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CHURCH AND STATE AS SEEN IN THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM.
by
T. W. ALLIES, M.A.
Author of
"Per Crucem ad Lucem, The Result of a Life,"
"A Life's Decision," "Journal in France and Letters from Italy,"
"The Formation of Christendom," etc.
London: Burns and Oates.
1882.
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
PROLOGUE.
PAGE
THE KINGDOM AS PROPHESIED AND AS FULFILLED, xix
CHAPTER I.
RELATION BETWEEN THE CIVIL AND THE SPIRITUAL POWERS FROM ADAM
TO CHRIST.
1. _The Divine and the Human Society, founded in Adam, refounded
in Noah._
The origin of man, of woman, of marriage, and of the human family, 1
Archetypal character of the fact that man is created a Race, 3
Sole creation of Adam in the maturity of thought and speech and
the perfection of knowledge, as shown in the naming of
creatures, 4
Subsequent building of woman from man, 5
The divine Image and Likeness in the individual man, 5
A further Image of the ever-blessed Trinity in the Race, 6
Indication of the Headship and the Passion of Christ in the
original creation, 8
Beauty and splendour of the divine plan, 9
The part in the divine plan which belongs to man's free-will, 10
The divine treatment of man as a Race not broken by the Fall, 11
Adam after the Fall the head of the civil and the religious
order, 12
Bearing of man's condition before the Fall upon his subsequent
state, 13
Adam receives in a great promise a disclosure of the future, 14
He becomes the Teacher and likewise the Priest of his Race, 15
The rite of sacrifice, 15
Triple dignity of Adam in this first society, 16
Man breaks up this society by the misuse of his free-will, 17
Resumption of the unity of the Race and its reparation in Noah, 18
Condition of man, individual and collective, at this new beginning
of the race; marriage and sacrifice, 19
Express establishment of civil government by divine authority, 20
Union of religion with civil government from the beginning, 21
Parallel between Adam and Noah, 22
2. _The Divine and Human Society in the Dispersion._
Unity of human language withdrawn on account of a great sin, 24
Coeval with which the various nations spring forth out of the one
original society, 26
Injury to human society by the degradation of the conception of
God, 28
Loss of belief in the divine unity followed by loss of the sense
of man's brotherhood, 29
Proof of this brotherhood recovered by science in the case of the
Aryan family of nations, 31
The one universal society becomes many nations at enmity with
each other, 32
Their state after a long lapse of time, when their several histories
begin, 33
Original goods of the race still remaining--
1. Marriage, 35
2. Religion as centered in the rite of sacrifice, 37
3. Civil government, 38
4. Alliance between government and religion, 41
Cumulative testimony of the four in their contrast with slavery
to the unity of man's Race, as its origin is recorded
by Moses, 43
Summary of the course of mankind from the Dispersion to Christ, 44
3. _Further Testimony of Law, Government, and Priesthood in the
Dispersion._
The fiction of universal savagery, or different races, or simial
descent, 45
The author of "Ancient Law" upon original society, 46
Proof from comparative jurisprudence of the patriarchal theory, 47
Law and government in their commencement, 48
Family the ancient unit of society, 49
Universal belief or assumption of blood-relationship, 50
The Roman Patria Potestas a relic of the original rule, 52
Family everything, the individual unknown, 52
Original union of religion with government, 53
Origin of law and property, 54
Summary of the foregoing witness, 55
The Two Powers from the beginning, 56
Degradation of worship and degradation of society in Gentilism, 57
Deification of the State, 58
Which, however, remains a lawful power, 59
The distinction between sacerdotal and civil power in the Roman
republic, 60
The power of the Pontifex Maximus united to that of the
Principate, 62
The College of Pontifices reversing a tribunitial law, 63
The distinction between Sacerdotal and Civil Power running
through all ancient nations, 64
Witness of the heathen priesthood to the unity of man's Race, 65
The providence of Abraham's call, 66
Relation of the Two Powers in the Mosaic law, 67
The actual result of the coming of Christ, 68
CHAPTER II.
RELATION BETWEEN THE SPIRITUAL AND THE CIVIL POWERS AFTER CHRIST.
1. _The Spiritual Power in its Source and Nature._
The Spiritual Power not only allied but subordinate to the Civil
throughout the Gentile world at the death of Christ, 70
1. Its independence in Israel alone, as acknowledged by the
people, a result of the creation of the Aaronic
priesthood, 72
Special offices of the High Priest, 73
2. The part of the High Priest through the whole history from
Moses to Christ, 75
3. The actual jurisdiction of the High Priest under the Roman
Empire, 77
4. The High-priesthood and the system of worship over which
it presided viewed as a prophecy and preparation for
Christ, 80
Bearing of the High-priesthood to Christ at His coming, 82
The undisputed circumstances of Christ's death, 83
Extreme antecedent improbability of what followed, 84
Its dependence upon a supernatural and miraculous fact, 85
As the Race springs from Adam in Paradise, so the Spiritual Power
from Christ at His Resurrection, 86
The inward cohesion of Priesthood, Teaching, and Jurisdiction, 87
The two forces of the Primacy and the Hierarchy from the
beginning, 90
The unity and triplicity of power in the regimen of the Church
an image of the Divine Unity and Trinity, 92
2. _The Spiritual Power a Complete Society._
The supernatural society exists for a supernatural end, 93
To which the present life is subordinated, 94
And which is beyond the provision of temporal government, 95
Analogy between the Two Powers, 96
Complete philosophical basis on which the Spiritual Power rests, 98
How the inward life which it imparts is united with the Person of
Christ, 99
From whom, in worship, belief, and conduct, the Christian people
derives, 101
The King and the Kingdom not of this world but in it, fulfilled
in thirteen particulars, 103
1. A kingdom ruling all the relations of man Godward, 103
2. Having an end outside this life, 103
3. Deriving all authority from Christ as Apostle and High
Priest, 103
4. Producing its people from its King, 103
5. Imparting grace from the King in its sacraments, 104
6. Transmitting the King's truth by the order of its regimen, 104
7. Having a complete analogy with civil government, 104
8. Fulfilling man's need of supernatural society, 105
9. Generating an universal law for all relations of public and
private life, 105
10. Possessing independence of the Temporal Power, 106
11. Not limited in space, 106
12. Not limited in time, 107
13. A kingdom of charity through union with its King, 107
3. _Relation of the Two Powers to each other._
Principles which ruled the relation between the Two Powers before
Christ, 108
A new basis given to the Spiritual Power by Christ, from which
every relation to the Temporal Power springs, 110
1. All Christians subject to the Spiritual Power, 112
2. And likewise to the Temporal Power as God's Vicegerent, 112
3. The relation between the Two Powers intended by God is
amity, 114
4. A separate action of the Two Powers, without regard to
each other, not intended, 115
5. Persecution of the Spiritual by the Temporal not intended, 119
6. Contrast between human kingdoms and the divine kingdom, 120
The _end_ the ground of the subordination of the one to the
other, 122
Doctrine of St. Thomas to that effect, 123
The indirect power over temporal things, 124
Sum of the foregoing chapter; Orders of Nature and Grace, 125
Co-operation of the Two Powers as stated by St. Gregory VII., 126
The image of marriage, as describing the ideal relation and the
various deflections from it, 128
CHAPTER III.
TRANSMISSION OF SPIRITUAL AUTHORITY FROM THE PERSON OF OUR LORD TO
PETER AND THE APOSTLES, AS SET FORTH IN THE NEW TESTAMENT.
The Church a kingdom subsisting from age to age by its own force,
but its original records to be considered, 131
Institution of the Priesthood; St. Paul's and St. Luke's
testimony, 132
St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. John, 133
Transmission of Spiritual Power as recorded by St. Matthew, 136
The same according to St. Mark, 138
The same according to St. Luke in his Gospel, 139
And in the Acts, 139
His record of a peculiar promise made to Peter, 141
Conversation which forms his main addition to the narrative, 141
Contrast between Gentile and Christian rule, 143
The kingdom disposed to the Apostles, 144
The confirmation of the brethren, 145
The time of the confirming marked out, 146
St. Luke distinguishes Peter as markedly as St. Matthew and St.
John, 148
Testimony of St. John as to the promises made to the Apostles, 149
And as to the universal pastorship bestowed on St. Peter, 152
Two classes of passages, 153
Comparison of the two, 154
And of the testimony of the four Evangelists, 156
Caution that what is recorded is not all that passed, 157
Perfect instruction of the Apostles in the forty days, 158
The powers comprising the Apostolate, 159
The powers bestowed on Peter, 160
Testimony of St. Paul; conception of the Church as the Body of
Christ, 161
Of the one ministry by which the Body is compacted together, 162
Of mission from this Body as necessary to every herald of the
gospel, 164
Of the grace given by ordination, 165
Mow the unity set forth by St. Paul bears witness to the Primacy
of St. Peter, 166
Of the inseparable bond of unity, truth, and government in St.
Paul's mind, 167
Six names by which he designates the principle of his own
authority, 168
The great vision of our Lord and His Church in the Apocalypse in
accordance with St. Paul and the Evangelists, 171
Four qualities of Spiritual Power in this Scriptural testimony, 175
1. The coming from above, 175
2. Its completeness, 176
3. Its unity, 179
4. Its independence, 181
How the idea of perpetuity pervades all these qualities, 182
CHAPTER IV.
TRANSMISSION OF SPIRITUAL AUTHORITY, AS WITNESSED IN THE HISTORY
OF THE CHURCH FROM A.D. 29 TO A.D. 325.
The letter of St. Clement of Rome, 184
Description of this letter by St. Irenæus, 185
St. Clement urges the Roman military discipline as an example for
Christian obedience, 186
Minute regulations given by Christ as to religious ordinances, 187
The descent of all spiritual order from above, 188
Example of Moses in establishing the Jewish Pontificate, 189
How the Apostles appointed everywhere Bishops with a rule of
succession, 190
St. Clement fills up details omitted in the Gospel record, 190
How he attests the continuation of the Mosaic hierarchy of high
priest, priest, and levite in the Christian Church, 191
How he says that Christian ordinances are to be observed more
accurately than Mosaic, 193
How the Apostles carried out the descent of power from above, 194
Why St. Clement instances the origin of the Jewish hierarchy, 195
How St. Clement exercises the Primacy, 197
St. Ignatius of Antioch supplements St. Clement of Rome, 200
His statement as to Bishops throughout the world, combined with
his statement as to the authority of the local Bishop, 201
The complete testimony of St. Clement and St. Ignatius, 203
The historian Eusebius notes three periods in the first ninety
years, 205
Sum of his testimony as to the great Sees and the Episcopate, 206
How Tertullian describes the first propagation of the Church, 211
And how Irenæus, 213
Concordance with the Gospels of these statements of St. Clement,
St. Ignatius, Eusebius, St. Irenæus, and Tertullian, 215
Bishops in every city and town of the Empire before the peace of
the Church, 216
St. Peter, St. Paul, and the Apostles appointed everywhere local
Bishops, 217
The Bishop universally said to wield a government, 218
Bishops sent out from Rome to convert the nations, 219
Episcopal government universal, 220
But the One Episcopate much more than this, 222
St. Cyprian's One Episcopate illustrated by St. Leo the Great, 223
What the One Episcopate adds to the universal establishment of
Bishops, 224
The special character of the miracle which St. Chrysostom and St.
Augustine proclaimed, 227
St. Augustine's criterion in the fourth century applied to the
nineteenth, 229
St. Chrysostom's epitome of the Church's course preceding his
time, 230
Christ's special miracle is that He founds the race of
Christians, 231
Contrast of the race with that out of which it was formed, 232
The incessant conflict amid which it was done, 233
A reflection upon this picture of the Church, 236
CHAPTER V.
THE ONE EPISCOPATE RESTING UPON THE ONE SACRIFICE.
St. Clement's assertion of the care with which our Lord instituted
the government of His Church, 238
Christ's High-priesthood consisting in two acts, 239
1. The assumption of a created nature, 240
2. The offering that nature in sacrifice, 241
His union of these two acts in instituting the Priesthood of His
Church, 242
The institution of bloody sacrifice in the world before Christ, 243
Lasaulx's statement how it enters into all the acts of human
life, 245
What the ceremonial of Gentile sacrifice was, 250
Union and correspondence of prayer and sacrifice, 253
The sense of guilt in bloody sacrifice, 254
Bloody sacrifice a positive divine enactment, 254
Statement of St. Augustine to this effect, 255
St. Thomas on sacrifice as offered to God alone, 256
Bloody sacrifice the most characteristic fact of the pre-Christian
world, 257
The practice of human sacrifices running through the history of
ancient nations, 259
Conclusion as to the divine appointment of sacrifice, 261
The Christian Sacrifice the counterpart of the original
institution, 263
And the compendium of the whole dispensation, 265
Containing in itself all the original force of sacrifice, 267
But besides it is guardian of the Divine Unity, 268
And of the Divine Trinity, 268
And of the Incarnation, 269
And of the Redemption, 270
And of the adoption to Sonship, 271
It contains also the fountain of spiritual life, 272
And the source of sanctification, 273
And the medicine of immortality, 274
The presence of Christ's physical body, St. Chrysostom, 275
The unity of the Christian people its result, St. Augustine, 276
How our Lord impressed His High-priesthood on the world, 276
Jurisdiction necessary to constitute a kingdom, 278
Jurisdiction in the diocese and in the whole Church, 279
The fulfilment of the parable, "I am the true vine," 280
The Eucharistic Sacrifice the centre of life in the Church during
eighteen hundred years, 283
CHAPTER VI.
INDEPENDENCE OF THE ANTE-NICENE CHURCH SHOWN IN HER ORGANIC GROWTH.
The Church's triple independence in government, teaching, and
worship as actually carried out, 287
Occasion of the Nicene Council's convocation, 289
The Emperor thereby recognised the Church as a divine kingdom, 290
This kingdom, as it appeared in A.D. 29 and in A.D. 325, 291
The Emperor also acknowledged the solidarity of the Episcopate, 292
The Christian Council and the Roman Senate, 293
Force of the Council as to the relation between Church and State, 294
A. Independence of the Church's government shown in five
points, 295
1. The ordered gradation of the hierarchy in mother and
daughter churches, 296
Recognised as original in the 6th canon of the Council, 297
This principle carried through the whole structure of the
Church, 298
Symbolised in the building of the great medieval
cathedrals, 301
2. Development of Provincial Councils, 302
3. Action of the Church in hearing and deciding causes, 303
Her proper jurisdiction in the exterior and interior forum, 304
The episcopal magistracy exercised in a fourfold gradation, 306
4. Election of Bishops and the inferior ministers, 307
St. Cyprian's testimony, 308
Outcome of the three centuries in this respect, 309
The principle upon which all this practice was built, 310
5. Administration of temporal goods, 311
Three states as to these goods in the early Church, 312
Acquisition and usage of temporal goods, 313
Temporal goods in A.D. 29 and in A.D. 325, 315
B. Independence of the Church's teaching, 316
The first teaching purely oral, based upon authority, 317
Three classes of truths forming the divine and the apostolical
tradition, 319
Importance in this period of exclusively oral teaching in
exhibiting the Church's office of teacher, 320
Seen in the rite of baptism, 321
In the Eucharistic Liturgy, 322
Picture of the Eucharistic Sacrifice by an Apostle, 324
Further exhibition in the rite of Ordination, 328
Fullness of the Magisterium expressed in these rites, 329
The Church's teaching office neither changed nor diminished by
the writings of the New Testament, 331
Shown by the nature of the office in itself, 331
By the circumstances under which these writings came, 331
By their internal arrangement, 332
By their own positive testimony, 335
The living personal authority an unchangeable principle, 335
Things in the Church which preceded the publication of the
New Testament, 336
The written record of our Lord's words and acts, 337
The various parts of ecclesiastical tradition, 338
CHAPTER VII.
INDEPENDENCE OF THE ANTE-NICENE CHURCH SHOWN IN HER MODE OF POSITIVE
TEACHING AND IN HER MODE OF RESISTING ERROR.
Germ of the Church in the missionary circuits of our Lord, 340
The mission carried on by the Apostles, 341
Its two parts: work of positive teaching and defence against
error, 343
As to the first--
1. The system of catechesis, 344
2. The employment of a Creed, 347
3. The dispensing of Sacraments, 349
4. The system of Penance, 351
5. The Scriptures carried in the Church's hand, 352
This mode of promulgation continued during fifteen centuries, 355
Substitution of a private interpretation of Scripture by the
individual attempted in the sixteenth century, 356
Summary of the mode in which the Church promulgated the faith, 358
As to the second, the Church's defence against error lay in the
principle of her own authority, 360
The first conflict with unbelieving Judaism, 362
Three incidents of it--
The proclaiming Jesus to be the Christ, 362
The receiving the Gentiles without Circumcision, 363
The protection of being Jews enjoyed by the first preachers of
Christ, 364
Gradual severance of the Christian Church from the Synagogue, 369
Circumstances and peculiar difficulties of the Ante-Nicene
Church, 371
The first condition of Christians one of simple faith, 376
The two opposed principles of orthodoxy and heresy, 378
Contest between them indicated in the Apostolic writings, 380
Character of the first writings after the Apostles, 381
Christian learning in the second century; conversions of heathens
who became Christian apologists, 382
Extension of education given in great catechetical schools, 385
The defence against error lodged in the Magisterium, 387
The Magisterium lies in the Church's divine government and concrete
life, 388
Athanasius as the expounder of it; his fundamental idea, 389
His Statement as to the authority of Scripture, 391
As to the Rule of Faith, 392
As to private judgment, 393
His tests of heresy, 393
Definitions, 394
How the Magisterium embraces Scripture and Tradition, and employs
them as a joint rule, 395
Testimony of the Council of Arles to the above principles, 397
And Constantine's public recognition that the Magisterium of
Christ is lodged in the Bishops, 398
CHAPTER VIII.
THE CHURCH'S BATTLE FOR INDEPENDENCE OVER AGAINST THE ROMAN EMPIRE.
Alliance of the Two Powers in the Roman Empire at the Advent of
Christ, 400
The Emperor official guardian of all religions, 401
The Christian religion a singular exception, 403
Its cause the position of Christians towards heathendom, 404
Contradiction in belief, worship, and government, 405
The Christian people as the outcome of these three constituents, 411
The course of the Roman Empire and the Christian Church in three
hundred years, 414
The ten persecutions from Nero to Diocletian, 417
The Martyrs champions of a great army, 421
St. Paul's account of this army's creation, 422
The wonder of this creation, 424
Supernatural character of the conversion wrought in these times, 426
Accounted for only by the internal action of the Holy Ghost, 427
Power of the kêrugma insisted on by Clement of Alexandria, 429
Contrasted by him with the impotence of philosophy, 430
Sufferings which followed on conversion according to Tertullian, 431
Martyrs enduring or God what heroes endured for goods of nature, 432
Origen insists on the divine power shown in converting sinners, 434
On miracles of conversion as greater than bodily miracles, 435
The spread of the Church and the conversion of sinners viewed
together, 436
Miracles only could account for the spread of the Church, 437
Statement of Irenæus as to miraculous powers exercised in his
time, 438
Athanasius on the cessation of idolatry, oracles, and magic, 440
And on the greatness of the conversion wrought by Christ, 442
The necessity of miracles in proof of our Lord's mission, 444
The connection between miracles and martyrdom, 445
Parallel between them as to their principle, witness, power, and
perpetuity, 449
How the liberty of the Church was gained against the empire, 455
How the Martyrs constructed a basis for civil liberty, 456
The five conflicts of the Church with Judaism, Heresy, Idolatry,
Philosophy, and the Roman State, 459
PROLOGUE.
THE KINGDOM AS PROPHESIED AND AS FULFILLED.
This volume, though entire in itself, is also the continuation of a
former work, the "Formation of Christendom," already written and
published by me in three volumes. It is, in fact, the further unfolding
of the subject under a particular aspect. In truth, the relation between
Church and State leads perhaps more directly than any other to the heart
of Christendom; for Christendom, both in word and idea, means not only
one and the same Church subsisting in all civil governments, but also a
community of Christian governments, having a common belief and common
principles of action, grounded upon the Incarnation of the Son of God,
and the Redemption wrought thereby. For this reason, the Formation of
Christendom can hardly be described, unless the relation which ought by
the institution of God to subsist between the two great Powers, the
Spiritual and Civil, appointed to rule human society, is first clearly
established.
In this volume, therefore, I treat first of the relation of these two
Powers before the coming of Christ. Secondly, of their relation as it was
affected by that coming, in order to show what position the Church of
Christ originally took up in regard to the Civil Power, and what the
behaviour of the Civil Power towards the Church was. And, thirdly, the
question of principles being thus laid down, the remainder of the volume
is occupied with the historical exhibition of the subject during the
first three centuries; that is, from the Day of Pentecost to the Nicene
Council. The supreme importance of that period will appear to all who
reflect that the Church from the beginning, and in the first centuries of
her existence, must be the same in principles with the Church of the
nineteenth and every succeeding century. And this volume is, in fact, a
prelude to the treatment of the same subject in the last three centuries,
down to the Ecumenical Council of the Vatican.
The subject which I am treating is, then, strictly historical, being the
action of a King in the establishment of a kingdom; the action of a
Lawgiver in the legislation which He gave to that kingdom; the action of
a Priest in founding a hierarchy, whereby that kingdom consists; but,
moreover, which is something much more--the action of One who is Priest,
Lawgiver, and King at once and always, and therefore whose work is at
once one and triple, and indivisible in its unity and triplicity, and
issuing in the forming of a people which is simply the creation of its
King.
1.--_The Kingdom as Prophesied._
As an introduction to it, let me refer to the distinct and explicit
prediction of such an event at a point of time six centuries before it
took effect, as well as now distant from us almost 2500 years, under
circumstances upon which it is most instructive to look back. For not
only did the secular and the religious histories of mankind then meet
together, as they had met before, but they began to stand in a certain
relation to each other, which continues from that time to this. The
intersection of two societies which work themselves out in the one human
history became permanent. At that moment a revelation was given, which is
perhaps the most definite detailed and absolute prophecy concerning the
whole compass of human society, as viewed in its relation to God, which
is to be found in the Old Testament. And the occasion upon which it was
given makes it even more significant, for it was like a burst of sunlight
suddenly scattering the darkness of a storm and bathing the whole
landscape in radiance.
That darkness indeed was terrible, for the ancient people chosen by God
to support His name among apostate nations no longer lived apart from
those nations in their own land which God had provided for them, with an
independence based upon the law especially given to them, but lay
prostrate under the feet of a heathen invader, who had placed a vassal
upon the diminished throne of Solomon, and the royal line of David seemed
on the eve of expiring in a degenerate descendant. For the continued
infidelities of four hundred years had worn out even the divine patience.
In vain had the ten tribes of schismatic Israel been carried into
captivity by Assyria. It needed that the remaining kingdom of Judah
should be broken up and its chiefs deported to Babylon, whose monarch was
now the heir of Assur's great empire, the king of kings, the sceptred
head of heathendom. Moreover, in a few years he was to punish the vassal,
rebellious to himself, but yet more faithless to the God of Israel, whom
he had placed on David's seat, and to burn that glorious Temple which the
wisest of kings had erected to the majesty of the one true God. And with
that fall of Zedekiah the line of David would cease for ever to sit upon
a temporal throne.
A darker moment in the history of the chosen people could not be found,
nor a more hopeless prospect, to all seeming, for the carrying out the
promises made to Abraham and his seed. What was a divine judgment on the
breakers of a special covenant with the one true God appeared to be the
triumph of a heathendom which had set up many false gods. Yet it was the
moment chosen to send to that very king, who was the executor of the
divine chastisements upon a faithless people, a revelation which
contained the future lot not only of the people which he had humbled, but
of the heathendom of which he was the crown. As he lay upon his bed,
Nabuchodonosor had a dream, "and his spirit was terrified, and the dream
went out of his mind." He strove in vain to recover it, either by the
efforts of his own memory or by the skill of the wise men and soothsayers
of Babylon. But among the captives in the imperial city was a youth of
David's lineage, nourished at the king's court, and a member of his
household. And when Daniel heard the decree of the great king ordering
the death of the wise men who failed to interpret a dream which the king
could not disclose to them, Daniel turned himself and his three
fellow-captives and companions to prayer and supplication, "to the end
that they should ask mercy at the face of the God of heaven concerning
this secret. Then was the mystery revealed to Daniel by a vision in the
night: and Daniel blessed the God of heaven, and speaking he said:
Blessed be the name of the Lord from eternity and for evermore: for
wisdom and fortitude are His. And He changeth times and ages: taketh away
kingdoms and establisheth them, giveth wisdom to the wise, and knowledge
to them that have understanding: He revealeth deep and hidden things, and
knoweth what is in darkness, and light is with Him. To Thee, O God of our
fathers, I give thanks, and I praise Thee; because Thou hast given me
wisdom and strength: and now Thou hast shown me what we desired of Thee,
for Thou hast made known to us the king's discourse. After this Daniel
went in to Arioch, to whom the king had given orders to destroy the wise
men of Babylon, and he spoke thus to him: Destroy not the wise men of
Babylon: bring me in before the king, and I will tell the solution to the
king. Then Arioch in haste brought in Daniel to the king, and said to
him: I have found a man of the children of the captivity of Judah that
will resolve the question to the king. The king answered and said to
Daniel, whose name was Baltassar: Thinkest thou indeed that thou canst
tell me the dream that I saw, and the interpretation thereof? And Daniel
made answer before the king and said: The secret that the king desireth
to know, none of the wise men, or the philosophers, or the diviners, or
the soothsayers can declare to the king. But there is a God in heaven
that revealeth mysteries, who hath shown to thee, O king Nabuchodonosor,
what is to come to pass in the latter times. Thy dream, and the visions
of thy head upon thy bed, are these: Thou, O king, didst begin to think
in thy bed what should come to pass hereafter: and He that revealeth
mysteries showed thee what shall come to pass. To me also this secret is
revealed, not by any wisdom that I have more than all men alive, but that
the interpretation might be made manifest to the king, and thou mightest
know the thoughts of thy mind. Thou, O king, sawest, and behold there was
as it were a great statue: this statue, which was great and high, tall of
stature, stood before thee, and the look thereof was terrible. The head
of this statue was of fine gold, but the breast and the arms of silver,
and the belly and the thighs of brass: and the legs of iron, the feet
part of iron and part of clay. Thus thou sawest, until a stone was cut
out of a mountain without hands, and it struck the statue upon the feet
thereof that were of iron and of clay, and broke them in pieces. Then was
the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold broken to pieces
together, and became like the chaff of a summer's threshing-floor, and
they were carried away by the wind, and there was no place found for
them: but the stone that struck the statue became a great mountain, and
filled the whole earth. This is the dream: we will also tell the
interpretation thereof before thee, O king. Thou art a king of kings: and
the God of heaven hath given thee a kingdom, and strength, and power, and
glory: and all places wherein the children of men and the beasts of the
field do dwell: he hath also given the birds of the air into thy hand,
and hath put all things under thy power: thou therefore art the head of
gold. And after thee shall rise up another kingdom, inferior to thee, of
silver: and another third kingdom of brass, which shall rule over all the
world. And the fourth kingdom shall be as iron. As iron breaketh into
pieces and subdueth all things, so shall that break and destroy all
these. And whereas thou sawest the feet and the toes part of potter's
clay, and part of iron: the kingdom shall be divided, but yet it shall
take its origin from the iron, according as thou sawest the iron mixed
with the miry clay. And as the toes of the feet were part of iron and
part of clay, the kingdom shall be partly strong and partly broken. And
whereas thou sawest the iron mixed with miry clay, they shall be mingled
indeed together with the seed of man, but they shall not stick fast one
to another, as iron cannot be mixed with clay. But in the days of those
kingdoms the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be
destroyed, and His kingdom shall not be delivered up to another people,
and it shall break in pieces and shall consume all these kingdoms, and
itself shall stand for ever. According as thou sawest that the stone was
cut out of the mountain without hands, and broke in pieces the clay, and
the iron, and the brass, and the silver, and the gold, the great God hath
shown the king what shall come to pass hereafter, and the dream is true,
and the interpretation thereof is faithful."
No one can study the vision and its interpretation without seeing that
the fabric of a great temporal empire, whose ruler is called a king of
kings, and whose seat is the city wherein Nimrod, "the great hunter
before the Lord," set up the first kingdom, to stand for ever at the head
of human history a kingdom symbolical not of justice but of force, is
therein contrasted with the fabric of a kingdom which the God of heaven
should set up. And it is specially noted that He should set up this
kingdom in the times of the empires denoted by the statue. And of the
kingdom so to be set up four things are predicated in, as it were, an
ascending scale. First, there is its divine institution: "the God of
heaven shall set up a kingdom," and that in a manner wholly unexampled,
which is expressed by "a stone cut out of a mountain without hands."
Secondly, "the kingdom shall never be destroyed." Thirdly, and further,
"it shall not be delivered up to another people;" a process which,
according to the interpretation of the vision, was to take place three
times in the empires represented by the statue. Fourthly, "that it should
break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, while itself should last
for ever."
Moreover, as the earthly kingdom was really a kingdom, so the force of
the similitude running through the whole, and heightened by the effect
of contrast, declares that the heavenly should be a kingdom. As the seat
of the earthly kingdom was this world, so evidently the seat of the
heavenly is this same world. As the earthly kingdom should be destroyed,
so the heavenly should be exempt from destruction. As the earthly kingdom
was to pass from one people to another, so the heavenly kingdom should
not pass from one people to another. But then comes a culmination which
no one could anticipate. For not only is there an antagonism between the
earthly and the heavenly kingdom, but by force of it, and in consequence
of it, the heavenly should consume and break in pieces the earthly.
Whereby the hearer is given to understand that the earthly kingdom,
terrible and grand and all-powerful as it seemed to be, was created for
the sake of the heavenly, which in due time should be set up in it, but
not of it nor from it.
It is no less implied through the whole tenor of the vision that the
authority which constitutes the essence of a kingdom--that is, supreme and
independent authority, which is expressed in legislation and administered
in government--subsists as much in the heavenly as in the earthly kingdom,
with this marked distinction, that it is transitory in the one case and
permanent in the other.
And, finally, the power by which all this should be done was something
beyond human power, and without parallel, very strange and astonishing,
"a stone cut out of a mountain without hands," which should not only
strike the statue upon its feet, but itself grow, "until it became a
great mountain, and filled the whole earth."
Thus the filling of the whole earth with the stone which struck the
statue and then became a great mountain terminates the vision. But it is
no less its scope and object. The statue exists before that the stone may
come after. The statue and the stone, as thus exhibited, indicate the
respective value in the divine counsels of the powers which they
represent; that is, the subordination of the human kingdom to the divine,
both in the order of causality and in duration, is distinctly laid down.
And the end of both accords with this. The great statue, when struck by
the stone, became like the chaff of a summer's threshing-floor; but the
stone which struck it filled the whole earth. And the vision leaves it in
possession.
The vision also reaches from end to end. It begins with the first empire,
which is human, and runs back by the place in which it is seated to the
commencement of actual things; and it ends with the last, which is
divine, and which shall consume all the other kingdoms recorded, and
itself last for ever. Thus the vision grasps the whole organism of
society in the human race, as it lies unrolled before the providence of
God.
2.--_The Kingdom as Fulfilled._
Such was the prophecy. Now let us pass over a thousand years, and take
the first fulfilment of the vision as it presented itself to an ancient
saint at the beginning of the fifth century. We will only note that in
the interval Nabuchodonosor and Cyrus and Alexander and Cæsar had set up
the four world-empires. They were four indeed, for they passed three
times from one people to another--from Chaldean to Persian, from Persian
to Grecian, from Grecian to Roman, as the variety of metals in the statue
was interpreted to mean. Yet were they also one--a unity which, as that of
a single person, the great statue so faithfully represented. For they
were one with each other in the character and unbroken tradition of the
same civilisation, and in the principle of their authority, which was
conquest. They were filled with the same spirit of heathen domination,
which was in truth the voice and the power of a false worship, as with
the spirit of one man who rose in Babylon to set in Rome.[1] Two
Apostles, special friends and constant fellow-workers, had marked this
identity by giving the mystical name of Babylon to heathen Rome--St.
Peter[2] in the epistle which he dates from Babylon, St. John in his
vision of the woman drunk with the blood of saints and martyrs, and
seated upon the seven hills, whom he himself interprets to be "the great
city which had kingdom over the kings of the earth." These empires had
run their appointed course, and the last and greatest of them, which was
likewise the heir and successor of the three preceding in power and
thought, as well as in the body of their territories and the soul which
ruled therein, was ending in disgrace and dissolution. For at length the
tribes of the North had broken through the long-guarded frontiers of
Roman power. Alaric with his Goths had taken Rome, and a deep cry of
distress arose through all the vast provinces of her empire. Every city
in that wide domain trembled with the sense of insecurity for the present
and fear for the future which the fall of Rome inspired. Just at this
moment the great Western Father, whose voice sounded like the voice of
the Church herself, wrote thus to a heathen inquirer:--
"Faith opens the door to intelligence, while unbelief closes it. Where is
the man who would not be moved to belief, simply by so vast an order of
events proceeding from the beginning; by the mere connection of various
ages, which accredits the present by the past, while it confirms
antiquity by what is recent? Out of the Chaldean nation a single man is
chosen, remarkable for a most constant piety. Divine promises are
disclosed to this man, which are to find their completion after a vast
series of ages in the last times, and it is predicted that all nations
are to receive a benediction in his seed. This man being a worshipper of
the one true God, the Creator of the universe, begets in his old age a
son, of a wife whom barrenness and age had long deprived of all hope of
offspring. From him is propagated a most numerous people, which
multiplies in Egypt, whither a divine disposition of things, redoubling
its promises and effects, had carried that family from eastern parts.
From their servitude in Egypt a strong people is led forth by terrible
signs and miracles; impious nations are driven out before it; it is
brought into the promised land, settled therein, and exalted into a
kingdom. Then it falls more and more into sin; it perpetually offends the
true God, who had conferred upon it so many favours, by violating His
worship; it is scourged with various misfortunes; it is visited with
consolations, and so carried on to the incarnation and manifestation of
Christ. All the promises made to this nation, all its prophecies, its
priesthoods, its sacrifices, its temple, in a word, all its sacred rites,
had for their special object this Christ, the Word of God, the Son of
God--God that was to come in the flesh, that was to die, to rise again, to
ascend to heaven, that by the exceeding power of His name was to obtain
in all nations a population dedicated to Himself; and in Him remission of
sins and eternal salvation unto such as believed.
"Christ came. In His birth, His life, His words, His deeds, His
sufferings, His death, His resurrection, His ascension,--all the
predictions of the prophets are fulfilled. He sends forth the Holy
Spirit; He fills the faithful who are assembled in one house, and who by
their prayers and desires are expecting this very promise. They are
filled with the Holy Spirit; they speak suddenly with the tongues of all
nations; they confidently refute errors; they proclaim a most salutary
truth; they exhort to penitence for the faults of past life; they promise
pardon from the divine grace. Their proclamation of piety and true
religion is followed by suitable signs and miracles. A savage unbelief is
stirred up against them. They endure what had been foretold; hope in
what had been promised; teach what had been commanded them. Few in
number, they are scattered through the world. They convert populations
with marvellous facility. In the midst of enemies they grow. They are
multiplied by persecutions. In the straits of affliction they are spread
abroad over vast regions. At first they are uninstructed, of very low
condition, very few in number. Their ignorance passes into the brightest
intelligence; their low ranks produce the most cultivated eloquence;
their fewness becomes a multitude; they subjugate to Christ minds the
most acute, learned, and accomplished, and convert them into preachers of
piety and salvation. In the alternating intervals of adversity and
prosperity, they exercise a watchful patience and temperance. As the
world verges in a perpetual decline, and by exhaustion expresses the
coming of its last age, since this also is what prophecy led them to
expect, they with greater confidence await the eternal happiness of the
heavenly city. And amid all this the unbelief of impious nations rages
against the Church of Christ, which works out victory by patience, and by
preserving unshaken faith against the cruelty of opponents. When the
sacrifice unveiled by the truth, which had so long been covered under
mystical promises, had at length succeeded, those sacrifices which
prefigured this one were removed by the destruction of the Temple itself.
This very Jewish people, rejected for its unbelief, was cast out of its
own seat, and scattered everywhere throughout the world, to carry with it
the sacred writings; so that the testimony of prophecy, by which Christ
and the Church were foretold, may not be thought a fiction of ours for
the occasion, but be produced by our very adversaries--a testimony in
which it is also foretold that they should not believe. The temples and
images of demons, and the sacrilegious rites of that worship, are
gradually overthrown, as prophecy foretold. Heresies against the name of
Christ, which yet veil themselves under that name, swarm, as was
foretold, in order to call out the force of teaching in our holy
religion. In all these things, as we read their prediction, so we discern
their fulfilment, and from so vast a portion which is fulfilled we rest
assured of what is still to come. Is there a single mind which yearns
after eternity and feels the shortness of the present life, that can
resist the light and the force of this divine authority?"[3]
St. Augustine wrote thus to his friend Volusian, the uncle of St.
Melania, a Roman nobleman of high reputation, who was then, as he
continued for many years to be, a heathen. But we must also take note
that he wrote at a point of time scarcely less remarkable than that of
the vision interpreted by Daniel. The old world with its sequence of
world-empires was passing away. And so soon as it passed another travail
of extraordinary severity was preparing for the Church, such a travail as
even the eagle eye of the Bishop of Hippo could not discern as he stood
before the beginning of its accomplishment. When he wrote there was a
Catholic Church, the fulfilment of a long train of prophecies in that
"connection of ages" which he has so wonderfully drawn out, but there was
not yet a Christendom. Nor could he the least foresee what was to take
place before that Christendom could be formed. Only, as he spoke, the
iron of Roman discipline--the inflexible Romulean mind--which had held
together the miry clay of so many various and divergent nationalities,
European, Asiatic, African, so that "the kingdom took its origin from the
iron," was losing its tenacity. That vast structure of Roman power, the
breaking up of which had been feared in the wars and insurrections
arising upon the death of Nero, and extinction of the family of Augustus,
was in truth dissolving.[4] The western and eastern limbs of the statue
were parting away from each other, and the toes were crumbling. But
though Augustine heard the sound of the advancing tide, he saw not yet
the full flood of the deluge from the north; and still less could he
foresee the counter desolation from the south; Teuton flood and Arab
desolation which in their joint effect would blast utterly the Roman
Peace, and break the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold
in pieces together, until they became like the chaff of the summer's
threshing-floor.
As little could he anticipate another sight, the further fulfilment of
the vision, when the provinces, those crumbling toes of the statue, which
lay before him in an impending dissolution, were to be formed into great
independent kingdoms, having for the common foundation of their power
"the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us." Then in that "connection of
ages" which should be drawn out after the time of Augustine in even
greater distinctness than before him, and with greater claim upon the
believing mind, which "yearns after eternity," a grander fulfilment of
the vision would be disclosed. The royalties set up by barbarian chiefs
of tribes among incoherent populations of victors and vanquished were to
educate mature nations with individual character in the one Christian
faith, and shine as distinct stars set in the crown of the Successor to
Peter's pastorship. For as the Word made flesh created Christian
monarchies and Christian nations in their several being, so the charge of
the Word to a disciple by the lake of Gennesareth, "Feed My Sheep,"
created the great unity of Christendom which bound them together. In
Constantine one empire had acknowledged the reign of Christ, and bent the
neck of heathen domination to raise the cross upon a heathen crown. But
then a group of nations should base the fabric of their laws, and the
whole civilisation which redeemed them from barbarism, upon the truth
that God assumed flesh for man's sake, and should acknowledge in Peter's
Successor the Vicar of that God, who by and in that pastoral rule of
Peter made them members of one Body, and in so making them "took the
Gentiles for His inheritance, and the utmost parts of the earth for His
possession."
This was a second and further fulfilment of the vision, which as yet
Augustine saw not, nor even anticipated; but after thus writing he set
himself in the last years of his life to a great task, even that of
comparing together from their origin to their end the course of the two
societies, not national, but world-wide, which run out through human
history, intermingled together, and claiming possession of the same man.
First, the natural society of the human race played upon by all the
passions and infirmities which are the effect of man's original Fall; and
secondly, that other society chosen by God from the beginning in view of
His Son's Incarnation, for the purpose of repairing and counterworking
that Fall. It was the capture of Rome by Alaric, and the deep despondency
which thence arose in the minds of many, both Christian and heathen, that
moved him originally to this design, of which the first tracing is seen
in the letter to Volusian just quoted. He sought to meet conclusions
unfavourable to the Christian faith, which were drawn by weak, or narrow,
or unbelieving minds from the fall of the imperial city. His plan
accordingly led him to take a complete view of all human history; and the
result has been that one of the last representatives of the old world,
and certainly the greatest of all as thinker, philosopher, and
theologian, the most universal genius of the patristic ages, whether
among Greeks or Latins, has left us a Philosophy of History, the first in
time, and as yet unequalled in ability; for it supplies a key to the acts
of man and the providence of God in that masterly comparison between the
City of God and the City of the devil in their origin, their course, and
their end.
The leading thought of this great work gives me a final text bearing on
the subject of this volume.
"Thus, then, two Cities have been created by two loves: the earthly, by
that love of self which reaches even to the contempt of God; the
heavenly, by the love of God which reaches even to the contempt of self.
The first has its boast in self; the second in its Lord. For the first
seeks its glory from men; whereas to the second, God, the witness of
conscience, is the greatest glory. The first in that glory which it has
made for itself exalts its own head; the second says to its God, 'Thou
art my glory and the lifter up of my head.' In the first the lust of
domination sways both its rulers and the nations which it subjugates. In
the second a mutual service of charity is exercised by rulers who consult
the good of subjects, and by subjects who practise obedience to rulers.
The first loves in its own potentates its own excellence; the second says
to the God of its choice, 'I will love Thee, O Lord, my strength.' And
thus in the first its own wise men, living after human fashion, pursue
the goods of their body or their mind, or both at once, or they who might
have known God, have not 'glorified him as God nor given thanks, but
became vain in their thoughts, and their foolish heart was darkened;
professing themselves to be wise,' that is, extolling themselves in their
own wisdom through the pride that mastered them, 'they became fools, and
changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image
of a corruptible man, and of birds, and of four-footed beasts, and of
creeping things;' for they either led their peoples or followed them in
the adoration of such-like images; and 'worshipped and served the
creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever.' But in the
second there is no wisdom of man save piety, by which the true God is
rightly worshipped, awaiting its reward in the society of saints, not men
only, but angels, that God may be all in all."[5]
I put together these three facts of human history, the vision of the King
of Babylon interpreted by Daniel six hundred years before Christ, the
summary of its fulfilment down to his own age written by St Augustine
four hundred years after the coming of Christ, and his delineation, a few
years later, of the Two Cities, as set forth by him in a work on which
the Christian mind has now been nurtured for fourteen hundred and fifty
years. The simple juxtaposition of these shows how Babylon stretches to
Rome, and Rome is heir of Babylon; and the heathen man thus formed
illustrates "the Man who is born in Sion, the city of the great King."[6]
It is true that the two great Powers of Civil and Spiritual government,
the relation between which forms the subject of this volume, are not
exactly represented as concerns that relation in the vision of Daniel;
but only the heathen growth of the Civil Power, and the miraculous rise,
permanent rule, and progressive growth of the Spiritual Power in the
midst of it; yet the mighty promise is recorded that in presence of the
Civil Power the Spiritual shall never pass away; rather that it shall
last unchanged, while the other is shifting and transitory; and also the
cognate truth, that the great and terrible Power represented by the
Statue is, in the counsels of God, subordinate in its scope to the Power
represented by the Stone.
It is true, again, that the vivid contrast of the Two Cities as drawn by
St. Augustine does not represent the legitimate relation of the Two
Powers to each other, but only the perversion of the one Power from its
true end and object, and the perfect antagonism of the other to that
perversion.
But the kingdom set up by the God of heaven in the vision interpreted by
Daniel, and the connection of ages dwelt upon by St. Augustine, which
leads up to the Person of Christ, and then starts afresh from Him, and
the Divine City delineated by St. Augustine, fit exactly into each other,
and so they seem to me to form together an appropriate introduction to
that most remarkable period of history with which the present volume is
occupied, when the Stone cut out without hands struck the Statue, and
became a great mountain, in preparation for that further growth when it
would fill the whole earth.
The Statue presented in vision to the heathen king has indeed been swept
away, but in every country a reduced likeness of it, "the look whereof is
terrible," stands over against "the Man born in Sion." And the Two Cities
everywhere run on in their predestined course until the end contemplated
by Augustine takes effect. But as he did not discern the second
fulfilment of the divine kingdom which followed upon the wandering of the
nations, so neither can we discern the third and yet grander fulfilment
when the divine kingdom shall become to the whole world what once it was
in the Roman Empire. For, to repeat St. Augustine's words, "In all these
things as we read their prediction, so we discern their fulfilment, and
from so vast a portion which is fulfilled we rest assured of what is
still to come." And "the stone that struck the statue became a great
mountain, and filled the whole earth."
February 12, 1882.
FOOTNOTES:
[1]
"Dentro dal monte sta dritto un gran veglio,
Che tiene volte le spalle inver Damiata,
E Roma guarda sì, come suo speglio."
--DANTE, _Inferno_, 14, 101.
[2] 1 Pet. v. 13; Apocal. xvii. 18, xviii. 2, 20.
[3] St. Aug. Epist. 137, ad Volusianum, § 15-16. A.D. 412. It is remarkable
that Volusian, who held the highest offices in the Roman Empire, and among
the rest was Prefect of the City, was not converted either by the genius or
the saintliness of Augustine. But more than twenty years after this letter,
about A.D. 435, he was sent on an embassy from the Emperor of the West to
the Emperor of the East at Constantinople. His niece, St. Melania the
younger, left the seclusion of her monastery at Jerusalem, and travelled
all the intervening distance to see him. When he met in the garb of
humility and poverty the niece whom he remembered at Rome in all the
splendour of youth, rank, and beauty at the head of the Roman nobility, he
was so impressed by the force of Christian charity which had wrought such a
change, that he was converted and baptized by the Patriarch Proclus, and
died shortly afterwards. God did by the sight of the nun what he had not
done by the learning of the theologian and the philosopher.
[4] The words which Cerialis addressed to the Gauls, as recorded by
Tacitus, Hist. 4, 74, apply in all their force to the times when the
trans-migration of the northern tribes took effect, four hundred years
after they were written. "Octingentorum annorum fortuna disciplinaque
compages hæc coaluit, quæ convelli sine exitio convellentium non potest."
And every city of the Roman empire could testify to the truth of what he
added: "Sed vobis maximum discrimen penes quos aurum et opes, præcipuæ
bellorum causæ."
[5] De Civ. Dei, xvi. 28.
[6] Ps. lxxxvi. 5.
CHURCH AND STATE
AS SEEN IN
THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM.
CHAPTER I.
RELATION BETWEEN THE CIVIL AND SPIRITUAL POWERS FROM ADAM TO CHRIST.
1.--_The Divine and Human Society founded in Adam, refounded in Noah._
In one of the most ancient books of the world, which, in addition to its
antiquity, all Christians venerate as containing the original tradition
of man's creation, guaranteed in purity and accuracy by divine assistance
given to the writer, we read the following words:--"God made the beasts of
the earth according to their kinds, and cattle, and everything that
creepeth on the earth after its kind. And God saw that it was good. And
he said: Let us make man to our image and likeness: and let him have
dominion over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and the
beasts, and the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon
the earth. And God created man to his own image: to the image of God he
created him: male and female he created them." And further: "The Lord God
formed man of the slime of the earth; and breathed into his face the
breath of life, and man became a living soul.... And the Lord God took
man and put him into the paradise of pleasure, to dress it and to keep
it. And he commanded him, saying, Of every tree of paradise thou shalt
eat; but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat.
For in what day soever thou shalt eat of it, thou shalt die the death.
And the Lord God said, It is not good for man to be alone; let us make
him a help like unto himself. And the Lord God having formed out of the
ground all the beasts of the earth, and all the fowls of the air, brought
them to Adam to see what he would call them: for whatsoever Adam called
any living creature, the same is its name. And Adam called all the beasts
by their names, and all the fowls of the air, and all the cattle of the
field; but for Adam there was not found a helper like himself. Then the
Lord God cast a deep sleep upon Adam: and when he was fast asleep he took
one of his ribs and filled up flesh for it. And the Lord God built the
rib which he took from Adam into a woman: and brought her to Adam. And
Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall
be called Woman, because she was taken out of man. Wherefore a man shall
leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they shall be
two in one flesh. And they were both naked, Adam and his wife, and were
not ashamed."
Such is the account of the origin of man, of woman, of marriage, as the
root of human society, and of that society itself, beginning in the
absolute unity of one who was father and head of his race, created in
full possession of reason and language, and exercising both by an
intuitive knowledge of the qualities of living creatures as they are
brought before him by his Maker. This account stands at the head of human
history, and has been venerated as truth by more than a hundred
generations of men since it was written down by Moses, not to speak of
those many generations among whom it had been a living tradition before
he had written it down. Human language scarcely possesses elsewhere such
an assemblage of important truths in so few words. Perhaps the only
parallel to it is contained in the fourteen verses which stand at the
opening of St. John's Gospel, wherein are recorded the Godhead and
Incarnation of the Divine Word. The first creation has its counterpart
only in the second; and the restoration of man by the personal action of
God alone surpasses, or, perhaps, more truly may be said to complete, the
Idea of his original formation by the same personal action of the same
Divine Word, who, great as He is in creating, is yet greater in
redeeming, but is one in both, and in both carries out one Idea.
For the creation of man as one individual, who is likewise the head and
bearer of a race, is the key to all the divine government of the world.
The fact rules its destinies through all their evolution. The world, as
it concerns the actions, the lot, and the reciprocal effect of men upon
each other, would have been quite a different world if it had not sprung
out of this unity. If, for instance, mankind had been a collection of
human beings in all things like to what they now are, except in one
point, that they were independent of each other and unconnected in their
origin. This unity further makes the race capable of that divine
restoration which from the beginning was intended, and with a view to
which man was made a race: which in restoring man likewise unspeakably
exalts him, for He who made Adam the father and head of the race, made
him also "the figure of One that was to come."
Let us briefly enumerate the parts of the divine plan as disclosed to us
in the narration just given.
In the council held by the Blessed Trinity it is said, "Let us make man
to our image and likeness;" not, Let us make men, but man: the singular
number used of the whole work indicates that the creation to be made was
not only an individual but a family. From the beginning the family is an
essential part of the plan. This is no less indicated in the single
creation of Adam first, not the simultaneous creation of the male and
female, as in the case of all other creatures, but the creation by
himself of the head alone, from whom first woman by herself, and then
from the conjunction of the two his family is drawn. In Adam first, while
as yet he is alone, the high gifts of reason, speech, and knowledge
indicated in the twofold and also congenital possession of reason and
language, are exhibited as residing as in a fountain-head, when all
creatures of the earth and the air are brought before him by his Maker,
and he with intuitive understanding of their several qualities and uses
imposes on them the corresponding name. Thus Adam is created complete, a
full-grown man, in whom the divine gift of thought finds expression in
the equally divine gift of language, both exerted with unerring truth,
for it is intimated that the names which he assigns to the creatures thus
passed in review render accurately their several natures. It is not said
that the Lord God intimated to Adam the names which he should give; but
the knowledge by which he gave the names was part of his original
endowment, like the gift of thought and language, which answer to each
other and imply each other, and in a being composed of soul and body
complete by their union and joint exercise the intellectual nature. "The
Lord God brought all beasts and all fowls before Adam to see what he
would call them; for whatsoever Adam called any living creature, the same
is its name."
This presentation of the creatures before Adam, and their naming by him,
is the token of the dominion promised to him "over the fishes of the sea,
and the fowls of the air, and the beasts, and the whole earth," as the
result of his being made to "the image and likeness" of the Triune God.
Only when he has thus taken possession of his royalty is the creation of
the family completed out of himself. For when "for Adam there was not
found a helper like himself," the Lord God took not again of the slime of
the earth to mould a woman and bring her to man, but "He cast a deep
sleep upon Adam, and built the rib which He took from Adam into a woman,
and brought her to Adam." And then He uttered the blessing which should
fill the earth with the progeny of the woman who had been drawn from the
man her head, saying, "Increase and multiply and fill the earth, and
subdue it, and rule over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air,
and all living creatures that move upon the earth."
What, then, is the image and likeness of the Triune God? The image
consists in the soul, with its two powers of the understanding and the
will, proceeding out of it, indivisible from it, yet distinct. May we not
infer that the likeness is the obedience of the soul, with its powers, to
the eternal law? This law, viewed in the Triune God, the prototype of
man's being, is the sanctity of the Divine Nature; but in man, thus
created, the obedience to it was the gift of original justice superadded
to his proper nature: the gift by which the soul, in the free exercise of
the understanding and the will, was obedient to the law of God, its
Creator.
This was an image and likeness which belonged to Adam in a double
capacity, firstly, as an individual, secondly, as head of a family; for
it was to descend to each individual of the family in virtue of natural
procreation from Adam. The man created after the image and likeness of
the Triune God was, according to the divine intention, to be repeated in
every one of the race.
But what of the family or race which was to be evolved out of Adam alone?
Not the individual only but the race also is in the divine plan. Is
there a further image of the Triune God in the mode of the race's
formation?
To give an answer to this question, we must first consider what is the
prototype of that singular unity according to which the first parents of
the race are not formed together out of the earth, male and female, like
the inferior creatures. For in most marked distinction from all these man
is formed by himself, and alone; receives the command to eat of all trees
in the garden except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, under
penalty of death if he take of it; and then is shown exercising the
grandeur of his knowledge and the fulness of his royalty in the naming of
the subject creatures. But inasmuch as none of them could supply him with
a companion, and as "it was not good for him to be alone," a council of
the Triune God is held again, and a help like to himself is taken out of
himself. Is there not here, with that infinite distance which separates
the created from the Increate, a yet striking image of the Divine
Filiation?
Again, from the conjunction of the two, from Adam the head, and from Eve
when she has been drawn out of him, proceeds, in virtue of the blessing
of God, the human family. Is there not here, again, at that distance
which separates divine from human things, an image of the procession of
the Third Divine Person, the Lord, and the Giver of life, from whom all
life proceeds?
May we not then say with reverence, that from the council of the Triune
God, "Let us make man to our image and likeness," proceeds forth the
individual man, an earthly counterpart in his memory, understanding, and
will to the divine Creator, and likewise man, the family, a created image
of the primal mystery, the ineffable joy of the Godhead, the ever blessed
Trinity in Unity? And since the origin of creation itself is the free act
of God, it ought not to surprise us that the chief work of His hands in
the visible universe should reflect in the proportion of a creature the
secret life of the Divine Nature, the Unity and Trinity of the Godhead.
But next to this primal mystery, which is the source of all creation,
stands that unspeakable condescension, that act of sovereign goodness, by
which God has chosen to assume a created nature into personal unity with
Himself, and to crown the creation which He has made. As to this the
first Adam, in all his headship, with the privileges included in it, the
transmission to his family of original justice, and of that wonderful
gift of adoption superadded to it, is "the figure of Him who was to
come." But more also, St. Paul tells us, is indicated in the formation of
Eve out of Adam during the sleep divinely cast upon him. This was the
"great sacrament of Christ and of His Church" (Eph. v. 32), to which he
pointed in reminding his hearers of the high institution of Christian
marriage. And thus we learn that God, in the act of forming the natural
race, supernaturally endowed, was pleased to foreshadow by the building
of Eve, "the mother of all living," out of the first Adam, the building
of another Eve, the second and truer mother of a divine race, out of the
wounded heart of the Redeemer of the world asleep upon the cross. As then
in Adam's headship we have the figure of the Headship of Christ, so in
the issuing of Eve from him in his sleep we have the Passion of Christ
and the issuing forth of His Bride from it, when His work of redemption
was completed and His royalty proclaimed.
Thus the mysteries of the blessed Trinity, that is, of God the Creator,
and of the Incarnation and Passion of Christ, that is, of God the
Redeemer, lie folded up, as it were, in the Mosaic narrative of the mode
in which Adam was created, and in the headship of the race conferred upon
him.
Before we approach the sin of Adam and its consequences to human society,
let us cast one glance back upon the beauty and splendour of the divine
plan in the original creation as it is disclosed to us in the narrative
of Moses. As the crown of the visible creation is placed a being who is
at once an individual and the head of a family, representing in his
personal nature the divine Unity and Trinity, and in the race of which he
is to stand at the head the same divine Unity and Trinity in their aspect
towards creation; representing the royalty of God in his dominion over
the creatures, a dominion the condition of which is the obedience of his
own compound nature to the law given to it by the Creator; representing
again in the vast number to which his race shall extend the prolific
energy of the Lord of Hosts; representing also in that secret and
altogether wonderful mystery, out of which the multiplication of his race
springs, the yet untold secret of the divine mercy, in virtue of which
his fathership is the prelude to a higher fathership, the first man is
the pattern of the Second, and the royalty of his creation but a
rehearsal at the beginning of the world of the reparation which is to
crown its end.
The whole work of creation as above described, depends in its result upon
the exercise of man's free-will. His value, before God, lies simply in
the way in which he exerts this great prerogative of his reasonable
nature. Without it he would be reduced from one who chooses his course,
and in that choice becomes good or evil, to the condition of a machine
devoid of any moral being. To test this free-will man was given a
commandment. We know that he failed under the trial; that he broke the
commandment. His disobedience to his Creator was punished by the
disobedience of his own compound nature to himself. That divine grace,
which we term the state of original justice, and in virtue of which his
soul, with its understanding and will, illuminated and fortified, was
subject to God, and the body with all its appetites was subject to the
soul, was withdrawn. He became subject to death, the certain death of the
body, with all that train of diseases and pains which precede it; and the
final separation of the soul from its Creator, unless by the way which
God indicated to him he should be restored. Becoming a sinner, his refuge
was penitence; henceforth his life was to be the life of a penitent; he
had lost the grace which was bestowed royally on the innocent; he was
left the grace which was to support and lead on the penitent. From the
garden of pleasure he is expelled, to go forth into a world which
produces thorns and thistles, unless he water it with the sweat of his
brow. To all this I only allude, since my proper subject is to trace the
first formation of human society as it came forth from the fall. But the
primal state of man could not be passed over, because the state in which
he grew up, and the state in which he now stands, cannot be understood
nor estimated rightly without a due conception of that original
condition.
With the loss of original justice Adam does not lose the headship of his
race. All men that are to be born remain his children, and continue to be
not a species of similar individuals, but a family, a race. All the
dealings of God with them continue to be dealings with them as a race.
Adam's fathership, had he not fallen, would have been to them the source
of an inestimable good, would have secured to them the transmission of
original justice, crowned as it further was by a wholly gratuitous gift,
the gift of adoption to a divine sonship. But that fathership, in
consequence of his sin, actually transmitted to them a nature penally
deprived both of the original endowment and of the superadded adoption;
and, as a fact, all the difficulties which occur to the mind in the
divine government of the world spring out of this treatment by God of man
as a family, a race. But likewise through this continuing fathership of
Adam, the Fathership of Christ appears as the completion of an original
plan, devised before the foundation of the world, and actually carried
out at the appointed time. He was to be son of David and son of Abraham
in order that He might be Son of man. This original plan of God is not
frustrated but executed by the fall of Adam. The yet undisclosed secrets
of human lot have their origin in Adam and their solution in Christ. We
are allowed to see that they belong to one plan. No doubt the hidden
things of God in this dispensation baffle our scrutiny: they remain for
the trial of faith until faith passes into sight, but we are allowed to
see the fact of a vast compensation; and over against the fathership
which brought death and corruption and the interminable ills of human
life, we see all the supernatural blessings of the new covenant,
consisting in the triple dowry of adoption, betrothal, and consecration,
come to man as a spiritual race descending from the Second Adam.
Thus, not only the primary but the actual state of man in society springs
out of an absolute unity. We have here to note two great truths. Adam, as
he was expelled from paradise to till the earth and subdue it, was the
head of his race in two particulars: first, as to natural society, whence
springs civil government; and secondly, as to the worship of God, and the
promises included in that worship, whence springs priesthood and all the
fabric of religion. The two unities, the social and the religious, had in
him their common root; and man thus comes before us in history as a
family in which the first father stands at the head of the civil and
religious order in most intimate intercourse with God. The only
description which we possess of that first period of human society from
the Fall to the Deluge, suggests to us a state which seems absolutely
walled round by God with securities, both as concerns human life in the
intercourse between man and man, and as concerns the purity of their
worship of God. As to the first, have we not said all which can be said
when we say that they were a family? The king of the human race was the
father of every one in it. Certainly if any king could ever command the
love and respect of his subjects it must have been Adam in that royalty.
But let us very briefly consider the bearing of man's condition before
the fall, as set forth to us in the sacred records which have been so far
followed, upon his knowledge of divine and human things, and his moral
state in his first society after the fall.
We have seen Adam in possession of a great dignity, created in the
maturity of reason, exercising the full power of thought and speech as
directed to truth by an inward gift, which conveys to him the knowledge
of the creatures surrounding him; moreover, taught by God as to his
present duties and future hopes. We have seen a wife bestowed upon him,
who is, as it were, created for him and drawn from him, and a vast family
promised to him. He is thus made father and head of his family and his
race, and his Creator is his immediate Teacher. After his fall these
privileges do not become to him as if they had never been. The memory of
them all is complete in him, but a very large portion of their substance
remains. Let us take three points, which are enough for our purpose. He
receives, at the fall itself, firstly, a great promise of God; secondly,
he becomes the Teacher and, thirdly, the Priest of his race. As to the
promise, God declares to him that, as the result of the serpent seducing
the woman to sin, He will create enmity between the serpent and the
woman, the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman; the seed of the
woman should crush the serpent's head; the serpent should lie in wait for
his heel. All human history is gathered up in that division of the race,
between the seed of the woman, from which springs the City of God, and
the seed of the serpent, from which springs the City of the Devil. That
is a communication of fresh knowledge to Adam, knowledge of good and
evil, a mixture of consolation and sorrow. That is a disclosure of the
issue of things stretching to the very end of the world, which comes to
sustain Adam in his penitence, to complete the knowledge which he
previously had of God and of himself.
In this first great prophecy, which embraces all the religion, the hope,
and the destiny of man, the consequences of which are not yet worked out,
man is treated as a race. The punishment falls on him as a Father; the
Woman through whom it comes, the Mother of his children, points to
another Woman and Mother, through whom it is to be reversed, and the
Deliverer is to come to him as a Descendant.
Adam, then, was cast out of paradise, but not without hope, still less
without knowledge, for he carried with him the knowledge which God had
given to him, and the lesson of a great experience. Thus he became the
great Teacher of his family. Through him from whom they received natural
being and nurture, they received the knowledge of God, of their own end,
of all which it behoved them to know for the purpose of their actual
life. The great Father was likewise the great Penitent; and the first
preacher of God's justice to men told them likewise of His mercy: a
preacher powerful and unequalled in both his themes.
But, by the fall, Adam became likewise the Priest in his family. We learn
from the narrative of Cain and Abel that the worship of God by sacrifice
had been instituted, and it is not obscurely intimated that it was
instituted even before he was cast out of paradise, since God Himself
clothed Adam and Eve with skins of beasts, which, doubtless, were slain
in sacrifice, since they were not used for food.[7]
The rite of bloody sacrifice, utterly unintelligible without the notion
of sin, and inconceivable without a positive divine institution, so
precise in its formularies about the statement of sin, and the need of
expiation, is an everliving prophecy of the great sacrifice which God had
intended "before the foundation of the world," and a token of the
knowledge which He had communicated to Adam before he became a father.
Unfallen man needed to make no sacrifice, but only the triple offering of
adoration, thanksgiving, and prayer. These Adam would have given before
he fell; after his fall he became a priest, and the bloody sacrifice to
God of His own creatures, a mode of propitiating God which man could
never have invented or imagined of himself, is a token of the ritual
enjoined upon him, and of the faith which it symbolised and perpetuated.
Such, then, was the condition of the children of Adam, the first human
society, in those "many days" which passed before Cain rose up against
Abel: the state of a family living in full knowledge of their own
creation, being, and end, in vast security, for who was there to hurt
them? worshipping God the Creator by a rite which He had ordained in
token of a great promise, at their head the Father, the Teacher, and the
Priest, with the triple dignity which emanates from the divine
sovereignty, and makes a perfect government.
The two powers which were to rule the world rested as yet undivided upon
Adam after his fall.
It is evident that nothing could be further from a state of savagery or
barbarism, from a state of defective knowledge of God and man, and his
end, than such a condition as this, which suggests itself necessarily to
any one who considers attentively the sacred narrative.
But as Adam in paradise was left to the exercise of his free-will, and
fell out of the most guarded state of innocence by its misuse, so the
first-born of Adam broke out of this secure condition of patriarchal life
through the same misuse, and begun by fratricide the City of the Devil.
We are told that God remonstrated with him when he fell under the
influence of envy and jealousy, but in vain. He rose against his brother
and slew him; he received in consequence the curse of God; "went out from
his face, and dwelt a fugitive on the earth at the east side of Eden."
There it is said that he built the first city, on which St. Augustine
comments: "It is written of Cain that he built a city; but Abel, as a
stranger and pilgrim, built none."
The fratricide of Cain leads to a split in the human family. The line of
Cain seems to depart from Adam and live in independence of him. It
becomes remarkable for its progress in mechanical arts, and for the first
example of bigamy. The end of it is all we need here note. In process of
time, "as men multiplied on the earth," two societies seem to divide the
race of Adam--one entitled that of "the sons of God," the other that of
"the daughters of men." But the ruin of the whole race is brought about
by the blending of the better with the worse: the bad prevail, the two
Cities become mixed together in inextricable confusion. God left to man
throughout his free-will, but when the result of this was that "the
wickedness of men was great upon the earth, and that all the thoughts of
their heart was bent upon evil at all times," that is, when the City of
the Devil had prevailed over the City of God in that patriarchal race
which He had so wonderfully taught and guarded, He interfered to destroy
those whose rebellion was hopeless of amendment, and to make out of one
who had remained faithful to Him a new beginning of the race.
The race had been cut down to the root because in the midst of knowledge
and grace it had deserted God; and Noah, as he stepped forth from the
ark, began with a solemn act of reparation. He "built an altar to the
Lord and offered holocausts upon it of all cattle and fowls that were
clean." God accepted the sacrifice, inasmuch as it was in and through
this act that He bestowed the earth upon Noah and his sons, and gave him
everything that lived and moved on it for food. He consecrated afresh the
life of man by ordaining that whoever took human life away, that is, by
an act of violence, not of justice, should himself be punished with the
loss of his own life; and He grounded this great ordinance upon the fact
that man was made after the image of God. At the same time God repeated
to Noah and his sons the primal blessing which had multiplied the race,
and was to fill the earth with it, and made a covenant with him and with
his seed for ever, a covenant to be afterwards developed, but never to be
abrogated. It is to be noted that the sacred narrative dwells rather upon
the sacrifice made by Noah immediately upon issuing from the ark than
upon the original sacrifice offered by Adam. Of the first institution of
sacrifice it makes only incidental mention, referring with great
significance to those skins of beasts, of which God provided a covering
for the nakedness of Adam and Eve. It is as if the rite of sacrifice,
instituted as a prophecy of the future expiation of sin, might fitly
supply from the skins of its victims a covering for that nakedness which
sin alone had revealed and made shameful. The mention of this fact ensues
immediately upon the record of the fall, before Adam is cast out of
paradise. And again, by the mention of the sacrifice of Abel, and of its
acceptance, it is shown that the rite already existed in the children of
the first man. But now the sacrifice of Noah, and the covenant made in
it, as being of so vast an import to every succeeding generation, is
described at length as the starting-point of the whole renewed, that is,
the actual race of man. In this sacrifice it is emphatically declared
that "the Lord smelled a sweet savour," since it stood at the beginning
of man's new life, coming after the waters of the deluge as the image and
precursor of the Sacrifice on Calvary, which was to purify the earth, and
which those waters typified.
As, then, we considered lately the position of man as to his knowledge of
God and of himself in the "many days" which ensued after the fall before
the death of Abel, so let us glance at his condition in these same
respects at the starting-point of this new life of man. First of all, out
of the wreck of the old world Noah had carried the two institutions, one
of which makes the human family in its natural increase, while the other
constitutes its spiritual life--marriage and sacrifice. In marriage we
have the root of society; in sacrifice the root of religion. These had
not perished, neither had they changed in character. They were the
never-displaced foundation of the race, an heirloom of paradise never
lost; marriage, as established in the primeval sanctity before man fell,
sacrifice as superadded to man's original worship of adoration,
thanksgiving, and prayer immediately upon his fall, in token of his
future recovery. God, in selecting Noah to repair the race, made him, in
so far like to Adam, the head of the two orders, King and Priest, and
from that double headship the actual government of the world through all
the lines of his posterity descends.
Thirdly, we find in Noah's family the divine authority of government
expressly established; for in the protection thrown over human life the
power to take it away in case of grievous crime is also given. Authority
to take life away belongs of right to the giver of life alone. He here
bestows the vicarious exercise of it upon that family which was likewise
the first State, and the fountain-head of actual human society. "At the
hand of every man, and of his brother, will I require the life of man:
whosoever shall shed man's blood, his blood shall be shed, for man was
made to the image of God. But increase you, and multiply, and go upon the
earth, and fill it." We have then the charter here of human society;[8]
the delegation to it of supreme power by the Head of all power, to be
vicariously exercised henceforward over the whole race as it went out,
conquered, and replenished the earth; the sacredness of man's life
declared, in virtue of that divine image according to which he alone of
all creatures upon the earth was made, yet power over that life for the
punishment of crime committed to man himself in the government
established by God. An absolute dominion over all beasts was given at the
same time to man; first for himself, in virtue of his distinction from
the beast, in virtue of the divine image resting upon him, a delegation
of divine power was set up in the midst of him, the supreme exercise of
which is the power of life and death. Civil government therefore was no
less created by God than marriage, and sacrifice, with the religious
offices belonging to it. Like them it was ratified afresh in the race at
this its second starting-point.
But, fourthly, it was as Father and Head of the race that the first act
of Noah leaving the ark was to offer sacrifice; he offered it for himself
and for all his children. With him, as offering in a public act the
homage of his race, the great covenant of which we have been speaking was
made. Besides the divine things bound together in the institution of
sacrifice--the accord of four acts, adoration, thanksgiving, prayer, and
expiation, which express man's knowledge of his condition of God's
sovereignty, and of his own last end, as well as the dedication of his
will to God--great temporal promises, such as the dominion over all other
creatures, and the filling the earth with his race, promises which belong
to man as one family and one race, were made to Noah in this solemn
covenant ratified in sacrifice. The common hopes of the whole community
for the present life and the future also were jointly represented in it.
It is, in fact, the alliance of the civil government with religion, of
which we see here the solemn ratification. Noah the Father, the King, and
the Priest, sacrifices for all, where all have a common hope, a common
belief, a common knowledge, a life not only as individual men, but as a
family, as a race, as a society.
Thus in marriage, in sacrifice, in the vicarial exercise of divine power
by civil government, and in the alliance of that government with the
worship of God, we have the four central pillars on which the glorious
dome of a sacred civilisation in the human family, when it should be
conterminous with the whole earth, was intended to rest. These four
things date from the beginning of the race; they precede heathenism, and
they last through it. Greatly as man in the exercise of his free-will may
rage against them, grievously as he may impair their harmony, and even
distort by his sin the vast good which that harmony ensures and guards
into partial evil, yet he will not avail to destroy the fabric of human
society resting upon them before the Restorer comes.
Noah having lived 600 years before the flood, and having been the
preacher of justice for 120 years to a world which would not listen to
him, has his life prolonged for 350 years after the flood. During this
time he is to be viewed as the great Teacher of his family, like Adam
when he came out of Paradise. What the Fall was in the mouth of Adam the
Deluge was in the mouth of Noah, a great example of punishment inflicted
on man for the disregard of God as his end. It is hard to see how God
could have more completely guarded those two beginnings of human society
from the corruption of error and the taint of unfaithfulness than by the
mode in which He caused them to arise, in that He formed them both
through the teaching of a family by the mouth of a Parent, and the
government of a race by the headship of its Author. For the larger
society sprung actually out of brethren as the brethren themselves out of
one parent. "They have," to use Bossuet's striking recapitulation, "one
God, one object, one end, a common origin, the same blood, a common
interest, a mutual need of each other, as well for the business of life
as for its enjoyments." And one common language, it may be added, serves
as the outward expression, the witness, and the bond of a society so
admirably compacted, based, as it would seem, on so immovable a
foundation.
Let us sum up in three words the history so far as it has yet been
recorded. The foundation of all is man coming forth by creation out of
the hand of God. He comes forth as one family in Adam. Falling from his
high estate by his Father's sin, he receives a religion guarded and
expressed by a specific rite of worship, which records his fall, and
prophesies his restoration. After this the family springs from parents
united in a holy bond, which, as it carries on the natural race, is
likewise the image of a future exaltation. As he increases and multiplies
the divine authority is vicariously exercised in the government of the
race as a society. That government is strictly allied with his religion.
It is most remarkable that the last end of man dominates the whole
history; that is, all the temporal goods of man from the beginning depend
on his fidelity to God. Disregard of this works the Fall; the same
disregard works the Deluge. It remains to show how that compact and
complete society instituted under Noah depended, as to the maintenance in
unimpaired co-operation of the great goods we have just enumerated, upon
the free-will of man to preserve his fidelity to God; that is, to show
how in the constant order of human things there is an inherent
subordination of the temporal to the spiritual good, as for the
individual so for the race.
2.--_The Divine and Human Society in the Dispersion._
The divine narrative of the beginning of human society ends with an event
of which the consequences remain to the present day, and from which all
the actual nations of the earth take their rise. The blessing and command
given to Noah and his family were, "Increase and multiply and fill the
earth." It would seem that the family of man continued in that highly
privileged and guarded state which has just been described during five
generations, comprehending perhaps the life of Noah and Shem. Of all this
time it is said, "The earth was of one tongue and the same speech." The
division of the earth among the families of a race by virtue of a
natural growth, which was itself the effect of the divine blessing and
command, did not carry with it as a condition of that growth the
withdrawal of so great a privilege as the unity of language. God had
formed the human family out of one; had built it up by marriage; cemented
it by a religious rite of highest meaning; crowned it with His own
delegated authority of government, and sanctified that government by its
alliance with religion. Unity of language is as it were the expression of
all these blessings. The possession of language by the first man, the
outer vocalised word, corresponding to the inner spiritual word of
reason, was a token of the complete intellectual nature inhabiting a
corporeal frame--a fact expressed by the doctrine that the soul is the
form of the body--which constituted his first endowment. And in a
proportionate manner the possession of one language as the exponent of
mind and heart by his race, was the most effective outward bond of inward
unity which could tie the race together, whatever its numerical and local
extension might be. It is to be noted that though the cause of the deluge
was that "the earth was corrupted before God, and was filled with
iniquity" (Gen. vii. 11), yet God had not withdrawn from man the unity of
language, perhaps because the revolt of man had not hitherto reached to a
corruption of his thought of the Divine Nature itself. But now ensued an
act of human pride and rebellion which led God Himself to undo the bond
of society, consisting in unity of language, in order to prevent a
greater evil. The sin is darkly recorded, as if some peculiar
abomination lay hid underneath the words; the punishment, on the
contrary, is made conspicuous. "And the earth was of one tongue and the
same speech. And when they removed from the east, they found a plain in
the land of Sennaar and dwelt in it. And each one said to his neighbour,
Come, let us make brick and bake them with fire. And they had brick
instead of stones, and slime instead of mortar. And they said, Come and
let us make a city and a tower, the top whereof may reach to heaven: and
let us make our name famous before we be scattered abroad into all lands.
And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children
of Adam were building. And He said, Behold it is one people, and all have
one tongue; and they have begun to do this, neither will they leave off
from their designs till they accomplish them indeed. Come ye, therefore,
let us go down and there confound their tongue, that they may not
understand one another's speech. And so the Lord scattered them from that
place into all lands, and they ceased to build the city. And therefore
the name thereof was called Babel, confusion, because there the language
of the whole earth was confounded; and from thence the Lord scattered
them abroad upon the face of all countries."
It may be inferred that the city and the tower thus begun point at a
society the bond of which was not to be the worship of the one true God.
As a matter of fact, thenceforth and to all time the name of Babel has
passed into the languages of men as signifying the City of Confusion, the
seat of false worship, the headship of the line of men who are the seed
of the serpent, and of that antagonism which the primal prophecy
announced as the issue of the fall.
But the severity of the punishment and its nature seem further to
indicate that we are here in presence of the beginning of the third great
sin of the human race, in which, as in the former, the free-will of man,
his inalienable prerogative and the instrument of his trial, runs athwart
the purpose of God. The first was the sin of Adam's disobedience
resulting in the Fall; the second the universal iniquity of the race
punished by the Deluge; the third is the corruption of the idea of God by
setting up many gods instead of one, a desertion of God as the source of
man's inward unity, which is punished by the loss of unity of language in
man, the voice of the inward unity, as it is also the chief stay and bond
of his outward unity. The multiplication of the race and its propagation
in all lands was part of the original divine intention. When the bond of
living together in one place and under one government was withdrawn,
there remained unity of worship and unity of language to continue and to
support the unity of the race. Man was breaking his fealty to God not
only by practical impiety, as in the time before the flood, but by denial
of the Divine Nature itself as the One Infinite Creator and Father; God
replied by withdrawing from rebellious vassals that unity of language
which was the mark and bond of their living together as children of one
Parent. With the record of this event Moses closes his history of the
human race as one family, which he had up to this point maintained. He
had hitherto strongly marked its unity in its creation, in its fall
through Adam, in its first growth after the fall, and in the common
punishment which descended upon it in the flood, and again in its second
growth and expansion from Noah. Language is the instrument of man's
thought, and the possession of one common language the most striking
token of his unity; and here, after recording the withdrawal of that
token by a miraculous act of God in punishment of a great sin, Moses
parts from all mention of the race as one. He proceeds at once to give
the genealogy of Shem's family as the ancestor of Abraham, and then
passes to the call of Abraham as the foundation of the promised people.
He never reverts to the nations as a whole, whom he has conducted to the
point of their dispersion and there leaves.
Through this great sin the division of the earth by the human family
started not in blessing, but in punishment. "The Lord scattered them
abroad upon the face of all countries." He who had made the unity of
Noah's family, Himself untied it, and we may conceive that He did so
because of that greatest of all crimes, the division of the Divine Nature
by man in his conception of it, his setting up many gods instead of one.
Let us see how this sin impaired, and more and more broke down, that
privileged civilisation brought by Noah from before the flood, and set up
by him in his family.
If God be conceived as more than one, He ceases by that very
conception to be self-existing from eternity, immense, infinite, and
incomprehensible, he ceases also to have power, wisdom, and goodness in
an infinite plenitude; and, further, He ceases to be the one Creator,
Ruler, and Rewarder of men.
Thus the conception of more gods than one carries with it an infinite
degradation of the Godhead itself, as received in the mind and heart of
man.
But it likewise unties the society of men with each other, and lays waste
the main goods of human life. Thus it was in the case of Noah's family.
As it was planted by God after the deluge, it possessed a distinct
knowledge and worship of Him, as the one end and object of human life.
This knowledge and worship were contained, as we have seen, in the rite
of sacrifice and its accompaniments. Proceeding from this, it possessed
the love of God, obliging men to mutual love, a precept the more easy
because it was given to those who, as members of one family, were
brethren. From these it followed that no man was stranger to another man;
that every one was charged with the care of his brother; and that a unity
of interest itself bound men to each other.[9]
But all these goods are dependent on the first. For if men do not worship
one and the same God, as the Creator, the Ruler, and the Rewarder of all,
their life ceases at once to have one end and object; their love to each
other is deprived of its root, for they suppose themselves to be the
creatures of different makers, or not to be made at all, to spring out of
the earth, or to come into the world no one knows how, whence, or
wherefore. Again, the natural brotherhood of man depends on his origin
from one family, which must be the creature of one maker. And if the root
of this natural affection and brotherhood be withered, men become strange
to each other, rivals in their competition for the visible goods of life;
they cease to care for others, and cease to be united in one interest.
When the family which had formed a patriarchal state became by natural
growth too large to live together, the natural process for it was that it
should swarm, and each successive swarm become a patriarchal state. Here
was in each the germ of a nation, as they occupied various countries.
Naturally, they would have parted in friendship, and if the bond of
belief and of language had continued unbroken, they would have become a
family of nations; they would each have carried out and propagated the
original society from which they sprang without alloy or deterioration.
What actually took place was this. The division of the race into separate
stems, and the corruption of the conception of God into separate
divinities, pursued a parallel course, until the deities became as
national as the communities over which they presided. As there ceased to
be in their thought one God of the whole earth, they ceased to believe in
one race of man, nor does any good seem to have more utterly perished
from the peoples who sprung out of this dispersion than the belief in the
universal brotherhood of man; and the conduct which should spring out of
that belief, the treatment of each other as brethren.
That their having lost the consciousness of such brotherhood is no proof
that it never existed, has been established for us by the new science of
comparative grammar in our own day in a very remarkable instance. The
careful study of a single family of languages in the great race of Japhet
has proved beyond question that those who came after their dispersion to
speak the Sanscrit, the Persian, the Greek, the Latin, the Celtic,
Slavic, and Teutonic tongues, all once dwelt as brethren beside a common
hearth, in the possession of the same language. Yet, in ancient times, it
never crossed the mind of the Greek that he was of the same family with
the Persian, by whose multitudinous inroad he was threatened; to him the
barbarian, that is the man who did not speak his tongue, was his enemy,
not a brother. As little did the Saxon, when he displaced the Celt, and
gave him, too, the name of barbarian,[10] as not understanding his
tongue, conceive that he was of the same family. It was with no little
wonder that the first French and English students of Sanscrit found in it
uneffaced the proofs of its parentage with Greek and Latin.
The study of the comparative grammar of various languages, when carried
out as fully in other directions, may have in reserve other surprises as
great as this; but the proof of unity in this case, where yet the
divergence has proceeded so far, of unity in a family from which the
greatest nations of the earth have sprung, and whose descendants stretch
over the world, tends to make the unity of the original language of man
credible on principles of science, independently either of historical
tradition or of revelation, while it shows into what complete and
universal oblivion a real relationship may fall.
With the belief in one God, then, fell the belief in one human
brotherhood as well as the existence of one human society. Each separated
stem became detached from the trunk, and lived for itself. It is true
that each state, as it began, was patriarchal; but identity of interests
was restricted to the single state; beyond its range there was war, and
within it, in process of time, war led to conquest, and after conquest
the conquering leader became head of the conquered. Thus the patriarchal
state, in which the head of the family was its priest, passed into
kingdoms compacted by war and its results, in an ever-varying succession
of victories and defeats.
But it is our special task to see what portion of the goods, which
belonged to the race when undivided, passed on to its several stems in
the dispersion with which Moses closes his account of the one human
family.
The universal society stops at Babel, and national existence begins; that
is, a number of inferior local unities succeed to the one universal. It
would be well if we had a Moses for guide through the long period which
follows, but he restricts his narrative to Abraham and his family, and to
such incidental notice of the nations with whom they come in contact as
their history requires. When we reach the beginnings of history in the
several peoples who took their rise at the dispersion, a long time has
intervened. The bond of one society in a race seems to consist in unity
of place, of language, of religion, and of government. Now for man in
general the unity of place was taken away by the dispersion itself. As to
language, the lapse of a thousand years was more than sufficient to make
the inhabitants of various countries strange to each other and
barbarians. Men of different lands had long utterly ceased to acknowledge
each other as brethren. As to religion, the worship of the one true God
had passed into the worship of many false gods in almost every country
each one of which had its own gods, generally both male and female, whom
it considered as much belonging to itself as its kings or its cities.
This diversity of deities in each nation, and the appropriation of them
by each to itself, was become a most fertile principle of division and
enmity among men. But if man had lost the unity of religion he had
created for himself in every land an institution which might be said to
be universal: the division of men into bond and free, the institution of
slavery. That condition of life whereby man ceased to be a member of a
family invested with reciprocal obligations and rights, came in fine to
be regarded, not as a person, but as the thing of another man, that is
the institution which man had made for himself in the interval between
the dispersion of Babel and the commencement of authentic history in each
nation. Man, who had divided the unity of the Godhead, had not only
ceased to recognise the one ineffaceable dignity of reason as the mark of
brotherhood in all his race demanding equality of treatment, and the
respect due to a creature who possesses moral freedom, but had come to
deprive a vast portion of his kindred of the fruit of their labour, and
to confiscate their toil for his own advantage.
There remains the fourth bond of unity, government, whether national,
tribal, or municipal, without which social existence is not possible; and
this, as the nations emerge into the light of history, appears everywhere
among them standing and in great vigour. In the vast majority of cases
that government clothes itself in the form of royalty; the king is
undoubtedly the most natural descendant of the patriarchal chief, the
father passing by insensible gradation into the sovereign. But whether
monarchy or republic, whether the rule of the many or of the few,
government, by which I mean the supreme dominion in each portion of the
race over itself, of life and death over subjects, is everywhere found.
Nowhere is man found as a flock of sheep without a shepherd.
Over these unrecorded years of human life, which want their prophet and
their bard, sounds yet the echo of perpetual strife. If mighty forms loom
among their obscurity, and come out at length with fixed character and a
strong and high civilisation, such as the Assyrian and Egyptian, the
Indian and Chinese monarchies, and so many others of more or less extent
and renown, we know that states have suffered change after change in a
series of wars. The patriarchal ruler has given way to the conquering
chief; conquest has humiliated some and exalted others. What remains
intact in each country, and after all changes, is government itself. This
carried on the human race.
But if we examine more closely this race which is thus scattered through
all countries, which speaks innumerable tongues, has lost the sense of
its own brotherhood, worships a multitude of local gods, is divided, cut
up, formed again, and torn again with innumerable wars, and has degraded
a large part of itself into servitude, so as to lose as it would seem all
semblance of its original unity, we yet find running through it, existing
from the beginning as constituent principles which the hand of the
Creator has set in it, four great goods.
1. For what hand but that of the Creator could have impressed
ineffaceably upon a race, misusing as we have seen to such a degree the
faculty of free-will, such an institution as marriage, in which the
family, and all which descends from the family, is contained? The
dedication of one man and one woman to each other for the term of their
lives, for the nurture and education of the family which is to spring
from them, is indeed the basis of human society, but a basis which none
but its Maker could lay. It exists in perpetual contradiction to human
passion and selfishness, for purposes which wisdom or the pure reason of
man entirely approves, but which human frailty is at any time ready to
break through and elude. If we could so entirely abstract ourselves from
habit as to imagine a company of men and women thrown together, without
connection with each other, without any knowledge, any conception
beforehand of such an institution, and left to form their society for
themselves, we should not, I think, imagine them one and all choosing to
engage themselves in such a union, resigning, respectively, their
liberty, and binding themselves to continue, whatever might happen to
either party, however strength and vigour might decline on one side, or
grace and attractiveness on the other, in this bondage for life. Yet this
institution of marriage is found established, not, as was just imagined,
in a single company of human beings thrown together, but in a thousand
societies of men separated by place, by language, by religion, and by
government. The most highly policied among them are the strictest in
maintaining its purity; and the higher you are enabled by existing
records to ascend in their history, the stronger and clearer appears the
conception of the duties of the married state. It is surrounded with all
the veneration which laws can give it, and the blessing of religion
consecrates it. Take marriage among the Romans as an instance. Their
commonwealth seems to be built upon the sanctity of marriage and the
power of the father. The like is the case with China, the most ancient of
existing politics. There is not one nation which has gained renown or
advanced in civilisation but shows, as far back as you can trace its
history, this institution honoured and supported. I leave to
mathematicians the task of calculating what are the chances of such an
institution springing up in so great a multitude of nations according to
an identical rule, guarded in all of them with whatever protection
religion and law could afford, except by the fiat of a Creator in the
manner described by Moses. The signet of God impressed on Adam at his
origin could alone create such a mark on his race; the Maker alone lay
such a foundation for it.
We find this institution in the course of time and in various countries
debased by polygamy, and corrupted by concubinage. These aberrations
testify to the force of human passion, and the wantonness of power and
wealth ever warring against it, but they only enhance thereby the force
of the institution's universal existence from the point of view from
which I have regarded it.
2. Take, secondly, the rite of bloody sacrifice. It would be hard to find
anything more contrary to reason and feeling than the thought that taking
away the life of innocent creatures by pouring out their blood could be
not only acceptable to the Maker of those creatures, but could be
accepted by Him in expiation of sin committed by man. Yet this is the
conception of bloody sacrifice; this was expressed in the rites which
accompanied it; and besides this particular notion of expiation, which is
the correlative of sin, the most solemn duties of man, that is,
Adoration, Thanksgiving, and Petition, the whole expression of his
obedience to God, and dependence on God, were bound up with this rite,
and formed part of it. And we find this rite of sacrifice existing from
the earliest times in these various nations; continued through the whole
of their history, solemnised at first by their kings and chief men, and
then by an order of men created for that special purpose, and in every
nation themselves holding a high rank in virtue of their performing this
function. What, again, are the chances of a rite so peculiar being chosen
spontaneously by so many various nations, and chosen precisely to express
their homage for their own creation and continuance in being, to make
their prayers acceptable, and above all, to cover their sin, to serve as
an expiation, and to turn away punishment. This is the testimony which
Assyria and Egypt, which Greece and Rome, which India and China bear to
their original unity. If God instituted this rite, at the fall itself, as
a record and token of the promise then made, its existence through the
many changes of the race becomes intelligible; on any other supposition
it remains a contradiction both to reason and feeling, which is like
nothing else in human history.
The institution of sacrifice comprehends with its accompaniments the
whole of religion. It suffered the most grievous corruption in that it
was offered to false gods, to deified men, to powers of nature, to those
who were not gods but demons. Again, its meaning was obscured, and the
priests who offered it were not pure in their lives. But whatever
abominations were at any time or in any place connected with it, its
peculiarity, its testimony to the unity of the race, to the power which
established it, remain without diminution.
3. Thirdly, let us take the great good of civil government. The human
race is scattered over all countries, in divisions which range as to
amount of population from the smallest independent tribe to the largest
empire. God suffered them to pursue their own course, to engage in
numberless wars, and to pass through a succession of the most opposite
circumstances, but He implanted in them from the beginning, and preserved
in them throughout, the instinct of society, which develops in
government. And He established that government in possession by the
patriarchal constitution of life, which each portion of the race at its
first start in independence took with it. By this He maintained order and
peace, as a rule, in the bosom of each community; the smallest and the
greatest alike possessed the commonwealth in the midst of them, which was
thus, independent of walls and forts, a citadel of safety. Not even the
most savage tribe in the most desolate northern wilderness, barren shore,
or inland lake, was left in its self-wrought degradation without this
support. In cultured nations, such as the Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians,
Indians, Chinese, the State attained a high degree of perfection; while
from the practice of the Hellenic cities Plato and Aristotle could draw
principles of government which are of value for all time; and Rome, the
queen-mother of cities, has been the teacher of state-wisdom to mankind.
But what I wish to note here is that civil government was everywhere
throughout the dispersion of the nations a dam, constructed by Divine
Providence, sufficiently strong to resist the inundation of evils brought
about by man's abuse of his moral freedom. It was the moon in heaven
which shone as a stable ordinance of God amid the storms and darkness of
human life in the fall of heathendom. It belonged to man as man and never
departed from him; because as conscience was given to the individual, the
witness and mark of God, sovereignty was given to the community, a
delegation of the divine kingship. "It is entirely by the providence of
God that the kingdoms of men are set up," says a great father.[11] "He
gave to every one of them, said the Son of Sirach, commandment concerning
his neighbour. Their ways are always before him, they are not hidden from
his eyes. Over every nation he set a ruler, and Israel was made the
manifest portion of God" (Ecclus. xvii. 12-15).
The human race, from its beginning and through all its dispersion, was
never in any of its parts without civil government. The headship of Adam,
repeated in Noah, itself a vicarious exercise of divine authority,
rested, amid its dispersion and partial degradation, upon each portion of
the race, so that it might never be kingless and lawless: never a herd,
always a society.
This great good had also its corruption, into which it very frequently
fell; the corruption of tyranny. Against this the Book of Wisdom (vi.
2-5) warned: "Hear therefore ye kings and understand: learn ye that are
judges of the ends of the earth. Give ear, you that rule the people, and
that please yourselves in multitudes of nations. For power is given you
by the Lord, and strength by the most High, who will examine your works,
and search out your thoughts: because being ministers of his kingdom, you
have not judged rightly, nor kept the law of justice, nor walked
according to the will of God." But this corruption of tyranny no more
destroys the good of government or its testimony as the mark of the
Creator, than the corruption of marriage by concubinage, or the offering
of sacrifice to false gods, impairs the testimony of those institutions.
4. The fourth good which I shall note as running through all the nations
of the dispersion, is the alliance between government and religion.
Distance of place, diversity of language, division of the idea of God
into separate divinities, which become the guardians of their several
peoples, these causes all co-operate to sever from each other the various
peoples and to make them enemies. But observe, at the same time, with
this hardening and estrangement of the peoples from each other, the
enlacement of all human life, public and private, by the rites and ties
of religion in each society. At the head of the new race we have seen
Noah offering sacrifice for his family, and a covenant with the whole
earth struck in that sacrifice between God and man. That aspect of the
public society towards religion was not altered during the whole course
of heathendom, and in all its parts. It is a relation of the strictest
alliance. No nation, no tribe of man, up to the coming of Christ,
conceived any condition of society in which the Two Powers should not
co-operate with each other. "If it be asked," says Bossuet,[12] "what
should be said of a State in which public authority should be
established without any religion, it is plain at once that there is no
need to answer chimerical questions. There never were such States.
Peoples, where there is no religion, are at the same time without policy,
without real subordination, and entirely savage." It is a fact which we
see stretching through all the times and all the nations of the
dispersion, that however tyrannical the government, and however corrupt
the belief, still the separation of government from religion was never
for a moment contemplated. A Greek or a Roman, and no less an Egyptian or
an Assyrian, an Indian or a Chinese, must have renounced every habit of
his life, every principle in which he had been nurtured, to accept such a
divorce. For all of them alike, "ancestral laws" and "ancestral gods,"
went together. He who was traitor to the city's worship was considered to
overthrow its foundation. In this point of view heathendom in all its
parts continued to be profoundly religious. It risked the life of a
favourite of the people when the statues of a god at Athens were
mutilated, as it was supposed, with the connivance of Alcibiades; and
Marcus Aurelius, stoic philosopher as he was, offered countless
sacrifices for the Roman people, as Noah offered sacrifice for his
family; and the Chinese Son of Heaven is to this day the father of his
family who unites religious and civil power in his sacred person, and
calls upon his people for the obedience of children.
The corruption of this relation between civil government and religion,
which was an original good of the race, was the forcible maintenance of
the polytheistic idolatry with all the moral abominations which it had
introduced. But the corruption does not belong to the relation itself; it
issues, as in the preceding cases, from the abuse of his free-will by
man.
Here then are four goods, marriage, religion, as summed up in sacrifice,
civil government, and alliance between civil government and religion,
which we find embedded in the whole human society from the beginning,
going with it through all its fractions, untouched by its wars,
dissensions, and varieties of belief, suffering indeed each one of them
by man's corruption, but lasting on. The force of any one of them as
testimony to the unity of God who alone could have established it in the
race, and so through Him to the unity of the race in which it is found
established, and so, further, to the whole account of Moses, would be
very great and not easily resisted by a candid mind seeking nothing but
the truth. But how great is the cumulative evidence of the four together
to the exactness of the account of the race's origin, establishment, and
education, which we receive through Moses.
How strangely also are these goods of the race contrasted each one of
them and all together with a great evil, universal like them, but man's
own invention, the result of his wars and of the destruction of the
feeling of brotherhood, in the various portions into which the race
divided. The hideous plague-spot of slavery, which yet is one institution
running through the race, attests also its unity, attests by its contrast
with the four goods, by its practical denial of their beneficent action
so far as the slave is concerned, the degradation of the race from that
condition of a family having one end in the worship of one God, one
brotherhood, a common care and charge of its members, a common interest
in which it started.
The sum then of the whole period which begins from the dispersion of
mankind at Babel and runs on to the coming of Christ is the progressive
moral degradation of a race founded in the unity of a family. That unity
itself rested upon the fidelity of the race to the belief and worship of
the God who created it. The race voluntarily parted from this belief and
worship; its own division followed; mutual enmity supplanted brotherhood,
and the end is to create two classes of men, dividing society in each
nation into the bond and the free. The nations themselves have lost all
remembrance that they were once actually brothers by one hearth. Yet they
still contain in themselves indisputable proof of that original unity.
There is not only the common nature which language, the token of reason,
raises to a dignity utterly incommensurable with the condition of any
other animal; but great divine institutions planted at the beginning
endure amid the corruption which has dimmed their original beauty, and
testify to the providence which has preserved them amid the surging flood
of heathenism for future restoration of the race.
3.--_Further Testimony of Law, Government, and Priesthood in the
Dispersion._
The account of the human race in its origin and its dispersion thus
presented allows for the existence of tribes in every part of the world,
who, through their isolation, the effect of nomad life, war, and
severities of climate, but most of all by that tendency to degrade
itself--to fall from known truth to error--which is the characteristic of
the race, and through the impairing of social life which thus ensues,
have left records of their uncultivated or even savage condition, which
an eager search is continually discovering. These records have been taken
as aids to a theory which, rejecting the scriptural and traditional
account of man's origin, would wish him to start from men of different
races, or from universal savagery, or even from the ape as an ancestor.
But, while on the one hand the existence of such tribes is no difficulty
in the scriptural record of the dispersion, where they may be fully
accounted for by the causes above-mentioned, the universal existence of
the four great goods in the most ancient nations, where they appear also
purest at the most remote time, is quite incompatible with either of the
three invented origins of the human race. Neither different races of men,
originally distinct and separated, nor universal savagery, and far less
fathership of the ape, will develop into simultaneous existence four
uniform institutions found through the widest range of divided nations,
such as marriage, a religion based on sacrifice, civil government, and
the alliance between government and religion. An original language
accounts for the proofs of unity embedded in the primary structure of the
Aryan tongues, and science professes its full belief in such unity. It
is but a parallel to this to say that a creative hand impressing itself
on the plastic origin of the race accounts for the existence of these
goods in the most-widely severed branches of it. But that scattered
savages should emerge from savagery into cultivation of the same ideal,
or different races in their dispersion pitch upon the same very marked
peculiarities of social life, or the ape teach his offspring the highest
requirements of human society, such imaginations are contrary to the
collective testimony of reason, experience, and history. Perhaps one must
go altogether beyond the bounds of true science to account for their
arising, and attribute them to that passionate dislike of a creating God,
which is the recoil from the condition of a creature subject to
responsibility for his actions.
On the contrary, pure historical inquiry, going back in the dry light of
science to the archaic society of nations as they first appear to us at
the beginning of written records, shows this remarkable chain of facts. A
condition of things is found existing, of which the only explanation is
that family was the nidus out of which sprung forth the House, then the
Tribe, then the Commonwealth with its patriarchal government. When
property is traced to its origin it seems to be first found in the family
as joint-ownership; and further, its succession is blended inexplicably
with the existence and state of the family. Again, the close union of
government with religion finds its root in the family. No testimony can
be more unsuspicious than that of the learned author of "Ancient Law,"
who observes (p. 4), that "the earliest notions connected with the
conception of a law or rule of life are those contained in the Homeric
words themis and Themistes." "The divine agent, suggesting judicial awards
to kings or to gods, the greatest of kings, was Themis." She is the
assessor of Zeus, the human king on earth, not a law-maker, but a judge.
The Themistes are the judgments, in fact, of a patriarchal sovereign,
"whose judgment, when he decided a dispute by a sentence, was assumed to
be the result of direct inspiration." And Themis and Themistes were (p.
6) "linked with that persuasion which clung so long and so tenaciously to
the human mind of a divine influence underlying and supporting every
relation of life, every social institution. In early law, and amid the
rudiments of political thought, symptoms of this belief met us on all
sides. A supernatural presidency is supposed to consecrate and keep
together all the cardinal institutions of those times, the State, the
Race, and the Family. Men, grouped together in the different relations
which these institutions imply, are bound to celebrate periodically
common rites and to offer common sacrifices; and every now and then the
same duty is even more significantly recognised in the purifications and
expiations which they perform, and which appear intended to deprecate
punishment for involuntary or neglectful disrespect. Everybody acquainted
with ordinary classical literature will remember the _Sacra Gentilicia_
which exercised so important an influence on the early Roman law of
adoption and of wills. And to this hour the Hindoo Customary Law, in
which some of the most curious features of primitive society are
stereotyped, makes almost all the rights of persons and all the rules of
succession hinge on the due solemnisation of fixed ceremonies at the dead
man's funeral, that is, at every point where a breach occurs in the
continuity of the family."
Thus every king, as history begins, appears in a position which recalls
the memory of Adam or of Noah, as the divinely appointed judge, whose
office springs out of his fathership. The original consecration, which
rested on the government of the race when it begun, is seen not yet to
have parted from its scattered members in their tribal or national
insulation.[13]
It is observed of Homeric Greece that "the people in its orderly
arrangement of family or clans, or tribal relationships coming down from
the patriarchal form of life, derives its unity from its king, whose
power as little springs from the people as that of the father from his
children." Thus he possesses this power not in virtue of compact or
choice, but simply from Zeus.
Ou men pôs pantes Basileusomen enthad' Achaioi.
ouk agathon polukoiraniê; heis koiranos estô,
heis Basileus, hô dôke Kronou pais ankulomêteô
skêptront' êde themistas, hina sphisin embasileuê.
--Iliad, 2. 203.
This conception shows itself not merely on occasion in the poet, as
perhaps in the well-known epithets, Jove-born, Jove-nurtured, friend of
Jove, or in the genealogies which connect with the gods the princely
races by ties of blood, but he has a distinct theory on the subject
variously expressed.
epei oupoth' homoiês emmore pmês
skêptouchos basileus, hô te Zeus kudos edôke.
Agamemnon's sceptre, the symbol of his rule over the Peloponnesus, is
referred to the immediate gift of Jupiter.
The effect of this evidence, says the author just before cited, derived
from comparative jurisprudence, is to establish that view of the primeval
condition of the human race which is known as the "Patriarchal Theory."
This is, "that the eldest male parent--the eldest ascendant--is absolutely
supreme in his household. His dominion extends to life and death, and is
as unqualified over his children and their houses as over his slaves;
indeed, the relations of sonship and serfdom appear to differ in little
beyond the higher capacity which the child in blood possesses of becoming
one day the head of a family himself. The flocks and herds of the
children are the flocks and herds of the father; and the possessions of
the parent, which he holds in a representative rather than a proprietary
character, are equally divided at his death among his descendants in the
first degree, the eldest son sometimes receiving a double share under the
name of birthright, but more generally endowed with no hereditary
advantage beyond an honorary precedence." "The sum of the hints given us
by legal antiquities" is that "men are first seen distributed in
perfectly insulated groups, held together by obedience to the parent.
Law is the parent's word. When we go forward to the state of society in
which those early legal conceptions show themselves as formed, we find
that they still partake of the mystery and spontaneity which must have
seemed to characterise a despotic father's commands, but that at the same
time, as they proceed from a sovereign, they presuppose a union of family
groups in some wider organisation. The next question is, what is the
nature of this union and the degree of intimacy which it involves? It is
just here that archaic law renders us one of the greatest of its
services, and fills up a gap which otherwise could only have been bridged
by conjecture. It is full in all its provinces of the clearest
indications that society, in primitive times, was not what it is assumed
to be at present, a collection of individuals. In fact, and in the view
of the men who composed it, it was an aggregation of families. The
contrast may be most forcibly expressed by saying that the _unit_ of an
ancient society was the Family, of a modern society, the Individual."
"In most of the Greek states, and in Rome, there long remained the vestiges
of an ascending series of groups, out of which the State was at first
constituted. The Family, House, and Tribe of the Romans may be taken as the
type of them; and they are so described to us that we can scarcely help
conceiving them as a system of concentric circles which have gradually
expanded from the same point. The elementary group is the family, connected
by common subjection to the highest male ascendant. The aggregation of
Families forms the Gens or House. The aggregation of Houses makes the
Tribe. The aggregation of Tribes constitutes the Commonwealth. Are we at
liberty to follow these indications, and to lay down that the commonwealth
is a collection of persons united by common descent from the progenitor of
an original family? Of this we may at least be certain, that all ancient
societies regarded themselves as having proceeded from one original stock,
and even laboured under an incapacity for comprehending any reason except
this for their holding together in political union. The history of
political ideas begins, in fact, with the assumption that kinship in blood
is the sole possible ground of community in political functions; nor is
there any of those subversions of feelings, which we term emphatically
revolutions, so startling and so complete as the change which is
accomplished when some other principle--such as that, for instance, of
local contiguity--establishes itself for the first time as the basis of
common political action. It may be affirmed, then, of early commonwealths
that their citizens considered all the groups in which they claimed
membership to be founded on common lineage."
"The conclusion, then, which is suggested by the evidence is, not that
all early societies were formed by descent from the same ancestor, but
that all of them, which had any permanence or solidity, either were so
descended, or assumed that they were. An indefinite number of causes may
have shattered the primitive groups; but wherever their ingredients
recombined, it was on the model or principle of an association of
kindred. Whatever was the fact, all thought, language, and law adjusted
themselves to the assumption" (p. 131).
"On a few systems of law the family organisation of the earliest society
has left a plain and broad mark in the life-long authority of the Father,
or other ancestor, over the person and property of his descendants, an
authority which we may conveniently call by its later Roman name of
Patria Potestas. No feature of the rudimentary associations of mankind is
deposed to by a greater amount of evidence than this, and yet none seems
to have disappeared so generally and so rapidly from the usages of
advancing communities" (p. 135).
"It may be shown, I think, that the Family, as held together by the
Patria Potestas, is the nidus out of which the entire Law of Persons has
germinated" (p. 152).
"When we speak of the slave as anciently included in the Family, we
intend to assert nothing as to the motives of those who brought him into
it or kept him there; we merely imply that the tie which bound him to his
master was regarded as one of the same general character with that which
united every other member of the group to its chieftain. This consequence
is, in fact, carried in the general assertion already made, that the
primitive ideas of mankind were unequal to comprehending any basis of the
connection _inter se_ of individuals apart from the relations of Family"
(p. 164).
"The point which before all others has to be apprehended in the
constitution of primitive societies, is that the individual creates for
himself few or no rights and few or no duties. The rules which he obeys
are derived first from the station into which he is born, and next from
the imperative commands addressed to him by the chief of the household of
which he forms part" (p. 311).
Then as to the union of government with religion:--"A stage occurs in the
history of all the families of mankind, the stage at which a rule of law
is not yet discriminated from a rule of religion. The members of such a
society consider that the transgression of a religious ordinance should
be punished by civil penalties, and that the violation of a civil duty
exposes the delinquent to divine correction" (p. 23). At the time of the
Code of the Twelve Tables, "Roman society had barely emerged from that
intellectual condition in which civil obligation and religious duty are
inevitably confounded" (p. 18).
For, in fact, originally, "Law is the parent's word" (p. 125), and "the
civil Laws of States first make their appearance as the Themistes of a
patriarchal sovereign" (p. 166); that is, "as separate, isolated
judgments, which, consistently with the belief in their emanation from
above, cannot be supposed to be connected by any thread of principle" (p.
5). Moreover, as to the origin of Property:--"It is more than likely that
joint-ownership, and not separate ownership, is the really archaic
institution, and that the forms of property which will afford us
instruction will be those which are associated with the rights of
families and the groups of kindred" (p. 259), as shown in the Indian
village-community, the Russian and Slavonic village. And "we have the
strongest reasons for thinking that property once belonged not to
individuals, nor even to isolated families, but to larger societies
composed on the patriarchal model" (p. 268). Thus the author conjectures
"that private property, in the shape in which we know it, was chiefly
formed by the gradual disentanglement of the separate rights of
individuals from the blended rights of a community" (p. 269).
He remarks "a peculiarity invariably distinguishing the infancy of
society. Men are regarded and treated not as individuals, but always as
members of a particular group. Everybody is first a citizen, and then, as
a citizen, he is a member of his order--of an aristocracy or a democracy,
of an order of patricians or plebeians; or in those societies which an
unhappy fate has afflicted with a special perversion in their course of
development, of a caste; next he is member of a gens, house, or clan; and
lastly he is member of his _family_. This last was the narrowest and most
personal relation in which he stood; nor, paradoxical as it may seem, was
he ever regarded as _himself_, as a distinct individual. His
individuality was swallowed up in his family. I repeat the definition of
a primitive society given before. It has for its units not individuals,
but groups of men united by the reality or the fiction of
blood-relationship" (p. 183). "The history of jurisprudence must be
followed in its whole course, if we are to understand how gradually and
tardily society dissolved itself into the component atoms of which it is
now constituted; by what insensible gradations the relation of man to
man substituted itself for the relation of the individual to his family,
and of families to each other" (p. 185).
Such is the strong--may we not say irrefragable?--testimony which the
condition of human society, as it emerges into the light of history,
bears to the family as the cradle of man's life. It is in the original
soil of the family that the four goods we have noted, marriage, religion,
government, and the alliance between religion and government, spring up
together. Further, also, they are seen to be not separate, one here and
another there, but bound together in the strictest coherence. For if this
human race be thrown up and down throughout the world, divided and
insulated in its several parts by vast distances and by thousands of
years, even the scattered limbs are shaped in the mould stamped upon it
at its birth, and in them government, law, property in its origin and its
succession, and religion bear witness to the family character. This
archaic society, from the Pacific to the Atlantic Oceans, from Scythia in
the north to India in the south, is never a crowd of individuals but an
organic structure: Adam and Eve prolonged and living in their race. We
see that in the beginning the fathership of God created a human plant
which should reveal Himself in its development, bearing in its structure
and fruit an undying witness to His nature; and serving, in spite of
corruption and decline, for the future exhibition of His fathership in a
yet higher degree, even to the communication of the divine nature.
Whatever may be the interval of time which runs out between the
dispersion of the family at Babel, and the appearance of each separate
member on the platform of history--and the longer this time, the greater
the marvel we note--the family remains in each as a sort of universal
Thesmós upon which the commonwealth, the government, property viewed in
itself and in its descent, law, and religion itself rest. The "natural
state" and the "social compact" when inquired into become unsubstantial
fictions; "theories plausible and comprehensive," as the author of
ancient law observes, "but absolutely unverified" (p. 3). Man is seen to
be the child of Adam; and all the relations of men to each other to have
been originally determined by that origin, and persistently maintained in
its mould.
Now let us return to the relation between the Spiritual and the Civil
Power, which forms part of this original constitution of the race.
At the head of the human race we have seen, first in Adam and then in
Noah, the junction of the two orders, sovereignty and priesthood. There
never was a time when the race was without government; there never was a
time when the race was without sacrifice. The delegated authority of God
rested ever upon the former for the prosperity of man's life upon earth;
the worship of the one God, man's Creator and End, was summed up in the
latter. All human life consists of the tissue formed by the two; and as
in his first abode man's condition was subject to his obedience to the
divine command, so throughout his course his worship of God ruled his
temporal condition. The lot of the antediluvian world bore witness to
that truth. With Noah the experience began afresh. Then once again the
covenant with Noah and his seed after him was made in sacrifice, in which
the unity of God and the religion of man stand recorded, and man's
earthly lot is made dependent on the purity of his worship. Thus the two
orders are seen in their origin to be both of divine institution; just as
the life of man upon earth was from the beginning subordinate to his
ultimate end, so government, which was created for the former, was
subordinate to worship, which was created for the latter.
Let us follow rapidly the relation between man's social state and his
religion, arising out of such origin, that we may note how the
degradation of worship entailed the degradation of society.
In Noah and his sons, so long as the earth continued of one tongue and
speech, the priesthood belonged to the head of the family. That was its
natural descent. We may suppose that the dispersion began with the same
rule, but we are not able to say how long that rule continued in force.
There was intended to be one priesthood offering one sacrifice over all
the earth to the one God. How prodigious became the degradation when the
divine unity was lost! A variety of gods was introduced; a similar
variety of priesthoods followed: and the sacrifice, which was the
rendering of supreme homage to the one Creator and Lord of life, in which
was contained the everliving prophecy of man's future restoration, was
prostituted to a number of deities, the offspring of man's sensual
imagination, or of perverted tradition, or of worship of natural powers,
or of demoniacal trickery.
As soon as the patriarchal State was changed by war into the State
founded by conquest, the natural appurtenance of the priesthood to the
head of the family must at least have been modified. It was probably
often attached to the actual head of the State. But it does not need to
trace step by step the debasement of worship and the multiplication of
deities which took place in the Gentile world. It is enough to see how
the whole mass of nations had by the time of Christ become divided from
each other in their civil societies and their religious belief. But we
may note that as with the loss of belief in one God the nations
originally lost the belief in their own brotherhood, so their national
gods became the stronghold of national prejudices and hatreds. Thus a
debased religion was turned into a source of cruelty to man, who had no
bitterer enemy to his life and welfare than a foreign god; and instead of
human life being sacred to man, it was sometimes even an act of worship
to immolate him to an idol.
It is not too much to say that the profound enmity of the Gentile nations
to each other was grounded in the variety of their gods; and in this
instance religion, which in its purity is the bond of human society, had
become a main cause of alienation between the members of the race.
The alliance of the State in each nation with its religion was, as we
have seen, an original good of the race; and it continued through all
the debasement of worship. Had that worship maintained its original
purity, the alliance would have been an unmixed good. But as the belief
became corrupt, it ended in the public force being ever at the command of
error. The final issue of this alliance seems to have been when the State
had laid hold of religion to deify, as it were, itself. The Roman
emperors were the most complete, but by no means the sole, bearers of
this corruption. They were considered to embody in their single persons
the united majesty of the gods. Whoever refused obedience to their
worship was guilty of the double crime of sacrilege and treason.
If this be a correct summary of the relation between the Two Powers as it
issued in the final condition of Gentilism, it is clear that the State
had far less declined from the high purpose for which it was instituted,
that is, the preservation of human society, than the priesthood from the
corresponding purpose which belonged to it, that is, the worship of God
and the sanctification of human life. The civil power was still in every
respect a lawful power. And obedience was due to it for conscience' sake,
as expressly declared by our Lord and His Apostles. But the priesthood
had been so utterly debased by its worship of false gods, which tore from
it the crown of unity, and by the abominations which its rites in too
many instances carried with them, that it had ceased to be a lawful
power. It had moreover fallen, at least in the Roman empire, and from the
time of the Cæsars, under the dominion of the State.
Yet down to the very coming of our Lord the veneration which had belonged
to the original character and institution of the priesthood is made
manifest by the clear acknowledgment that the authority of the priest was
not derived from the king. The Gentiles in the lowest depths of their
moral degradation referred the excellency of the priesthood to its divine
origin. The honour due to God, and the thought of the future world, were
so imbedded in the original constitution of human society everywhere,
that even in a pantheon of false gods, and in a service paid to
numberless male and female deities, the priest's office itself was held
to be divine.[14]
In the case of the Romans, it is true that when the free state was
suppressed by the empire, the priesthood and the imperial power were
improperly conjoined in the same person. But this conjunction was at once
a novelty and an usurpation. Thus the office of Pontifex Maximus, first
seized by Lepidus after the death of Julius Cæsar, and after Lepidus
assumed by Augustus, and then kept in succession by the following Cæsars,
whether through the adulation of the people or their own pride, seemed to
pass as a proper title of their principate, and was numbered among the
honours, even of the Christian emperors, down to Gratian, who refused and
prohibited it. Nevertheless the functions of these two powers were
reckoned as distinct; but in the time of the Kings and the free
Commonwealth this distinction was much more marked.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus thus describes the Roman Pontifical
College:--"They have authority over the most weighty affairs; they are
judges of all sacred causes, whether among private persons, or
magistrates, or ministers of the gods; they legislate for all sacred
things which are not written or prescribed by custom, enacting laws and
customs as seems to them good; they examine into all magistracies to
which sacrifice and worship of the gods belong, and scrutinise all
priests; they keep watch over the ministers which these use in their
sacred office, so that the sacred laws be not transgressed; they instruct
and interpret for lay persons who do not understand what concerns the
worship of gods or genii. If they observe any disobedient to their
commands, they punish them according to the due of each. They are
themselves exempt from all trial and punishment. They render account
neither to senate nor to people. It would be no error to call them
priests, or sacred legislators, or custodians, or, as we should prefer,
rulers of sacred things. On the death of any one another is elected to
his place, not by the people, but by themselves, whoever of the citizens
they judge the most meet."[15] From this account of the historian, says
Bianchi, we may deduce the following conclusions:--Firstly, how great was
the power of the Roman Sacerdotes in judging matters of religion, in
which the magistrates were subject to them. Secondly, their authority to
punish those who transgressed their laws, independently of kings and
magistrates. Thirdly, their immunity from the civil power, even of the
Commonwealth itself, to which they were not bound to render an account of
what they did. Fourthly, the distinction which existed between the power
of the priests and that of the civil magistrates, which results not
merely from the points recited, but also from the reflection that the
Pontiffs were perpetual, while the magistrates under the free
Commonwealth were temporary. The latter were created by the suffrages of
the people; in the former vacancies were filled by the College of
Pontiffs itself. This custom lasted from Numa's time to the year of Rome
601, when Cneius Domitius, tribune of the people, transferred the right
of filling vacancies from the College to the people; this was abolished
by Sylla in his dictatorship; but again restored by the Tribune Titus
Labienus during Cicero's consulship. But finally the right of electing
its members was given back to the College of Pontiffs by Augustus.
The Pontifex Maximus, though created by the suffrage of the people, was
always taken from the College of Pontiffs, and his office was perpetual.
Augustus would not take it from Lepidus during his life, though he took
it after his death. Thus the power of the Supreme Pontiff was by no means
confused with that of the magistrate or the prince; and the assumption of
this priesthood by the Cæsars makes it evident that they recognised it
not to be part of the prince's power to intrude into matters of religion;
and that they needed a sacerdotal power in order to superintend sacred
things. It was for the sake of this superintendence, Dio observes, that
the emperor always assumed the office of Pontifex Maximus, in virtue of
which he became master of all religious and sacred things.
The example of Cicero pleading before the College of Pontifices for the
restoration of his house, which had been dedicated by Clodius to Concord,
a plea involving their power to revoke a tribunicial law passed by
Clodius, is a remarkable testimony to the pontifical authority: "If
ever," he said, "a great cause rested on the judgment and power of the
Priests of the Roman people, it is this; in which all the dignity of the
commonwealth, the safety, the life, the liberty, the public and private
worship, the household gods, the goods, the fortunes, and the homes of
all seem intrusted to your wisdom and integrity."[16]
The fair conclusions from these facts, says Bianchi again, are that the
Romans knew religion to be directed to a higher end than temporal
felicity, though they did esteem it also necessary for the preservation
of the State; that the power of the priesthood was distinct from the
civil power of the magistrate; that it had the right to judge in all
cases of religion without interference from the magistrate; that immunity
and exemption from the civil power belonged to it.
It is needless to go through the various nations of antiquity in order to
show the veneration which everywhere belonged to the office of the
priest. That is shown likewise in the frequent connection of the royal
power with the priesthood; but though thus connected, they were not
confused; kings were priests, not in virtue of their kingship, but by a
distinct appointment. Plato asserts that in some nations the priesthood
was reputed so excellent that it was not considered to be properly placed
save in the person of the king; and that among the Egyptians it was not
lawful for any king to command the people without being first consecrated
to the priesthood. By this fact is seen how the sacerdotal dignity was
esteemed by antiquity, even in the darkness of idolatry; and, at the same
time, how the power of the priest was considered to be distinct from the
power of the sovereign. Plato gives his own judgment when he says that
the creation of priests should be left to the care of God; and that they
should be elected by lot, in order that the person destined to so high an
office may be divinely chosen.[17]
All that it is requisite here to point out seems to be that, however
great was the degradation of worship produced by the character of the
gods worshipped, as well as by the divisions of the godhead which the
multiplying of divine beings brought with itself, yet two things survived
in the minds of men: one the intrinsic excellence of worship in itself,
as the homage paid by man to a power above himself; and the other, the
sense that this worship was a thing of divine institution, coming down
from heaven upon earth, quite distinct in character from civil rule, and
if exercised by kings, exercised not because they were kings, but in
virtue of a separate consecration. Thus, if the patriarchal origin of
property, law, and government is borne witness to by the most ancient
institutions, customs, and feelings of men, which witness likewise
extends to the unity of the race, so likewise the original independence
of the priestly order as to all its sacred functions and the sense of its
divine origin, which runs through so many nations, bear joint witness to
the unity of the race and to the truth of the Mosaic record. They convey
a manifest contradiction to the theory that man sprung originally from a
number of different races, and likewise to the theory that he grew up
originally in a state of savagery.
The force of the testimony consists in this: first, a priesthood appears
everywhere; secondly, it is connected with the rite of sacrifice;
thirdly, it usually comprises an order of men devoted to the purpose of
divine worship, or at least having special functions which by no means
belong to the civil ruler as such, so that if he performs them, it is as
priest and not as king; fourthly, this order has a special authority from
the Divine Being or Beings whom it represents, not subject to the civil
rule; fifthly, injury to the priest's person or contravention to his
order in divine things is esteemed as an injury done to the God whom he
represents.
The peculiarity of a priesthood must therefore be added to the
peculiarity of the rite of sacrifice upon which his office rests, and
both together form an order of ideas so marked and distinctive as to
establish the unity of the race in the several portions of which they
appear; and at the same time it establishes, as the common inheritance of
that race, an overwhelming sense of human life being founded, preserved,
and exalted by a communion between heaven and earth: it is, in short, a
sense of man lying in the hand of God.
We have hitherto followed the dispersion of Babel in its Gentile
development down to that ultimate issue in which a long and unbroken
civilisation is combined with an extreme moral corruption; now let us
revert to the divine plan which was followed to repair this evil.
At a certain point of time, when forgetfulness of the divine unity was
becoming general, God chose one man out of whom to form a nation, whose
function should be the preservation of a belief in this unity. Abraham,
the friend of God and the forefather of Christ, was called out of his own
country that he might preserve the religion of Noah, and that "in him all
the kindreds of the earth might be blessed" (Gen. xii. 3). In the second
generation his family was carried down into Egypt, and became, in the
security of that kingdom, a people, but it likewise fell into bondage.
From this it was redeemed in a series of wonderful events under the
guidance of Moses, was led by him into the desert, and there formed into
a nation by the discipline of a religious, which was also a civil code.
In the law given on Mount Sinai we see once more the constitution of the
society established in Noah. The whole moral order of the world contained
in the ten commandments is made to rest upon the sovereignty of God: "I
am the Lord; thou shalt have no strange gods." From this precept, which
fills the first table, proceed the precepts which, in the second,
maintain the order of society: "Honour thy father and thy mother; thou
shalt not kill; thou shalt not steal," and the rest. Such, says Bossuet,
is the general order of all legislation. The ten words of God form the
core of a complete religious and civil code, in which the two Powers
exist in an ideal no less than a practical union. The individual and the
national worship is the same, and the society springs out of it, the root
being, "I am the Lord;" but the persuasiveness of redemption is added to
the power of creation: "I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of
the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage." Abraham, the father of
the people, had exercised the patriarchal priesthood and the patriarchal
sacrifice in his family; but just as God had not chosen Abraham because
he was the first-born, so Moses, taking the patriarchal priesthood, with
a special sanction, set it not in the first-born of the tribes, but in
another tribe, and in a family of this tribe. He took, further, the rite
of sacrifice, which had existed from the beginning, only developing its
meaning in a series of ordinances, which, as St. Paul tells us, all
pointed to Christ: "Almost all things according to the law are cleansed
with blood, and without shedding of blood is no remission" (Heb. ix. 22).
But while there is here a complete union in faith, in practice, and in
worship, for every true Israelite and for the whole people, while there
is one source of authority to the three, the bearers of the dignities
which represent this triple life of man are separated. Moses instituted,
in the person of Aaron, a high priesthood which from that time stands
through the whole history of his people at the head of their worship,
superior in all that concerns it to the civil authority, which is bound
to consult it and obey it, not only in the things of God, but in the
chief civil acts which regard the nation. The outcome of this work is the
creation of a people whose function is to bear on the worship of the one
true God and faith in the Redeemer to come, a royal, prophetic, and
priestly nation, the special domain of the promised Messias.
I have no need here to follow this people through the trials, revolts,
chastisements, and humiliations of 1500 years. It is sufficient to
observe the result at the coming of Christ. The nation at length, as the
fruit it would seem of captivity and suffering, has accepted with one
mind and heart the doctrine and worship of one God; the Jewish
priesthood, uncorrupted in its essence by any of the abominations of
polytheism, offers the daily morning and evening sacrifice, which
typified the Lamb of God, in the spirit of Adam, Noah, Abraham, and
Moses. The power of the State had indeed just passed to a Roman lord, but
it left the rites and practices and doctrines of the Jewish faith
untouched in the hands of the High Priest and the Great Council, which
sat in this respect in the chair of Moses,--a great and manifest
distinction, perhaps, from the condition in this respect of the whole
Gentile world. In Rome, at least, the worship "of the Immortal Gods,"
though blended with the whole growth of the State, and seated
triumphantly in the Capitol, was simply subservient to the Civil Power:
in Judea, a small and despised province of Rome, the religion was the
life of the people, which had been made a people that it might be God's
domain, and, with all its divisions, was filled from the highest to the
lowest with an universal expectation of the promised Christ, who was to
be Prophet, Priest, and King.
In the relation between the two Powers, Gentilism required a total
reconstruction, in order that the priesthood, existing in it from the
beginning, might be completely purified, derived afresh from God, and
receive from Him an independence which it had lost from the moment that
it lost its fidelity to the One Creator,--and such a gift would be a
token of divine power. Judaism, on the contrary, made, after the
programme of God, an image in the nation of what the Christian people was
to be in the world, required only to acknowledge in the Christ the
purpose for which it was appointed, that the law might go forth from Sion
and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] St. Aug. cont. Faustum, 22, 17. Antiqua enim res est prænuntiativa
immolatio sanguinis, futuram passionem Mediatoris ab initio generis humani
testificans; hanc enim primus Abel obtulisse in sacris litteris invenitur.
[8] Leo XIII., in the great Encyclical of June 29, 1881, says: "It is also
of great importance that they by whose authority public affairs are
administered may be able to command the obedience of citizens, so that
their disobedience is a sin. But no man possesses in himself or of himself
the right to constrain the free-will of others by the bonds of such a
command as this. That power belongs solely to God, the Creator of all
things and the Lawgiver; and those who exercise it must exercise it as
communicated to them by God. 'There is one lawgiver and judge who is able
to destroy and to deliver' (James iv. 12)."
[9] Bossuet sums up the state in these six points: Politique, &c. Art. 1.
[10] Welsh, _i.e._, foreigner, not speaking a language understood.
[11] St. Augustine.
[12] Politique, &c., lib. vii. art. 2.
[13] Nägelsbach, Homerische Theologie, 275.
[14] See Bianchi, vol. iii. ch. ii.
[15] Hierodidaskaloi eite hieronomoi, eite hierophulakes, eite, hôs hêmeis
axioumen, hierophantai. Dionys. Halic., 1. 2.
[16] Bianchi, Sect. VI.
[17] Bianchi, p. 23.