Then however ensued a course of events which must be regarded as among the greatest surprises of history; for just when they and their religion might have been expected to vanish as completely as the ten tribes previously deported had vanished, they are found to be preserved; and the worship of Jehovah, instead of being extinguished by the dominant worship of Babylon, is seen to emerge in the course of two generations more vigorous and considerably purer than ever it had been before. It was during the Exile that the real nature of the religionof Israel, as one adapted and destined to enlighten and sanctify far more than a single people, began to be truly discerned.[111]The Jewish people had a great deal to learn from Babylon and Persia, and they returned to their own land with clearer conceptions of immortality, the resurrection, the spiritual world and judgment to come, than any of their forefathers had gained. Scholars, however, who enlarge upon their indebtedness to their conquerors, seem to forget how much they had to communicate to them. In the psalms of the pre-Exilian period, and in the doctrines of Moses and the prophets, they carried with them a treasure richer than the whole wisdom of the East. So though they learned much from Babylon, they also learned in it to appreciate the gifts which they had previously despised. Sorrow and penitence helped to clear their spiritual vision, and prepared them for the prophecies of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah. They learned that though banished from the Holy Land they were not thereby cast out—as their fathers imagined—from the presence of Jehovah; that, though the temple had been destroyed and sacrifice had been suspended, God could still be worshipped with sincerity and truth. The teachings of their prophets brought home with conviction to themthe oracles of their earlier seers, that obedience was better than sacrifice, and contrition than sin-offering,—“that he that doeth repentance, it is imputed to him as if he went to Jerusalem, built a temple and altar, and wrought all the sacrifices of the law.”[112]
With the destruction of the temple there arose the synagogue, which, with its reading of the Law and the Prophets, its chanting of the Psalms, its offering of prayer, and the giving heed to the voices of the elders, represented a far higher and more spiritual service than temple courts reeking with sacrifices and steaming with incense. It is true that they were still fascinated by the material splendours of the former days; for after their return they restored Jerusalem, rebuilt the temple, and re-appointed its services. A revival led to a reformation, which, following the old lines as closely as possible, assumed the form of a retrogression rather than advance. The new energies of the nation were repressed by a Levitical domination as rigid and intolerant as Brahmanism ever was in India. It was not the spirit of the Living God but the hand of the long dead Moses that was to rule their conscience and mould their history. The consequence was just what might have been anticipated. Human nature revolted from subjugation to a system which had servedits day. Religion, where it was earnest, stiffened into formalism, and formalism in many cases congealed into hypocrisy, and, as inevitably happens, intellect raised its protest against this irreligious religion in many anti-religious and even atheistic forms. Meanwhile synagogues rose all over the land, promoting doctrine rather than ritual, stimulating rather than repressing discussion, and thus conserving and propagating the truths that prepared the ways of the Lord. Only a handful however, had returned; the majority of the exiles prospered and multiplied, and, unlike the ten tribes, were not absorbed among the Gentiles. At the beginning of the Christian era, for one Jew living in Palestine there would be a hundred living beyond it, not only in Babylonia, but in Greece, and Egypt, and Italy, and all over the Empire. There were many Jews in Spain, in Britain, and in the dark territories beyond the Danube; and though they adapted themselves to foreign ways, and became all things to all men, in regard to their religion and their intimate connection with Jerusalem they still continued to be Jews.[113]As their nationality declined their faith arose. By and by, not content with the heathen toleration for their religion as only one of the many in the world, they began to spread it abroad.Judaism, with the temple and the Levitical law, would in Palestine eventually have petrified, but the Diaspora, with the Synagogue and the Septuagint, enabled Israel to play their proper parts as the religious teachers of mankind. Proselytism gradually became very vigorous and successful; devout men and women everywhere, unable to find peace of conscience in the intoxicating and demoralising rites of Pagan temples, turned from them to take hold of the skirts of the man who was a Jew. In a manner and to an extent which even the youthful Isaiah never could have dreamed, Jerusalem began to attract out of every nation under heaven the kind of people who were found in its streets at Pentecost,—Parthians and Medes, and dwellers in Pontus and Arabia, and the eunuch of far distant Ethiopia.[114]
As we have noticed the highest outcome of Vedic thought in pursuit of Atman, let us also notice the highest development of Hebrew belief in their hope of Messiah, whose germs are traceable in their faith from the first. For example, one of the earliest and most lasting effects of their conception of Deity was the conviction of their own unworthiness and inability to live in the presence of the holy God. Though they were tobe a kingdom of priests for other nations, they dared not enter into the relationship which priest implied. They required a mediator like Moses, who could speak to the Holy One for them, and receive for them His message. Their whole worship was based on this feeling, and the purer and higher rose their conceptions of God, the more intense became their self-abasement. Between Him and the noblest of His creatures there was an impassable gulf. Though He was far, far off from them, He was far too near—so near that they could not go anywhither from His presence, and yet in their dread there was a yearning to come near to Him and to see Him face to face. The Brahman aspired to lose himself in the Absolute, in the pure light of characterless knowledge; the Hebrew, mastered by the personality of God, longed to see Him as He is. And never more earnest was this longing in the Hebrew to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to be satisfied with His likeness, than in the times of his deepest self-humiliation and keenest contrition. “I pray Thee, pardon theiniquityof Thy people;” “I beseech Thee, show us Thyglory;” “and these two pangs so counter and so keen,” shame and reverence akin to dread, aspiring love, were to prove not only the purification of their own faith, but the birth-throe of a better hope for the world.
For their dread and shame sprang from their consciousness of their own evil, and their aspiration from an instinct which whispered that evil, though deeply ingrained in, was not essential to the being of man. Their sense of sin was very poignant, more so than in the case of any other people. The Hindus had a conception of merit, but a very poor and weak conception of sin. They were more impressed by life’s suffering than by the taint of which it was only the consequence. But the Hebrews felt the shame and the curse of that taint as no people ever felt it. They had quite a vocabulary to express the many shades and degrees of the feeling of it; yet in their speculations they were led to believe that this taint was not inherent in their nature nor ineradicable from it. There was a time when sin was not; there might be a time when it would not be. The dominion of evil was an interlude, and though terribly prolonged in human experience, it might have an end. That was the central ideal of the Fall which they pictured on the first page of their Bible, and conserved in their seventh-day Sabbath.[115]In the fact of man’s creation theyfelt that his redemption was involved, and so the Hebrew dread of and longing for God were reconciled by a hope that though to man belongeth shame, to God belongeth mercy as the God of salvation. There was another and a better covenant than that which had been concluded with their ancestors at Sinai, or with the first father of their tribes long before. It was made not with Moses or Abraham for Israel, but for all nations with a Divine Mediator, who, behind all that was of man, though yet the seed of the woman, would, in a way that neither Moses nor any of the prophets could understand, eventually make an end of sin.
The history and the literature of the Hebrews would be a perplexing enigma without this hope. Like their faith, it was too pure and spiritual for them to receive, and to the very latest it always appears with something of the defilement of their religious condition clinging to it. During the Exile, however, this hope became purer and stronger, and the imagery in which they embodied it became more evangelical and spiritual than that employed by earlier poets and prophets. The section of the Hebrews that returned to Palestine held it in increased strength, but with the old national taint upon it. Their own restoration andthe favour of Persia kindled anew the foolish dreams of their ancestors, and, alas! when Persia disappointed them, and its favour was supplanted by oppression, and the kingdom, instead of rising Phœnix-like out of its ashes, became the battlefield or the gage of foreign nations, there broke out in Palestine the bitterest plague of unbelief and apostasy that had ever assailed the nation. For idolatry, for overlaying or corrupting the worship of Jehovah, their forefathers had often been severely chastised, but no prophet had as yet complained of a temple deserted and an altar defiled by unworthy offerings. And this was because men professed to have discovered in the destruction of their national hopes that after all religion was vain, and there was no profit in serving God.
Any one who has intelligently read Malachi, or the sayings of Agur the proverb-collector,[116]or the Book of Ecclesiastes, will see to what a depth of scepticism, if not indeed of atheism, their perverted Messianic hopes had brought the Jews of Palestine. We appreciate the criticism which regards Coheleth, so alien to the healthy and joyous spirit of the Hebrew religion, as the natural outgrowth of this period.[117]When faith in Israel’s imperishable kingdomseemed to be completely wrecked, when ministers of religion led the revolt from it, and unrighteous rulers and corrupt society made life in Palestine, as in Rome in Nero’s day, not worth the living, it is not to be wondered that this one which has survived, but that “many books”[118]should have been written to echo the cry, “All is vanity.” We may listen to it as a note of despair from a pessimist in whose people religion had died, because disappointed political ambition had shown them that “no earthly good” came of serving God; or we may read it as the protest of some healthy-minded Jew against that orthodox asceticism which after the Captivity invaded religion, and led to the rise of Pharisaism and Essenism. In any case, it seems to mark the proper close in Palestine of an age of national perverted faith and hope. The Essenes like the Indian ascetics had hope neither for the nation’s recovery nor for the establishment anywhere of a kingdom of God. The Pharisees, on the contrary, had hope, but it was the old political hope, and in them, though Egyptian and Syrian and Greek and Roman had trodden the nation under foot, and though the Maccabees had suffered and poured out their blood in vain, it seemed to grow stronger and stronger. Ready to believe any impostor, and to rise at the faintest call, their fanaticism more thanonce betrayed the people into ineffectual and most sanguinary revolts; but it had one result that was not wholly evil, for they drew after them the multitudes to the desert, when the thunder of the Baptist’s cry reached Jerusalem, “The kingdom of God is at hand.”[119]
So was it in Palestine; but among the Diaspora all over the Empire the hope of Messiah assumed a purer and more catholic form. Everywhere it was strong, but the broader horizons by which they were surrounded saved them from the delusions which intoxicated the Palestinian Jew. In classical literature there are tokens that it had filtered into Gentile minds. It was undoubtedly vague and shadowy even at its brightest, but in the Sibyl and Pollio its fulfilment signified something more important than a successful revolution in Palestine. It meant mighty changes impending that would bring good to all the world, the augury of a star that would soon glimmer in the eastern horizon, and grow and brighten till it would be seen to be not a light for Asia only, but the Sun of Righteousness with healing in His beams for every nation under heaven.
We have thus been following two lines ofreligious movement, perfectly independent of each other, far apart geographically, still further apart in the beliefs which inspired them. We have seen how the melody of joy and health which the Indians brought with them from our common primeval home ended in a sigh of despair. Individual existence, at first so full of wonder and delight, lost soon its freshness and glory, and came to be felt to be such a burden that emancipation from it by absorption into the Absolute was hailed as a boon. The human mind, leaving its childhood behind it, and advancing to question itself and the universe, after a season of movement and sense of freedom and power, somehow lost or missed the way. Oppressed in the toils of the jungle, and wandering ever further from practical life as it proceeded, it lay down vanquished, longing only to be at rest and in quiet as infants that never saw the light.
The other line of development marks not the course of a speculation, but the growth of a faith laying hold of mankind with creative and transforming power. This faith, never dissociated from, but seeking to dominate and reform actual life, condemned inertion, and fostered hope for a race working out its salvation, because convinced that God is working in them both to will and to do. We see a light streaming from above into the darkness of man, paining and blinding at first theorgans which it seeks to purify. We see a struggle on the part of the creatures to bring the Most High down to their level, and make Him their servant, and a striving of the Divine Spirit to train them as children. We see a mighty Hand laid ever on a peculiar people, at times so softly that they hardly felt it, at times with conscious guiding and sustaining power; at times chastising them sorely by the sword of the enemy and the heart-hunger of exile, but never giving them over unto death. Not for forty years, but for twice forty generations we see Him leading and humbling and proving them, till in the souls of the aptest—though only “a remnant” of them—He had rooted ideals of human destiny which never can perish. Then, that all might be ready in the fulness of time, He scattered them among the nations, and lo! when required they are everywhere, crying in the crowded capitals of the East and of the West, in the darkness of the North and the brightness of the South, “Prepare ye in the desert an highway for the Lord.”