experiences of many souls, with a certain kinship, yet with wide
differences. In many of these hymns one recognizes the religion in which
Jesus was cradled. Imagination and feeling have full scope. The
constant idea is of Yahveh, ruler of the world and its inhabitants, the
judge of the wicked and friend of the good. "Mark the perfect man and
behold the upright, for the end of that man is peace." "How excellent is
thy loving-kindness, O God! therefore the children of men put their trust
under the shadow of thy wings." "Thy righteousness is like the great
mountains; thy judgments as a great deep." "The Lord redeemeth the soul
of his servants, and none of them that trust in him shall be desolate."
"Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man that
trusteth in him."
The depth and passion of the struggle against sin is shown in the
fifty-first Psalm. "Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy
loving-kindness; according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies, blot
out my transgressions." "Against thee, thee only, have I sinned." "Wash
me, and I shall be whiter than snow." "Make me to hear joy and
gladness." "Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit
within me." "Thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it. The
sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O
God, thou wilt not despise."
This passion against sin--this cry for inward purity--is the root of the
religion of Jesus, the blessedness of the pure in heart; the warfare of
Paul, the spirit against the flesh.
In other psalms, again, is a poignant cry for help and deliverance. It
is the expostulation of the soul with Fate, the cry to a Power who should
be a friend, but hides his face. There, is a pathetic sense of man's
frailty and mortality. "Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear unto my
cry; hold not thy peace at my tears, for I am a stranger with thee and a
sojourner, as all my fathers were. O spare me, that I may recover
strength, before I go hence, and be no more."
Praise for God's greatness and awe for his eternity are joined with the
sad sense of man's mortality. "Wilt thou show wonders to the dead?
Shall the dead arise and praise thee? Shall thy lovingkindness be
declared in the grave? or thy faithfulness in destruction? Shall thy
wonders be known in the dark? and thy righteousness in the land of
forgetfulness?"
Very often again the burden is the cry of the weak against the oppressor.
Man, wronged by his fellow, cries to God, and can imagine no deliverance
save by the ruin of his enemies. The cursing is tremendous. "O daughter
of Babylon, happy shall he be that taketh thy little ones and dasheth
them against the stones!" At this point is the widest ethical difference
between "them of old time" and our own religion. In them, abhorrence of
sin was not yet distinguished from hatred of the sinner, and the foes of
the Psalmist or his nation were always identified with the foes of God.
To hate thine enemy seemed as righteous as to love thy friend.
In a sense we may say the Psalms are a cry to which Jesus is the answer:
"Lord, save me, and destroy my enemies!" "Love your enemies, and in
loving you are saved."
In the book of Psalms there blends and alternates with the old theory of
reward and punishment a later idea,--that goodness carries its own
blessing with it,--that better than oil and wine, flocks and herds,
health and friends, is the peace of well-doing, the joy of gratitude,
yes, even the passionate contrition in which the soul revolts from its
own sin and finds again the sweetness of the upward effort and a response
to that effort like heaven's own smile. Not, goodness brings blessings,
but goodness _is_ blessed; not, the wicked shall perish, but wickedness
_is_ perdition; this is the deep undertone of the best of the Psalms.
Among these hymns are some which are filled with a noble delight in the
works of nature,--a fresh, glad pleasure in the whole spectacle of
creation, from sun and stars, sea and mountains, to the goats among the
hills, and the conies of the rock. There is frank satisfaction in the
bread which strengtheneth man's heart and the wine that makes him glad.
And all this free human joy in the activities and splendors of nature
never so much as approaches the perilous slope towards sensuality. It is
everywhere sublimated by the all-pervading recognition of a holy and
beneficent God.
What may be said of the Psalms generally is this: they express the most
vivid and various play of human emotions,--sorrow, wrath, repentance,
joy, dread, hope,--always exercised as in the presence of an Almighty
being, holy, righteous, and the friend of righteous men. In this is
their abiding power,--this close reflection of the fluctuations in every
sensitive heart under the play of life's experiences,--encompassed with
an atmosphere of noble seriousness, and outreaching toward a higher Power.
In the story of the Jewish mind, the book of Job stands by itself. It is
not so much a stage in the progressive development of a faith, as a
powerful and unanswered challenge to the current assertions of that
faith. The characteristic idea of Judaism was that God rules the world
in the interest of the good man. Not so, says Job, the facts are against
it. Hear the complaint of a good man to whom life has brought trouble
and sorrow, without remedy and without hope! So stood first the bold
arraignment, the earliest voice of truly religious skepticism. Job is
skeptical, not from any want of goodness,--he has been strenuously good;
even now in all his darkness, "my righteousness I hold fast and will not
let it go: my heart shall not reproach me so long as I live." His
goodness is of no narrow sort; justice, protection of the oppressed, help
to the suffering, these have been his delight; from wantonness of sense
he has kept himself pure; not even against wrong-doers and enemies has
his hate gone out; he has not "rejoiced at the destruction of them that
hated me, or lifted up myself when evil found him; neither have I
suffered my mouth to sin by wishing a curse to his soul." Yet, after a
life of this sort, he finds himself bereft, impoverished, tormented.
Where is the righteousness of God? He turns to his friends for sympathy.
"Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends; for the hand of
God hath touched me." His friends for reply justify God by blaming Job.
Doubtless you deserve it all: you must have done all manner of wrong, and
been a hypocrite to boot! That is all the comfort they give him. Dreary
and desolate he stands, no good in the present, no hope in the future.
"I cry unto thee, and thou dost not hear me: I stand up, and thou
regardest me not. Thou art become cruel to me; with thy strong hand thou
opposest thyself against me. I know that thou wilt bring me to death,
and to the house appointed for all living."
Upon that gloom the curtain falls. "The words of Job are ended."
The later chapters of the book seem added by successive hands. They
introduce a fresh speaker, to help out the argument for God. They make
the Almighty speak in his own behalf. His answer is simply an appeal to
the wonders of physical nature. Look, vain man, at my works; consider
the war-horse, the behemoth, the leviathan; how can your petty mind judge
the creator of these? This strikes a note which is still heard in the
music of to-day, the awe and reverence before the grandeur of nature
which can sometimes soothe the restlessness of man and hush his
anxieties, as the harp of David brought peace to the moody Saul. Yet
such thoughts do not suffice for the man whose personal suffering is
keen. They silence rather than answer the question which presses upon
Job.
The story must be otherwise helped out, so some kindly champion of
orthodoxy put in a fairy-story climax,--Job got well of his boils, had
more sheep and oxen than ever, had other children born to him. And so
the difficulty is happily solved!
But the earlier and deeper words remain, with their unanswerable
challenge to the comfortable creed that God will always make the good man
happy. The book stands, the expression of a typical, a mournful but
sublime attitude of the human mind. It is a facing of truth when truth
looks darkest, rather than to take refuge in comfortable make-believe.
And it shows man falling back on his innermost stronghold of all. If God
himself fail me,--if the power of the universe be cruel or
indifferent,--yet "my righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go;
my heart shall not reproach me so long as I live."
The habitual weapon of the Prophets is denunciation. They pour out on
their opponents a wrath which is the hotter because it involves a moral
condemnation, and the heavier because it claims the sanction of Deity.
Among their exemplars are Samuel deposing Saul, and scaring him from the
tomb, and Elijah slaying the priests of Baal. Of the written prophecies
the characteristic word is "Woe unto you!" They are the prototypes of
Jesus assailing the Pharisees and driving out the money-changers; of the
book of Revelation; of Tertullian proclaiming the torments of the damned;
of the mediaeval ban on the heretic; of Puritan and Catholic hurling
anathemas at each other; of Carlyle, of Garrison. But in the greatest of
the prophets the threat is almost hidden by the promise, and instead of
cursing there is benediction.
Whoever would get at the heart of the Old Testament, and understand the
spell which the religion first of Judaism and then of Christianity has
cast upon the world for thousands of years, should ponder the book of
Isaiah. It blends the work of two authors, but their spirit is closely
akin. In each case the prophet is full of a conviction so intense that
he propounds it with perfect confidence as the word of God. By the
boldest personification, he speaks continually in the name of God. This
was the characteristic method of Hebrew prophecy. The prophetic books
all stand as for the most part the direct word of God. This way of
thought and speech was possible only to men in an early stage of
intellectual development and under the highest pressure of conviction and
emotion.
The traditional repute of these Jewish prophets and the record of their
words were accepted by both Jews and Christians. Their writings were
taken as the authoritative voice of God. The same credit came to be
extended to all the ancient books of the Jewish religion,--psalms,
histories, genealogies, ritual, and all. But it is mainly the prophecies
to which this character originally belonged. The Psalms are, with few
exceptions, purely human in their standpoint. In them, it is avowedly a
_man_ who mourns, rejoices, repents, prays, curses, or gives thanks. But
in the prophecies God himself is presented as the speaker.
In both the earlier and later Isaiah, God appears as speaking to men in
extreme need, in words of incomparable comfort, inspiration, and hope.
To whatever special exigency of Israel they were first addressed, the
language, stripped of all local references, comes home to the universal
human heart in its deepest experiences. To the divine favor this
teaching sets only one condition: "Cease to do evil, learn to do well."
"Seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for
the widow." "If ye be willing and obedient." "Say ye to the righteous
that it shall be well with them, for they shall eat the fruit of their
doings. Woe unto the wicked; it shall be ill with him, for the reward of
his hands shall be given him." On the one simple condition of turning
from moral evil to good, the blessings of the inner life are promised in
every tone of assurance, consolation, promise. "Though your sins be as
scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson,
they shall be as wool." "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your
God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her that her
warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned." "He shall feed
his flock like a shepherd; he shall gather the lambs with his arm and
carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with
young." "Sing, O heavens, and be joyful, O earth, and break forth into
singing, O mountains, for the Lord hath comforted his people, and will
have mercy upon his afflicted."
The most triumphant word in the New Testament, and its tenderest word,
both are drawn from one verse in the elder Isaiah: "He will swallow up
death in victory, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from off all
faces."
The distinctive word and thought of Jesus toward God is first found in
the later Isaiah,--"our Father." "Doubtless thou art our father, though
Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledge us not; thou, O Lord,
art our father, our redeemer; thy name is from everlasting." The word
recurs, together with an image which by a later than Jesus was made the
symbol of an arbitrary divine despotism, but which Isaiah first employed
to blend the idea of omnipotent power with closest affection: "O Lord,
thou art our father; we are the clay and thou the potter; and we are all
the work of thy hand." A similitude is used even gentler than a father's
care: "As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you." "Can a
woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on
the son of her womb? Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee."
By the later Isaiah is shown the figure of an innocent sufferer, whose
sorrows are to issue in the widest blessing. This sufferer has been
interpreted sometimes as typifying the few heroic souls among the people
of Israel, sometimes as a prophet in Isaiah's day, last and most fondly
as Christ. Whomever the prophet had in mind, the idea goes home to the
heart; somehow, undeserved sorrow borne blamelessly, bravely, even
gladly, since for love's sake, is to have a celestial fruitage.
"Despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with
grief;" "he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows,"--and at last
"he shall see of the travail of his soul, and be satisfied." Then the
strain breaks into an exultant tenderness, weaving into one chord the
deepest griefs and consolations of woman, the sublimities of nature, all
the passion and all the peace of the heart. "Sing, O barren, thou that
didst not bear; break forth into singing and cry aloud, thou that didst
not travail with child, for more are the children of the desolate than
the children of the married wife, saith the Lord. Fear not, for thou
shalt not be ashamed. For thy Maker is thy husband, the Lord of hosts is
his name, and thy redeemer the Holy One of Israel. For a small moment
have I forsaken thee, but with great mercies will I gather thee. In a
little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment, but with everlasting
kindness will I have mercy on thee, saith the Lord thy Redeemer. The
mountains shall depart and the hills be removed, but my kindness shall
not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed,
saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee. O thou afflicted, tossed with
tempest, and not comforted! I will lay thy stones with fair colors, and
lay thy foundations with sapphires; and all thy children shall be taught
of the Lord, and great shall be the peace of thy children."
To such words men and women in all times have clung, and always will
cling. For, so first spoke a voice in some soul which in the heart of
the storm had found peace. He called it the voice of God. What better
name can we give it?
In the prophecies and the psalms we have seen the high-wrought poetry of
Israel's religion. For the requirements of daily life there needs a more
prosaic, definite, and minute guidance. This the Jew found in the body
of usages and precepts which gradually grew up under the care of the
priesthood. The prescriptive sanction of habit attached to these
observances was at certain memorable epochs exchanged for a belief in the
direct communication of the code from heaven. One such occasion was the
finding of the "book of the Law" by the high priest, and its presentation
and enforcement on king and people which is recorded in 2 Kings xxii. and
xxiii. The strong indications are that this was the book known to us as
Deuteronomy, and that instead of the rediscovery of a forgotten book
there was in truth a new book set forth, claiming the authority of Moses,
and enlarging and enriching the traditional observances according to the
most "advanced" ideas of the time. A similar occasion, at a later
period, is described at length in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. The
new legislation there imposed in the name of Moses and the fathers--or
rather of Yahveh himself, as he spoke to the men of old--was probably in
substance the regulations contained in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers.
By our standards of judgment, these acts were pious forgeries. The
mental conditions under which they were done, the psychologic state which
prompted them, the ethical standards which sanctioned them, are matter
for curious study. It would be crude to class them as the deliberate and
inexcusable crimes which they would be in our day. The claim of a divine
authority for human beliefs--the idea that what is morally beneficial may
be asserted as historically true--has worked in many strange forms. We
see it here in its early phase, among a people in whom, as in mankind at
large, the virtue and obligation of truthfulness was a late and slow
discovery. The same instinct--to claim for what we wish to believe a
sanction of infallible revelation--works in subtle forms to-day.
As to the contents of the Law which thus gradually took form, a
distinction may easily be traced even by the cursory reader. The earlier
code, Deuteronomy, is full of a generous and lofty temper. It is one of
the most impressive documents of the Jewish scriptures. Here is that
which Jesus named as the first and great commandment: "Thou shalt love
the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all
thy might." The teaching of the book is primarily the worship of
Yahveh,--a holy, loving, and judging God,--who rewards his people with
blessings or punishes them with disasters. Promises and threats are
equally distinct and vivid: never were blessing and cursing more
emphatic. The morality enjoined is charitable and pure. With an equal
insistence is enjoined a certain method and form of worship, including
sacrifices at the temple, three yearly feasts, the observance of the
Sabbath, the due maintenance of the priesthood, and the utter rejection
of all other gods.
When we turn to the other books of the Law, we come into an atmosphere
less exalted, and with a multiplicity of ceremonial details. There is
endless regulation as to varieties of sacrifice, cleansing from technical
uncleanness, and the like. Interwoven with these, as if on an equal
footing, are special applications of morality--inculcations of chastity,
justice, and good neighborhood. The principles of the Ten
Words--themselves an inheritance from a very early day--are applied in
many particulars. Occasionally is a lofty sentiment, a clear advance.
Thus we find in Leviticus the "second commandment" of Jesus, "Thou shalt
love thy neighbor as thyself."
The general increase in rigidity of ceremonial in these books is to be
read along with the stern decrees of Ezra as to separation from family
and friendly relations with non-Jewish neighbors. It was, in a word, a
Puritan reformation. There was just the same combination of heightened
moral conviction with urgency upon matters of form and detail, and
hostility to all outside of one special church, which belonged to the
Puritan. But the Jewish reformer, unlike the English, enlarged instead
of simplifying his ritual. It is this interblending of outward
observance with moral and spiritual quality which stumbles the modern
reader at every page. It was a confusion which needed the spiritual
genius of Jesus to dissolve, and the leadership of Paul to definitely
renounce.
By the side of the ceremonial element in the Law there ripened gradually
an expansion of its moral precepts. The sacred books were expounded by
the Scribes. The preacher in the synagogue came to touch the people's
heart often more closely and delicately than the priest with his bloody
sacrifices and his imposing liturgies. Spontaneity, inspiration,
prophetic power, was no longer present, but in the guise of comment and
interpretation there grew up a gentler, humaner morality. The moral
value of labor and industry came into recognition. There were teachers
like Hillel and Gamaliel in whom devout piety and homely practice went
hand in hand. In the ethics of Judaism--under all these various forms of
"the Law and the Prophets"--the distinctive note, compared with the
ethics of Greece and Rome, was chastity. The ideal Greece represented
wisdom and beauty; the ideal Rome was valor and self-control; the ideal
Israel was the subjugation of sense to spirit, the approach of man to God
by purity of life.
The twofold service of Judaism was to impress this special note of
chastity on human virtue, and to give to virtue the wings of a great
hope. The flowering of that hope was in Christianity; the preparation
for it comes now before us.
Under the rule of Alexander's successors the Jewish system, with its
mixture of ethics and ritual, came in collision with the ideas and
practice of degenerate Greek culture,--pleasure-loving,
nature-worshiping, sensual, with gymnastics and aesthetics, tolerant and
tyrannical. The two systems were hostile alike in their virtues and
vices. The Greek ruler put down with a strong hand the religious and
patriotic scruples of his Jewish subject. The Jew bore persecution with
the tough endurance of his race, then rose in revolt with the fierce
courage and religious fervor of his race. He won his last victory in the
field of arms. Brief was the independence, soon followed by inglorious
servitude; but its sufferings and triumphs had fused the nation once more
into invincible devotion to the Law of their God, and had rooted in their
hearts a principle of hope which in varying forms and growing power was
to change the aspect of human life.