issued in the wonderfully placed and constituted Israel of Christ's
time, and which was crowned by the New Religion, we find this agency,
which in itself would arrest our wonder. The more we look at it, the
more wonderful it is. Every suggestion of comparison with heathen
oracles, divination and the rest, can only bring out with more vivid
effect the contrast and difference between it and all such things. It
claims by the mouth of men transparently earnest and honest, to speak
from God. It brings with it the highest credentials, moral, spiritual,
historical: _moral_, for it spends what at first sight seems all its
strength in the intrepid and scathing rebuke of the evils immediately
round it, especially in the high places of society, against the lust,
cruelty, avarice, frivolity, insolence, foul worships, which it found
so rankly abundant: _spiritual_, for it speaks the language of an
absolutely unworldly faith, and accomplishes a great spiritual work,
such as we can hardly over-estimate, unless indeed with Prof. Huxley
we distort its proportions so as to prejudice the earlier religion
from which it sprang or the Christianity to which it contributed:
_historical_, because occurring at the very crisis of Israel's history
(750-550), it gained credence and authority from the witness of
events, and dealt with an emergency of the most perilous and
bewildering kind, as not the most skilful opportunist could have dealt
with it, by a use, as sublime as simple, of the principles of
righteousness and faith. If we compare what the prophets did for their
contemporaries and what they did for the future of Israel and the
world, and see that this was done, not by two sets of utterances
working two different ways, but by a single blended strain of
prophecy, we gain a double impression, of which the twofold force is
astonishing indeed. It is gained without pressing their claim to
predictive power, at least beyond the horizons of their own period.
But it is impossible for any careful and candid reader of the words of
the prophets to stop there, and not to feel that there is another
element in them, not contained in a passage here and there but for
ever reappearing, interwoven with the rest, and evidently felt by the
prophets themselves to be in some sense necessary for the vindication
and completion of their whole teaching. It is an element of
anticipation and foresight. We see that this is so, and we see in part
the method of it. It is bound up with, it springs out of, all that is
spiritually and morally greatest in the prophets. Their marvellous,
clear-sighted, steady certainty that the Lord who sitteth above rules
all, that He is holy, and that unrighteousness in man or nations
cannot prevail; their insight piercing through the surface of history
to underlying laws of providential order; the strange conviction or
consciousness, felt throughout the nation but centring in the
prophets, that this God had a purpose for Israel:--these deep things,
which, however they came and whatever we think of them, make Israel's
distinctive and peculiar glory, were accompanied by, and issued in,
anticipations of a future which would vindicate and respond to them.
Just as the belief in a future life for God's children was not taught
as a set doctrine to the Jews, but grew with the growth of their
knowledge of the Living and Holy God, and of man's relation as a
spiritual being to Him, so with the predictions of which we speak. As
it was given to the prophets to realize the great spiritual truths of
present because eternal moment which they taught, it was given to them
also to discern that these truths pointed to a future which should
bring them vindication. The cloudy time of trial and confusion would
one day come to a close; the Sun whose rays they caught would one day
shine out; the partial and passing deliverances in which they taught
men to see God's hand must one day issue in a deliverance of deeper
moment, of lasting and adequate significance; there would be an
unbaring of God's arm, a manifesting of His power to decide, to
justify, to condemn, and it would be seen in some final form why and
how Israel was, in a distinctive sense, the people of the God of the
whole earth; that union between God and His people, of which the
prophets were themselves mediators and which was so miserably
imperfect and so constantly broken, would one day be complete; and,
finally, even the very instruments which He was using in the present,
the Anointed King, the chosen Royal House, the Prophet-Servant of God,
the holy hill of Zion, were charged with a meaning of which the
significance was only in the future to become clear. Thus, in this
free, deep, spiritual--let us say it out, inspired--manner the
predictions of prophecy emerge and gather shape. Thus among the people
which was most conservative and jealous of its own religious
privilege, the promise most deeply cherished was one in which all
nations of the earth should be blessed, and there is heard the strange
announcement of a 'new covenant.' Thus it comes about that the most
satisfying and satisfied of all religions becomes the one which, in
its deepest meaning, in the minds of its most faithful followers,
strains forward most completely beyond itself. Thus, as it has been
said, 'Prophecy takes off its crown and lays it at the feet of One who
is to be.' Thus a people who have become intensely and inexorably
monotheistic and to whom the Deity becomes more and more remote in
awful majesty so that they do not dare to name His Name, carry down
with them Scriptures which discover the strange vision of a human King
with Divine attributes and strain towards some manifestation of God in
present nearness. Thus amidst the pictures in which, with every
varying detail, using the scenery, the personages, the nations, the
ideas of its own day, the instinct of prophetic anticipation finds
expression, there emerges, with gradually gathering strength, a
definite Hope, and some clear lineaments of that which is to be.
For, be it observed, at this point interpretation, declaring what the
prophets seem to us to-day to mean, passes into and gives way to
historical fact. The most sceptical cannot deny either that the words
in which the prophets spoke of the future, did as a matter of fact
crystallize into a hope, a hope such as has no parallel in history,
and of which distorted rumours were able to stir and interest the
heathen world: or that they were, long before the time of Jesus,
interpreted as sketching features, some general and shadowy, some
curiously distinct and particular, of Messiah's work and kingdom.
And then, face to face with this, stands another fact as confessedly
historical. For, 'in the fulness of the time,' it did appear to men of
many kinds who had the books in their hands, men with every reason for
judging seriously and critically, and in most cases with the strongest
prejudice in favour of an adverse judgment, that these prophecies were
fulfilled in a King and a Kingdom such as they never dreamt of till
they saw them. It would be a strange chapter in the history of
delusion, if there were no more to add. But there is to add, first,
that the King and the Kingdom whereto, (in no small part upon the
seeming perilous ground of this correspondence with prophecy,) these
men gave their faith, have proved to win such a spiritual empire as
they claimed: and, further, that men like ourselves, judging at the
cool distance of two thousand years, are unable to deny that in the
truest sense of 'fulfilment,' as it would be judged by a religious
mind, Jesus and His Kingdom do 'fulfil the prophets,' fulfil their
assertion of a unique religious destiny for Israel by which the
nations were to profit, of a time when the righteousness of God should
be revealed for the discomfiture of pride and sin and for the help of
the meek, of a nearer dwelling of God with His people, of a new
covenant, and of the lasting reign of a perfect Ruler.
To some minds it may weaken, but to others it will certainly
intensify, the impression thus created, if they are asked to observe
that now and again there occur in the Jewish Scriptures words,
passages, events, in which with startling distinctness, independence,
and minuteness there stand forth features of what was to be. It is as
if the anticipation which fills the air with glow focussed itself here
and there in sparkling points of light which form and flash and fade
away again. We may confidently assert that in the case of such
passages as the 22nd and 110th Psalms or the 9th and 53rd Chapters of
Isaiah the harder task is for him who will deny, than for him who will
assert, a direct correspondence between prediction and fulfilment. If
they stood alone, general scientific considerations might make it
necessary to undertake the harder task. Standing out as they do from
such a context and background as has been here indicated, the
interpretation which sees in them the work of a Divine providence
shaping out a 'sign' for the purpose which in each Christian age, and
especially in the first, it has actually subserved, is the
interpretation which is truest to all the facts. They are the special
self-betrayal of a power which is at work throughout, of which the
spiritual ear hears the sound, though we are often unable distinctly
to see the footprints.
It seems then impossible, upon such a view of the phenomena of
prophecy as has been here roughly and insufficiently indicated, to
deny that whatever appearance of preparation we may discern in the
condition outward and inward of the Jews in the time of Christ, is
strongly corroborated by a like appearance of preparation in the
process by which they had become what they were.
(_b_) We have selected out of all the foregoing history the epoch and
the influence of the prophets for several reasons. They preside over
the most critical period of Israel's history. They seem to bring to
most pronounced expression the spirit and character which pervades the
whole of that history. They are known to us through their own
writings: and we are therefore on ground where (comparatively
speaking) the premises are uncontroverted. And as it is the fashion
perhaps to discredit the argument of prophecy--partly, no doubt, on
account of the technical form in which it was ordinarily presented--it
is important to re-assert that in all its main strength that argument
holds its ground, reinforced indeed, as we think, by the increased
power to apprehend its breadth and solidity which our more
historically trained modern minds should have gained. But selection of
what is most salient should imply no neglect of the rest; and the
argument, or view of the facts,--which has here for clearness sake
been abbreviated, and mainly centralized upon the work and
implications of prophecy,--can be deepened as the drift of the great
lines of Israel's discipline is more deeply realized. Thus, for
example, little or nothing has been here said of the Law. Yet, without
foreclosing any discussion as to its sources and development, we can
see that the law of God was a factor in every stage of Israel's
history, and that in the making of the prepared Israel of Christ's
time, the law in its fullest and most developed shape was, and had
been for ages, a paramount influence. No influence more concentrated
and potent can be found in history. And to see the deepest drift of it
we have no need to speculate on what might have been, or was sure to
be. Historical documents point us to what was. The Epistles to the
Romans and the Galatians, and the Epistle to the Hebrews, lay open
respectively two ways of its working. On the one side it appears as a
great witness for righteousness. Men were schooled to live under a
sense of peremptory obligation; to comply scrupulously, exactly,
submissively with an unquestioned authority. This sense and temper is
liable to great abuse: it lends itself when abused to a mechanical
morality, to a morbid casuistry, to the complacency of an external
perfectness. It was so abused very widely among the Jews. But it is
nevertheless an indispensable factor in a true morality, to which it
lends the special power of command: and in Israel it conferred this
power because it connected obligation with the will of a righteous
God. This is expressed in the repeated sanction 'I am the Lord your
God,' following precept after precept of the law, and in the summary
claim 'Be ye holy, for I am holy.' Evidently here there is that which
transcends all mechanical schemes of obedience; there is an infinite
standard. As such it pointed and impelled onwards towards the true
religion in which faith and holiness should be entirely at one. As
such meanwhile it stimulated and dismayed the deeper spirits:
stimulating them by the loftiness of its demand, dismaying them by the
proved impossibility of that perfect compliance which alone was
compliance at all. Thus the foundations were laid of a temper at once
robust and humble, confident and diffident; though they were laid upon
a contradiction which the law had in itself no power to resolve. There
was indeed (here we take up the guidance of the Epistle to the
Hebrews) one part of the law which acknowledged that contradiction,
which half promised to resolve it, but having no real power to do so,
could only shape and deepen the demand for some solution. This was, of
course, the sacrificial system. The sacrificial system opens up quite
other thoughts from those of strict demand and strict obedience. It
points to quite another side of religious and moral development. Yet
it starts from the same truth of a Holy God Who requires, and inasmuch
as He is holy must require, a perfect obedience. Only it acknowledges
the inevitable fact of disobedience. It embodies the sense of need. It
appeals to, and as part of the Divine law it reveals, a quality in the
Supreme Goodness which can go beyond commanding and condemning, to
forgive and reconcile. It creates in a word the spirit of humility,
and it feels, at the least, after a God of love.
What a profound preparation there is in this for the life which Christ
blessed in the Beatitudes and inaugurated by all that He was and did,
and for the truth of the Divine being and character which was set
forth in Him. Yet the law only prepared for this, and made the demand
which this met. It made no answer to its own demand. It could not
reconcile its own severity, and its own hopes of mercy: its apparatus
of sacrifice was in itself absolutely and obviously insufficient for
any solution of the contradiction. It was a marvellous discipline
which, while it trained its people so far, demanded the more urgently
something which all its training could never give nor reach.
(_c_) The work of prophecy and the work of the law was also (if we can
distinguish causes which were so much affected by one another) the
work of history. To the work of the prophets, indeed, the history of
both the past and the succeeding times was essential, the former to
supply their work with a standing ground, the latter to engrain its
teaching into the life of the nation. We look back, and we ask, What
gave the prophets their advantage, what was the fulcrum of their
lever? Trained to observe the processes of religious evolution, we
must refuse to believe with Professor Huxley that a lofty monotheism
and a noble morality sprang out of the ground among a 'minority of
Babylonian Jews.' But we shall be prepared to find that the
rudimentary stages differ much from the mature. The beginnings of
life, as we know them, are laid in darkness: they emerge crude and
childish: the physical and outward almost conceals the germ of
spiritual and rational being which nevertheless is the self, and which
will increasingly assert itself and rule. It may be so with that
organism which God was to make the shrine of His Incarnation. We may
have to learn that the beginnings of Israel are more obscure, more
elementary, less distinctive from surrounding religions, than we had
supposed. We need not fear to be as bold as Amos in recognising that
what was in one aspect the unique calling of God's Son out of
Egypt[183] was in another but one among the Divinely ruled processes
of history, such as brought up the Philistines from Caphtor and the
Syrians from Kir[184]. We need not be more afraid than Ezekiel to say
that the peculiar people were an offshoot (if so it should be) of
natural stocks, with the Amorite for father and the Hittite for
mother[185]. But all this will hardly take from us that sense of
continuous shaping of a thing towards a Divine event which has always
been among the supports of faith. We shall see that the prophetic
appeals imply a past, and that their whole force lies in what they
assume, and only recal to their hearers; the special possession of
Israel by Jehovah, His selection of them for His own, His deliverances
of them from Egypt and onwards, giving the earnest of a future purpose
for which they were preserved, and for which His definite promises
were committed to them, to the seed of Abraham, the house of Israel,
the line of David. These things the prophets imply, standing upon
these they speak with all the force of those who need only bid the
people to realize and to remember, or at most to receive from God some
fresh confirmation and enlargement of their hopes[186].
Or again, from the work of the prophets we look forward, and when we
have recovered from our surprise at seeing that a dreary interval of
five centuries separates the Evangelical prophecy, which seemed so
ready for the flower of the Gospel, from the time of its blooming, we
discern how the processes of that interval were utilized in realizing,
ingraining, diffusing the great truths of prophetic teaching. The
return without a monarchy and under an ecclesiastical governor, and
the dispersion through many lands, necessitated in act that
transformation of the political into the spiritual polity, almost of
the nation into the Church, of which Isaiah's work was the germ. The
institution of the synagogues, which belongs to this time and in which
public worship was detached from all local associations and from the
ancient forms of material sacrifice, was, as it were, the spiritual
organ of the new ubiquitous cosmopolitan Jewish life. Yet
contemporaneously the centralizing influences gained strength. The
conservative work of Ezra and of the Scribes and Rabbis at whose head
he stands, gathered up and preserved the treasures which gave a
consciously spiritual character to Israel's national loyalty; and
guarded with the hedge of a scrupulous literalism, what needed some
such defence to secure it against the perils implied in being carried
wide over the world. By the resistance in Palestine under Syrian rule
to Hellenizing insolence, and in the Dispersion to the fascinations
and pleasures of Hellenizing culture, and by the great Maccabean
struggle, the nation was identified with religious earnestness and
zeal in a way of which we only see the caricature and distortion in
the Pharisaism which our Lord denounced.
Thus, if we compare our Lord's time with the great age of prophecy, we
see how much has been acquired. Time has been given for the prophetic
influences to work. There has been loss, but there has also been gain.
That conscious, explicit, and magnificently uncompromising Monotheism,
which in the mouth of the Evangelical prophet was quivering with the
glow and passion of freshly inspired realization, has by 'the end of
the age' had time to bring everything in the sphere of religion under
its influence. It had discovered its points of contact with the
highest aspirations of the Greek thought which on intellectual lines
felt its way towards God. And it had unfolded its own corollaries: it
had drawn along with it the great spiritual truths which cohere with
the belief in one Living and True God: and Israel in the Pharisee
epoch had passed, we hardly know how, into secure if not undisputed
possession of the belief in a future life, in a world of spirits, and
in the spiritual character of prayer.
But there was another and more direct manner, in which the work of
history interlaced with what we have indicated as the work of the law.
In the formation of the temper of chastened confidence which is so
characteristic of later Israel, a part must evidently be given to the
discipline of national experience saddened by departed glory, and with
the shadows thickening over it. Just as we can see that the
populations of the Empire were in a sense more ready to learn of
Christ than the young self-reliant Greeks of Sparta or Athens could
have been, so we can see in such language as that of the 119th Psalm
or of the 9th chapter of Daniel a temper to which the meek and lowly
Christ would make an appeal which might have been lost upon the rough
times of the judges or the prosperous age of the monarchy. Old age has
come and with it the wisdom of a chastened spirit. This is not
difficult to see, and it is important to take it into account. It
means that the comparatively normal discipline of life has brought
with it (as doubtless it is meant to do alike in personal and national
life) a spiritual gain. But it is important to see how much of the
process and the effect remains unexplained. The chastening is obvious,
but whence the confidence?
It is in some far less normal cause, in something which seems
distinctive of Israel, that we have to find the adequate explanation
of the whole result. We have to ask (as Pascal so keenly felt[187])
why a nation records its failures and misfortunes as being
chastisements of wilful, repeated, and disgraceful fault, and then
jealously guards the record as its most cherished possession. It would
be easy to suggest that there is in this an egotism clothing itself in
humility: and to point out that this egotism would explain the
confidence which still looked forward to the future, which anticipated
greatness for an 'afflicted and poor people,' and a blessing to all
the nations of the earth from its own history. Only this is just to
slur the difficulty, and under the invidious word 'egotism' to
disguise that wonderful instinct of a destiny and a mission which is
so strangely unlike egotism, and which allowed, or even produced, in
so profound a form the self-condemnation which egotism refuses.
Doubtless the effects of these preparing forces were felt, and their
meanings discerned, only by a few. Not only were they 'not all Israel
that were of Israel,' but the bulk of the nation and its
representative and official leaders were blind. They were off the way,
down the false tracks of literalist Rabbinism, or of one-sided Essene
asceticism, or of earthly visions of a restored kingdom, or (as in
Alexandria) of a philosophized Judaism. The issues were the
crucifixion of the Lord, and all which Judaism, without and within the
Church, did to extinguish the Gospel and persecute its followers in
its first age. It is right to refer to this, but there are probably
few to whom it would cause any difficulty. To the observer of the
world's history it is a common sight that the true issues and the
distinctive work of a people is worked out not by the many or by the
prominent, but by the few, and often the obscure. To the student of
Jewish history that which has made Israel what it is in
world-significance appears throughout the course of its history as a
gold thread running through a web of very different texture. It can be
no surprise that the end should be of a piece with the rest. There, in
a climax of sharpest contrast, we see the antithesis which marks the
history throughout. The training issues in a S. Mary, a Simeon, in
those who 'waited for the consolation of Israel' on the one side, and
in the 'Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites,' on the other. The natural
issue of Israel's life and tendencies is seen in the cold and sterile
impotence which, because it is the 'corruption of the best,' is the
most irreversible spiritual ruin; while beside and amidst this there
was fashioned by a grace and power above nature, though in a perfectly
natural way, the true Israel which realize all that 'Israel according
to the flesh' professed yet betrayed, guarded yet obscured. And if we
have at all rightly discerned as a principle of Divine preparation
that it should be negative as well as positive, and should demonstrate
to the world before Christ was given, how little the world's own
wisdom or effort could supply His place: we shall not wonder that time
was thus given for Israel to try out as it were its second experiment,
and to shew that by its selfishness and arrogance, by its
'carnalness,' it could warp and distort its later spiritual
constitution, even more than its former temporal one, out of all
likeness of what God would have it be. 'The last state of the man' was
'worse than the first[188].'
But the observation of these predominant currents and forms of Jewish
life and thought and religion has this further value, that it shews
the variety, the energy, and the unlikeness to one another of the
tendencies present in Israel. They emphasize the fact that the history
of Israel was in no sense working itself out towards the _production_
by its own forces of the true religion which went forth from the midst
of it. They remind us how intractable the problem of finding by human
ingenuity the solution which could harmonize in one issue elements so
powerful and so alien from each other; which with a perfect spiritual
liberty could combine an assertion of the permanent value of the law;
which with no withdrawal from and despair of the world could secure
all that was sought by Essene purity and self-denial; which, itself
utterly unworldly, could satisfy the idea of a restored monarchy and a
glory for Israel; which while bringing no philosophy could achieve
what Jewish philosophizing had desired, in a capture of the world's
reason by Jewish truth.