts otherwise than in conformity to the
dictates of complete knowledge, perfect wisdom, unvarying justice, and
unfailing goodness? If so, then, it contains implicitly the doctrine of
General Laws. The two doctrines, therefore, must be mutually inclusive.
Each presupposes the other. In fact, the two are one and the same thing.
If, in some points, the preceding statements and conclusions do, at
all, diverge from anything that is popularly taught on the subjects to
which they refer, there need be no attempt here to gauge and discuss
such divergences. Because all that the inquiry that has been before
us calls upon me to consider, in a work of this kind, is the higher
question (which, in fact, embraces, and is decisive of, the minor ones)
of what in this matter is historically true. We have been endeavouring
to ascertain the right interpretation, and the real connexion of some
particulars in the history of our religion, regarded as a part of general
History. That the conclusions we may be brought to have an important
bearing on morality and religion themselves, which are the chiefest
concerns of mankind, ought to have the effect of making us only more
careful, and more determined, in our search for the truth. We are all
agreed that truth, together with the effects it has on men’s hearts and
lives, is, or at all events ought to be, religion: not what any person,
or persons, at the present time think, or at any past periods may have
thought; but, as far as is attainable, the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth. We owe no fealty to anything else. Any error in
this matter, just like any mistake in the statement of an arithmetical
problem, must vitiate every step that follows. If any mistakes exist in
the data, either of the arithmetical, or of the religious, problem, it
cannot be worked out to any useful conclusion. From the beginning it
was apprehended that religion was the truth. In this sense it was that
it was described as ‘the Knowledge of God.’ In no other sense can it be
‘the Inspiration of Gods Spirit.’ We, at this day, looking back over the
pages of History, can see that wherever this knowledge was clouded, or
something else mistaken for it, the result was bad; and, as far as it
went, destructive of religion. However venerable any mistakes may be, and
however useful they may appear, supposing there are such mistakes, it is
our interest, as well as our duty, to rid ourselves and the world of them
as speedily and as completely as possible.
I hardly need say that there is nothing in the foregoing argument, or in
any of the remarks that have arisen out of its course, which militates
against the ideas, that God has so ordered the course of this world as
to show on which side He is; and that He has made doing right to be good
in itself and good in its general and final consequences; and doing evil
to be evil in itself, and evil in its general and final consequences. In
fact, as much is assumed in the argument.[6]
But, however, if the discussion we have been passing through supplies
a true and complete solution of the interesting question this chapter
propounds, and I cannot but think that it does, then one of its
consequences will be, (though, indeed, it is a consequence in which
the world will not, now, take much interest) that Bishop Warburton’s
much-bruited Theory of the Divine Legation of Moses—as a schoolboy
I rejected it, but could not then answer it—will prove to be but an
Escurial in the air. That the Mosaic Dispensation made no use of the
Doctrine of a future life does not prove that it was upheld by a daily
renewed miracle. With contemporary and subsequent history before
us, we can see that the omission was originally made on logical and
administratively wise grounds.
* * * * *
We ask permission for one remark more. It will be observed that the
foregoing disquisition assumes to some degree that there is a logical
basis for belief in a future life. It is the argument which arises in
the bosom of social development. It is not precisely the same process of
thought as that which appears to have first implanted the idea in the
mind of the Aryan: that was, in some measure, founded on a sentiment,
which arose from the bosom of nature. But, however, the old Aryan
sentiment which, though a sentiment, had its logic, combined with the
distinctly logical argument, founded on the recognition and eternity of
justice, which there is no possibility of working out on the stage of
this world, where the same act carries one man to the gallows and another
to the throne, and which argument social development makes palpable and
intelligible, will satisfy many minds and must have weight with every
mind. That something, and even that much, can be said on the other side,
is a remark of no weight. It is merely an assertion that, in this
respect, the question before us does not differ from other moral and
religious questions. The same observation may be made of every one of
them; for this is a world, as all must see, in which belief, just like
virtue itself which is the matured fruit of belief, can be the result
only of a right choice, after honest deliberation, between conflicting
considerations. This is of its very essence. The great argument, however,
itself, and everything that depends upon it, are lost to, and obscured
by, those who have persuaded themselves, and are endeavouring to persuade
others, to accept precisely what Christ overthrew, and which He overthrew
precisely that He might establish belief in the future life.
* * * * *
I have dwelt on the question of this chapter, not on account of its
intrinsic interest, although that is great, but because it is a necessary
part of the survey of old Egypt. The history of Egypt must include some
account of the influence it had upon the world; and a great part of
that influence had to pass through, and be transmitted onward by, the
Hebrews. It was imperative, therefore, in a work of this kind, that some
attempt should be made to obtain a true conception of the relations of
Israel to Mizraim; and the most essential part of those relations is
that which is intellectual, moral, and religious. This appears to be the
only intelligible meaning that can be attached to the reference ‘out of
Egypt have I called my son’: His capital doctrine was what had been the
capital doctrine of Egypt. If, however, the reference was not intended
to have any meaning in the intellectual, moral, and religious order,
this passing comment is non-suited and must be withdrawn. But, whatever
may be the value of the explanation I have been just attempting to give
of the particular question that has been before us, the fact itself
remains, standing forth on the long records of history as one of the
most important they contain, that, while the belief in future rewards
and punishments was the motive power of morality and religion in Egypt,
among a neighbouring people, who had in some sort been a secession from
Egypt, and always continued to be more or less affected by it, morality
and religion were able, under most adverse circumstances, to maintain
themselves for fifteen centuries without any formal or direct support
from this belief.
Verily we are debtors to the Jew for the great lesson contained in this
fact. Another religion—that one indeed which at the present day commands
the greatest number of believers—does, as some of its own doctors tell
us, leave open, to a considerable extent, this question of future rewards
and punishments, contenting itself with teaching that virtue is its own
sufficient reward; and that should it have any consequences in a life to
come they cannot be evil: and the bearing of this evidence on the point
before us is not unimportant. Those, however, who are in the habit of
passing by unheeded what more than 300,000,000 of the human family have
to say on such questions, will not think it immaterial what the Jews
believed. And never had any people more unclouded faith in the eternity
and ultimate mundane triumph of truth, of right, and of goodness than the
Jews, although they seldom had any thought, and then only very dimly;
that they should themselves participate in, or witness that triumph:
they lived and died in the faith of it, never having been supported and
strengthened by the sight of it, but only by the desire to see it: the
better condition, which was to make perfect theirs, having been reserved
for other times. Never, however, were any people more ready to sacrifice
everything, even to life itself, in proclaiming, and endeavouring to
carry out, what they believed. It was this that prompted, and made
successful, the Asmonæan insurrection against Greek domination; and which
afterwards impelled them to challenge single-handed the world-Empire of
Rome. Contemporary history, like much that has been written subsequently,
did not understand, indeed quite misunderstood, their motives, and what
was stirring within them; and so failed to do them the honour they
deserved for their heroic efforts to prevent the extinction of their
religion and morality. We, however, can now, at the same time, both
do them justice, and acknowledge our obligations to them, for having
taught us that the moral sentiments have such deep root in man’s nature;
and can maintain so vigorous an existence by their own inherent power,
without aid from other-world hopes and fears, and against all of force or
seduction with which this world can assail them. This, I submit, throws
light upon much that, at the present day, and amongst ourselves, stands
somewhat in need of proof and distinctness.
It shows, I think, that there are in our composite mental and bodily
constitution principles, or laws, of morality, which, as they are
indestructible, and capable of maintaining themselves, and of acting
vigorously, under even the most adverse circumstances, must be regarded
as inseparable and essential parts of our being. This fact in the
natural history of morality may be illustrated by an analogous fact in
the natural history of language. A man cannot but use language, and he
cannot but use it in conformity with certain rules and laws. He cannot
alter one law of language any more than he could invent a new language:
he can even hardly add a single word, deliberately and designedly, to an
existing one. And he must not only use language in conformity with its
natural laws, but he must also use that particular form of it which the
working of general laws has developed, necessarily, both for him, and in
him. Just so is it with morality. Indeed, the parallel is so complete as
to lead one to suspect that morality must to some considerable degree
be dependent upon language. Man seems to invent it; and so he does in a
certain sense. But, however, he cannot help inventing it; and he must
invent it in conformity with certain laws. Over these he has no control:
for though he must use, yet he does not invent, or originate, them.
That falls within the sphere of a Higher Power. In some form or other,
better or not so good, and in some measure, more or less, morality is a
congenital necessity of our being, and if society be fairly and wisely
dealt with (but of this when we speak of the wisdom of Egypt, and again
in our summing up) there are grounds for disposing us to believe that
moral, and not animal instincts, may in any people be made the lords of
the ascendant.
It will be enough to say here that extremes, then, appear in some
sense to have met. We believe just as distinctly as the Jew, or as the
Egyptian, that the law came from God; that in it God speaks within us,
and through us; and that our part is to hearken to, to bow down before,
and obey the Divinity. This involves morality, religion, responsibility,
conscience. They saw this through moral intuition. We see it also
through history and science. The primæval intuition, and the modern
demonstration, constructed out of the materials with which our hoards
of experience and observation have supplied us, are in perfect accord.
Intuition prior to knowledge, and accumulated knowledge reasoning out
the problem, have both arrived at the same conclusion: and so we have
sufficient grounds for believing that no other conclusion is possible;
and that what history has demonstrated to be inseparable from the working
of society, and from the being of man, will endure as long as society and
as man shall endure.[7]