Part 6 (2/2)

The most triumphant word in the New Testament, and its tenderest word, both are drawn from one verse in the elder Isaiah: ”He will swallow up death in victory, and the Lord G.o.d will wipe away tears from off all faces.”

The distinctive word and thought of Jesus toward G.o.d is first found in the later Isaiah,--”our Father.” ”Doubtless thou art our father, though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledge us not; thou, O Lord, art our father, our redeemer; thy name is from everlasting.” The word recurs, together with an image which by a later than Jesus was made the symbol of an arbitrary divine despotism, but which Isaiah first employed to blend the idea of omnipotent power with closest affection: ”O Lord, thou art our father; we are the clay and thou the potter; and we are all the work of thy hand.” A similitude is used even gentler than a father's care: ”As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.” ”Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compa.s.sion on the son of her womb? Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee.”

By the later Isaiah is shown the figure of an innocent sufferer, whose sorrows are to issue in the widest blessing. This sufferer has been interpreted sometimes as typifying the few heroic souls among the people of Israel, sometimes as a prophet in Isaiah's day, last and most fondly as Christ. Whomever the prophet had in mind, the idea goes home to the heart; somehow, undeserved sorrow borne blamelessly, bravely, even gladly, since for love's sake, is to have a celestial fruitage.

”Despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;” ”he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows,”--and at last ”he shall see of the travail of his soul, and be satisfied.” Then the strain breaks into an exultant tenderness, weaving into one chord the deepest griefs and consolations of woman, the sublimities of nature, all the pa.s.sion and all the peace of the heart. ”Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear; break forth into singing and cry aloud, thou that didst not travail with child, for more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith the Lord. Fear not, for thou shalt not be ashamed. For thy Maker is thy husband, the Lord of hosts is his name, and thy redeemer the Holy One of Israel. For a small moment have I forsaken thee, but with great mercies will I gather thee. In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment, but with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee, saith the Lord thy Redeemer. The mountains shall depart and the hills be removed, but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee. O thou afflicted, tossed with tempest, and not comforted! I will lay thy stones with fair colors, and lay thy foundations with sapphires; and all thy children shall be taught of the Lord, and great shall be the peace of thy children.”

To such words men and women in all times have clung, and always will cling. For, so first spoke a voice in some soul which in the heart of the storm had found peace. He called it the voice of G.o.d. What better name can we give it?

In the prophecies and the psalms we have seen the high-wrought poetry of Israel's religion. For the requirements of daily life there needs a more prosaic, definite, and minute guidance. This the Jew found in the body of usages and precepts which gradually grew up under the care of the priesthood. The prescriptive sanction of habit attached to these observances was at certain memorable epochs exchanged for a belief in the direct communication of the code from heaven. One such occasion was the finding of the ”book of the Law” by the high priest, and its presentation and enforcement on king and people which is recorded in 2 Kings xxii. and xxiii. The strong indications are that this was the book known to us as Deuteronomy, and that instead of the rediscovery of a forgotten book there was in truth a new book set forth, claiming the authority of Moses, and enlarging and enriching the traditional observances according to the most ”advanced” ideas of the time. A similar occasion, at a later period, is described at length in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. The new legislation there imposed in the name of Moses and the fathers--or rather of Yahveh himself, as he spoke to the men of old--was probably in substance the regulations contained in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers.

By our standards of judgment, these acts were pious forgeries. The mental conditions under which they were done, the psychologic state which prompted them, the ethical standards which sanctioned them, are matter for curious study. It would be crude to cla.s.s them as the deliberate and inexcusable crimes which they would be in our day. The claim of a divine authority for human beliefs--the idea that what is morally beneficial may be a.s.serted as historically true--has worked in many strange forms. We see it here in its early phase, among a people in whom, as in mankind at large, the virtue and obligation of truthfulness was a late and slow discovery. The same instinct--to claim for what we wish to believe a sanction of infallible revelation--works in subtle forms to-day.

As to the contents of the Law which thus gradually took form, a distinction may easily be traced even by the cursory reader. The earlier code, Deuteronomy, is full of a generous and lofty temper. It is one of the most impressive doc.u.ments of the Jewish scriptures. Here is that which Jesus named as the first and great commandment: ”Thou shalt love the Lord thy G.o.d with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.” The teaching of the book is primarily the wors.h.i.+p of Yahveh,--a holy, loving, and judging G.o.d,--who rewards his people with blessings or punishes them with disasters. Promises and threats are equally distinct and vivid: never were blessing and cursing more emphatic. The morality enjoined is charitable and pure. With an equal insistence is enjoined a certain method and form of wors.h.i.+p, including sacrifices at the temple, three yearly feasts, the observance of the Sabbath, the due maintenance of the priesthood, and the utter rejection of all other G.o.ds.

When we turn to the other books of the Law, we come into an atmosphere less exalted, and with a multiplicity of ceremonial details. There is endless regulation as to varieties of sacrifice, cleansing from technical uncleanness, and the like. Interwoven with these, as if on an equal footing, are special applications of morality--inculcations of chast.i.ty, justice, and good neighborhood. The principles of the Ten Words--themselves an inheritance from a very early day--are applied in many particulars. Occasionally is a lofty sentiment, a clear advance.

Thus we find in Leviticus the ”second commandment” of Jesus, ”Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”

The general increase in rigidity of ceremonial in these books is to be read along with the stern decrees of Ezra as to separation from family and friendly relations with non-Jewish neighbors. It was, in a word, a Puritan reformation. There was just the same combination of heightened moral conviction with urgency upon matters of form and detail, and hostility to all outside of one special church, which belonged to the Puritan. But the Jewish reformer, unlike the English, enlarged instead of simplifying his ritual. It is this interblending of outward observance with moral and spiritual quality which stumbles the modern reader at every page. It was a confusion which needed the spiritual genius of Jesus to dissolve, and the leaders.h.i.+p of Paul to definitely renounce.

By the side of the ceremonial element in the Law there ripened gradually an expansion of its moral precepts. The sacred books were expounded by the Scribes. The preacher in the synagogue came to touch the people's heart often more closely and delicately than the priest with his b.l.o.o.d.y sacrifices and his imposing liturgies. Spontaneity, inspiration, prophetic power, was no longer present, but in the guise of comment and interpretation there grew up a gentler, humaner morality. The moral value of labor and industry came into recognition. There were teachers like Hillel and Gamaliel in whom devout piety and homely practice went hand in hand. In the ethics of Judaism--under all these various forms of ”the Law and the Prophets”--the distinctive note, compared with the ethics of Greece and Rome, was chast.i.ty. The ideal Greece represented wisdom and beauty; the ideal Rome was valor and self-control; the ideal Israel was the subjugation of sense to spirit, the approach of man to G.o.d by purity of life.

The twofold service of Judaism was to impress this special note of chast.i.ty on human virtue, and to give to virtue the wings of a great hope. The flowering of that hope was in Christianity; the preparation for it comes now before us.

Under the rule of Alexander's successors the Jewish system, with its mixture of ethics and ritual, came in collision with the ideas and practice of degenerate Greek culture,--pleasure-loving, nature-wors.h.i.+ping, sensual, with gymnastics and aesthetics, tolerant and tyrannical. The two systems were hostile alike in their virtues and vices. The Greek ruler put down with a strong hand the religious and patriotic scruples of his Jewish subject. The Jew bore persecution with the tough endurance of his race, then rose in revolt with the fierce courage and religious fervor of his race. He won his last victory in the field of arms. Brief was the independence, soon followed by inglorious servitude; but its sufferings and triumphs had fused the nation once more into invincible devotion to the Law of their G.o.d, and had rooted in their hearts a principle of hope which in varying forms and growing power was to change the aspect of human life.

It seems natural to man to ascribe some impressive origin, some dramatic birth, to the beliefs that are dearest to him. But if we trace back through Christian and Jewish lineage the idea of immortality, we are quite unable to discover the time or place of its beginning. The early Jew thought of death much as did the early Greek,--as the extinction of all that was precious in life, and the transition to a shadowy and forlorn existence in the realm of shades. The Hades of Homer seems much to resemble the Sheol of the Old Testament, though more vividly conceived. The strong, ruddy, pa.s.sionate life of the Hebrew found as little to cheer it in the outlook beyond death as did the energetic, graceful, joyful life of the Greek. Ancient Egypt had, at least for the initiate, a n.o.ble teaching of retribution hereafter to crown the mortal career with fit consummation of joy or woe. Ancient Persia had in its own form a like doctrine. The Hebrews in their servile period caught not a scintilla of the Egyptian faith. In their exile it is probable that they did get some unrecorded influence from their Persian neighbors.

Unmistakably, their emigrants to Alexandria, meeting there the n.o.bler form of Greek culture while the Palestinian Jews encountered its baser side, caught some inspiration from the philosophy which followed, though afar off, the n.o.ble visions of Plato. Whether Persia or Greece was more directly the source of the new hope which crept almost unperceived into the stern bosom of Judaism is not certain. But the first clear voice of that hope comes from the time of the martyrs. In the second book of the Maccabees is told--probably by an Alexandrian Jew--the story of the men and women who faced a dreadful death rather than disobey the Law of their G.o.d. In that last extremity--that confrontal of the soul by the bitterest choice, and its acceptance of death rather than wrong-doing--comes the sudden voice of a hope triumphant over the tyrant.

”Thou like a fury takest us out of this present life, but the King of the world shall raise us up, who have died for his laws, unto everlasting life.” So in succession bear testimony the seven sons of one mother, herself the bravest of them all. ”She exhorted every one of them in her own language, filled with courageous spirit; and stirring up her womanish thoughts with a manly courage, she said unto them: 'I cannot tell how ye came into my womb: for I neither gave you breath nor life, neither was it I that formed the members of every one of you. But doubtless the Creator of the world who formed the generations of man, and found out the beginning of all things, will also of his due mercy give you breath and life again, as ye now regard not your own selves for his laws' sake.

Fear not this tormentor, but, being worthy of thy brethren, take thy death, that I may receive thee again in mercy with thy brethren.'”

Just as the death of Socrates inspired in Plato the out-reaching hope of a hereafter, so these Jewish martyrdoms quickened the doubtful guess, the dim conjecture, into fervid conviction. From this period dates the settled Jewish belief in immortality.

The form which that belief a.s.sumed is seen in the book of Daniel. That book was a creation of this period, inspired by its sufferings, aspirations, and hopes. The writer, a.s.suming the name and authority of a traditional hero,--by that easy confusion of the ideal and the historical which we have seen before,--blends with stories of unconquerable fidelity and divine deliverance his own interpretation of the world's recent history and probable future. It is an early essay in what we call the philosophy of history, the first recorded conception of a world-drama.

Median, Persian, Greek, and Roman monarchies move their appointed course and pa.s.s away. G.o.d's plan is working itself out, and the culmination is yet to come. In vision the prophet beholds it: the ”Ancient of days,”

with garment white as snow and hair like pure wool, upon a throne like fiery flame, with wheels as burning fire. Thousands of thousands minister before him: the judgment is set and the books are opened. One like the Son of Man comes with the clouds of heaven, and there is given to him dominion and glory and a kingdom which shall not pa.s.s away. In his kingdom shall be gathered the saints of the Most High. Many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to ever-lasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt.

This was the figure in which the Jewish imagination clothed the Jewish hope. The national and the individual future blent in one antic.i.p.ation.

The dead were to ”sleep in the dust” until the day when the divine kingdom was established, and then were to rise again to life, and according to their deserts were to share the endless glory or shame.

So philosophy makes its essay at the destiny of mankind. So imagination fas.h.i.+ons its pictures. And back of philosophy and imagination we trace the elemental and highest forces of the soul. It is martyrdom and motherhood that inspire the immortal hope. Man faces the worst that can befall him--drinks the hemlock or suffers the torture--rather than be false to duty. The mother broods over the life mysteriously sprung from her own, and given back by her as a sacred trust to the service of the right and to an unseen keeping. And to martyr and mother comes the voice, ”All shall be well with thee and thine.”

Christianity, inheriting from Judaism the belief in immortality, gave it a more central place, and a more appealing force. Of the older religion, the special characteristic--compared with the Greek and Roman world--was the impressing upon a whole people of a law of conduct, in which with a mult.i.tude of external ceremonies were bound up the fundamental principles of justice, benevolence, and chast.i.ty, enforced by the authority of a personal and righteous G.o.d. We see the educational effect upon the religious Hebrew of this clearly personal G.o.d. It constantly lifted him out of the littleness of self-consciousness, setting before his imagination the loftiest object. It gave definiteness and impressiveness to his best ideals. And, further, this anthropomorphism, as we name it now, was but the primitive expression of the principle which is central in all forms of religious faith, that man and the universe are in some deepest sense at one, and that man's closest approach to the secret of the universe lies through his own n.o.blest development. That is one way of saying what the Jew felt when his imagination gave to the sternest command and the highest promise the sanction, ”Thus saith the Lord.”

The Hebrew religion was wrought out under constant pressure of disaster.

It was the religion of a proud, brave people, who were constantly held in subjection to foreign conquerors. Hence came a quality of intense hostility to these tyrannical foes, and also a constant appeal to the Divine Power which seemed often to conceal itself. Hence--and from that sorrowful lot of the individual which often matches this national tragedy--hence comes the pa.s.sionate, pleading, poignant quality through which the Old Testament has always spoken to the struggling and suffering,--with gleams of hope, the more intense from the clouds through which they s.h.i.+ne.

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