§ 1

The idea of the good life in the religious tradition of the Jews is a much more familiar matter to us than that which is to be found in the nations of the remoter East, or even among the Greeks. For the last fifty years books based upon a critical study of the Old Testament documents have been pouring from the press; and for the most part their drift is identical, and their sense of the world’s debt to the ethical monotheism of Israel is expressed in similar terms. No one who has any belief in a superintendent Providence in the world’s history would be inclined to doubt that a special providence was at work to preserve Jewish nationality from extinction, in spite of the overwhelming risks which it ran in its rough history of being absorbed into more powerful empires; nor could anyone who believes in a divine providence doubt that the purpose of this protection of Israel was that its faith, which it had at last learned to guard so jealously, might become available for the nations of the earth when it had been emancipated from a narrow nationalism.

Moreover, we have learned to see that this attitude of special reverence towards the Old Testament is not dependent on any such belief in its inspiration as would make it equivalent to historical infallibility, or would hinder us from recognizing in the literature of the Jews the features which are common to all national histories. I will confess myself to be a conservative critic. I mean, for instance, that, while recognizing to the full that in the Pentateuch a great deal is attributed to Moses, the great founder of Jewish nationality, which was in fact elaborated in a gradual historical process, the stages of which we can trace more or less clearly in the literature, yet I find it difficult to doubt that the fundamentally ethical character of Israel’s worship of Jehovah must be traced back to its Founder, and that the prophets, of whose ministry authentic records remain to us, were really, as they believed themselves to be, in the succession of Moses, while the popular non-ethical religion which they denounced—the religion of the Canaanite Baals, adapted to the worship of Jehovah—really represented a lapse from what Moses had taught to his people.

Nevertheless, criticism is right in bidding us start in our investigation of the history and religion of the Jews from the written prophets, as from the most solid historical ground, that is, from Amos and Hosea and Isaiah and Micah, and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and the second Isaiah; and right in bidding us recognize in the message of these great men a teaching which, through a long period profoundly unpopular, finally, through the catastrophe of the Captivity, won a supreme victory and became the acknowledged glory of the Jewish people. Gradually and finally it penetrated all their literature—its folk-lore, its legends, its history, its cultus, its ethics, its wisdom, its poetry—and gave to the Hebrew Bible a unity and intensity such as belongs to no other national literature.1

I do not propose to attempt an answer to the question of how much exactly of the whole final complex of Jewish religion was “borrowed” from other nations with whom they came in contact. The Hebrews appear in the historical scene in the midst of a world penetrated by Babylonian culture, and no one can doubt that its influence, as represented in the legislation of Hammurabi,2 was very great on the Jewish social law. Again, we cannot doubt that S. Chrysostom was right when he described the material of Jewish religious rites—” the sacrifices, the cleansings, the new-moons, the ark and the temple itself,” as derived from their pagan background.3

From Egypt, however, they certainly did not derive the spirit either of their religion or of their worship, and what they derived from the Canaanites, with a lamentable freedom, was in great part precisely what the prophets finally succeeded in excluding from the religious tradition of Israel. Prophecy itself had its origin in a sub-rational kind of religious frenzy, common to many nations; and it would seem that the mass of the prophets in Israel—whom (what we call) the “true prophets” are in the habit of denouncing, and from whom they peremptorily distinguish themselves—remained down to the captivity on the same low level. Amos, Hosea and their successors owed very little to this class or to its traditions. Thus the real religion of the Jews with its accompanying conception of the good life for man—all that formed the basis of the religion of Jesus—was essentially a native growth, and was already in being in all essential points before the Jews came in contact, on their restoration from captivity, with the religion of Persia.

During the Persian period—on which we have little historical light—Judaism seems to have assimilated elements from Persian religion, especially a developed belief in angels, while it studiously refused the element of ultimate dualism which had become so prominent a feature in the Persian creed. Later, in Hellenistic times, the book of the Wisdom of Solomon shows how much of Platonism a loyal Jew could make his own, and the Book of Proverbs borrows from Hellenistic and probably from Egyptian “wisdom.” It is a grave mistake to attempt to minimize the borrowings of Judaism, or later of Christianity. Any real belief in one God must be a belief in His universal presence and the universal activity of His Spirit, and a religion of the true God ought to be able to show its affinity with the higher wisdom of all peoples; that is to say, it ought to give evidence of its divine origin by its power of assimilating truth wherever it comes in contact with it. When we come to review the results of our whole historical enquiry, we shall need to lay stress on this consideration. But what it is important to recognize at this stage is that substantially—in spite of their marked resemblance to the religion and the ethics of Zarathustra—the religion and ethics of Israel were indisputably in all their essential qualities a native growth, rightly attributed in their origin to Moses, but fashioned under our eyes in authentic history by the great prophets—who spoke, not as philosophers who had thought and arrived at certain conclusions of their own, but as men who were constrained to speak as they did under the pressure of the Spirit of Jehovah.

I will only add that those of us who hold that nothing can adequately account for the teaching of the prophets of Israel, except a belief that they were really inspired of God, can hardly find any ground for doubting that Zoroaster was equally an inspired man. But there is this marked difference. In succession to Zoroaster we find no signs of a like inspiration. We see his lofty religion being swallowed up in superstition. What is unique in Jewish history is the spectacle of a great prophetic tradition from Amos to Malachi or Joel, extending over centuries and constantly maintaining and elaborating, through the mouths of men of very different personal characteristics, a substantially identical doctrine about God and human duty, till it becomes indestructibly embodied in a whole literature which, as culminating in the New Testament, becomes the basis of a religion for the world; and which in its earliest Christian form showed its power to assimilate—what in the world’s literature comes nearest to it—the long tradition of Greek philosophy.

§ 2

There are certain features of the religion of Israel, and of the ethics based upon their religious beliefs, which we do well to notice before we attempt, with something more of detail, to describe its character.

(1) First that religion, and the good life based upon the religion, was, as Ewald says, the one all-absorbing quest in Israel. Of their art—the art, for example, of Bazalel and Oholiab, who are described as “full of the spirit of God,” to work in precious metals and precious stones and woven fabrics for the adornment of the tabernacle,4 or the art of Huram, of mixed Israelitish and Tyrian origin, who fashioned the furniture of Solomon’s temple5—we know nothing. The Herodian architecture of later days, so far as we can judge, owed little to Jewish genius.

Again, if an exhaustive science of nature is ascribed to Solomon in the Book of Wisdom,6 that is due to the imagination of a Hellenized Jew. Israel made no early contribution to science like Babylonians or Egyptians or Greeks. Again, they contributed nothing to political science, and they show no interest in theological or metaphysical speculation. In poetry indeed, and in the art of narration, they reach the highest level, but both their poetry and their prose narratives and their proverbial literature are concerned with the one theme of religion and its ethical fruits. It is a single debt which mankind owes to Israel—not indeed to them only, but to them in an eminent degree. Athanasius’s estimate of them is justified—that they were (through the prophets) “the sacred school of the knowledge of God and of the spiritual life for all mankind”—or at least, up to the present, for a very large and important section of mankind.

(2) Their religion was ethical through and through, and not in its main character ritualistic. The earlier prophets, indeed, finding the popular cultus non-moral or immoral, like that of the peoples round about them, speak of it with contempt. Their fierce denunciations of idolatry or image-making, and their depreciation of material sacrifices, were doubtless due to their abhorrence of the religions with which they were familiar, which were morally worthless or corrupting. Later, under the guidance especially of the Book of Deuteronomy and the prophesying of Ezekiel, a synthesis was effected between the traditional sacrificial cultus and the ethical religion of the prophets; and the specially priestly portions of the Old Testament, such as a great part of the Pentateuch and the Books of Chronicles, show an enthusiastic veneration for exact ceremonial. In many of the Psalms, again—those which may properly be called Psalms of the Sanctuary—we find the highest spirituality associated with the worship of the Temple. Such close association of spiritual religion with sacrificial worship may have maintained itself over periods of Jewish history of which we know little.

But in the centuries which intervene between the triumphant success of the Maccabæan revolt and the time of our Lord, it does not appear as if the priesthood or the Temple was the real centre of religion in Israel: that is to be found in the influence of the Scribes and the Pharisees, who came to be fiercely opposed to the priest-kings, and later to the Sadducean family who occupied the priesthood and had charge of the Temple. The religion of the Pharisees, while of course observant of the sacrificial rites, centred in the Synagogue worship rather than in the Temple. The strict observances which they accepted and inculcated were connected rather with details of personal and domestic life than with sacrificial worship. The marked alienation of Jesus from a religion of minute and punctilious observances is, we shall remark, uncoloured by any depreciation of priesthood or sacrifice. There is, in his teaching, strangely little attention given to the latter. In this respect the religion of Israel is like the religion, not indeed of Zoroastrianism but of Zoroaster himself: it was predominantly ethical. And this was a very rare feature indeed in ancient religions.

(3) The religion of Israel in the Old Testament is seen in process of development. In the theology of the Fathers of the Christian Church, especially the Greek-speaking Fathers, this point is seized upon and emphasized. I think I am right in saying that the recognition of gradual development, as the characteristic of the method of God, is more distinctly found among them than anywhere else in antiquity.7 The original creative act of God was, they thought, the creation of something germinal, which would gradually unfold into the differentiated world of life, as we know it. Man, again, was not created perfect, but with such an equipment as would enable him to advance towards perfection. And man’s education, as we find it in the Old Testament, proceeded gradually. On this line of thought they explained the moral problems which the Old Testament presents. If they found commandments attributed to God—like the commandment given to Abraham to sacrifice his son or the commandments to sacrifice indiscriminately whole populations—which in days of greater light could not have been given or could not have been attributed to God, that, they held, was because the people were being led by gradual stages upwards to “the true philosophy.” The justification of this divine method lies in its results—in the very fact that we can now reprobate in the name of God what was in earlier days conceded or enjoined. All the laws concerning animal and vegetable sacrifices are explained by the same method. God did not so much enjoin or command as tolerate such concessions to ignorant customs, and the test of such a progressive method is to be found in the attainment of its goal.

All this is very consonant with modern ideas. We feel that it is very unfortunate that later theology overlaid these evolutionary conceptions with more static conceptions of the divine method. But we have been learning of late years that the actual development, whether of physical organisms or of individuals or of ideas or of civilizations, is not by any means always on the upward road. Nature and history are alike full of the evidences of declension. Catastrophe is as possible as advance. This was certainly the case in the development of religious and ethical ideas among the Jews. You can indeed trace a clear development from Amos to the second Isaiah.

Thus Amos’s conception of Jehovah as the God of universal nature and the just ruler of all peoples is a great advance upon the idea of Jehovah as the God of the land of Israel, with a limited jurisdiction not seemingly extending downwards even to Sheol, such as we find in earlier days. Thus, again, Hosea8 pronounces the condemnation by God of the bloody slaughter of the whole house of Ahab by Jehu, which the chronicler of Jehu’s reign regarded as the command of God. Again, the sense of the equal value and responsibility of each individual soul only emerges in Ezekiel, and with this comes the dawning of the sense of man’s immortality and of the resurrection. But the advance is not continuous. There is here advance and there retrogression.

Thus in Isaiah (xix. 19-25) we see a magnificent universalism in his conception of the religion of Jehovah. Israel is to be one with Egypt and with Assyria. In the second Isaiah the Servant-People of Jehovah are to be evangelists of all the world. The eighty-seventh psalm contemplates all nations as destined to call Jerusalem their mother.9 The Book of Jonah extends the welcome of Jehovah and His free forgiveness to the most hostile of peoples, if only they will listen to His word. But this high level is not maintained. A narrow nationalism revives and tends to prevail. What is contemplated is the bloody triumph of Israel over all other nations rather than the inclusion of them. The Pharisaic Psalms of Solomon, dating about 50 b.c., are content with such a vision. Moreover, the prophetic succession closes under the Persian dominion. There is “no prophet more”; and the successor of the prophets is not so much the priest in the Temple as the scribe in charge of the Sacred Book of the Law, who is occupied in interpreting, and in the process enlarging, the prescriptions of the Books of Moses till they form a minute network over the whole surface of Jewish life, and formalism takes the place of inspiration. It is certainly not the case that the religion of Israel in the last centuries of our era—the religion of Israel as dominated by the Pharisees—was that religion at its best. It had long been on the down grade.

§ 3

It has been necessary to entertain these preliminary considerations so that the prophetic religion of Israel and the conception of the good life based upon it may be set in the proper context. The conception in all its grandeur is exceedingly simple, and is rooted in the idea of Jehovah. There are no limits to the divine absoluteness. All local limitations of Jehovah’s jurisdiction are repudiated. He is the one God of the whole universe of being. There is no place left for any rival God or co-existent matter. He is the absolute creator of all that exists, visible or invisible, material or spiritual. There is no antagonism between souls and bodies. No such absoluteness of statement about God is to be found in Zoroaster or in Plato.

Moreover, the messages of the prophets are given not as the conclusion of reasoning but as the word of God. That word sometimes came to them through the medium of a vision in a trance, but that does not appear to be by any means usual. All we can say is that the intuition of certain truths, which the prophets experience and are compelled to utter, they experience not as derived from any reflection of their own but from something speaking inwardly in their hearts which they recognize as God’s own utterance—so sharply distinguished from their own ideas that they sometimes appear as in conversation with God, remonstrating with God, and even as reluctantly submitting to be the instrument of His will.

This supreme and transcendent God is absolutely righteous, so much so that there is nothing He really demands of men but righteousness, and there cannot possibly exist any form of costly sacrifice or any expedient of magical knowledge which can for an instant be supposed capable of inducing him to depart in his judgment from perfect righteousness. That righteousness must show itself in judgment on sin, because sin is rebellion against God; but God has no pleasure in condemning or punishing. His righteousness is love—a love greater than that of a mother to its child or a husband to a wife, and such as involves an impartial care of each individual Israelite, even of each individual human being.

In the earlier stages of prophecy and history indeed, the thought is merely of the people as a whole, as consecrated to Jehovah; and there is little to remind us of the distinct worth and responsibility of the individual, save of those individuals who represent the nation, that is, kings and prophets and priests. The constantly reiterated lesson is that if the nation, regarded as a whole, will keep Jehovah and His declared will for them constantly in mind, and will carefully keep His commandments, then the nation will be prosperous and happy. But the one God of their worship is a God who will not tolerate a divided allegiance in His people. He is a jealous God, and He treats the nation in its succession of generations as a whole: “He visits the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate him, and shows mercy unto thousands of them that love him and keep his commandments.” This double-edged assurance, though it appeals to experience, is plainly not based upon experience. It is based simply upon “the word of God” and the conviction that, God being what He is, so it must be.

It is important that we should still in our day recognize the permanent truth of this assurance. If we seriously set to work to analyse the causes of national miseries and failures, we are, I believe, bound to recognize that among the causes of these catastrophes incomparably the chief is sin—the refusal of men in the mass to set themselves seriously to do right. Is it not a simple truth that if our British nation to-day would in the mass seriously determine to keep the moral law, to be just and truthful, unselfish and kind to all, self-restrained in respect of sensual indulgence, and industrious and thoughtful in its activities, all our social miseries and deformities would speedily vanish, or be reduced at least within very measurable proportions? But the mysterious fact is that mankind in the mass will not so act even though they faintly recognize that such is the will of God. Meanwhile, the law of judgment on society—the law which the famous agnostic Huxley used to declare as unflinchingly as any ancient prophet—” that fixed order of nature which sends social disorganization upon the track of immorality, as surely as it sends physical disease after physical trespasses,” so that it is “the high mission” of science “to be the priestess of a firm and lively faith” in that fixed moral order—that law works with a fearful disregard of individual differences. The righteous suffer with the guilty. They often seem to suffer more than the guilty.

One of the deepest elements of interest in the Old Testament lies in the passionate and profound expression which it gives to the experience of the righteous soul seemingly forgotten and tormented of God. That became the central problem for the religion of Israel. Though the idea of vicarious suffering emerges into recognition, yet the problem of pain is not solved. Individual responsibility and worth is indeed fully recognized by Ezekiel and in the Psalms and Wisdom literature, but till late in the history of Israel, throughout the bulk of the Old Testament, the assumption continues that the justice of God, His dealing with men strictly according to their deserts, must be vindicated in this life.

It is a most remarkable fact that whereas in so many religions, such as Zarathustra’s, the belief in a future life was part of their substance from the first, the opposite was the case with Israel. Not indeed that they did not retain some dim belief in a world of shadowy souls in Sheol; but this world below was, it would seem, outside the jurisdiction of Jehovah and altogether dark. All their religious faith was concentrated on this world. This concentration was what gave effectiveness to its intensely ethical character. In the conduct here and now of His chosen people the righteousness of their God had to be manifested and His justice had to vindicate itself.

The strain, however, became intolerable, and the belief in resurrection of the dead and the life beyond emerged in the later stages of Israel’s religion on this quite distinctive basis—not as a thing borrowed from Persia or Babylon—but as a growth out of its own soul. The root of the new belief was threefold. It emerged out of the sense of the justice of God—because experience forced the conclusion that God must have some wider area than this world in which to vindicate Himself. “Though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet without my flesh I shall see God.”10 We see this belief established in the age of the Maccabæan martyrs.

It emerged secondly, and we feel it emerging in the Psalms, out of the developed sense of personal religion, the personal relation of the soul to God. “God is not a God of the dead, but of the living; for all live unto him.” It cannot be that the souls of men who are taken up into such intimacy of fellowship with God are to be thrust out into nothingness by death. Surely “I shall behold thy face in righteousness: I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness.”11

Thirdly, it emerged as part of the confident expectation of a kingdom of God to come—that the ideal Israel was, after all disappointments, to be finally realized. Then surely it could not be that those who had laboured and fought and failed and died in the cause of Israel should have no part in that glorious day? Such is the motive of the cry of Isaiah. “Thy dead shall live; my dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust.”12

We need not concern ourselves with the critical question as to the precise moment in Israel’s history when the belief in the life beyond and the resurrection from the dead emerged, or in what form precisely. In some respects the belief as it lies behind the Gospels may have owed something to Persian influences. But substantially it was a thoroughly native growth out of the heart of Jewish religion.

The same is true of the belief in the Kingdom of God or the final vindication of Israel. It is a mistake to say that the phrase “the kingdom of God,” which seems to appear first in the New Testament, means merely “the sovereignty of God.” If we examine the meaning of the idea in the New Testament, or trace it to its root in the Old Testament, our conclusion will be the same. The Kingdom of God means His sovereignty as at last to be realized in Israel and through Israel in all the world. The assurance of the prophets is that as surely as God is God He must finally come into His own; and as Israel is His child and His instrument, Israel—under its king of David’s line13—must be vindicated over all its enemies; and this triumphant Israel can be only a morally perfect Israel, an Israel worthy of its God, under a king truly godlike or divine; and as the whole world is God’s, so this perfected Israel, centring in the New Jerusalem and its ideal king, must find a world perfectly adapted to it. This Messianic expectation, in all its elements, we find in very familiar and very glorious passages of the prophets. It is regarded as indisputably bound up with faith in the righteous God.

There are other elements in the expectation which make the enhanced fellowship with God more evident. There is to be a wholly new outpouring of the Spirit of God upon the Anointed King and upon the whole people; and a new Covenant written in their hearts. Mostly in the prophets the realization of the great hope is anticipated in the more or less immediate future. The glory of Israel is seen as the immediate sequel to the annihilation of some particular enemy of God and His people—be it Assyria or Edom, or Babylon. But this did not happen. Then this anticipated judgment of God upon His enemies tends to be generalized. It is thrown upon the background of a cosmic catastrophe, and more and more, as the hope of a military triumph for Israel becomes a dream, the apocalyptic element becomes intensified. We need not pursue the subject here. The only point with which we are here concerned is that in the religion of Israel the belief in the one Good God is absolutely identified with the assurance that in this world—albeit a transformed world—whatever the cosmic catastrophe through which it must pass—God is to come into His own, and Israel purged and made righteous, and finding its centre in a New Jerusalem, is to be vindicated as the people of God.

It should be added that, while the conception of the spirituality of God and His spiritual omnipresence reaches its climax in such passages as the 139th Psalm and in the second Isaiah, this is not felt to be inconsistent with the idea that God is in some intensified sense present in His Tabernacle or His Temple.

§ 4

What is the effect of this lofty monotheism upon the idea of the good life for man? First, it should be noticed that no interest appears to be taken in harmonizing the strong sense of the omnipotence and omniscience of God, and the idea of divine predestination in all human history, with the correlative idea of human responsibility, involving, as it does, the present freedom of man to resist God, or, in the forcible language of Isaiah, to “make God serve with his sins.”

The two correlatives are emphasized side by side just as in Stoicism. Though the obstinately wicked may be regarded as finally “hardened” by God and, so to speak, committed to sin, this is not allowed to obscure the real freedom of man. “Behold, I have set before thee life and death, blessing and cursing,” God says to the nation in Deuteronomy, “therefore choose life”; and the same awful freedom of choice is emphasized for the individual will by Ezekiel and in Ecclesiasticus—“Stretch forth thy hand to whether thou likest.”

The sense of the universal fact of sin, as following from this freedom misused, and of the disorder in God’s world which it generates, is everywhere evident. But the responsibility for it lies with the sinners. When the idea of Satan and other malevolent spirits comes to be fully assimilated, as was the case before New Testament times, it is accompanied and explained by the conception of a fall of the angels from an original righteousness. There can be no being created evil. Moral evil is only lawlessness—the violation of divine law by the rebel will of man or of other spirits.

Physical evil, taken by itself, does not appear to be felt as a problem, or to be in any way explained, except so far as it is identified with divine judgments; but the responsibility for moral evil is wholly laid on the created wills. Thus the world is viewed as a great scene in which there is evident a divine purpose for good destined at last to triumph, but at present thwarted by human wilfulness—a scene, however, in which man, made in the divine image, is constantly called to co-operate with God. In all this region the doctrine is the same as appears in Zoroaster’s Gâthâs. In both alike co-operation with God means specially moral co-operation. There is no approach to God—no doing of the work of God—except by keeping His moral commandments, which are the expression of His essential character.

From Amos downwards, as has been said, it is realized that God is the God of all the earth, and that all men, and not Israel only, are called to be just and merciful like God or to suffer punishment. But while Zarathustra shows no signs of a belief in a “chosen” people, that sense dominates the Old Testament. It expresses itself in the terrific requirements of extirpation for alien races, regarded as involved in hopeless wickedness; and, within the circle of the chosen people, in the commands to extirpate such an evil family as the house of Ahab, which is akin to the external adversaries and has “made Israel to sin.” It is, however, always represented that in proportion to the closeness of covenanted relation in which Israel stands towards God, is the severity of God’s requirement and judgment upon her.

But what underlies all such terrible curses laid upon sinful man is the sense of the unchangeable righteousness of God, in conformity to which man must live or perish. Especially within Israel, the sense of the mercy of God, as a constant element in His righteousness, involving the like mercy in man towards his fellow-men, is very prominent. Nothing is more beautiful in the law and the prophets and the Psalms and the Wisdom literature than the requirement of mercy for the poor and helpless. There is no “respect of persons” with God, and God seeth the heart. No sacrifices, no devices of any kind, can shield from the judgment of God the “grinding of the faces of the poor.” And a number of features in the law, such as the prohibition of usury or of the permanent alienation of lands, and the restrictions on slavery, are conceived simply in the interests of the poor and defenceless. Finally, as the result of painful experience of the effects of wealth on character, the idea of “the saints” comes to be identified with that of “the humble poor.”

Thus associated with the prophetic demand for mercy is that for humility, and the accompanying horror of human insolence which the Hebrews shared with the Greeks. National and individual pride is mercilessly chastised. Unlike any other national literature, the Old Testament denounces from end to end the wilfulness and pride of the chosen people. They owe nothing to their own merits or their own power. They deserve nothing but evil. Insolent self-satisfaction or self-reliance is an abomination. No passages in the Old Testament are more splendid than the denunciations of pride, whether of intellect or will.

While the restraints laid by the law upon sensual lust are by no means up to the highest standard, and are framed in view of “the hardness of men’s hearts,” they seem in fact to have produced a people more moral in respect of sexual indulgence than can be found elsewhere. And the like may be said of the requirements of strict justice in the matters of buying and selling.

All the mass of prophetic exhortations and legal enactments and religious poetry is irradiated with beautiful touches which admit one to the inner life of the good man, who not only fears to do evil, but still more loves to do good and finds his delight in the loving fellowship of God; and though for the most part it must be admitted that the motive of the fear of God is more prominent in the Hebrew conception of the good life than the motive of love; and the sense of the inevitable divine judgment upon wickedness of all kinds is the keynote of the whole collection of the sacred books of Israel; yet this salutary fear is never (after the teaching of the prophets begins) expressed as if the terror of the Lord were the terror of something unknown, arbitrary and unintelligible.14 Always, though “clouds and darkness are round about Him,” His character and motive are known. What He looks for is righteousness, purity, justice, mercy, truth.

Viewed, then, as containing a presentation of the good life for man, the Old Testament reaches a very high level. It is imperfect. It is a religion for a particular nation rather than for mankind, though its broadening out into a religion for all mankind is contemplated. It is savage in its expression of the divine judgment on the enemies of Israel. But in considering its imperfections, it must be remembered that it is throughout presented to us as conscious of its imperfection. It looks forward to a better day—to a fuller light, and more perfect and spiritual covenant, a completer inspiration of the divine spirit.

We may illustrate this by a more particular examination of the central document of Jewish morality, the Ten Words. They are obviously imperfect; they are, not exclusively but mainly, negative, and they were, in fact, drastically revised by the greatest of the sons of Israel, Jesus of Nazareth. But revised in His spirit, taken back behind the act to the motive and spirit of the action and converted from negative to positive precepts, they are found fairly to cover the whole realm of public and private morality; and in the highest ethical reaches of the Old Testament, this deepening and conversion of their meaning, such as appears more constantly under the “new covenant,” is already in principle almost accomplished.

If the laws of the Second Table correspond with the commandments formulated by the Buddha for his monks and laymen, yet an essentially different spirit is introduced into the Ten Commandments in Israel by the First Table. The unique supremacy of the one God, the concentration of all worship on Him, and the exclusion of all idolatry, all attempts to represent God or worship Him in sensible forms, separate off the religion of Israel from all the non-moral religions around them, and from their spirit of indiscriminate toleration one of another. Israel’s life is to be based, strictly and fixedly, on the recognition of the righteous Jehovah as the only God, the absolute creator of all that is, transcendent and unrepresentable by any earthly form. This positive side of the first two commandments appears in Deuteronomy as “the first and great commandment” recalled by Jesus. The third commandment, prohibiting the taking of the sacred name in vain, is deepened by Christ into the law of absolute truthfulness in speech; but it is found already so converted in the Psalms and Wisdom books. The fourth commandment consists of three laws—the law of work, the law of rest in connection with the Sabbath, and the law of fellowship in the recognition that all men and even animals are to share the same privilege of repose. The generalized law of work enunciated by St. Paul—“If a man will not work neither let him eat”—is quite in the spirit of the Old Testament. The law of the Sabbath rest finds fullest expression in the Christian association of rest with worship, which again is anticipated in the Psalms; and the law of fellowship, deepened and expanded in the New Testament, is found in fuller form (again in Deuteronomy) in the “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” which Christ found sufficient.

Again, the law of obedience to parents, the emphasis on which is as characteristic of Judaism as of Chinese religion, is maintained and also enlarged in the New Testament as a general law of social order and mutual submission and humility, and such enlargement can be found already in the Wisdom books of the Jews. The law prohibiting murder is already found deepened to a requirement of positive goodness, in the Psalms and elsewhere, in the spirit of Christ. So the prohibition of adultery is already interpreted in the general sense of a requirement of an all-round control of sexual passion—the prohibition of stealing as a general requirement of honesty and honour in mutual relations—the prohibition of false witness as a law which lies upon the tongue to allow no speech which is not kindly—and the final prohibition of coveting thy neighbour’s good as a general condemnation of the acquisitive temper.

The Ten Words, then, no doubt represent an imperfect stage of moral education; but, deepened and enlarged in the spirit in which Christ dealt with them, they represent a remarkably complete scheme of moral requirements based on the pro-foundest motive; and the Jewish books show such deepening and enlargement already operating in the best minds of Israel. In a word, the ethical achievement of Israel cannot be justly disparaged; nor can any sacred book or collection of books in any nation rival the power and psychological insight with which the moral education of a nation and of individuals is exhibited, and illustrated with fascinating stories, in the Jewish Bible.

• 1.

  Ewald, whose History of Israel dates from 1843, writes, vol. i, p. 4: “This aim [perfect religion] was lofty enough to concentrate the highest efforts of a whole people [Israel]. And as, however the mode of the pursuit might vary, it was this single object which was always pursued, till finally attained only with the political death of the nation, there is hardly any history of equal compass that possesses, in all its phases and variations, so much intrinsic unity, and is so closely bound to a single thought pertinaciously held, but always developing itself to greater purity.” But it must be recognized that the “pursuit” was not a continuous advance. It may be said to have reached its climax with the second Isaiah. Certainly the last four centuries before Christ do not represent an advance.

• 2.

  See John’s Oldest Code of Laws in the World (Edinburgh: Clarks, 1903). This code is based on the idea of the divine authority of social justice. But Dr. Hertz, Affirmations of Judaism, p. 138, is justified in noting the absence in this code, as compared with that of the Pentateuch, of the idea of mercy.

• 3.

  Hom., in Matt. vi. 3 (P.G. lvii, col. 66).

• 4.

  Exod. xxxi. 1-11.

• 5.

  2 Chron. ii. 13 f.; iv. 11 ff.

• 6.

  Wisd. vi. 17 ff.

• 7.

  The Italian philosopher, Croce, gives a preference to the mediæval historians over their Græco-Roman predecessors, in spite of their manifest inferiority in culture and ability, in this respect—that they first viewed history as progress towards a goal (Teoria e Storia della Storiografta, p. 188). He does not notice that they owed this vision to the Hebrew prophets.

• 8.

  Hos. i. 4.

• 9.

  Ver. 5 is so rendered in the LXX version.

• 10.

  Job xix. 26 (the familiar A.V., with the one word “without” from R.V. marg.).

• 11.

  Ps. xvii. 15 (R.V.).

• 12.

  Is. xxvi. 18-19.

• 13.

  The figure of the Davidic king, however, is not always present in the pictures of the Good Time Coming.

• 14.

  E.g. nothing is to be found like the earlier story of the “breach upon Uzzah” (2 Sam. vi. 6 ff.).