THE HISTORICAL CONDITIONS.

The greatest problems in the field of history centre in the Person and Life of Christ. Who He was, what He was, how and why He came to be it, are questions that have not lost and will not lose their interest for us and for mankind. For the problems that centre in Jesus have this peculiarity: they are not individual, but general concern not a person, but the world. How we are to judge Him is not simply a curious point for historical criticism, but a vital matter for religion. Jesus Christ is the most powerful spiritual force that ever operated for good on and in humanity. He is to-day what He has been for centuries an object of reverence and love to the good, the cause of remorse and change, penitence and hope to the bad; of moral strength to the morally weak, of inspiration to the despondent, consolation to the desolate, and cheer to the dying. He has created the typical virtues and moral ambitions of civilized man; has been to the benevolent a motive to beneficence, to the selfish a persuasion to self-forgetful obedience; and has become the living ideal that has steadied and raised, awed and guided youth, braced and ennobled manhood, mellowed and beautified age. In Him the Christian ages have seen the manifested God, the Eternal living in time, the Infinite within the limits of humanity; and their faith has glorified His sufferings into a sacrifice by the Creator for the creature, His death into an atonement for human sin. No other life has done such work, no other person been made to bear such transcendent and mysterious meanings. It is impossible to touch Jesus without touching millions of hearts now living or yet to live. He is, whatever else He may be, as a world's imperishable wonder, a world's everlasting problem, as a preeminent object of human faith, a pre-eminent subject of human thought.

For the very greatness of the work makes it the more necessary that we see the Worker, not as He lives in our faith and reverence, but as He lived on our common earth; a man looking before and after, speaking as a man, and spoken to by men. But this is no easy matter. Hardly any man can come to the problems that centre in Jesus as to the problems of the purer sciences, those that can be solved by the passionless processes of mathematics. The name of Christ is a representative name. It means Christianity. Men who are convinced that the religion is false, assail it through its Founder; men who believe that it is true, defend it through His Person. They too much interdespise each other to be altogether fair to history. The former reproach the latter with being apologists men whose primary aim is not to find the truth, but to defend what has been, with or without sufficient reason, believed; the latter seek to silence the former by censure, charging them with rationalism or unbelief, with being men who love what is negative, and hate what is positive. Yet it were well if both classes could unite to help each other. The one interest that is common to both is the truth. To find it is here, as elsewhere, the grand necessity; yet without the clear eye and open mind it cannot be found. By all means let us r^ct near enough to Jesus to see Him as He really was. The river is inexplicable without its source; Christianity a mystery, an unread riddle, without Christ. If the stream does not disgrace the fountain, the fountain will not disgrace the stream. If Christianity does not make Christ ashamed, Christ will not shame Christianity. The Founder is greater than the faith He founded, as mind is nobler than all its works. However highly the Christian religion may be rated, the religion of Christ, revealed in His words, articulated in His person, ought to be more highly rated still. The ideal is ever above the real. The picture painted on the canvas is poor compared with its image in the painter's mind. The palace or temple built in stone but feebly realizes the ideal of the great architect. The universe is but a poor and inadequate expression of the Divine thought. God is greater than the universe, and His thought than all things. So we may be certain that, whatever our faith or our fancy may imagine Jesus to have been, the reality was greater than our dream. True faith proves its truth by its willingness to use all the lights of modern science and all the eyes of modern criticism, that it may get the nearer to the historical Christ, convinced that it can look in His face without fear and without dismay. The men that best knew Him most loved Him, and to stand in His immediate presence is to be touched with a deeper reverence than can be awakened by the broken image reflected in the traditions or phantasies of men.

Strauss, in one of his most satirical moods, said, "The critical study of the life of Jesus is the pit into which the theology of our age necessarily fell, and was destroyed."¹ But the precise opposite is the truth. There is no study that has so renovated and vivified theology, that has so tended to translate it from an arid scholasticism into a humane and fruitful science of religion. The historical Christ is the eternal rock down to which Christian science must dig, and on which it must build, if our religion is to live; He is the everlasting and sunlit mountain up which our thought must climb, if we are ever to stand where Moses stood, and, like him, see God face to face. And this necessity reposes on a twofold reason, (1) The historical person of Christ is at once the basis and source of the Christian religion. He made it, He is it. Its distinctive and essential elements are elements that can be found in Him. Whatever cannot be found there belongs to its accidents, not to its essence. And so the better we know Him, the better we know our faith; the more He is made a reality to heart and mind, the more will it be the same. He who best knows Christ is the best Christian. (2) Knowledge of the historical and personal Christ is necessary to the knowledge and realization of the Christian religion. An abstract theology is but a speculative system, necessary, perhaps, to satisfy the intellect, and be to it, from the standpoint of the religious consciousness, an explication of the universe of nature and man. But religion is concrete and complex, must stand before us articulated in a person, that persons may know what it is, and how it is to be realized. There may be a science of religion, but religion is not a science, is rather the richest reality science can investigate. But to be a reality it must be embodied in thought and feeling, in action and conduct i.e., in a person or persons. It has no being till it is so embodied, but is the moment it is personalized. And he who first embodies it is its creative personality, the one in whom it lives, moves, and has its being. And Christ is here our creative personality. Christianity must be studied as it was realized in Him, and only as men embody His ideal do they remain Christians, or does the Christian religion continue to live. The one thing that can lift the churches of to-day above the sectional in character and aim, above the mean jealousies and ungenerous rivalries of a miserable ecclesiasticism, is a loving and sympathetic study of the Christianity of Christ. Here, indeed, the first is the best, and the divinest ambition is to be religious not after the manner of the churches, but after the manner and in the Spirit of Jesus the Christ.

We start, then, from this position. The person of Christ is the explanation of Christianity, its first cause, its perennial inspiration, its imperishable ideal. In Him our religion was first realized, and by Him created. But have we any right so to regard Him? He lived like all of us under and within the conditions of space and time, was an Heir to the past before He was a Creator of the future. Was He not, then, made by His historical conditions? Were not they the forces that formed Christ, rather than the Spirit that lived within Him? These questions suggest some of our gravest problems:

What does our religion owe to Jesus, and what to Judaea and the Jews? Is it the ripe fruit of His Spirit, or the fair and final blossom of dying Judaism? Was He its legitimate, though outcast and hated, Son? Was He created by His circumstances, the child of a land and people prodigal of choicest gifts and propitious opportunities? Was He but a Voice, throwing into memorable and immortal speech the truths given Him by the fathers of His people and the schools of His faith? These are question history and historical criticism alone can exhaustively discuss, but at the first blush only one answer seems possible. Circumstances may be plausibly thought to make a man where they are equal to his making, where he does not conspicuously transcend all they are and contain. But where he does, it were as absurd to make the circumstances create the man as to make the night create the day, because after and out of the dark comes the light. Jesus was born in Judaea and nursed in Judaism, but He rose out of them as the sun rises out of the grey dawn to pour his beams over heaven and earth, and flood them with the glories of light and colour. Jesus was the antithesis and contradiction of the conditions amid which He grew. By His coming they were changed, and in all their distinctive features annihilated. What He brought with Him was so much more than they contained, that passing from Judaism to Jesus is like passing from the hill top tipped with the cold but beautiful dawn to a plain lying warm and radiant under the unveiling and revealing: light of the summer noonday.

But while the historical conditions do not explain Jesus, without them He cannot be either explained or understood. The mysterious force we call His person was clothed in natural forms. The conditions under which He lived were human conditions. He was open and sensitive to every influence, inherited, traditional, social, physical, intellectual, moral, religious, that can affect man. He was a son, a brother, and a friend. He was a Jew by birth,, speech, and education, and the Spirit, the Geist, of His land and people and time worked on and in Him with its, plastic hands. Where He was divinely set there He must be humbly studied, and only as He is so studied can it be seen how He resembles " the bright consummate flower "" which crowns the months of culture and of growth, and yet, when it bursts into blossom, beauty, and fragrance, is. so unlike the dark earth, hard seed, and green stem out of which it has grown.

The question as to the causes and conditions which contributed to form its founder, is one of the deepest moment to every religion. It helps to determine its claims, the degree in which it has been a discoverer or revealer of new truths, a creator of fresh moral forces for humanity, a minister to the happiness and progress of man. It helps,, too, to determine our estimate of its creative personality, to show him as a maker or an adapter, as one who depraved by his touch or transfigured by his spirit what he found before and around him, becoming to after ages the embodiment of the most deteriorative or the most regenerative influences. Thus the question as to the century in which Buddha was born, and the circumstances amid which he lived, powerfully affect our criticism both of the man and his religion. It affects our interpretation of its most characteristic doctrines, our judgment as to its relation on the one hand to the Sankhya philosophy, and on the other to Brahmanism and to the political movements of India; and these, again, influence our estimate of a religion that is at once so rich in ethical spirit and so poor in intellectual content. Buddha, regarded as a man who simply translates metaphysical into religious doctrines, and precipitates a political by converting it into a religious revolution, is a less original and beautiful character than the Buddha who so pities man and so hates his sorrow as to find for him by suffering and sacrifice the way to everlasting rest, the path to the blessed Nirvana. And so, too, with Islam and its founder. If Mohammed be compared with his heathen contemporaries and their ancestors, and his system with theirs, he can only profit by the comparison, stand out as a pre-eminent religious genius and benefactor of his country and kind. But if his doctrines be traced to their sources, Judaic, Magian, Christian, if it be found that he depraved what he appropriated, that he practised what his own precepts forbade, turned his sublimest doctrine into a battle-cry, building on it both a military system that lived by the lust of conqust and a civil code that showed little mercy to the vanquished, then we find that he is a political much more than a religious genius, with an ultimate personal influence that works more mightly for evil than his law works for good. Knowledge of the historical conditions may thus so modify as to change from favourable to adverse our judgment of the historical person.

Now what were the historical conditions under which Jesus was formed? Are they in themselves sufficient to explain Him. Did they embody intellectual and spiritual forces potent enough to form Him, and, through Him, His religion? Was He, as we have been assured, a pupil of the rabbis and a child of the native Judaic culture?² Was He indeed " called out of Egypt," a Son of its later wisdom, educated in Alexandrian philosophy illumined by the light that lived in Aristobulus and Philo?³ Or was He by the accident of birth a Jew, by the essential qualities as by the nurture of His spirit a Greek, gifted with the serene soul and open sense of ancient Hellas,⁴ softening by His Hellenic nature and culture the stern and exalted truths of Hebraism? It is impossible to discuss here and now the many points involved in these questions: all that is possible is to indicate the historical conditions amid which He lived, His relation to them, and theirs to Him.

1. THE LAND. Modern historical thought sufficiently recognizes the influence of a country and climate upon a people, upon the collective nation and its constituent units. Physical conditions have both a moral and an intellectual worth. The great people and the great man are held to owe much to nature without, as well as to the .nature within. And the land is here of singular significance, both in its physical and historical aspects and influences. It was small but goodly, in many places rich in the fruits of the earth, fair, fragrant, and fertile as the garden of the Lord. It was a land of hills and valleys, lakes and water-courses, mountains that guarded, streams that made glad its cities, especially queenly Zion, beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth. Shut in before by the sea, behind by the desert, girt and guarded to the north by the royal ranges of Lebanon and the lofty heights of Hermon, to the south by waste lands, its fruitful plains, full of corn and wine, seemed to the wandering sons of the desert to flow with milk and honey. To tribes weary of change and migration in the wilderness, Canaan was by pre-eminence the land of rest. And so many distinct yet related families had striven for a foothold and a home in it, for room on its plains and a right to its cities. The sons of fathers who had parted as kinsmen in the desert met as foemen on the plains, as invaders and invaded, as Hebrews and Phoenicians. On the coast once famous cities stood, the cities of the men who made the commerce of the ancient, and, through it, of the modern world men full of resource and invention: builders, dyers, carvers of ivory, weavers of rich stuffs, discoverers of the secrets the stars can whisper to the seafaring, bearers of manifold impulses for good and ill to the cities and isles of Greece. On the one side lay Egypt, on the other Assyria; over and through the land that intervened they had fought out their rivalries, and made their names, their armies, their civilizations both familiar and fearful to the sons of Israel.

But though they and the later and mightier empires of Greece and Rome might conquer, they could never absorb Israel. The more his land was invaded the more sacred it became to him, and the oftener he lost his freedom to the foreigner the more hostile and inaccessible did he grow to the influences by which the victorious alien can assimilate and extinguish the vanquished.

In the time of Jesus, Palestine existed in four great divisions a northern, central, eastern, and southern: Galilee, Samaria, Perea, and Judaea. Of these, only the first and last concern us. Galilee was the richest and most varied province, Judaea the most secluded and barren. In the north Galilee was guarded by the snowy crown of Hermon and the wooded slopes of Lebanon, and was graced in the south by Carmel and Tabor; while in the south-east, it embosomed the lake of Gennesareth, out from which opened those glorious plains that were to the fond imagination of the people as the garden of God. On the west, its table-land overlooked the blue sea, where went the. stately " ships of Tarshish," and by the side of which, stood ancient Tyre, the home of men with other aims and ambitions than had been known to Israel. And the land was rich in men, the fields in husbandmen, the towns and villages in merchants, the lake in fishermen. One who knew and loved it said, " It is a fertile land and full of meadows, where trees of every kind grow, and promises through its luxuriant fruitfulness a rich reward, even to the most miserable husbandry."⁵ And the life the people lived is sketched for us by many a quiet touch in the Gospels. In the market-place labourers wait to be hired,⁶ and children dance and sing, sport and quarrel.⁷ In the highways and by the gates the lame and the blind sit asking alms.⁸ In the synagogues the people meet and the rabbis read and expound the Scriptures.⁹ On the lake the fishermen ply their craft, and by its margin, in field or on the rocks, dry their nets.¹⁰ The shepherd on the hillside or plain tends his sheep, seeks in the desert or on the mountain the lost lamb, tenderly bearing it home.¹¹ The careful woman searches for the piece she has lost;¹² and the woman who is a sinner wakes to penitence and shame, and the love that is born of holy gratitude.¹³ Men build barns and store grain, and die in the moment of proudest prosperity.¹⁴ The diseased seek the physician, the widow loses her only son, and the father, fearing he may be left childless, inquires for one who may heal his daughter.¹⁵ The rich man leaves the steward to manage his estate, and he abuses the brief authority in which he is dressed, beats the maid-servants, and is the more a tyrant that he is a tyrant's slave.¹⁶ Men are so deep in business and pleasure, with lands, or oxen, or newly-wedded wife that they cannot mind the things of the kingdom of God.¹⁷ In the many towns, and populous villages, and thriving districts of Galilee " they ate, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded, they married, and were given in marriage."¹⁸

The people that so lived were mainly, but not entirely, of Jewish descent. Their land was too open and busy to be exclusive the people too remote from Jerusalem, and too jealous of its priesthood to be dominated by the narrower Judaean ideal. The men of Jerusalem used to say, " there was no priest among the Galileans; "and the Galileans were the happier in life and freer in faith for wanting the priest. And the scribes who there flourished were more varied and less rigid in opinion than those of Judaea, and so the stricter southern said of the looser northern province, " The men there do not learn the law from one master." And they could learn of foreign as well as of native masters. In Galilee there were Gentile cities like Scythopolis, and cities like Tiberias, where Greeks dwelt, and where Greek culture and art were not unknown.¹⁹ Through it, too, there was continually flowing a stream of commerce, and Syrians and Arabians, Phoenicians and Greeks often made their homes in a land which was a highway of the nations. These elements and influences were strong enough to modify and enrich, but not to change the native faith. In Galilee there was less aversion to Gentile culture than in Judaea. Aristobulus, the first of the Jews to discover Moses in Plato, and the law of Jahveh in the philosophy of Greece, was a Galilean. So were Alexander Jannaeus, the Asmonaean most skilled in the wisdom of the Gentiles; and Justus of Tiberias, who, though a Jew, was possessed of the best Hellenic culture. There, too, coins with Greek inscriptions circulated, amphitheatres and palaces ornamented in the Greek and Roman styles were tolerated, and even the Roman eagles, which could not be introduced into Jerusalem without danger of insurrection, were allowed to pass unchallenged through Galilee.²⁰ But while this contact with a wider world made the men of Galilee more open in mind and heart than the men of Judaea, it did not make them less devoted to the faith and hope of Israel. Sacred history and song had consecrated their land. The victory that Barak had achieved and Deborah had sung was won by Galileans on Galilean soil.²¹ A later poet, who rejoiced to see God arise to scatter His enemies, praised the heroic feats of " the princes of Zebulon and the princes of Naphtali."²² Cowardice was never a vice of the Galileans;²³ and in the darkest period of Judaism names like those of Ezekias, Judas Galilaeus, and John of Giscala justify the saying. To the religion of Israel it had given prophets like Hosea and Nahum, and to its literature poets like the singer of the Song of Songs. They loved the city and and service of their faith, and to the last " they went up to Jerusalem, as was the custom of the feast."²⁴ But the grand religious agency in Galilee was the synagogue, not the temple; its ideal was that of the scribe rather than that of the priest. As a necessary consequence, they were more concerned with the ethical than with the ritual in Judaism, with the interpretation of the written and oral law than with the observance of the instituted and hierarchic worship. Their Judaism was one of the letter, but even as such it was nobler and purer than the Judaism of the temple and the priesthood.

Judaea was in its physical aspect a less favoured land than Galilee. It, too, had its fair and fertile districts, like the plain of Shephela, so rich in glorious historical memories; and the country around Bethlehem, so suggestive of heroic names and inextinguishable Messianic hopes, and the graves where grew " the palm trees by the water, the rose plants which are in Jericho.²⁵ But if it could not as regards its physical features rival the grandeur of upper or the lovely luxuriance of lower Galilee, in what pertained to historical and political interest it stood preeminent. The people were of purest Jewish blood. The men of Judah and Benjamin who had returned from the captivity, settled in Judaea, and there proceeded to realize their hierocratic state. They built their temple and their holy city, and fenced themselves round with laws and customs which should at once prevent imitation of the heathen, and maintain in purity the worship of Jahveh. Their success was in many respects wonderful, perhaps more wonderful than any achievement on record in the domain of national polity and life. Their ideal was to be a people apart, the elect of Jahveh, the only people that knew Him, the only people He knew. In order to realize this ideal, their polity was so framed as to blend and identify the religious and civil, the worship of God with the being and conduct of the state. The one God had His one temple; the capital was the holy city, the seat of civil authority, the scene of national worship. The act of collective reverence was an act of loyal obeisance; the service performed in the temple was rendered to the great King. The action of this ideal on the land and state was to penetrate both with a deep religious meaning to associate both with the will of God and the ultimate destinies of His people. The city and temple made Israel a unity in his very dispersion. Though Jews might be counted by millions in Alexandria or Rome, yet the home of their spirits was Jerusalem; to it their hearts turned as not only the city of their fathers, but as the one place where the God whose chosen they were could be worshipped by His collective and united people. And this belief was expressed, maintained, and strengthened by loved institutions. There were great festivals that drew the scattered tribes to the city of their faith, the home of their hopes; -and they came there, as many often as three millions of men²⁶- " Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judaea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and the Romans sojourning in Jerusalem, Jews and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians."²⁷

And the city that was the scene of so immense assemblies had necessarily a peculiar character of its own. It existed for them, it lived by them. There were priests needed for the conduct of the worship, twenty-four courses of them and 20,000 men.²⁸ There were Levites, their servants, in immense numbers, needed to watch, maintain, clean the temple to do the, menial and ministering work necessary to its elaborate service and stupendous acts of worship. There were scribes needed for the interpretation of the law, men skilled in the Scriptures and tradition, with names like Gamaliel, so famed for wisdom as to draw young men like Saul from distant Tarsus, or Apollos from rich Alexandria. There- were synagogues, 480 of them at least, where the rabbis read and the people heard the word which God had in past times spoken unto the fathers by the prophets. The city was indeed in a sense the religion of Israel, incorporated and localized, and the man who loved the one turned daily his face toward the other, saying, "My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth, for the courts of Jahveh." " I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of Jahveh. Our feet shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem."²⁹

But the land and city had meanings no political or sacerdotal institutions could express. It had been the arena of a great history, which was less the history of a nation than a religion. Jahveh had given the land to the people; within it His kingdom was to come, His society and state to be realized. On its plains, even where most arid, Abraham had lived, and had sanctified them by his presence and his intercourse with God. Into it the people Moses had led out of Egypt had passed with Joshua, and there in the valley of Ajalon was the place where he commanded the sun to stand still, that he might the more utterly smite the Amorite. On these fields the people of God had done battle with the Philistines, Samson had -descended from the hill country to woo their daughters, to suffer his terrible punishment, and work his splendid revenge, and the ruddy-faced David in his humble yet glorious youth had met and vanquished the proud Goliath. On the hills above, the Maccabees had defied the tyrant, raised the standard of freedom and faith, and saved Israel. Northward is Bethlehem, the birthplace of David, surrounded by the hills on which he had watched his flocks;: while beyond is Jerusalem, the city where he reigned and Solomon judged. On all there lies a light that fades not, but grows richer and more radiant with the ages. Zion has heard the sublimest of the -prophets say unto her, "Thy God reigneth." The mountains of Judah have been touched by the beautiful feet of Him who brought good tidings and published peace. The ways that converge upon the city have been consecrated by pilgrims' songs, that are songs of cheer and hope for pilgrims of all lands and times. The city is embalmed in the most glorious sacred poetry of the world, so humanly universal, so divinely immortal, that once man has learned to use it he can never cease to sing. And the land transfigured by these meanings and memories is mightier in spiritual than physical influences; the hands by which it shapes men are moral and religious rather than material and fateful. Its plastic energies are born not of nature but of spirit, and are to the susceptible soul as the inspiration of God, but to the insusceptible soul they are not, or are hardened into institutions and traditions that can neither maintain nor communicate life.

Jesus thus lived in a land full of many influences, historical and physical, small in size, but mighty in power. Greece is great for ever as the home of the Hellenes, the men so gifted with " the vision and the faculty divine " as to discover and reveal to the world the beautiful in nature and man. The city that rose beside the Tiber, and swayed for centuries the sceptre of the world, has made the hills on which she sat throned famous for evermore. The queenly Nile and the rivers of Mesopotamia have been immortalized by the ancient empires of Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon. But to only one land was it given to bear and nurse two peoples, most dissimilar while akin, small in numbers but most potent in influence the Phoenicians, who made for us the art of commerce and found for us the pathway of the sea, and the Hebrews, the people of the Book, "to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the shechinah, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises; whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came, who is over all, God blessed for ever. Amen."³⁰

The land, then, was an appropriate home for Jesus. With its ideal significance, the purposes to which it had been, as it were, dedicated of God, He stood in essential sympathy. In and through Him, indeed, the ideal was destined to be realized. And as in Him its history culminated, He could not have been apart from it. Nowhere else could He have found the conditions necessary to His becoming what He became, doing what He did, fulfilling the mission He fulfilled. In Galilee He found the political and social conditions that allowed Him to reach His end, to realize His ideal; in Judaea He found the historical conditions which made His ideal possible, intelligible, real. But in both cases it was simply conditions He found; in neither did there exist the creative causes that found and made Him. Judaism was a condition, but not the cause, of Christ's being; and while the condition may be necessary to the operation of the cause, it is insufficient to the production of the effect. Without Judaism, Jesus had been without an arena on which to live and develop and act; but without Jesus, Judaism had been without the Christ that created Christianity. Galilee was, by the very circumstances which qualified it to be a condition of his growth or becoming, disqualified to be a cause; Judaea, by the very conditions which qualified it to be an arena for the evolution of the ideal He was to realize, was disqualified for effecting its realization. And the evidence lies in their respective characters and histories, and in their respective relations to Him. Galilee never struggled towards the production of a being like Christ, and so has no one that can be compared with Him. He stands alone in its history. Though it furnished Him with a soil on which to grow, yet so soon as He had grown into the Christ He was to be, it knew Him not, wondered at and followed Him for a few days, then despised and forsook Him. Judaea, though it longed for a Messiah, never dreamed of a religion without a temple and with only a single and invisible Priest. Out of the institutions it favoured and maintained no one who so held and taught could ever have issued. When, without a priesthood and opposed to the priestly spirit, its Messiah came, Judaea had nothing more or better for Him than the cross. The land supplied the conditions necessary to the forms of His being, character, and action; but in Himself alone lived the cause of what He was and became and did, of all He said and has achieved.

2. THE PEOPLE. Descent is a potent factor of character. The past can never disinherit the present; the present can never dispossess itself of qualities transmitted from the past. The great man cannot be understood apart from his people must be approached through his country and kin. Jesus was a Jew, a son of Israel. Israel had not been a royal or imperial people, had no claim to stand among the empires of the world. Once, for a brief season, they had become a great power. Their history boasted but two splendid reigns, one famed for conquest, the other for wisdom; yet in each case the splendour was dashed with darkness. The great kings died, and the great kingdom perished, fell into two miserable monarchies, always rivals, often at war, threatened or held in fee by the great empires on either side. And the people were as destitute of literary genius as of political importance. They were not gifted with the faculty of making a language beautiful and musical for ever, of treating a literature that could command the world by its rich and exact science, sublime and profound philosophy, pure and exalted poetry. They were, too, not only without the genius for art, but possessed the spirit to which art is alien, an unholy and hateful thing. They had had as a people nothing cosmopolitan in their past, had never, like the Phoenicians, penetrated the world with their inventions and commerce, like the Greeks, with their literature, like the Assyrians or Romans, with their arms; but they had lived a life that grew narrower and more exclusive every day, and had become among the nations not so much a nation as a sect.

Yet this people had had a glorious and singular past. If ever a people had been created and destined for a great work in the sphere of religion, it was the people of Israel. They accomplished in obscurity and amid contempt and against difficulties that seemed inconquerable, a work that is in its own order the foremost work ever done in the world. They created not simply a new religion that was in primitive times an almost daily feat but an idea and embodiment of religion so absolutely new, yet of such transcendent truth and potence as to have made religion a new force for man, sweeter, truer, and more ethical than it had ever been conceived to be. It is not possible to tell here and now how they did it. Enough to say, they had been creators of a new and peculiar conception of God and man, of society and the state. Two thousand years before our date they had fled as a band of slaves from Egypt and found freedom in the desert. There their leader had given them laws which were his, yet God's. They were organized into a nation, with God as their King, and settled in Canaan to realize a Divine kingdom, an ideal state, instituted and ruled of God. In it everything was sacred, nothing profane. The common duties of life were subjects of Divine commandment. The nation in its collective being was meant to be the vehicle and minister of the Divine Will. Worship was, while individual, national, the homage of the people to their invisible King. While the nation by its worship and through its priests spoke to God, God by His prophets spoke to the nation. They were, indeed, the voices of God, speakers for Him, revealing His truths, enforcing His will. But a recognized is not always an obeyed authority. The notion of religion was sublimer than the people had mind to appreciate or will to incorporate and adequately actualize. Worship is easier than obedience. Men are ever readier to serve the priest than to obey the prophet, and sacerdotalism flourished in Israel while prophecy decayed and died. And so, while the prophets created a literature embodying an unrealized religion, the priests created a nation, a people devoted to the worship they administered, the symbols and ceremonies they had instituted.

There were thus two ideals in Israel, each the express antithesis of the other. The one was prophetic, the other priestly. The prophetic was an exalted ethical faith, possessed of an intense and lofty consciousness of the absolute holiness of God, and of the need of holiness in man, or the perfect conformity of the human to the Divine will, to the obedience He required and approved. The priestly was an elaborate, sensuous, and sacerdotal system, which aspired to regulate the relations between God and man by sacrifices and symbols and ceremonial observances. The prophetic we name Hebraism, the priestly Judaism. The grand aim of the first was to create alike in the man and the people moral obedience, and so it was ever preaching " the righteous. God loveth righteousness;" "He is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity;" " Justice and judgment are the habitation of His throne;" He cannot allow the ill-doer to go unpunished or the well-doer to live unrewarded. The grand aim of the second was to create a people devoted to sacerdotal customs, a state so constituted and conducted that men should regard the laws of the priest as the laws of God, and performance of his rites as supreme conformity to the Divine will. There were times when the prophetic faith penetrated with its spirit and transfigured with its meaning the priestly system and in this, their real Mosaic relation, they completed and complemented each other; but in the actual field of history and life their usual relation was one of antagonism and conflict. The prophetic was by its very nature qualified to be in all its splendid elements permanent and universal, but the priestly was designed and qualified to be at best typical and provisional. But the temporal, in its struggle to become eternally and universally valid, would not allow the eternal to be realized. The priests so tenaciously laboured to make their shadows the substance that the substance was hidden by the shadows, and it was against this sustained endeavour of theirs that the prophets so strenuously contended. But the weakness of man helped the priests. Hebraism remained an ideal, a faith too sublimely spiritual and ethical for gross and sensuous men; but Judaism became a reality, as was easily possible to a religion that translated the grand and severe idea of righteousness into the poor and simple notion of legal cleanness, and substituted the fanaticism of the symbol for the enthusiasm of humanity.

Two things need to be here noted, (1) The contradiction in the history of Israel between the political ideal, which was in its highest qualities prophetic, and the reality. The ideal was the Theocracy. The state was the Church, God was the king, the polity was the religion. Our modern distinctions were unknown; God penetrated everywhere and everything, and consecrated whatever He penetrated. The individual and the state were in all their modes of being and action meant to be religious. But to the realization of such an ideal, absolute freedom was necessary; a tyranny, either native or foreign, could only be fatal to it. If the state was not allowed to develop according to its own nature, its institutions spontaneously crystallizing round its central belief, it could not fulfil the end given in its very idea. And Israel had but seldom enjoyed the freedom his ideal demanded. He had often been the vassal, had even been the captive, of great empires. His struggle for political existence acted injuriously on his religious ideal made him feel that to maintain national being was to fulfil his religious mission. And the patriotism evoked by the first narrowed to a miserable particularism the generous universalism that lived in the second. Israel believed that the states which were the enemies of his political being were the enemies of his religious mission, and so he hated his conquerors with the double hatred of the vanquished patriot and the disappointed zealot. If the alien refused to spare his freedom, he could refuse to distribute his light. The circumstances that did not allow him to realize his political ideal prevented him from fulfilling his religious mission.

(2) The contradiction in the life of Israel between the religious ideal and the reality. The two elements in the faith of Israel were, as above indicated, the sacerdotal and the spiritual, or the priestly and the prophetic. The one was embodied in the legal ordinances and worship, the other expressed in the prophetic Scriptures. The prophets represent the religion of Jahveh, not as realized in Israel, but in its ideal truth and purity. The priests represent it, not as it ought to have been, but as it actually was. It was possible to be most faithful to the sacerdotal, while most false to the spiritual element. Where the priest was. most blindly followed the prophet was most obstinately disobeyed. Prophecy, neglected, died, but the priesthood, respected and revered, grew. While all that remained of the prophets was a dead literature, the priests lived and multiplied, the soul of an active and comprehensive' system. It has often been said that the Jews went into captivity polytheists and returned monotheists; that,, before it, nothing could keep them back from idolatry, after it, nothing tempt them to it. But it entirely depends, on the meaning of the terms whether the above statement be true. The Jews were as little monotheists, in the sense of the prophets, after as before the captivity. There is an idolatry of the symbol as well as of the image. The idol is a representation of God, the symbol a representation of the truth; and where the representation becomes to the man as the thing represented, there is idolatry reverence, of the sign instead of the thing signified. And the Jews were idolaters of the symbol. Their sacerdotalism was. deified. Means were made ends, legal more than ethical purity, mint, anise, and cummin, more than righteousness mercy, and truth. Priestcraft and legalism proved as fatal to the realization of the religious ideal as bondage to the realization of the political.

And these contradictions between the ideal and the real had reached their sharpest point when Christ came. Freedom, the necessary condition of greatness, whether of deed or endeavour, was unknown. The land was ruled by hated aliens. In things outer and social, indeed, the people seemed prosperous. New and splendid cities like Cæsarea were rising, aping the magnificence in architecture and vice, in law and license, of the famous and dreaded Capital in the West. In old cities like Jerusalem buildings were in process that eclipsed the greatest structures of ancient times, a temple splendid as Solomon's, monument of a man who mocked the faith it was meant to honour. While the people used the temple, they hated and feared its builder. For Herod was a double offence a son of Edom, a hated child of hated Esau; and a vassal king, monarch of Judaea, but subject of Rome, one whose rule made the ruled slaves of a slave. On the religious side the people had been for centuries afflicted with barrenness. The Divine oracles were dumb, and in their place -there had risen a forced and fantastic literature, visionary, turgid, that was to the prophetic what the spent echo, broken into confused and inarticulate sound, is to the human voice, full of soft music and sweet reason. The people were in the seat of their strength smitten with weakness, and at their heart the grim and terrible forces of dissolution were at work.

But the state of the people will become more evident if we analyze and describe the two great parties of Christ's day. the Pharisees and Sadducees. Ascetic and communist societies like the Essenes stood too remote from the national life and influenced it too little to be here of much significance. Our knowledge of the two great historical and politico-religious parties is still most imperfect, though clearer than it once was. The parallel suggested by Josephus between the Pharisees and the Stoics, and the Sadducees and the Epicureans, was as incorrect as unjust.³¹ The popular notion, identifying the Pharisee with the formalist and the Sadducee with the sceptic, is no better. The two parties were at once political and religious, represented different ideas of the national polity, and different interpretations of the national faith. The Pharisees were a popular and democratic, but the Sadducees a conservative and aristocratic, party. The former represented a freer and more individual movement, but the latter a hereditary and sacerdotal tendency. The Pharisees constituted a school or society, where the condition of membership was intellectual; but the Sadducees constituted a party, where the condition of membership was descent. The former was an association of the likeminded, but the latter a cluster of priestly and governing families. Each had a different interpretation of the past, present, and future of Israel; and their conduct differed with their interpretation. When the creative period in Israel ceased, the interpretive began. When the school of the prophets died, the school of the scribes was founded, and in the latter Pharisaism was born. The Pharisees were essentially interpreters; what had been written and delivered as law they lived to explain and obey.³² Their ideal was to see every Israelite skilled in the law, and obedient to it, in order that man, by being faithful to the human conditions of the covenant, might enable God to fulfil His promise and restore the kingdom to Israel. Their notion of the law was broader than the Sadducean; comprehended not simply the priestly ordinances, but every statute or precept by lawgiver, prophet, or rabbi which related to the regulation of the individual or social life. Their notion, too, of reward or recompense was much more pronounced and powerful, bound all the promises of the Old Testament both to this life and one that was to come. The necessary counterpart of an obedient people was a faithful God; when the people did as God commanded, God would do as He had promised. So the Pharisaic zeal for the law but expressed the Pharisaic zeal for the future and triumph of Israel; and it at once rested on and addressed the deepest of Jewish hopes the hope in the Messiah. Thus over against the Sadducean policy and position they placed the ancient national ideal, which was to be realized by obedience to the law the fathers had received and they interpreted. With the idea, of interpretation came the idea of authority. The men that had been despised while living were revered when dead; and the interpretation became as authoritative and sacred as the interpreted, the oral as the written law. The former at once explained, modified, and enlarged the latter. The school became a sort of permanent lawgiver, augmenting the original germ by aggregation as opposed to growth or development. This process the Pharisees represented, but the Sadducees resisted. They stood by the old sacerdotalism, by the hereditary principle that secured sacerdotal functions and political authority to the old families. The prophecy their fathers had hated, they ignored. The later doctrines of angels and spirits, of resurrection and immortality, they denied. The oral law, the interpretations of the schools, they despised. And so they and the Pharisees stood in practical as in theoretical politics in antithetical relations. The Pharisee represented the patriotic view, developed Judaism, the theocratic belief in all its scholastic exaggeration and rigidity. But the Sadducees represented the standpoint of the politician, the creed of the ruling families, that know how calmly to accept the inevitable while preserving their prerogatives and privileges. Neither party was true to Hebraism, the universalism that lived in the prophets. Both were illustrations of how historical parties may be most false to history, to every great principle it expresses or contains. Judaism, as it then lived, was the antithesis and contradiction of Hebraism; the religion alike of Pharisees and Sadducees was the negation of the religion Psalmists had sung and Prophets preached.

Now, amid these and similar historical conditions Jesus lived. Could they make Him? Can they explain Him? There was a fine fitness in His being a Jew, a Son of Abraham the Hebrew. The supreme religious person of the race fitly came from its most religious family. He was the personalization of its genius, the heir of its work. It had created the history that made Him possible, the men to whom He was intelligible and through whom He could be revealed to the world. But He transcended its powers of production, was more and greater than what its native energies could create. The splendid religious genius of Israel had issued in Judaism, and which of its two great parties could produce a Christ? The Sadducees would not own Him. He belonged to no ruling family, had no priestly blood in His veins, was one whose very meddling with religion deserved nothing less than death. And Pharisaism was as incapable of forming Him. It was nobler than its rival, had loftier aims, truer ambitions, a sincerer spirit. But it was fundamentally increative, radically infertile. It could not be inventive, inward, spiritual, without being suicidal. The moment it had tried to transcend legalism and particularism, it had perished. All its wisdom is the wisdom of the interpreter, all its goodness the goodness of the School. But Jesus is throughout the very antithesis and contradiction of Pharisaism. He is the supreme religious spirit of history, the foremost creator of faith, the least bound by legalism, the most absolutely universal, rich in the most human wisdom, gracious with the most Divine goodness. It is a small thing to find among the sayings of Hillel or Shammai one curiously like a saying of Jesus. The great thing is the spirit of the men and the system. Common sayings can be claimed for neither Hillel nor Jesus, but what each can claim is his distinctive character and spirit. Hillel is a Jewish Rabbi, and could never have been a Universal Teacher; Jesus is a Universal Teacher, and could never have remained a mere Jewish Rabbi. But He could be the first only as He transcended the second, and his historical conditions, while equal to the making of a Rabbi, were not equal to the creation of a Universal Teacher.

There is nothing so easy as to change conditions into causes, to mistake the enumeration of formal elements for the discovery of the plastic mind. What is dead and amorphous in Judaism was made living and organic by the touch of Christ. Judaism cannot show how His hand became creative, though the fact is indubitable that His hand did create. The maker of a great religion is no simple product which an exhausted faith suddenly and almost insensibly touched by other exhausted faiths may easily produce. The most hurried glance can see how complex and difficult the problem is.

Contrast Christ's day with ours. We are free, the children of a land where a man can speak the thing he will; but He was without freedom, the Son of a people enslaved and oppressed. We are educated, enlightened by the best thought of the past, the surest knowledge of the present; but His were an uneducated people, hardly knew the schoolmaster, and where they did, received from him instruction that stunted rather than developed. We live in a present that knows the past and is enriched with all its mental wealth the treasures of India, from its earliest Vedic to its latest Puranic age of China, of Egypt, of Persia, of Assyria; the classic riches of Greece and Rome; the wondrous stores accumulated by the Hebrews themselves and deposited in their Scriptures all are ours, at our feet, in our heads, there to make the new wealth old wealth never fails to create. But Jesus lived in a present closed to every past, save the past of His own people. The common home-born Jew knew the Gentile but to despise him; the wisdom of Greece and Rome was to him but foolishness, best unknown; while the light that streamed from his own Scriptures could be seen only through the thick dark horn of rabbinical interpretation. We live in times when the world has grown wondrously wide and open to man; when nations beat in closest sympathy with each other; when the thoughts of one people swiftly become those of another; when commerce has so woven its fine network round the world that all its parts now feel connected and akin; but Jesus lived in a land which prided itself on its ignorance and hatred of the foreigner, where the thought of common brotherhood or kinship could only rise to be cast out and abhorred. In our day nature has been interpreted, the physical universe has become practically infinite in space and time, filling the soul with a sense of awe in its presence the earlier ages could not possibly have experienced; but in Christ's day and to His countrymen nature was but a simple thing, of small significance, with few mysteries. Ours is, indeed, a day that might well create a great man, a universal teacher, the founder of a new faith. Yet where is the person that thinks it possible for our historical conditions to create a Christ? Strauss did not think they could, for Christ was to him the supreme religious genius,, unapproached, unapproachable, who must in His own order stand alone for all time. Renan does not think so, for to him Christ is a Creator, the Founder of the absolute religion, who did His work so well that it only remains to us to be His continuators. But if the creation of Christ transcends our historical conditions, was it possible to His own? Or does He not stand out so much their superior as to be, while a Child of time, the Son of the Eternal, the only Begotten who has descended to earth from the bosom of the Father, that He might declare Him?

1) Das Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk, p. 5.

2) Salvator, Jesus Christ et sa Doctrine. Paris, 1838. Renan, Vie de Jesus, chap. iii.

3) So Gfrörer in his work, Ueber Philo und die Alexandrinische Philosophic. In his preface he declares Christianity to be a mere confused compound of Alexandrian wisdom without any originality. In his later work, Geschichte des Urchristenthums, he seeks to trace the most distinctive doctrines of the New Testament and the oldest Fathers to rabbinical sources; and the New Testament history, so far as it has any affinity with Talmudical legends, to rabbinical traditions.

4) Strauss, Das Leben Jesus für das deutsche Volk, § 34.

5) Jos., Bell. Jud., iii. 3. 2.

6) Matt. xx. 3, 4.

7) Matt. xi. 16.

8) Ibid. xx. 30.

9) Luke iv. 16.

10) Ibid. v. 1-3.

11) Luke xv. 3-6.

12) Luke xv. 8, 9.

13) Ibid. vii. 37, 38.

14) Ibid. xii. 17, 18.

15) Ibid. viii. 49-56.

16) Ibid. xii. 45.

17) Ibid. xiv. 17-20.

18) Ibid. xvii. 28.

19) Jos., Vita, 12.

20) Antt., xviii. 5. 3.

21) Judges iv.-v.

22) Psa. Ixviii. 27.

23) Jos., Bell. Jud., iii. 3. 2.

24) Luke ii. 42.

25) Ecclus. xxiv. 14.

26) Jos., Bell. Jud., vi. 9. 3.

27) Acts ii. 9-11.

28) Jos., Vita, i.; Contra Apion., ii. 8.

29) Pss. Ixxxiv. 2; cxxii. 1, 2.

30) Romans ix. 4, 5. 3

31) Josephus was indeed too careful to draw the parallel explicitly himself. He compares the Pharisees to the Stoics and the Essenes to the Pythagoreans (Vita, 2; Antt., xv. 10. 4); but while his exposition of Sadducean doctrine (Antt. t xiii. 5. 9) suggests the Epicurean, he too well understood the thoroughly Jewish character of the party to compare it with any Greek school. Even as it is, his use of Greek terms is essentially misleading. There was no idea affirmed by the Pharisees and Essenes and denied by the Sadducees that could be fitly translated by Εἰμαρμένη

32) Jos., Bell. Jud., ii. 8. 14; Antt., xvii. 2. 4.