Progress and History Part 6

BARON FRIEDRICH VON HuGEL

The difficulties are deep and delicate which confront any man at all well acquainted with the fuller significance of Religion and of Progress, who attempts clearly and shortly to describe or define the ultimate relations between these two sets of fact and conviction. It is plain that Religion is the deeper and richer of the two terms; and that we have here, above all, to attempt to fathom the chief elements and forces of Religion as such, and then to see whether Progress is really traceable in Religion at all. And again it is clear that strongly religious souls will, as such, hold that Religion answers to, and is occasioned by, the action, within our human life and needs, of great, abiding, living non-human Realities; and yet, if such souls are at all experienced and sincere, they will also admit--as possibly the most baffling of facts--that the human individuals, families, races, are relatively rare in whom this sense and need of Religion is strongly, sensitively active. Thus the religion of most men will either all but completely wither or vanish before the invasion of other great facts and interests of human life--Economics or Politics or Ethics, or again, Science, Art, Philosophy; or it will, more frequently, become largely a.s.similated, in its conception, valuation, and practice, to the quite distinct, and often subtly different, conceptions, valuations, and practices pertaining to such of these other ranges and levels of human life as happen here to be vigorously active. And such a.s.similations are, of course, effected with a particular Philosophy or Ethic, mostly some pa.s.sing fashion of the day, which does not reach the deepest laws and standards even of its own domain, and which, if taken as Religion, will gravely numb and mar the power and character of such religious perception as may still remain in this particular soul.

I will, then, first attempt some discriminations in certain fundamental questions concerning the functioning of our minds, feelings, wills. I will next attempt short, vivid descriptions of the chief stages in the Jewish and Christian Religions, with a view to tracing here what may concern their progress; and will very shortly ill.u.s.trate the main results attained by the corresponding main peculiarities of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism. And I will finally strive to elucidate and to estimate, as clearly as possible, the main facts in past and present Religion which concern the question of religious 'Progressiveness'.

I

I begin with insisting upon some seven discriminations which, even only forty years ago, would have appeared largely preposterous to the then fashionable philosophy.

First, then, our Knowledge is always wider and deeper than is our Science. I know my mother, I know my dog, I know my favourite rose-tree; and this, although I am quite ignorant of the anatomical differences between woman and man; of the psychological limits between dog and human being; or of the natural or artificial botanical order to which my rose-plant belongs. Any kind or degree of consciousness on my part as to these three realities is a knowledge of their content. 'Knowledge is not simply the reduction of phenomena to law and their resolution into abstract elements; since thus the unknowable would be found well within the facts of experience itself, in so far as these possess a concrete character which refuses translation into abstract relations.' So Professor Aliotta urges with unanswerable truth.[32]

And next, this spontaneous awareness of other realities by myself, the reality Man, contains always, from the first, both matter and form, and sense, reason, feeling, volition, all more or less in action. Sir Henry Jones insists finely: 'The difference between the primary and elementary data of thought on the one hand, and the highest forms of systematized knowledge on the other, is no difference in kind, a.n.a.logous to a mere particular and a mere universal; but it is a difference of articulation.'[33]

Thirdly, direct, unchallengeable Experience is always only experience of a particular moment; only by means of Thought, and trust in Thought, can such Experience be extended, communicated, utilized. The sceptic, to be at all effective, practises this trust as really as does his opponent.

Thought, taken apart from Experience, is indeed artificial and arid; but Experience without Thought, is largely an orderless flux. Philosophers as different as the Neo-Positivist Mach and the Intuitionist Bergson, do indeed attempt to construct systems composed solely of direct Experience and pure Intuition; and, at the same time, almost ceaselessly insist upon the sheer novelty, the utter unexpectedness of all direct Experience, and the entire artificiality of the constructions of Thought--constructions which alone adulterate our perceptions of reality with the non-realities repet.i.tion, uniformity, foreseeableness. Yet the amazing success of the application of such constructions to actual Nature stares us all in the face. 'It is, indeed, strange,' if that contention be right, 'that facts behave as if they too had a turn for mathematics.' a.s.suredly 'if thought, with its durable and coherent structure, were not the reflection of some order of stable relations in the nature of things, it would be worthless as an organ of life'.[34]

Fourthly, both s.p.a.ce and Time are indeed essential const.i.tuents of all our perceptions, thoughts, actions, at least in this life. Yet Time is perhaps the more real, and a.s.suredly the richer, const.i.tuent of the two.

But this rich reality applies only to Concrete or Filled Time, Duration, in which our experiences, although always more or less successive, interpenetrate each other in various degrees and ways, and are thus more or less simultaneous. An absolutely even flow of equal, mutually exclusive moments, on the contrary, exists only for our theoretical thinking, in Abstract, Empty, or Clock time. Already, in 1886, Professor James Ward wrote: 'In time, conceived as physical, there is no trace of intensity; in time, as psychically experienced, duration is primarily an intensive magnitude.'[35] And in 1889 Professor Bergson, in his _Essai sur les Donnees Immediates de la Conscience_, gave us exquisite descriptions of time as we really experience it, of 'duration strictly speaking', which 'does not possess moments that are identical or exterior to each other'.[36] Thus all our real soul life, in proportion to its depth, moves in Partial Simultaneity; and it apprehends, requires and rests, at its deepest, in an overflowingly rich Pure Simultaneity.

Fifthly, Man is Body as well as Soul, and the two are closely interrelated. The sensible perception of objects, however humble, is always necessary for the beginning, and (in the long run) for the persistence and growth, of the more spiritual apprehensions of man.

Hence Historical Persons and Happenings, Inst.i.tutions, affording Sensible Acts and Contacts, and Social Corporations, each different according to the different ranges and levels of life, can hardly fail to be of importance for man's full awakening--even ethical and spiritual.

Professor Ernst Troeltsch, so free from natural prejudice in favour of such a Sense-and-Spirit position, has become perhaps the most adequate exponent of this great fact of life, which is ever in such danger of evaporation amidst the intellectual and leading minority of men.

Sixthly, the cultivated modern man is still largely arrested and stunted by the spell of Descartes, with his insistence upon immediate unity of outlook and perfect clearness of idea as the sole, universal tests, indeed const.i.tuents, of truth. 'I judged that I could take for my general rule that the things which we conceive very clearly and very distinctly are all true'--these and these alone.[37] Thus thenceforth Mathematics and Mechanics have generally been held to be the only full and typical sciences, and human knowledge to be co-extensive with such sciences alone. Yet Biology and Psychology now rightly claim to be sciences, each with its own special methods and tests distinct from those of Mathematics and Mechanics. Indeed, the wisest and most fruitful philosophy is now coming to see that 'Reality generally eludes our thought, when thought is reduced to mathematical formulas'.[38] Concrete thought, contrariwise, finds full room also for History, Philosophy, Religion, for each as furnishing rich subject-matters for Knowledge or Science, of a special but true kind.

Seventhly. Already Mathematics and Mechanics absolutely depend, for the success of their applications to actual Nature, upon a spontaneous correspondence between the human reason and the Rationality of Nature.

The immensity of this success is an unanswerable proof that this rationality is not imposed, but found there, by man. But Thought without a Thinker is an absurd proposition. Thus faith in Science is faith in G.o.d. Perhaps the most impressive declaration of this necessary connexion between Knowledge and Theism stands at the end of that great work, Christoph Sigwart's _Logik_. 'As soon as we raise the question as to the real _right_', the adequate reason, 'of our demands for a correspondence, within our several sciences, between the principles and the objects of the researches special to each, there emerges the need for the Last and Unconditional Reason. And the actual situation is not that this Reason appears only on the horizon of our finite knowledge,'

as Kant would have it. 'Not in thus merely extending our knowledge lies the significance of the situation, but in the fact that this Unconditional Reason const.i.tutes the presupposition without which no desire for Knowledge (in the proper and strict sense of the word) is truly thinkable.'[39]

And lastly, all this and more points to philosophical Agnosticism as an artificial system, and one hopelessly inadequate to the depths of human experience. a.s.suredly Bossuet is right: 'man knows not the whole of anything'; and mystery, in this sense, is also of the essence of all higher religion. But what man knows of anything is that thing manifested, not essentially travestied, in that same thing's appearances. We men are most a.s.suredly realities forming part of a real world-whole of various realities; those other realities continuously affect our own reality; we cannot help thinking certain things about these other realities; and these things, when accepted and pressed home by us in action or in science, turn out, by our success in this their utilization, to be rightly apprehended by us, as parts of interconnected, objective Nature. Thus our knowledge of Reality is real as far as it goes, and philosophical Agnosticism is a _doctrinaire_ position. We can say with Herbert Spencer, in spite of his predominant Agnosticism, that 'the error' committed by philosophers intent upon demonstrating the limits and conditions of consciousness 'consists in a.s.suming that consciousness contains _nothing but_ limits and conditions, to the entire neglect of that which is limited and conditioned'. In reality 'there is some thing which alike forms the raw material of definite thought and remains after the definiteness, which thinking gave to it, has been destroyed'.[40]

II

Let us next consider five of the most ancient and extensively developed amongst the still living Religions: the Israelitish-Jewish and the Christian religions shall, as by far the best known to us and as the most fully articulated, form the great bulk of this short account; the Confucian, Buddhist, and Mohammedan religions will be taken quite briefly, only as contrasts to, or elucidations of, the characteristics found in the Jewish and Christian faiths. All this in view of the question concerning the relations between Religion and Progress.

1. We can roughly divide the Israelitish-Jewish religion into three long periods; in each the points that specially concern us will greatly vary in clearness, importance, and richness of content.

The first period, from the time of the founder Moses and the Jewish exodus out of Egypt to the appearance of the first great prophet Elijah (say 1300 B.C. to about 860 B.C.) is indeed but little known to us; yet it gives us the great historical figure of the initial lawgiver, the recipient and transmitter of deep ethical and religious experiences and convictions. True, the code of King Hammurabi of Babylon (in 1958 to 1916 B.C.; or, according to others, in about 1650) antic.i.p.ates many of the laws of the _Book of the Covenant_ (Exod. xx, 22-xxiii. 33), the oldest amongst the at all lengthy bodies of laws in the Pentateuch; and, again, this covenant appears to presuppose the Jewish settlement in Canaan (say in 1250 B.C.) as an accomplished fact. And, indeed, the Law and the books of Moses generally have undoubtedly pa.s.sed through a long, deep, wide, and elaborate development, of which three chief stages, all considerably subsequent to the Covenant-Book, have, by now, been established with substantial certainty and precision. The record of directly Mosaic sayings and writings is thus certainly very small. Yet it is a.s.suredly a gross excess to deny the historical reality of Moses, as even distinguished scholars such as Edward Meyer and Bernhard Stade have done. Far wiser here is Wellhausen, who finds, in the very greatness and fixity of orientation of the development in the Law and in the figure of the Lawgiver, a conclusive proof of the rich reality and greatness of the Man of G.o.d, Moses. Yet it is Hermann Gunkel, I think, who has reached the best balanced judgement in this matter. With Gunkel we can securely hold that Moses called G.o.d Yahweh, and proclaimed Him as the national G.o.d of Israel; that Moses invoked Him as 'Yahweh is my banner'--the divine leader of the Israelites in battle (Exod. xvii. 15); and that Yahweh is for Moses a G.o.d of righteousness--of the right and the law which he, Moses, brought down from Mount Sinai and published at its foot. Fierce as may now appear to us the figure of Yahweh, thus proclaimed, yet the soul's att.i.tude towards Him is already here, from the first, a religion of the will: an absolute trust in G.o.d ('Yahweh shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace,' Exod. xiv. 14), and a terrible relentlessness in the execution of His commands--as when Moses orders the sons of Levi to go to and fro in the camp, slaying all who, as worshippers of the Golden Calf, had not been 'on Yahweh's side'

(Exod. x.x.xii. 25-29); and when the chiefs, who had joined in the worship of Baal-Peor, are 'hung up unto Yahweh before the sun' (Num. xxv. 1-5).

Long after Moses the Jews still believed in the real existence of the G.o.ds of the heathen; and the religion of Moses was presumably, in the first instance, 'Monolatry' (the adoration of One G.o.d among many); but already accompanied by the conviction that Yahweh was mightier than any other G.o.d--certainly Micah, 'Who is like Yahweh?,' is a very ancient Israelitish name. And if Yahweh is worshipped by Moses on a mountain (Sinai) and His law is proclaimed at a spring, if Moses perhaps himself really fashioned the brazen serpent as a sensible symbol of Yahweh, Yahweh nevertheless remains without visible representation in or on the Ark; He is never conceived as the sheer equivalent of natural forces; and all mythology is absent here--the vehement rejection of the calf-worship shows this strikingly. Michael Angelo, himself a soul of fire, understood Moses well, Gunkel thinks.[41]

The second period, from Elijah's first public appearance (about 860 B.C.) to the Dedication of the Second Temple (516 B.C.), and on to the public subscription to the Law of Moses, under Ezra (in 444 B.C.), is surpa.s.sed, in spiritual richness and importance, only by the cla.s.sical times of Christianity itself. Its beginning, its middle, and its end each possess distinctive characters.

The whole opens with Elijah, 'the grandest heroic figure in all the Bible,' as it still breathes and burns in the First Book of Kings. 'For Elijah there existed not, in different regions, forces possessed of equal rights and equal claims to adoration, but everywhere only one Holy Power that revealed Itself, not like Baal, in the life of Nature, but like Yahweh, in the moral demands of the Spirit' (Wellhausen).

And then (in about 750 B.C.) appears Amos, the first of the n.o.ble 'storm-birds' who herald the coming national destructions and divine survivals. 'Yahweh was for these prophets above all the G.o.d of justice, and G.o.d of Israel only in so far as Israel satisfied His demands of justice. And yet the special relation of Yahweh to Israel is still recognized as real; the ethical truth, which now stood high above Israel, had, after all, arisen within Israel and could still only be found within it.' The two oldest lengthy narrative doc.u.ments of the Pentateuch--the Yahwist (J) and the Ephraemite (E)--appear to have been composed, the first in Judah in the time of Elijah, the second in Israel in the time of Amos. J gives us the immortal stories of Paradise and the Fall, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Flood; E, Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac; and the doc.u.ments conjointly furnish the more nave and picturesque parts of the grand accounts of the Patriarchs generally--the first great narrative stage of the Pentateuch. G.o.d here gives us some of His most exquisite self-revelations through the Israelitish peasant-soul. And Isaiah of Jerusalem, successful statesman as well as deep seer, still vividly lives for us in some thirty-six chapters of that great collection the 'Book of Isaiah' (i-xii, xv-xx, xxii-x.x.xix).

There is his majestic vocation in about 740 B.C., described by himself, without ambiguity, as a precise, objective revelation (chap. vi); and there is the divinely impressive close of his long and great activity, when he nerves King Hezekiah to refuse the surrender of the Holy City to the all-powerful Sennacherib, King of a.s.syria: that Yahweh would not allow a single arrow to be shot against it, and would turn back the a.s.syrian by the way by which he came--all which actually happens as thus predicted (chap. x.x.xvii).

The middle of this rich second period is filled by a great prophet-priest's figure, and a great prophetical priestly reform.

Jeremiah is called in 628 B.C., and dies obscurely in Egypt in about 585 B.C.; and the Deuteronomic Law and Book is found in the Temple, and is solemnly proclaimed to, and accepted by, the people, under the leadership of the High Priest Hilkiah and King Josiah, 'the Constantine of the Jewish Church,' in 628 B.C. Jeremiah and Deuteronomy (D) are strikingly cognate in style, temper, and injunctions; and especially D contrasts remarkably in all this with the doc.u.ments J and E. We thus have here the second great development of the Mosaic Law. Both Jeremiah and Deuteronomy possess a deeply interior, tenderly spiritual, kernel and a fiercely polemical husk--they both are full of the contrast between the one All-Holy G.o.d to be worshipped in the one Holy Place, Jerusalem, and the many impure heathen G.o.ds worshipped in so many places by the Jewish crowd. Thus in Jeremiah Yahweh declares: 'This shall be my covenant that I will make with the house of Israel: I will write my law in their hearts: and they shall all know me, from the least to the greatest: for I will remember their sin no more' (x.x.xi. 33, 34). And Yahweh exclaims: 'My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and have hewn out cisterns that can hold no water.' 'Lift up thine eyes unto the high places ... thou hast polluted the land with thy wickedness.' 'Wilt thou not from this time cry unto me: My Father, thou art the guide of my youth?' (ii. 13, iii.

2, 4). And Deuteronomy teaches magnificently: 'This commandment which I command you this day, is not too hard for thee, neither is it far off.

It is not in heaven, neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say: Who shall go up for us to heaven or over the sea, and bring it unto us? But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it' (x.x.x. 11-14). And there are here exquisite injunctions--to bring back stray cattle to their owners; to spare the sitting bird, where eggs or fledglings are found; to leave over, at the harvest, some of the grain, olives, grapes, for the stranger, the orphan, the widow; and not to muzzle the ox when treading out the corn (xxii. 1, 6, 7; xxiv. 19; xxv. 4). Yet the same Deuteronomy ordains: 'If thine own brother, son, daughter, wife, or bosom friend entice thee secretly, saying, let us go and serve other G.o.ds, thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death.' Also 'There shall not be found with thee any consulter with a familiar spirit ... or a necromancer. Yahweh thy G.o.d doth drive them out before thee.' And, finally, amongst the laws of war, 'of the cities of these people (Hitt.i.te, Amorite, Canaanite, Perizzite, Hivite, Jebusite) thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth, as Yahweh thy G.o.d hath commanded thee' (xii. 2-5; xiii. 6, 9; xviii. 10-13; xx. 16, 17). Here we must remember that the immorality of these Canaanitish tribes and cults was of the grossest, indeed largely unnatural, kind; that it had copiously proved its terrible fascination for their kinsmen, the Jews; that these ancient Easterns, e.g. the a.s.syrians, were ruthlessly cruel at the storming of enemy cities; and especially that the morality and spirituality, thus saved for humanity from out of a putrid flood, was (in very deed) immensely precious. One point here is particularly far-sighted--the severe watchfulness against all animism, spiritualism, worship of the dead, things in which the environing world of the Jews' fellow Semites was steeped. The Israelitish-Jewish prophetic movement did not first attain belief in a Future Life, and then, through this, belief in G.o.d; but the belief in G.o.d, strongly hostile to all those spiritualisms, only very slowly, and not until the danger of any infusion of those naturalisms had become remote, led on the Jews to a realization of the soul's survival with a consciousness at least equal to its earthly aliveness. The Second Book of Kings (chaps. xxii, xxiii) gives a graphic account of King Josiah's rigorous execution of the Deuteronomic law.

The end of this most full second period is marked by the now rapid predominance of a largely technical priestly legislation and a corresponding conception of past history; by the inception of the Synagogue and the religion of the Book; but also by writings the most profound of any in the Old Testament, all presumably occasioned by the probing experiences of the Exile. In 597 and 586 B.C. Jerusalem is destroyed and the majority of the Jews are taken captives to Babylon; and in between (in 593) occurs the vocation of the prophet-priest Ezekiel, and his book is practically complete by 573 B.C. Here the prophecies as to the restoration are strangely detailed and schematic--already somewhat like the apocalyptic writers. Yet Ezekiel reveals to us deathless truths--the responsibility of the individual soul for its good and its evil, and G.o.d Himself as the Good Shepherd of the lost and the sick (xviii. 20-32; x.x.xiv. 1-6); he gives us the grand pictures of the resurrection unto life of the dead bones of Israel (chap. x.x.xvii), and of the waters of healing and of life which flow forth, ever deeper and wider, from beneath the Temple, and by their sweetness transform all sour waters and arid lands that they touch (xlvii. 1-12). A spirit and doctrine closely akin to those of Ezekiel produced the third, last, and most extensive development of the Pentateuchal legislation and doctrinal history--in about 560 B.C., the Law of Holiness (Lev., chaps. xvii-xxvi); and in about 500 B.C., the Priestly Code. As with Ezekiel's look forward, so here with these Priests' look backward, we have to recognize much schematic precision of dates, genealogies, and explanations instinct with technical interests.

The unity of sanctuary and the removal from the feasts and the worship of all traces of naturalism, which in Jeremiah, Deuteronomy, and the Second Book of Kings appear still as the subject-matters of intensest effort and conflict, are here a.s.sumed as operative even back to patriarchal times. Yet it can reasonably be pleaded that the life-work of Moses truly involved all this development; and even that Monotheism (at least, for the times and peoples here concerned) required some such rules as are a.s.sumed by P throughout.

And P gives us the great six days' Creation Story with its splendid sense of rational order pervasive of the Universe, the work of the all-reasonable G.o.d--its single parts good, its totality very good; and man and woman springing together from the Creator's will. But the writer nowhere indicates that he means long periods by the 'days'; each creation appears as effected in an instant, and these instants as separated from each other by but twenty-four hours.

In between Deuteronomy and the Priestly Code, or a little later still, lies probably the composition of three religious works full, respectively, of exultant thanksgiving, of the n.o.blest insight into the fruitfulness of suffering, and of the deepest questionings issuing in childlike trust in G.o.d. For an anonymous writer composes (say, in 550 B.C.) the great bulk of the magnificent chapters forty to fifty-five of our Book of Isaiah--a paean of spiritual exultation over the Jews'

proximate deliverance from exile by the Persian King Cyrus. In 538 B.C.

Cyrus issues the edict for the restoration to Judaea, and in 516 the Second Temple is dedicated. Within this great Consolation stand (xlii.

1-4; xlix. 1-6; l. 4-9; lii. 13-liii. 12) the four poems on the Suffering Servant of Yahweh--the tenderest revelation of the Old Testament--apparently written previously in the Exile, say in 570-560 B.C. The Old Law here reaches to the very feet of the New Law--to the Lamb of G.o.d who taketh away the sins of the world. And the Book of Job, in its chief const.i.tuents (chaps. i-x.x.xi, x.x.xviii-xlii), was probably composed when Greek influences began--say in about 480 B.C., the year of the battle of Thermopylae. The canonization of this daringly speculative book indicates finely how sensitive even the deepest faith and holiness can remain to the apparently unjust distribution of man's earthly lot.

Our second period ends in 444 B.C., when the priest and scribe Ezra solemnly proclaims, and receives the public subscription to, the Book of the Law of Moses--the Priestly Code, brought by him from Babylon.

The Jewish last period, from Ezra's Proclamation 444 B.C. to the completion of the Fourth Book of Ezra, about A.D. 95, is (upon the whole) derivative. Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah were absorbed in the realities of their own epoch-making times, and of G.o.d's universal governance of the world past and future; Daniel now, with practically all the other Apocalyptic writers in his train, is absorbed in those earlier prophecies, and in ingenious speculations and precise computations as to the how and the when of the world's ending. The Exile had given rise to the Synagogue, and had favoured the final development and codifying of the Mosaic law; the seventy years intermission of the Temple sacrifices and symbolic acts had turned the worship, which had been so largely visible, dramatic, social, into the praying, singing, reading, preaching of extant texts, taken as direct and final rules for all thought and action, and as incapable of additions or interpretations equal in value to themselves. Yet thus priceless treasures of spiritual truth and light were handed down to times again aglow with great--the greatest religious gifts and growths; and indeed this literature itself introduced various conceptions or images destined to form a largely fitting, and in the circ.u.mstances attractive, garment for the profound further realities brought by Christianity.

In the Book of Daniel (written somewhere between 163 and 165 B.C.) all earthly events appear as already inscribed in the heavenly books (vii.

10), and the events which have still really to come consist in the complete and speedy triumph of the Church-State Israel against King Antiochus Epiphanes. But here we get the earliest clear proclamation of a heightened life beyond death--though not yet for all (xii. 2). The n.o.ble vision of the four great beasts that came up from the sea, and of one like unto a Son of Man that came with the clouds of heaven (chap.

vii), doubtless here figures the earthly kingdoms, Babel, Media, Persia, Greece (Alexander), and G.o.d's kingdom Israel. The Psalter appears to have been closed as late as 140 B.C.; some Psalms doubtless date back to 701--a few perhaps to David himself, about 1000 B.C. The comminatory Psalms, even if spoken as by representatives of G.o.d's Church and people, we cannot now echo within our own spiritual life; any heightened consciousness after death is frequently denied (e.g. vi. 5: 'in the grave who shall give thee thanks?' and cxv. 17: 'the dead praise not the Lord')--we have seen the impressive reason of this; and perhaps a quarter of the Psalms are doubles, or pale imitations of others. But, for the rest, the Psalter remains as magnificently fresh and powerful as ever: culminating in the glorious self-commitment (Ps. lxxiii), 'I was as a beast before Thee. Nevertheless I am continually with Thee. Whom have I in heaven but Thee, and there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee.' The keen sense, present throughout this amazingly rich collection, of the reality, prevenience, presence, protection--of the central importance for man, of G.o.d, the All-Abiding, finds thus its full, deathless articulation.

Religiously slighter, yet interesting as a preparation for Christian theology, are the writings of Philo, a devout, Greek-trained Jew of Alexandria, who in A.D. 40 appeared before the Emperor Caligula in Rome.

Philo does not feel his daringly allegorical sublimations as any departures from the devoutest Biblical faith. Thus 'G.o.d never ceases from action; as to burn is special to fire, so is action to G.o.d'--this in spite of G.o.d's rest on the seventh day (Gen. ii. 2). 'There exist two kinds of men: the heavenly man and the earthly man.'[42] The long Life of Moses[43] represents him as the King, Lawgiver, High Priest, Prophet, Mediator. The Word, the Logos (which here everywhere hovers near, but never reaches, personality) is 'the firstborn son of G.o.d', 'the image of G.o.d'[44]; its types are 'the Rock', the Manna, the High Priest's Coat; it is 'the Wine Pourer and Master of the Drinking Feast of G.o.d'.[45] The majority of the Jews, who did not accept Jesus as the Christ, soon felt they had no need for so much allegory, and dropped it, with advantage upon the whole, to the Jewish faith. But already St. Paul and the Fourth Gospel find here n.o.ble mental raiment for the great new facts revealed by Jesus Christ.

2. The Christian Religion we will take, as to our points, at four stages of its development--Synoptic, Johannine, Augustinian, Thomistic.

The Synoptic material here specially concerned we shall find especially in Mark i. 1 to xv. 47; but also in Matt. iii. 1 to xxvii. 56, and in Luke iii. 1 to xxiii. 56. Within the material thus marked off, there is no greater or lesser authenticity conferred by treble, or double, or only single attestation; for this material springs from two original sources--a collection primarily of doings and sufferings, which our Mark incorporates with some expansions; and a collection primarily of discourses, utilized especially by Matthew and Luke in addition to the original Mark. Both these sources contain the records of eyewitnesses, probably Saints Peter and Matthew.

The chronological order and the special occasions of the growths in our Lord's self-manifestation, or in the self-consciousness of His human soul, are most carefully given by Mark and next by Luke. Matthew largely ignores the stages and occasions of both these growths, and a.s.sumes, as fully explicit from the beginning of the Ministry, what was manifested only later on or at the last; and he already introduces ecclesiastical and Christological terms and discriminations which, however really implicit as to their substance in Jesus's teaching, or inevitable (as to their particular form) for the maintenance and propagation of Christianity in the near future, are nevertheless still absent from the accounts of Mark and Luke.

The chief rules for the understanding of the specific character of our Lord's revelation appear to be the following. The life and teaching must be taken entire; and, within this entirety, each stage must be apprehended in its own special peculiarities. The thirty years in the home, the school, the synagogue, the workshop at Nazareth, form a profoundly important const.i.tuent of His life and teaching--impressively contrasted, as they are, with the probably not full year of the Public Ministry, even though we are almost completely bereft of all details for those years of silent preparation.

The Public Ministry, again, consists of two strongly contrasted stages, divided by the great scene of Jesus with the Apostles alone at Caesarea Philippi (Mark viii. 27-33; Luke ix. 18-22; Matt. xvi. 13-23). The stage before is predominantly expansive, hopeful, peacefully growing; the stage after, is concentrated, sad, in conflict, and in storm. To the first stage belong the plant parables, full of exquisite sympathy with the unfolding of natural beauty and of slow fruitfulness; to the second stage belong the parables of keen watchfulness and of the proximate, sudden second coming. Both movements are essential to the physiognomy of our Lord. And they are not simply differences in self-manifestation; they represent a growth, a relatively new element, in His human soul's experience and outlook.

The central doctrine in the teaching is throughout the Kingdom of G.o.d.

But in the first stage this central doctrine appears as especially upheld by Jesus's fundamental experience--the Fatherhood of G.o.d. In the second stage the central doctrine appears as especially coloured by Jesus's other great experience--of Himself as the Son of Man. In the earlier stage the Kingdom is presented more in the spirit of the ancient prophets, as predominantly ethical, as already come in its beginnings, and as subject to laws a.n.a.logous to those obtaining in the natural world. In the second stage the coming of the Kingdom is presented more with the form of the apocalyptic writers, in a purely religious, intensely transcendent, and dualistic outlook--especially this also in the Parables of Immediate Expectation--as not present but future (Matt.

xix. 28); not distant but imminent (Matt. xvi. 28; xxiv. 33; xxvi. 64); not gradual but sudden (Matt. xxiv. 27, 39, 43); not at all achieved by man but purely given by G.o.d (so still in Rev. xxi. 10).

To the earlier stage belongs the great Rejoicing of Jesus (Matt. xi.

25-30; Luke x. 21, 22). The splendid opening, 'I thank Thee, Father--for so it hath seemed good in Thy sight', and the exquisite close, special to Matthew, 'Come unto Me--and my burthen is light', raise no grave difficulty. But the intermediate majestic declaration, 'All things are delivered unto Me by the Father--neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him', causes critical perplexities.

I take this declaration to be modelled upon actual words of Jesus, which genuinely implied rather than clearly proclaimed a unique relation between the Father and Himself. Numerous other words and acts involve such a relation and Jesus's full consciousness of it. His first public act, His baptism, is clearly described by Mark as a personal experience, 'He saw the heavens opened' and heard a heavenly voice 'Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased' (i. 10, 11). Already in the first stage Jesus declares the Baptist to be 'more than a prophet'

(Matt. xi. 9), yet claims superiority over him and over Solomon (xi. 11; xii. 42). His doctrine is new wine requiring new bottles (Mark ii. 22); indeed His whole att.i.tude towards the law is that of a superior, who most really exhorts all, 'Learn of Me'. And soon after Caesarea Philippi He insists to the people: 'Whosoever shall be ashamed of Me in this generation, of him also shall the Son of Man be ashamed, when He cometh in the glory of the Father' (Mark viii. 38). The most numerous cures, physical, psychical, moral, certainly performed by Him, appear as the spontaneous effect of a unique degree and kind of spiritual authority; and the sinlessness attributed to Him throughout by the apostolic community (2 Cor. v. 21; Heb. iv. 15; John viii. 46; 1 John ii. 29) entirely corresponds to the absence, in the records of Him, of all traits indicating troubles of conscience and the corresponding fear of G.o.d. And this His unique Sonship is conjoined, in the earliest picture of Him, with an endless variety and combination of all the joys, admirations, affections, disappointments, desolations, temptations possible to such a stainless human soul and will. We thus find here a comprehensiveness unlike the att.i.tude of the Baptist or St. Paul, and like, although far exceeding, the joy in nature and the peace in suffering of St. Francis of a.s.sisi.

The Second Stage opens with the great scene at Caesarea Philippi and its sequel (given with specially marked successiveness in Mark viii. 27-x.

45), when, for the first time in a manner beyond all dispute, Mark represents Jesus as adopting the designation 'the Son of Man' in a Messianic and eschatological sense. For our Lord here promptly corrects Peter's conception of 'Messiah' by repeated insistence upon 'the Son of Man'--His glory yet also His sufferings. Thus Jesus adopts the term of Daniel vii. 13 (which already the Apocalypse of Enoch had understood of a personal Messiah) as a succinct description of His specific vocation--its heavenly origin and difference from all earthly Messianism; its combination of the depths of human weakness, dereliction, sufferings with the highest elevation in joy, power and glory; and its connexion of that pain with this triumph as strictly interrelated--only with and through the Cross, was there here the offer and acceptance of the Crown.