THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF CHRISTIANITY 2
what they saw. OE hey went to school with a living God who was then at work in his world, and not with a God who had acted long ago and put it down in a book. They lcarned religion by the laboratory Inethod of studying contemporary lire. Consequently their conception of God and of God's purposes was enlarged and clarified as their political horizon grew wider and clearer. The first fise of widespread prophefisin of which we have any record in Isracl was historically conncctcd with the raids and invasions of the Philistines (about xo2o B.c.). Against their united and disciplined forces the scattered tribes were hclpless. The national calamity creatcd a religious revival. We catch gliinpses of bands of prophets Ino'ing about in rhythmical processions, with Inusic and song, spreading a contagious religious ecstasy. In Sainuel the popular emotion found a practical, statesinanlike expression. The result was the election of the first king, the Inost iinportant step toward organized national Ulfity. As in the case of the Ainerican colonies and of the Gerinan States, the pressure of a great war was the only force sufficient to crystallize the loose ingredients of Israel into a nation. But the sane national crisis which created the "kingship also inaugurated the higher career of the prophetic order. There had been prophets in Israel belote; they were a religious phenolnenon coininon to all the Seinitic peoples. But they had been Inainly soothsayers, using their clairvoyant powers for any one who needed thein and paid thein for their service. Their ecstatic raptures and their predictions had hot been based on any fundamental Inoral convictions. The patriotic enthusiasin of the uprising against Philistine doinination began to lift the prophets clear of the function and the Inagical impleinents of soothsaying, and cut them loose from ceremonial ritual in general. These functions now fell to the priests. This was "probably the very greatest relief which prophecy experienced in the course of its evolution." I Henceforth they were free to take that independent or hostile attitude to ritual religion to which we have referred, and their predictions henceforth were national in scope and based on fundamental moral laws and convictions. Thus patriotism was the emancipating power which set the feet of the prophetic order on that new and higher path which was destined to lift them far above the soothsayers of other nations with whom they started on a common level. That religious passion which had turned against a foreign invader was equally ready to turn against the domestic oppressors of the people. The new series of prophets which began with Amos about 755 B.C. was summoned to action by a vaster danger thal that of the Philistine invaders. The empire of Assyria was rising on the Eastern horizon like a cyclone-cloud. It moved down on the cluster of little kingdoms in.Syria and Palestine with irresistible force. Assyria was the first of those great powers which were destined to grind up the tribal nationalities of the ancient Orient and out of the detritus to form new conglomerate formations on a grander scale. What Assyria began, Chaldea and the Greeks continued and the Romans completed. We can see now that the process was inevitable and necessary for the development of a wider and higher civilization, but for those who got between the millstones, i was terror and agony. Napoleon playing at nine-pins with the kingdoms of Europe, or the white race dividing the earth during the nineteenth century, are mild modern parallels. i G. A. Smith, "The Book of the Twelve Prophets," I, 2 3.
Now, to ail the nations their gods were fundamentally the national gods. Every tribe had its god and every god had his tribe. Each people relied on the national god to preserve the nation. If the nation suffered some temporary defeat and disaster, the people were either angry with their god because he was inefficient and id!e, or they cringed before him because he was angry. But when a nation was annihilated, it meant the collapse of the national faith and religion. Such a nation would hear the scoff of its neighbors:" Where is now thy god?" This catastrophe of despair and disillusionment which brought other national religions to the ground amid the wreck of the nations that hcld them, threatened Israel too. The prophets saved the faith of the people. They even taught the people to rise on the ruins of their national past to a higher faith. The religion of the prophets was not based on local shrines or sacrifices, but on moral law. They asserted that Jehovah is fundamentally a god of righteousness, and a god of Israel only in so far as Israel was a nation of righteousness. The popular feeling was that if the people stood by Jehovah, he was in duty bound to stand by them against all comers. They expected their god to act on the maxim: "My country, right or wrong." The prophets denied it. They repudiated the idea of favoritism in the divine government. God moves on the plane of universal and impartial ethical law. Assyria belongs to him as well as Israel. He would lire and be just even if Israel was broken. Israel was hOt a pet child that would escape the rod. Its prerogative was the revelation of God's will and not any immunity from the penalties of the moral law. The relation of the nation to Jehovah was hot a natural right and privilege, but rested on .oral conditions.
Thus the same historical catastrophe which wrecked the faith of others lifted the prophets to a higher faith. Their religion became international in its horizon and more profoundly ethical. Had their piety previously been narrow in its outlook and ritual in its character, it would now have suffered shipwreck. The Assyrian riddle would have been insoluble. Because they were men of large interest, new occasions under the inspiration of God were able to teach them new duties and new truths. They added new terms to the synthesis of truth. Their new faith at first seemed to the people a blasphemous denial of religion. When the events which they had foretold were actually fulfilled, the prophetic books became the support and stay on which popular religion slowly climbed to new life. We are often told that ministers who concern themselves in political and social questions are likely to lose their spiritual power and faith. Professor George Adam Smith, in discussing the development of prophetic religion, says on the contrary: "Confine religion to the personal, it grows rancid, morbid. Wed it to patriotism, it lives in the open air, and its blood is pure."' I do hot think so sweeping a generalization about purely private religion is just. But those who hold that the flower of refigion can be raised only in flowerpots will have to make their reckoning with the prophets of Israel. The very book on whlch they. feed their private devotion and that entire religion out of which Christianity grew, took shape through a divine inspiration which round its fittest and highest organs in a serles of political and social preachers. It is safe to say that the "ethical monotheism" which has been Israel's invaluable contribution to the reli.. 1 G. A. Smith, « The Book of the Twelve Prophets, '» I, 2 5.
gious life of humanity, would never have developed and survived if the prophets had from the outset limited their religion in the way in which we are nowadays advised to limit it.
That virility and humaneness of the prophets and that capacity for growth which stir our enthusiasm were largely due to the breadth and inclusiveness of their rcligious sympathy and faith. All the world was God's field; all the affairs of the nation were the affairs of religion. Every great event in history taught them a lesson in theology. This type of religion was destroyed when the national lire itself was destroyed by the foreign conquerors. The nation had been the subject of prophecy, and now the nation as such was blotted out. How could the prophets any longer appeal for national righteousness, when it was hot at the option of the people tobe righteous? Political agitation among a people under jealous foreign despotism would mean revolutionary agitation and would never be tolerated. Thus all the religious passion and reflection which had formerly flowed into social and political channels was dammed up and turned back. l'rayer and private devoutness in pious individuals and in groups of pious men was the only field left to the religious impulse. The religious history and the ceremonial worship cf Israel were the only bond of national unity that survive& Jeremiah began the turn toward individual piety. The nation was breaking up about him. His prophetic activity had failed; the people refused to believe that his words were the word of Jehovah. But he heard the insistent inner voice of God, and the consciousness of this personal communion with Jehovah was his stay and comfort. Through his very
The lat, religiou dividua failure and sufferings a tender personal relation developed between the soul of the prophet and his God. Other choice spirits were in the saine situation. The influence of Jeremiah's writings reproduced in others that personal piety which was the outcome of his peculiar experience. For religious experience has a remarkable capacity for perpetuating and reproducing its type; witness the Confessions of Saint Augustine and the mysticism of Saint Bernard. Jehovah had been the God of the nation, and the God of the individual in so far as he was part of the nation. Noxv the nation was gone, and the righteous and lowly in their surfering and isolation stretched the lonely hand of faith to him and found him near with a personal touch of love and corrffort. Thus the death-pangs of the national lire were the birth-pangs of the personal religious lire. This was a wonderful triumph of religion, an evidence of the indestructibility of the religious impulse. It was fraught with far-reaching importance for the future of religion and of humanity in general. The subtlest springs of human personality were liberated when the individual realized that he personally was dear to God and could work out his sah-ation not as a member of his nation, but as a man by virtue of his humanity. The value of this religious achievement has so impressed the students of Hebrew religious history that they bave frequently assumed that this change in religion was pure gain. The real edifice of religion in the individual soul was now ready to stand for itself, they say, and the scaffolding of political and social religion could be torn down and its planking abandoned. Itis assumed that Jeremiah and those who followed him recognized that the external means of :ealizing the ideal theocracy had failed, and they now set themselves deliberately to build a new religious community of regenerate souls. They turned their back on the Jewish nation and created the Jewish church. That seems to me a misleading construction of the historical situation. It is true that the progress of religion toward spirituality was sure to make religion more personal. But every new religious synthesis should contain all that was good and true in the old. If tbe religious value of the individual was being discovered, why should the religious value of the community be forgotten? is a matter of fact, this concentration of religious life in the individual was nota deliberate step of progress, freely taken, but was forced upon these men by dire necessity. Religion round the broad plains of national lire destroyed and in possession of the enemy, and it retreated into the mountain fastnesses of individual soul-life. It is a triumph of religious faith if a man who is crippled for lire, and confimed to a hopeless bed of pain and uselessness, still keeps his faith in God intact, or even develops so strong a trust in him who has slain him that others corne to his bedside to draw faitb from his mere look and existence. But that is not normal religion. Religion is the hallowing of all lire, and its health-giving powers are always impaired if it is deniea free access to some of the organs through which it fulfils its functio'ns. Moreover, even with the prophets of the Exile, the restoration of the nation was the controlling desire. They insisted on personal holiness, not because that was the end of all religion, but because it was the condition and guarantee of national restoration. Personal religion was chiefly a means to an end; the end was social. We can appreciate to the full the significance and value of the personal religion developed under the abnormal con« ditions of foreign domination and national prostration, and yet recognize frankly that this gain had involved a tremendous loss and that a religion developed under abnormal conditions is likely itself tobe abnormal. This view is confirmed by the subsequent development of religious thought and life. Ezekiel, who lived during the Exile, shows the effect of the separation between the political and religious interests. He too still cherishes the national hope. At the end of l.,_'s book he describes his vision of Jerusalem as he hoped it would be when restored and rebuilt. The old social convictions still persist; for instance, he takes care to provide for the just distribution of the land. And yet the political commonwealth and the king have become shadowy; the memory of them was growing dim and therefore the hope of them vas vague and colorless. On the other hand the community of worshippers and the priests as their leaders were now vividly in the foreground. As a consequence the moral and religious emphasis had changed. His ideal city was no longer a city of justice so much as a city of the true vorship. The older prophets had condemned the sins of man against man, especially injustice and oppression. Ezekiel dwelt on the sins of man against God, especially idolatry. Not justice but holiness had become the fundamental requirement, and holiness meant chiefly ceremonial correctness. The righteous nation was turned into a holy church. Ezekiel was a prophet by calling, but he was a priest by birth and training, and in comparing his literary style, his outlook on life, and his spiritual power with that of the older prophets, it is impossible to avoid a sense of religious decadence. The classical age was past. Religion had growr, aarrower and feebler when it was forced back from the great national and human interests into an ecclesiastical attitude of mind. This impression deepens as we follow the little colony of lewish Puritans who returned to their home and rebuilt the temple and the city amid poverty and fear. We shall bave occasion hereafter to point out how intimately the religious life is connected with the secular life in which it develops. It is unjust to expect that the religious lire which took form in the contracted circle that gathered about the rebuilt shrine of Jehovah would bave the saine bold originality and genius that swept through a hopeful and autonomous nation. But it is also unwise to hold that type of religion up to us as a higher development of religion. It was an earnest, solid cornmunity of sifted and picked religious men, with a great preponderance of priests. There was marvellous courage and tenacity, heroic loyalty to conviction, a tenderness of personal piety and a devotion to religion surpassing that of better times. But on its serious brow this religion wore a pa]lid complexion. It became legal, xed, monotonous, a thing by itself, shut off from the spontaneity and naturalness of the general life. The prophetic voice was hushed and the prophetic tire died out. The scribe now sat where the prophet had stood, and the sacred book took the place of the living Voice. There was greater insistence on holiness than ever, but the conception of holiness had insensibly been lowered. The prophets had lifted the expression of religioI1 to the ethical plane. The strong ettfical ingredient was never again lost frorn Jewish religion, but the ceremonial igredient began to mix with it in larger proportions and to become almost the cllief constituent of m protic hope national rfection.
holiness. Religion became once more priestly and ritual, with a timid and legal reverence for externals. It was coming to be dominated by those influences which Jesus and Paul opposed. This was a development similar to that of Christianity when the primitive spirituality of Paul passed into the ecclesiasticism and ceremonialism of the Catholic Church. This is not the classical period of Israel to which we turn for inspiration. Yet this is the period when personal religion was cultivated and when the teachers of religion did not preach politics, but devoted themselves to questions of worship and to church affairs.
In our personal Christian life every call to duty is immensely strengthened by the large hope of ultimately attaining a Christlike character and the eternal life. That creates the atmosphcre for the details of the religious life. In the social movement of our time the single reformatory demands are drawing a new and remarkable power from the larger conception of a reconstitution of social life on a co6perative basis. It takes a great and comprehensive hope to kindle the full power of enthusiasm in human lires. The prophets too cherished a large ideal of the ultimate perfection of their people. Their specific demands for justice were reënforced by the conviction that these were at the saine time an approximation to that wider national regeneration and a condition of its final completion. In the earliest age of prophetism there was no distant outlook. Religious patriots were content if the nation was victorious over its enemies and could lire in peace and prosperity under just kings. The development of a larger national hope was due to a double cause. On the one hand the ethical development of the nation and of its prophctic spokesmen furnished a higher ideal standard by which to measure the present. As long as a man has a low conception of what a perfect human character would imply, lais idea of salvation wilI consist in slight reforms of conduct. The higher the conception of personaI or social possibilities, the:arger is the task set for us. On the other hand the doom of the nation, first impending and then actual, developed and enlarged the hope of the prophcts. Thc less they lived by sight, the more they had to live by faith in the future. The more acute the present misery, the intenser thc Ionging for the better day of God. We can find a ready illustration of this process in modern life. Those classes which are in practical control of wealth and power have practically no reformatory programme; they are anxious to maintain the present situation intact. The middle classes, which shat« only partially in the advantages of the present social adjustments, have a list of grievances under which they chafe, but their social ideals do not differ very radically from the actual condition. They want reforms on the basis of the present social order, and they. can reasonably hope to secure them by peaceful and gradual methods. But when we descend to the disinherited classes, or to those nations which are forcibly held back from political liberty and social betterment, the chasm between their actual condition and their desires grows so wide that only a revolutionary lift can carry them across. Thus under the double influence of a rising ethical life and a declining national Iife, the hope of the prophets became wider and more inclusive, and also more remote, separated from the present by a sharper line. With the older prophets their social ideal was nota Utopian D dream detached from present conditions, nota fair mirage floating in the air. feet were planted on the actual social and polifical situation. The poetic imagery used by these Oriental patfiots is apt to put a rainbow around their ideas, and our prosaic minds rail to see that they dealt with stern realities in a sober way. They had a clear-eyed outlook on" contemporary event. They were religious men and as such expected no great crisis to corne except through's God's action. In any national regeneration God would have tobe the real cause and force. They pictured his interference under the sublime image of a royal advent, God coming to his people on the wings of thunder and revealing his majesty to ail the nations. This "day of Jehovah" v¢ould be the decisive tuming-point, the inauguration of a new epoch of history. It meant vengeance on the foreign oppressor, punishment for the wicked, the sifting of Israel, the rcscue of the weak. Beyond that day lay the golden age, in which all men would -lnow God and his 'ill, and the suffering of the just would be over forever. This day of Jehovah v¢as to the prophets vhat the social revolution is to modern radical reformers, but expressed in terms of fervent religious faith; therefore its real goal was moral justice rather than economic prosperity, and it was to corne by divine help and not by mere social evolution. When the life of the nation withered away under the mailed fist of an alien power and the attainment of future improvements was torn from its control, the character of the naticnal hope underwent a gradual change. It was never surrendered. I-Iowever individualistic religion became, it never abandoned the collective hope as the real consummation of religion. The :esto:ation of the temple after the Exile was hailed as a pledge of the national restoration that was to follow. The tense personal obedience to the minutioe of the Law in postexilic Judaism was only the condition for the full blessing of God on the nation. Jehovah was always the God of an organized society and hOt of a disconnected mass of individuals. The Book of Daniel i n interpretation of international relations and events, a programme for history to follow. But when the weight of foreign empire was so overwhelming and crushing that even the boldest hope could see no adequate resources in the people, the catastrophe that would break this power was conccived as a supcrnatural cataclysm out of all relation to human activity. By contact with foreign religious life during the Exile the belief in a great organized kingdom of evil had become a vital part of Jewish thought, and the Jews saw behind the oppressive human forces the shadowy and sinister forms of dcmon powers that could be overcome only by archangels and heavenly armies. When religion was driven from national interests into the refuge of priva.te life, it lost its grasp of larger affairs, and the old clear outlook into ¢ontemporary history gave way to an artificial scheme. Instead of reading present facts to discern God's purposes, men began to pore over the sacred books, and to piece the unfulfilled prophecies of the dead prophcts into a mosaic picture of the future. The sunlight of the prophetic hope gave way to the limelight of the apocalyptic visions of later Judaism. [t is profoundly pathefic to see how a people paralyzed, broken on the rack, and almost destroyed, still clung toits national existence and believed in its political future. Even the crudest dreams of apocalypticism have a tragic dignity and a lingering touch of vital force. In those dreams the
Jewish people kept alive both their memories and their hopes, much as an impoverished aristocratic family will preserve the tarnished swords and the faded uniforms worn by illustrious ancestors and nurse the hope in its sons that they may some day regain the old position. But it is a mistake to look for political wisdom in a people that had no politics. Bands of foreign political rcfugees gathered in England have often dreamed intensely of the liberation of their fatherland, but they have rarely planned wisely, and usually rail to take account of changes since they left their home. Yet the unhistorical and artificial schemes of apocalypticism have been and are now more influential in shaping the imagination of Christian men about the future course of history than the inspired thoughts of the great prophets. Men still rival the rabbis in learned calculations that somehow never turn out correct, and follow wandering lights which have thus far disappointed and led astray all that have ever followed them.
Social preachers nowadays are very commonly charged with being "too pessimistic." The saine charge was ruade against the Hebrew prophets. Their people, like ours, was filled full of cheerful and egotistic optimism, with this distinction in favor of the Hebrews, that their optimism was based on religious faith, while ours is bascd mainly on material wealth. Israel had the strongest of all the gods for its champion, and he would surely see his people through all trouble. Was not Israel his dwelling-place and did not his people supply him with the sacrifices which he loved? It is significant that Amos first appeared at a festival at Bethel and interrupted its revels with a jarring note, crying that the fall of the Northern kingdom and the exile of its