of the pre-Christian age, we of the modern world trace back our
religious lineage. We speak of the religion of the Old Testament as
'revealed' in contrast with all other pre-Christian religions. Is that
distinction tenable? If so, what does it mean, and what justifies us
in making it? It is clear that the answer must be sought in what the
Old Testament revelation is, rather than in the process by which the
Jews became the appointed depositaries of it. For whatever were the
prehistoric elements out of which the religion of Israel came, whether
Assyrian or Accadian or Indo-German or Egyptian, and whatever were the
steps by which Israel was led[83] to that doctrine of God which
constituted its mission and its message to the world, as we look back
from the point of view of Christianity we see that the religion of
Israel stands to the teaching of Christ in a relation in which no
Pagan religion stands[84]. The Law and the Prophets were for all the
world 'a sacred school of the knowledge of God, and the ordering of
the soul[85].' If it is true that the Bible only records the later and
more important stages in a process which began in prehistoric times
amidst the various forms of polytheistic worship, even if it could be
shewn that the history, as we have it, has been subjected to
successive revisions, that its laws have been codified, its ritual
elaborated, its symbolism interpreted, it would still remain true that
the religion of Israel, which begins where its history begins, and of
which, indeed, its history is little more than the vehicle, is bound
up with the assertion of Monotheism. The central fact of its
revelation is this, 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is One Lord.'
The central utterance of its law is, 'Thou shalt have none other gods
but Me.' The unity of God, that truth which other religions were
feeling after and tending towards, stands out clearly and distinctly
as the characteristic of the religion of Israel, and is fearlessly
claimed as an inheritance from the patriarchal age.
And not less remarkable than the assertion of the unity of God is the
assumption that this One God is a God of Righteousness. He is 'a God
of truth and without iniquity; just and right is He.' Here, again, it
was not that the religion of Israel asserted what other religions
denied, but that Israel proclaimed clearly and with increasing
certainty a truth which the highest contemporary religions were
struggling to express. In the religion of Israel the pre-Christian
world rose to articulate religious utterance. Its highest and truest
intuitions found a voice. Israel had yet much to learn and much to
unlearn as to what true morality is. It had anthropomorphisms of
thought and language to get rid of. It had to rise in Psalmist and
Prophet to moral heights unknown to the patriarchal age. But the
remarkable thing is that the claim is made. Morality is claimed for
God: God is declared to be irrevocably on the side of what man knows
as righteousness. And this truth is proclaimed not as a discovery but
as a revelation from God Himself. It was this, not less than the
proclamation of monotheism, which made the teaching of the Old
Testament what it was. It consciously transformed the natural law of
'might is right' into the moral truth that 'right is might.'
And the consequences of this new departure in the religious history of
man were far-reaching. It made the difference between the religion of
Israel and all other religions a difference not merely of degree but
of kind. The worship of the Lord and the worship of the heathen gods
becomes not only a conflict between the true and the false in
religion, but between the moral and the immoral in practice. More than
this, it changes the mere emotional feeling of awe and dependence on
invisible powers into trust and confidence. If God is irrevocably on
the side of right, the nation or the individual, that is struggling
for the right, is fighting on the side of God. It was this which made
the great Hebrew leaders, and the Psalmists after them, take it for
granted that their cause was the cause of God, and that the Lord of
Hosts was with them. Even the wars of extermination were the
expression in act of the utter antagonism between good and evil, the
cause of God and that of His enemies. And when Saul spared Agag it was
from no excess of charity, no glimpse of a higher morality; it was an
act of moral weakness. Finally, this claim of morality for God
precluded the possibility of such a collision as took place in the
history of the Greeks. The progressive development of morals in the
Old Testament, and the gradual unfolding of a perfect character[86]
was also for Israel a progressive revelation of the character of God.
Step by step the religious idea advanced with moral progress. And, as
they advance, the contrast with other religions becomes more marked.
'It was the final distinction between Polytheism and the religion of
Israel that the former emphasized power, the latter the moral element
to which it subordinated and conjoined power[87].' And this moral
conception of God was constantly kept before the people. If they lapse
into idolatry and adopt heathen practices and heathen ideas of God,
the prophets are ready with the warning that God is the God of Israel,
only because Israel is a chosen people to bear His name and His truth
before the world; and if they are false to their mission, they will be
rejected. If, again, the sacrificial system loses its moral
significance as the recognition of the holiness of God and the
sinfulness of the sinner, and the forward-pointing look towards the
great moral fact of the Atonement, and becomes merely ritual, and
perfunctory, and formal, the prophets dare to denounce even the
divinely ordered sacrifices as things which God hates.
Yet it was not that, in the religion of Israel, morality was made the
essential thing, a nucleus of morals, as it were, with a halo of
religious emotion round it. It was that the religious and the moral
consciousness are brought together in a real unity. To love the Lord
is to hate evil. God is One who gives His blessing to the righteous,
while the ungodly and him that delighteth in wickedness doth His soul
abhor. He, then, who would ascend into the hill of the Lord and stand
in His holy place, must have clean hands, and a pure heart, and a
lowly mind. The Lord God is holy. He has no pleasure in wickedness,
neither shall any evil dwell with Him. Righteousness and judgment are
the habitation of His seat. The sacrifice that He loves is the
sacrifice of righteousness. He is to be worshipped in the beauty of
holiness. What He requires of man is that he shall do justly, and love
mercy, and walk humbly with his God.
All this, which comes out no doubt with increasing clearness in the
Psalms and Prophets, is already implicit in that earlier claim made by
the religion of Israel, that the true God is on the side of
righteousness, and that to be false to righteousness is to be a
traitor to God. In this union of religion and morality neither is
sacrificed to the other. Each gains from its union with the other. The
religious idea of God, and the religious emotions which gather round
it, are progressively purified with the growth of moral ideas; and
morality receives new life and strength when the moral law is seen to
be the unfolding of the character of a Righteous God, and moral evil
is known as 'sin' against a Personal Being. The earnest moral protest
which in Greece was directed against the national religion, is found
in the Old Testament making common cause with the national religion
against the immoral beliefs of heathenism. Hence the Jew was not
called upon, as the Greek was, to choose between his religion and his
conscience. He never felt the strain which men feel in the present
day, when a high and pure morality seems ranged against religious
faith. For the Jew every advance in moral insight purified, while it
justified, that idea of God, which he believed had come down to him
from the 'Father of the Faithful.' His hope of immortality, his faith
in the ultimate triumph of the God of Israel, were alike based upon
the conviction that God is a God of justice and mercy, and that the
Righteous One could not fail His people, or suffer His holy One to see
corruption. Even though with the growth of morality, and the fuller
unfolding of the character of God, there came, like a shadow cast by
light, the deepening consciousness of sin as the barrier between man
and God, the Jew refused to believe that the separation was for ever.
Sin was a disease which needed healing, a bondage which called for a
deliverer, a state of indebtedness from which man could not free
himself. But Israel believed in and looked forward to, with confidence
and hope, the Redeemer who should come to Zion and save His people
from their sins.
The final revelation of Christianity came outwardly as a continuation
and development of the religion of Israel, and claimed to be the
fulfilment of Israel's hope. It was a 'republication' of the highest
truth about God which had been realized hitherto. For it came 'not to
destroy but to fulfil.' God is still the Eternally One, the Eternally
Righteous. Not sacrifice but holiness, not external 'works' but inward
'faith,' not the deeds of the law, but the righteousness which is of
God--this is what He requires. He is still the God of Israel. But
Israel according to the flesh had ceased to be the Israel of God, and
the children of faithful Abraham, in whom, according to the ancient
promise, all the families of the earth should be blessed, are to be
gathered from east and west and north and south, from circumcised and
uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, bond or free, and recognised as
one family under the one Father. If Christianity had been this and
this only, Christ might have claimed to be a great prophet, breaking
the silence of 400 years, restoring the ancient faith, and truly
interpreting and carrying forward the spirit of the ancient
revelation. But He claimed to be more than this. He claimed, as the
Son of God, to be not only the true, but the only, Revealer of the
Father. For 'no man knoweth the Father but the Son, and he to whom the
Son shall reveal Him.' What fresh characteristics, then, has this new
revelation to add to the Old Testament teaching about God? He is still
One, the only God. He is perfect Righteousness, yet, as even the older
religion knew, a God of loving-kindness and tender mercy, 'Who wills
not the death of the sinner.' But more than all this, He is now
revealed to man as Infinite Love, the One Father of humanity, Whose
only begotten Son is Incarnate and 'made man that we may be made God.'
Not one jot or tittle of the old revelation of God, as a God of
Righteousness, is lost or cancelled. The moral teaching is stern and
uncompromising as ever. God's love, which is Himself, is not the
invertebrate amiability, or weak good-naturedness, to which some would
reduce it. 'The highest righteousness of the Old Testament is raised
to the completeness of the Sermon on the Mount[88].' The New
Testament,' it has been said, 'with all its glad tidings of mercy, is
a severe book[89].' For the goodness and the severity of God are, as
it were, the convex and the concave in His moral nature. But what
seized upon the imagination of mankind as the distinctive revelation
of Christianity was the infinite love and tenderness and compassion of
this Righteous God for sinful man. It was this which shone out in the
character of Christ, He was Very God, with a Divine hatred of evil,
yet living as man among men, revealing the true idea of God, and not
only realizing in His human life the moral ideal of man, but by taking
human nature into Himself setting loose a power of moral regeneration,
of which the world had never dreamed.
The advance which the Gospel of Christ makes upon the Old Testament
revelation consists then, not only in the new truth it teaches as to
the character of God, but in the new relation which it establishes
between God and man. So soon as men learn the Old Testament truth that
God is eternally on the side of righteousness, the awe and cringing
fear, which lies behind heathen religions, and justifies us in calling
them superstitions, gives place to trustful confidence, which deepens
into faith, and gathers round it those affections and desires for
union with God which find expression in the book of Psalms. The saints
of the Old Testament could 'rest in the Lord' and wait for the
vindication of His Righteousness in human life; they could yearn for
His presence and hope for the day when they should 'see the King in
His beauty.' But they were yet separated from Him by the unobliterated
fact of sin. Enoch 'walked with God,' Abraham was called 'the friend
of God,' Moses 'the Lord knew face to face,' David was 'a man after
God's own heart,' Daniel 'a man greatly beloved.' But one and all of
these fell short, and necessarily fell short, of the closeness of that
union which is the Christian's birthright. In the Gospel, God is
revealed as one with man. And this truth changed the whole attitude
and atmosphere of worship. There was worship still, for humanity was
not merged and lost in Godhead. There is no Christian ring about the
statement[90] that 'in Christianity, in the consciousness that he is
partaker of the Divine existence, man no longer sustains the relation
of Dependence but of Love.' Rather the antithesis between dependence
and freedom is destroyed. As perfect love casts out fear, yet leaves
reverence, so the consciousness of union with God, as distinct from
absorption in Him, while it destroys the last remnant of what is
servile and degrading in religious emotion, and gives man freedom, yet
gives the freedom of loving dependence upon God. And by this gift it
sets free new affections and appeals to new motives. It was the
assured consciousness of union with God which gave the first
Christians their power in the great moral struggles of their day.
Their moral ideal with its loftiness, its purity, its perfect
truthfulness, would by its very perfectness have paralyzed effort, had
they not believed that they were one with Him Who had not only
proclaimed but realized it, that they could do all things through
Christ which strengthened them. And the horror of sin, which was a
characteristic note of Christian ethics, was due to the same fact.
Unrighteousness, not only as under the Old Testament, ranged a man on
the side of the enemies of God, but according to its degree tended to
break the supernatural bond which through the Incarnation united men
with God. Impurity, which meant so little for the civilized world of
the first Christian centuries, was for the Christian not defilement
only, but sacrilege, for his body was God's temple. The love of the
world was enmity against God, yet the neglect of social duties, and of
all that is now summed up in the 'service of man,' was for the
Christian _ipso facto_ the declaring himself outside the love of God,
just as, conversely, the love of the brethren was the proof that he
had 'passed from death unto life.'
Thus in primitive Christianity the religious and the moral
consciousness were at one, as in the Old Testament, but both are now
raised to their highest level. Free scope is given for the development
of both, and the satisfaction of the demands of both, in Christian
life and Christian worship. Side by side they fought and triumphed
over heathenism, taking up and assimilating all that was best and
truest in non-Christian ethics. And though Christians were long in
learning what manner of spirit they were of, it seemed as if a real
conflict between religion and morals, within the area of Christianity,
was impossible.
And yet again and again, in the history of Christianity, such a
conflict has come about. Every moral reformation within the Church was
a protest of the conscience against unworthy views of God; every new
Order that was founded was a nursery of moral reformation. Yet every
protest against formalism and unreality in religion, every attack on
ecclesiasticism and 'priestcraft' in the Church, or on worldliness and
laxity in professing Christians, owed its strength to the reassertion
of the truth, that in the Christian idea religion and morals are
inseparably united. The moral reformer always claimed Christianity on
his side, when attacking the Christianity of his day. This was
conspicuously so in the great moral upheaval of the sixteenth century.
In actual fact, religion and morality had separated. And the nearer
one got to the centre of Western Christendom, the more open and
unabashed the neglect of morality was. In Italy of the fifteenth
century renaissance we see, in strange confusion, 'all that we love in
art, and all that we loathe in man[91].' It seemed as if, as in the
old riddle, a swarm of bees had settled in the dead lion's carcass,
and there was sweetness instead of strength, corruption where once was
life. When the new century opened, Borgia was the supreme Bishop of
the West, and the strength of the protest of Christianity against
immorality may be gathered from the list of prices to be paid to the
pardoner. The devout retired from the contest into the severer
discipline of the monastic life, and hoped against hope for the days
of a _Papa angelicus_, who never came. Yet when the strained relations
of religion and morals resulted in a revolution, it never occurred to
those, who had a moral reformation at heart, to say that religion was
outgrown, and morality must henceforth take its place. They appealed
from the Christianity of the sixteenth century to the Christianity of
Christ. Even of those who, in their fear of popery, broke away
farthest from the Christian idea of God, all, if we except the
Anabaptists, claimed the Bible on their side. It was a genuine moral
revolt against a religion which had come to tolerate immorality. The
hatred of 'ecclesiasticism' and 'sacerdotalism' was not at first a
rejection of the Church and the Priesthood, but a protest against
anything which, under the sacred name of religion, becomes a cover for
unreality, or makes sin a thing easy to be atoned for. The Reformation
was a moral protest, and its results were seen within as well as
outside the Roman communion. The Council of Trent was a reforming
Council; the Jesuits were the children of the Reformation; and Roman
Christianity in the strength of its own moral revival, even in the
moment of defeat, became again 'a conquering power[92].'
On the other hand, those whose first impulse was a protest in favour
of a moral religion and a belief in a God who hates iniquity, have
bequeathed to the world a legacy of immorality, of which they never
dreamt, and of which we, in the present day, are feeling the full
effects. Lutheranism starts with the belief that God is love:
Calvinism with the conception of God as power. With the former, the
desire, at all costs, to guard the belief in the freedom of God's
grace, led to a morbid fear of righteousness, as if it were somehow a
rival to faith. With the latter, a one-sided view of the power of God
gradually obscured the fact that righteousness and justice eternally
condition its exercise. If the one was, as history shews us, in
constant danger of Antinomian developments, the other struck at the
root of morality by making God Himself unjust. Forensic fictions of
substitution, immoral theories of the Atonement, 'the rending asunder
of the Trinity' and the opposing of the Divine Persons, like parties
in a lawsuit[93], were the natural corollaries of a theory which
taught that God was above morality and man beneath it.
How deeply these false views of God have influenced English religious
thought is shewn by the fact that every attack on the moral, as
distinguished from the intellectual position of Christianity, is
demonstrably an attack on that which is not Christianity, but a
mediaeval or modern perversion of it. J. S. Mill's well-known
words[94], 'I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I
apply that epithet to my fellow creatures,' was a noble assertion of
'immutable morality' against a religion, which alas! he mistook for
Christianity. The conscience of to-day,--and it is a real gain that it
should be so,--refuses to believe that the _imprimatur_ of religion
can be given to that which is not good, or that God would put us to
moral confusion. It would rather give up religion altogether than
accept one which will not endorse and advance our highest moral ideas.
But men do not always stop to make the necessary distinctions. On the
one side they see a traditional view of religion which they cannot
harmonise with the highest morality; on the other, they see a
morality, which, though it has grown up under the shadow and shelter
of religion, seems strong enough to stand alone. And their first
thought is 'Away with religion. We have outgrown it. Henceforward we
will have morals unencumbered by religion.' What would be the effect
on the morals of a nation of thus renouncing the religious sanction it
is not safe to predict. In individuals certainly it sometimes has
disastrous results. But there is one thing which those who talk about
the 'secularization of morals[95]' seldom take into account, and that
is the effect on what, in contrast to morals, they call religion. The
religious consciousness always refuses to be treated as defunct, and
the religious emotions, if they no longer find their object in a God
of Righteousness, and are no longer controlled by morality, will not
be satisfied with the worship of the Unknowable or of idealized
humanity, but will avenge themselves, as they have done again and
again, in superstition[96].
And the attempt to do without religion in morals is as unphilosophical
as it is dangerous. It is parallel to what, in the region of morality
proper, we all recognise as a false asceticism. It is the attempt to
crush out, rather than to purify. When men realize the danger of
giving the rein to the animal passions, there are always to be found
moralists who will treat these passions as in themselves evil, and
advocate the suppression of them. And only after an antinomian revolt
against that false teaching do men realize that morality is not the
destruction, but the purification and regulation of the passions. So
with religion and the religious emotions. The function of morality is
to purify the religious idea of God, and religion and morality are
strong and true in proportion as each uses the help of the other. But
neither can treat the other as subordinate. God is more than what Kant
makes Him, the ultimate justification of morality: morality is more
than what some religious people would have it, obedience to the
positive commands of even God Himself. In experience we find them
separate and even opposed: ideally they are one, united not confused.
Separated, religion tends to become superstitious, morality to
degenerate into a mere prudentialism, or at least an expanded
utilitarianism. United, religion gives to right that absolute
character which makes it defiant of consequences; morality safeguards
the idea of God from aught that is unworthy of the worship of moral
beings.
As the result of all the conflicts which have raged round the idea of
God so far as morals are concerned, one truth has burned itself into
the consciousness of both the apologists and opponents of religion, a
truth as old indeed as the religion of Israel, but only slowly
realized in the course of ages, the truth, namely, that the religious
idea of God must claim and justify itself to the highest known
morality, and no amount of authority, ecclesiastical or civil, will
make men worship an immoral God. And already that truth has thrown
back its light upon questions of Old Testament morality. We no longer
say, 'It is in the Bible, approved or allowed by God, and therefore it
must be right.' It was this view which, in every age, has given its
protection to religious wars and intolerance and persecution. But we
look back and see in the perspective of history how God in every age
takes man as he is that He may make him what he is not. We see in the
Old Testament not only the revelation of the Righteousness of God, but
the record of the way in which, in spite of waywardness and
disobedience, He raised His people to the knowledge of the truth.
VI. But the religious idea of God in our day, as in former ages, is
challenged not only by conscience, but by the speculative reason. And
there is a close parallelism between the two conflicts. When religion
and morals are opposed, men naturally say, 'Give us morals; away with
religion.' And the answer is--True religion is moral; that which is
not moral is not true; and morality without religion will not only
leave the religious consciousness unsatisfied, but fall short of its
own true perfection. So when religion and philosophy are opposed, men
say once more, 'Give us reason; away with religion.' And the answer
again is--True religion is rational: if it excludes reason, it is
self-condemned. And reason without religion fails of its object,
since, if philosophy can find no place for religion, it cannot explain
man.