LECTUREII.THE HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS OF BUDDHISM AND CHRISTIANITY, AND THE EVIDENTIAL VALUE OF THEIR RESPECTIVE SCRIPTURES.
It should be an advantage to the study of Buddhism that even in its origin it confronts us as the religion of a people sufficiently advanced in civilisation to be able to formulate their metaphysical conceptions and present us with their religious beliefs organised in a system. Like Christianity it not only inherited but also produced a considerable and very miscellaneous literature, whose contents throw valuable light upon the past from which it emerged and upon the course which it followed, and like Christianity it has left its stamp on most of the institutions of the peoples among whom it was successfully propagated. When all these sources of information have been properly investigated, we may hope that the story of the rise and progress of Buddhism in the East willbe revealed with something at least of the clearness with which the history of Christianity is disclosed by the literature and art of the West.
To trace, however, the dawn and spread of Buddhism with anything like historical accuracy for the first six or seven hundred years of its course, is a task as yet beyond the literary ability of the times. It is doubtful whether the materials for such a work have as yet been collected, and he would be a bold man who would claim for the task of sifting what has already been furnished more than an earnest beginning. Not even Saint-Hilaire would now repeat the assertion so confidently made thirty years ago,[62]that “no new discoveries can change our conclusions regarding it”; for during the past generation the effect of fuller information has been not only to modify, but in several instances to revolutionise the theories formed concerning it. Discoveries are multiplying every year; and, though the knowledge thus acquired serves often more to reveal difficulties than to solve them, we may be thankful that the examination of them is engaging the attention of the highest order of scholarship, and hopeful, yea, even confident that since so many of the ablest and most patient minds are turned in this direction, the aggregate of progress will speedily be immense.
All that we know of Buddhism, and all that we are likely to know of it, is to be gathered from its own Scriptures; and a comparison of these with the Christian Scriptures reveals at the very outset a difference amounting to a vast contrast between them. The original Scriptures of Christianity have been before the tribunal of the world’s keenest and most hostile criticism for 1800 years; but we are only now beginning to make the acquaintance of the Scriptures of Buddhism, which have hardly been subjected to any cross-questioning worthy of the name. Those who have ventured to assail have only published their inability to understand them, and those most competent to criticise may be pardoned if they handle tenderly the fragments which they are collecting and translating for our use. The services which they are thus rendering to religion as well as to science are very great. Previously we had only anthologies extracted often without reference to date or authorship or connection to judge from, but now these learned pundits are furnishing us with books containing not only the wisdom and beauties of Eastern literature, but its follies and blemishes as well. Omitting only what is obscene and offensive to the moral sense,[63]they are giving us specimens of several strata of Oriental thought and belief,vertically and thoroughly cut, from which a correct understanding of the essential features of this very peculiar religion may with considerable probability be ascertained.
Only a portion of the Buddhist Scriptures are as yet available, and these we are certainly not at liberty to place side by side as of equal evidential value with the contents of the New Testament. It is said that two thousand manuscripts of the New Testament, or of portions of it, have been discovered, several of which are of great antiquity, and notwithstanding the immense number of various readings on points of detail, the text of the oldest corresponds substantially with that of the books as we have them to-day. We are informed, however, on the best authority, that “all Indian manuscripts are comparatively modern, that no manuscript written one thousand years ago is now existent in India, and that it is almost impossible to find one written five hundred years ago; for most manuscripts which claim to be of that date are merely copies of old ones, the dates of which are repeated by the copyists.”[64]It is admitted, moreover, that the literary honesty of these Indian translators and copyists is very questionable, that the books of the Buddhists have undergone wholesaletextual alterations, that none of the Sanskrit works as yet known to us are unadulterated specimens of transmitted doctrines, that the oldest and most reliable authorities for the life of Buddha exaggerate greatly events which are said to have happened, and ascribe to him long discourses of which the writers themselves were the composers.[65]In respect, therefore, of literary accuracy and faithfulness of purpose, these old compilers and re-editors of the Buddhist books are far below the standard which criticism has inexorably applied to the versionists of the Christian Scriptures.
The faithfulness of our English versions is vouched for by the names of the translators, and yet they admit that their translations are only approximations.[66]From the very nature of the case they must be so. The East is very far distant from the West; its ways are not our ways; its thoughts are not our thoughts. Some one has said that “theIliadis separated from theRig Vedaby an interval of several civilisations”; and if so, how vast must be the gulf separating Vedic and even Buddhist metaphysicians from the British philosopher of to-day! It is simply impossiblefor the most impartial translator to put himself in the place of the ancient Indian sage, and to prevent his own preconceptions from insinuating themselves among the data with which he has to deal. He has to express, as we have been reminded, “a lower order of ideas in a higher order of terms, and use words suggesting a wealth of analysis and association quite foreign to the thought to be reproduced. Translation from a lower to a higher language is thus a process of elevation.”[67]In reading these translations and the books founded upon them, we have constantly to guard against giving to such terms as “sin,” “lust,” “salvation,” “law,” “church,” and many others, our Christian conceptions of them. We are often perplexed whether the phrases employed, and even the very titles of the treatises, be really the equivalents of the ancient texts and titles, or nineteenth century conceptions of what they may be made to mean. A European scholar inheriting the results of ages of Christian culture may be more likely to interpret the reach of an old Buddhist expression than the monk who first used it; but he is always in danger of confounding that reach with his own firm grasp of truth, and of expressing his conceptions by phraseologywhich, if it could be explained to the ancient, would be rejected by him as inconsistent with his original meaning.
Another strong contrast between the two sets of scriptures emerges when we attempt to fix the dates at which the earliest Buddhist works were produced. The New Testament is admitted by authorities who cannot be accused of prejudice in favour of Christianity and even by antichristian critics, to contain the actual writings of some of the original disciples of Jesus. The very latest of the books which compose it was in circulation within a century after His death, while the great bulk of them were accepted before half a century had passed as the testimonies of those who were eye-witnesses of the rise of our religion.[68]M. Renan admits that the three Synoptical Gospels are the “tender remembrances and simple narratives of the first and second generations of Christians, written in substantially their present form by the men whose names they bear.”[69]Theepistle ofSt.James and several of the epistles ofSt.Paul are almost now unanimously accepted as the products of the first generation.Mons.E.Burnouf therefore may safely aver that “the history of Christian doctrine and worship bears the crown over all others in respect that its records are complete.”[70]What of these records are comprised in the New Testament, though tried by the severest of tests, continues to-day as they were eighteen centuries ago delivered to the Church. Though the various readings in themss.are said to be counted by 200,000, hardly one of them can be said to affect a fundamental doctrinal or historical statement; and so outstanding and distinct is their canonical character that it requires no external authority, but only comparison with them, to disclose what of early Christian literature is to be regarded as apocryphal.
The evidence on which Orientalists have to rely in fixing the date of the Buddhist scriptures is confessedly such “that we must not be surprised if those who are accustomed to test historical and chronological evidence in reference to Greece and Rome declined to be convinced by it.”[71]For centuries after the death of Buddha his followers assure us that they had no written books constitutingtheir rules of faith and manners. The earliest written collection of which in their own records we have any historical trace is that of Ceylon, and all that can be said of it is “that there is nothing improbable” that part of it may have been reduced to writing about the first centuryB.C., but the whole was only fixed about 420A.D.The Nepaulese collection is said to date only from the first Christian century; but it is not alleged that the whole of the works now in it were even then in existence. According to their own tradition, they had no written biography of Buddha till about the first century of our era, and no one who has examined that narrative or read the opinions expressed by Orientalists as to the date when it was produced—opinions so divergent as to indicate a difference of several centuries—would ever dream of employing it as evidence of what is alleged in it to have happened. It is simply impossible, therefore, to regard the Buddhist’s Pitakas as if they were of similar authoritative value with the New Testament, for, in fact, in respect of canonical worth they do not deserve to be ranked with much of our later patristic literature.
A very high antiquity, however, is claimed by Buddhists for these collections. According to the Dipavanso, their earliest available chronicle, datingonly from the fifth centuryA.D., the doctrines orally communicated by Buddha to his disciples were by them immediately after his death revised and classified under the three divisions of Vinaya, Abhidharma, and Sutta, in which they have always since then been preserved. This collection having passed through the crucible of a council held at Vaisali a hundred years later, was fixed as canonical at another held in the reign of Asoka about 242B.C.It is urged that a canon, to be authoritative, does not require to be written, and that Indians claim for one orally transmitted higher authority than for one transcribed. The art of writing was probably unknown in India in Buddha’s time, and so, thrown back upon their resources, memory was by the Indians cultivated to an extent which enabled them to dispense with methods deemed by nearly all other peoples to be essential to accuracy. Eminent Orientalists therefore, while regarding the account of the first council as apocryphal, are yet inclined to admit—from the identity of the threefold division in all the schools that have been tested, from the similarity of the titles of the contents of all the various collections, and especially from the quality of the writings themselves—that the tradition recorded in the Dipavanso is well founded, and that considerable portions of the Vinaya and Sutta literature may date from a hundred years after the death of Buddha.
In assuming so much, however, these scholars by no means believe that they have found in these texts the actual teaching of Buddha in an unadulterated condition. While not thinking it possible to impugn the substantial accuracy of the Vinaya texts, though given in Pali translations of the lost dialect in which they were originally preached, they tell us that the oldest of the Sutta texts are “not his teachings nor the teachings of his immediate disciples, who could not have spoken of him in the manner in which he is there described. They are only founded on his teachings, and record existing beliefs as to the doctrines which he actually taught.”[72]For “the fundamental and original doctrines they may be accepted as fairly trustworthy authorities,” but for the facts of his life they are even at the best very questionable guides. Nearer to the origin of Buddhism and of the person of its founder we are not likely to get than in the book entitled by its translator the Sutta of the Great Decease; but he confesses that even in it we are standing on anything but solid ground, and that we are only able to catch a distant and most uncertain glimpse of the figure of the great Teacher as he comes out at rare intervals from the mist of legends which, designed to adorn and magnify, have in reality diminished and obscured his real personality.
For our knowledge of Buddhism, therefore, we have for centuries only oral traditions to rely upon. Of these traditions only a portion may be traced approximately to the times of Buddha, and of the fragments which can possibly be traced not one contains a narrative nor any historical reference to passing events. On the contrary, our knowledge of the origin of Christianity is derived not from fragments of oral tradition, but from a set of canonical writings, many of them traceable close to the generation that witnessed Christ’s death, in which the story of His ministry is set in historical relation to the age in which He appeared, and His peculiar doctrines are so fixed that any addition to them is at once recognised as spurious. Between the extremes of criticism as to the period covered by the life of Christ there is a difference of only half a dozen years; but there is a difference in Buddhist traditions of more than a thousand years as to the date of Buddha’s birth, and even European scholars, after carefully sifting traditions and writings, have only been able approximately to fix dates for his death ranging over a period of 175 years.[73]
For historical accuracy, therefore, the traditions are as worthless as they are for any photographic presentation of the various persons who figure inthem. In truth we have in them neither chronology nor biography. Events and actors are equally indistinct; we have only a background without any perspective, and pasteboard puppets projected against it which might be designated by any name whatever. Even in respect of transmission of doctrine, oral tradition was found very early to have failed. The reason given in their chronicles for resorting to writing is confession sufficient that they considered that method of preserving the deposit of the faith a safer one.[74]So divergent had the renderings and so corrupt had the texts become—“for even the monks of the great council were blamed for turning the religion upside down, for distorting the sense and teaching of the five Nikayas, for casting aside that Sutta and Vinaya, and making imitations of them changing this to that[75]—that the profoundly wise priests, foreseeing the perdition of the people (from the perversion of the doctrines), and in order that the religion might endure for ages, wrote the same in books.”[76]Before this time the many schisms which had arisen were powerful illustrations of the evils which the “profoundly wise” transcribers deplored,and of that falling away from the original creed which this religion had already suffered for lack of a secured basis of faith.[77]
For the want of an authoritative standard told very severely against the early history of Buddhism. Its rapid and widespread extension was due, not so much to the natural development of its own principles as to its assimilation of the external and foreign influences with which it came in contact.Its advance was the result more of compromise than of conquest.[78]It welcomed or tolerated, at least it could not or did not defend itself against the introduction of many parasitical germs which were destined to arrest its growth and pass into its life. As the ivy covers and adorns the oak only to suck away with its million mouths its strength, so the popular beliefs which Buddhism incorporated from without, as well as the defections from the original teaching which took place within it, produced very soon upon it alterations so extensive that its founder would have disclaimed or would have been really unable to recognise it as his own.
No temptation happened to Buddhism, however, but such as is common to all the higher religions. As far as observation and experience go, the lower types of religion continue unchanged; but those that confront us upon a higher level are in a perpetual flux, in which change does not always indicate progress. Instead of tracing their path by the superstitions which they have outgrown, their course may be indicated by those which they have incorporated. Man, in his exodus of faith, is always tempted to go back to the condition from which he has emerged, or to fall away to thereligions by which he is surrounded. Mosaism and Christianity had to pass through this trial, and certainly they did not pass through it unscathed. They suffered from the corruption of popular superstitions and of Pagan rites, all of which, as in the case of Buddhism, were defended by an appeal to tradition. Just as every Buddhist innovator was ready with some forgotten saying or Sutta alleged to have been delivered by the “Blessed One,” sometimes miraculously preserved through the ages till the necessity for the revelation arose, so the Popes and the Fathers of Christendom were never at a loss for authorities when, professing to develop and define, they in reality were adding to the faith and the worship and the claims of the Church.
But Christianity from the very earliest possessed what Buddhism for a long period lacked. In its canonical writings it conserved not only a check upon this apostasy, but a security for reformation. Mechanical though it seems, there was a providence in the early committal to writing of such books as compose our Bibles. In the fact that their successive disclosures of truth were thus registered there is more significance than at first appears. It is admitted by all that man’s progress depends in no small degree on his ability to secure and hand down the treasures of hiswisdom and experience. The art of writing is thus recognised to be one of the most moving powers in the world. The nations that have depended upon it for the transmission of knowledge inherited or acquired, have certainly made more progress in religion and civilisation than those that have neglected or despised it. It is significant that the writers of the Bible have all recognised this condition of human progress, and that many of them have represented themselves as instructed by the Divine authority, from whom they profess to have received their communications, to make them permanent in popular language and in plain written form.[79]
In the history of the Hebrews there is not a single recorded instance of religious reformation in which the law and the testimony, or the scrolls of the prophets, did not play an important part. In like manner the New Testament, which embodies the ideals and perpetuates the standard which is to regulate its course, not only saved Christianity from the perils which threatened its earliest spread, but has often rescued it from the degradation into which it has fallen. Canonical books may only give, as it has been said, “the reflected image of the real doctrines of the founder of a religion, an image always blurred and distortedby the medium through which it has to pass”;[80]but in the case of the New Testament the Church has never developed, or thought it possible to develop, a purer reflection. Advance as it may, the Church never can outgrow the ideals of its youth, and change what it pleases, it never can improve them. Whenever the Church assumed supremacy over its law, and whenever tradition superseded its testimony, it yielded to the disintegrating influences of heathenism. It was rapidly lapsing into polytheism when Mohammed rose with a spurious and mutilated version of the Scriptures to recall it to the witness of true Scriptures to the unity and sovereignty of God. Later on, when sinking through formalism into superstition and sorcery almost as degrading as any Indian, Luther, by the re-discovery of the Greek Testament, brought about a reformation which not only saved Europe, but has created a new Western and Southern world. In every revival and every advance which has taken place since then there may be traced, directly or indirectly, the regenerative influences of the Christian originals. On its human side the Christian Church will always be in danger of losing its pure conceptions and noble aims in grosser forms of belief and in lower ambitions;but high over all its degradation towers in its early Scriptures the majesty and spirituality of its Divine authority, and we have only to look up to be first convicted, then attracted and redeemed. The purest sections of the Christian Church, the surest and the first to outgrow all unworthy expressions of Christianity, are those which adhere most closely to the original rule of faith and worship. It is quite possible that we “may be only too apt to make a fetich of our sacred books”;[81]but somehow the Christian communities that most revere their sacred books show that they are least likely to fall into this danger. The more we obey the Scriptures, the less likely are we to idolise them. The New Testament, so far from attaching any mystical or talismanic value to its contents, tells us that the letter killeth, and the spirit alone giveth life. It is otherwise with the Buddhist Tripitaka. Its authors claim meritorious efficacy not only for the repetition of its sentences, but for the very sound of its words, “as if they were capable of elevating every one who hears them to heavenly abodes in future existence.” Sir Monier Williams has illustrated this by a legend long current, not in northern Buddhist countries, but in Ceylon, where a purer Buddhism prevails. According to it, two monks were heard by fivehundred bats reciting in a cave the law of Buddha, and they by merely hearing gained such merit that in death they were re-born as men, and ultimately through successive re-births were raised to the fellowship of the gods.[82]Of course this is simply a legend, a thing of hay or straw that has got mixed with the purer primitive faith; but it indicates that the course of the current flows in quite an opposite direction from the faith which allows itself to be dominated and guided by the canon of Holy Scriptures.
The quality of the contents of the two sets of writings is not under discussion, but we cannot help remarking one characteristic of the Christian Scriptures which is not likely to emerge in our longest acquaintance with the Buddhist books. No one ever expects that the genuineness of the contents of the Tripitaka will ever be discussed with anything like the intensity and acerbity with which we have discussed the genuineness of the books of the Bible. The long and fierce contendings that have been waged over each portion of the Gospels will never take place over any of the Suttas. We have been working for five centuries to secure a proper English translation of the Holy Bible, and we are not satisfied with it yet: does any oneexpect a similar expenditure of labour to secure a proper version of the Tripitaka? It is possible that scholarship will by and by exhaust this particular field of Oriental research, and “having catalogued its discoveries will put them aside and proceed to more interesting studies”; but though men have quarrelled about and questioned the Holy Scriptures for eighteen centuries they are not likely to come to a term of their hostility or curiosity. The ceaseless endeavour to disprove, refute, shows that we cannot get rid of them. There must be something either in the history of their production or the quality of their contents, or the range of their influence, which separates them from all sacred books of the type of the Buddhist Tripitaka. Certainly we cannot conceive it possible that any of these so-called Bibles of other religions will ever among any civilised people supplant the Christian Bible. “One chapter of Isaiah,” says Quinet,[83]“has more in it than a whole Republic of Plato.” One Psalm of David will outweigh all the religious lore of the Vedas. One sentence of Moses, “The Lord our God is one Lord: I the Lord am holy,” is worth all the speculations of the devout and learned authors of the Upanishads. Not that the Republic, the Vedas, the Upanishads are to be despised. On the contrary, the more they arestudied the more likely is the Bible to be revered, for the truth that is in them is only prophetic of truth which could not then be revealed and received. We may outlive and outgrow the teaching of these wise ancients, but we have not yet transcended the originals of Christianity, and it is not at all likely that we ever shall. There is an end to the perfection of all other systems, but here is “a commandment exceeding broad,” “whose line has gone through all the earth, and its word to the end of the world.”
From this slight notice of the literature which Buddhism has produced let us proceed to glance at the literature which it inherited, with the view of catching a glimpse of the conditions out of which it arose. As with man’s language, so is it with his other distinctive birthright: we can only understand a religion when we have ascertained its antecedents. Christianity emerged from a previous religion of which it professed to be the complement. Our Lord appeared among a people whose spiritual history extended over several thousand years. They had a sacred canon, professing to register the successive Divine revelations made to their ancestors, which was fixed as we have it now at least two, and perhaps more, centuries before He came. Instead of breaking with the past He acknowledged and appropriated it; instead of abrogating theirlaw, He fulfilled it; instead of disowning their prophets He claimed them as His witnesses. In prosecuting His mission He brought upon Himself the fierce antagonism of the existing Church, whose leaders in less than three years succeeded in having Him crucified; but His constant appeal was to their ever-venerated Scriptures. His apostles again record and expound the incidents of His ministry and His death as realising the pre-intimations of their ancient rites, and as fulfilling all their prophecies; and all along faith in the Divine origin of Christianity is never supposed to be weakened but to be greatly confirmed by an appeal to the religion which it annulled and supplanted.
Now Buddhism grew out of Brahmanism, but however divergent their relations eventually became, it was originally accepted as a natural consequence of it. Unlike Christianity and Judaism, there was for long no trace of serious antagonism between the Brahmans and many generations of the successors of Buddha. Brahmans formed a considerable portion of his followers, and in regard to his teaching, his doctrines, where not identical, were not likely to offend them.St.Paul scandalised the Pharisees by preaching that outward Jewish connection marked by the seal of circumcision profited nothing, but long before Buddha’s time Brahman teachers had declared, as he did, to that mostexclusive of the Indian elect, that the true Brahman was not a person born within the sacred caste, but only the thoughtful and self-controlled man:[84]that a bad mind and wicked deeds are what defile a man, and that no outward observances can purify him.[85]Buddha has been designated as the best and wisest and greatest of Hindus; “a reformer of Hinduism who ignored its superstitions and follies, and sought to elevate and refine its dogmas.”[86]It is now considered very questionable whether the difference between the two systems ever grew into hostility involving persecution of the new religion by the old. The two streams of Hindu belief seem for long in their course in India to have flowed peaceably side by side, and if Buddhism eventually disappeared from India as a separate and distinct system, it was not altogether because it was crushed by persecution, but because it returned to enrich and modify the religion from which it originally parted.[87]
Buddhism was thus an offspring of Brahmanism, but Brahmanism was itself the product of a religion older still. Behind Buddhism lies a great andundefined past, a past with no history in the proper sense of the word, and absolutely without chronology; but out of this vast and nebulous era there has been extracted a rich traditional literature, and Oriental scholars working on principles similar to those by which geologic periods are determined,[88]are endeavouring by an examination of the various civilisations reflected in that literature to establish the leading stages in the growth of prehistoric Indian thought. The sacred books of India disclose sufficiently in outline the social and religious progress of the people from a period of great antiquity. No one can tell when the oldest fragments of them were originally composed, but some of them are said to have been in circulation among the Aryans when one immigrant contingent of them had arrived at the confluence of Jumna with the Ganges,[89]and if so, they image for us the life and beliefs of a people who must have been contemporaries with Moses some fifteen centuries at latest before the coming of Christ.
It is now asserted that this Aryan immigration had been preceded from the same quarter by an earlier one, in a past so very remote that the Indians had lost completely the memory of it, and that by the time this second wave had reachedthe north-west Gangetic tracts, the first had pushed its way as far east as the delta, where first vanquishing it finally amalgamated with the aboriginal tribes. It is supposed that from out of this earliest section arose the natural ancestors of Buddha, while in the second and intellectually superior section we must look for the religious teachers from whom his spiritual lineage is to be traced.[90]For with them were introduced the Vedas, revealing the earliest forms of civilisation and religion in that great section of the human family to which we ourselves belong. We see pictured in the Rig-Veda a people who, in complexion, manner, and rites, were at first as distinct from the native Indian races as were the Israelites from those of Canaan. Patriarchal in their institutions, pastoral or agricultural in their pursuits, they confront us as a primitive but certainly not a barbarous folk. Nurtured by the invigorating climate and magnificent scenery of an ancestral home “on the very roof of the world,” they had reached a social condition in which, in a language fitly called “polished,” or “carefully made” (Sanskrita), they were as fitly called “Aryan” or “noble.” They practised the arts of Jabal and Jubal, venerated their sages and poets, and called their wives and daughters bynames of beauty and grace like that of Naamah. Their religion, though polytheistic, was not inspired by dread of evil spirits or awe of ancestral shades, but by wonder of the world around them and their own awakening instincts. Man in these ancient fragments, as in the first pages of our Bible, is evidently a creature transcending the savage, and made in a diviner image than the type from which it is maintained he must have sprung. Instead of consorting with or worshipping the animals, he exercises dominion over them; he questions himself and the heavens and the earth concerning their origin and author, and with some divine authentic instinct which he has never lost, he seems to be growing into the feeling that not only the trinity of supernatural powers which he worshipped, but his very self, are the children of some primordial and eternal Dyaus, the father of all.
While the earliest light that falls upon our ancestors reveals them as a religious people, whose worship, simple and rudimentary as it was, indicated a sense of inferiority, and also, as one who ought to know informs us, “some sense of flaw in the relationship, some concept of sin and guilt,”[91]to the deities worshipped, it is to be noted that gods and men were felt to be toomuch akin to allow of spiritual aspiration, or of high moral significance in man’s religious acts. The ethical or rather spiritual elements so vital to the Biblical conceptions of religion may not be quite foreign to the earliest Veda, but they are scantily, if at all, represented in it. No prayer can be said to have ever been directed to obtain forgiveness, or growth in goodness, in the Bible sense. The sinner was for the most part only a defaulter in respect of offerings, and his guilt was that of a person who refused to render homage. That the gods might be able to watch over and enrich mankind, they had to be fed and sustained. The worshipper was thus in a certain degree necessary to the worshipped. The sense of submissive gratitude to the Deity which meets us in the earliest fragments of the Bible is not expressed, for religion was conceived of as a kind of exchange in which men purchased a right to divine help by service rendered, and “each man satisfied his higher instinct according to his own conception of the character of the being on whose favour his welfare was thought to depend.”[92]
Centuries later, in another strata of sacred literature, composed in prose, dogmatic and liturgicin character, and designated Brahmanas,[93]we behold the same branch of the Aryan family in a further stage of their history. Their patriarchal age has vanished, and their heroic seems passing into the aristocratic and hierarchic. Caste has appeared as the invariable attendant upon conquest, when the victor is separated from the vanquished by language, complexion, and religion. It is not so much caste, however, in the ordinary sense of the word, as class, sternly prohibiting marriage not only with the aboriginal tribes, but between persons of unequal rank, and anticipating the organisation of European society in the middle ages. In the nobles, who were subordinate only to the Church, the burghers or merchants socially distinct from and inferior to the nobles, and in the villeins or serfs of the conquered territories, we have an exact parallel to the old Indian system, in which Sudra, Vaisya, Kshatrya, all formed steps in a social pyramid, on the top of which the Brahman was throned.[94]
Thus early in the history of the Indian people emerged that sacerdotal institution which was to exercise so powerful and eventually so sinister an influence upon their religious progress. In Vedictimes the father of the family and the rajah of the clan were the celebrants of the religious rites, but as life became more complicated ceremonies became more laborious, and men who had preserved the knowledge of the old hymns, and the religious formularies which had died out from the common people, gradually took the rajah’s place. As thought widened, men refused to be satisfied with guardian deities that could be fed with rice and butter. The sense of human law reflected itself in the conception of divine rulers governing men, and penalties inflicted by man for wrong-doing suggested expiation for the infringed laws of deity. This idea of sacrifice, of which there is said to be no trace in the flesh feasts of earlier times, becomes prominent in the offerings of the period. “The shedding of blood, the burning of a limb of the victim in the fire, by some at least was believed to atone for transgression, and it is probable that at one time the religious instinct expressed itself in human sacrifice.[95]” In any case, the development of the idea of the great efficacy of sacrifice as a means of compelling the gods to do the will of the worshipper—yea, of elevating the worshipper to their privileges and rank,—must soon have had the effect of making a priesthood, at first only helpful, to benecessary as the sole agents between man and deity. By preserving the memory of what had faded from the vulgar, by transmitting to their families a lore which became the more sacred the more it was forgotten, the professional liturgists or sacrificers, at first satirised by the poets as was the Romish friar by the minstrel in the middle ages, imperceptibly grew into an order whose privileges were more exclusive and whose pretensions were higher than were ever asserted in Israel by the descendants of Aaron. Among the Hebrews the priesthood was never allowed to gain complete ascendency. Its representatives were subordinated to the king, who was the fountain of all law, and they were kept in check by the prophets as the ministers of Divine revelation; but the Brahmans came to be regarded as not only the guardians of religion, but the teachers of all knowledge and the source of all authority. They owned no superior, were subject to no law in the state: each one was a pope in himself, more independent of the crown and the commonwealth than a Christian pope ever pretended to be, and had a faith in his personal infallibility which no Christian pope affected to have. In India there resulted from the ascendency all the evils that were manifested in Judaism and in Latin Christianity; and in India far worse results were produced. For, left to themselves assuperior beings apart from the actual world, who never could err, they gave their minds that licence which too often in the history of thought has been confounded with liberty, and, as always happens when self-restraint is disregarded, the result in this instance was the production, not of a system of philosophy, but a crude conglomerate of incongruous phantasies more resembling a chaos than a cosmos.[96]
Let us not suppose that the Brahmans were originally, or even eventually, the vain and greedy and self-seeking bigots which the name unfortunately suggests to a European. They gained the ascendency because they cultivated the power to rise; they represent what many are inclined to revere as the ideal aristocracy, that of Intellect. They were not ignorant priests, but learned philosophers, from whom sprung again and again the reformers who headed the revolt from an overdone ritual, and from a faith which expressed itself wholly in metaphysical speculations. By them were excogitated the Upanishads and the laws of Manu, two of the most wonderful literary productions of mankind. From there too came the great epic poems of the Rāmāyana and the Mahābhārata, poems in some respects equal to the Homeric, andin cleverness of purpose, which is said to be that of arresting the progress of Buddhism, equalling anything which the Society of Jesus ever produced to counteract the Reformation. In its complexity and adaptability and many-sidedness Brahmanism is unrivalled by any human system, and the men who first gave it expression and directed its earliest movements must rank among the most original and daring of thinkers.
But they were Indians living in the period beginning about the tenth centuryB.C., in a land as completely cut off from the rest of the world as they were severed from the practical life of their countrymen. They had the same earnest and inquisitive mind which their westward-moving kinsmen had inherited with them from their trans-Himalayan ancestors, but in them it had to work out its advances in more adverse conditions. The tribes that went westward marched along the uplands, in zones of climate and through scenery and conditions stimulating effort, both mental and physical. Consequently they went on improving their beliefs, till they apprehended the truth which lies at the base of all true systems of faith, the immortality of the soul, and developed a philosophy which represents man’s most successful attempt to grasp that divine unity after which man in his polytheism is ever feeling. It was otherwise with the branch thatwent southwards. They had to live under physical conditions not conducive to energy, under burning skies which repressed, and on soils which rendered industry unnecessary. As they gained ascendency over the aborigines the vices of the vanquished race told fatally upon them. Their sensual worship, customs like polygamy and sutteeism, ascetic practices and sorcerous rites, took possession of them; and, most marked of all, a belief very widely spread among the lower tribes of mankind so terribly bewitched them that to this day the Indian mind has never been able to break away from its fascination.
This belief in transmigration, with the pessimism which is its inevitable concomitant, was wholly absent from their ancient Vedic faith. At intervals from the times of Pythagoras it has infected the religion and philosophy of the Western Aryans, but never to any extent or with any serious result. Its true habitat and breeding-place, like that of the cholera, is among the degraded and broken-down populations of the East. It was communicated from the native Indian races to the Hindus, who unfortunately were prepared to receive it through the depressing and degenerating influences of tropical life on a northern-born family. Anyway, while their more fortunate brethren were eagerly groping after, in their westward progress, the truth of immortality,and thirsting for more life and fuller, they in their fat Gangetic plains, wearied of life as something not worth having, yet dreading death because it was appointed unto man not once but many times to die, were seeking some way of deliverance from this inherited curse. And the Brahmans professed to point to it. Their earliest popular conception of deliverance was simply that of re-birth in a happier world, perchance secured by sacrificial rites and religious acts, but such a conception could not long satisfy, and eventually it gave way in the higher class of minds to nobler views. In India, as elsewhere, men soon became conscious of the more solid security of merit procured by a life of justice and mercy. Man’s future was in his own and not in the hands of a priest: its happiness or misery would be no accident, but the sure result of good or evil done here and now. Therefore the wise man endeavoured laboriously and continuously to collect merit by good deeds, “as the white ant builds her house, for with these as his guide he could hope to traverse a gloom hard to be crossed.”
But by and by even this belief ceased to satisfy them, for how could man hope to liberate himself from the bondage of endless change as long as, seeking only a happier existence, he was content to be a citizen of the changeable? Let him seek reunion with Brahma, of which he is an emanation.So here again, while the Westerns were finding the path which would lead them from polytheism to theism, and were growing into nobler conceptions of what the individual self should be, the speculative ascetics of the East, in a life of meditation far apart, were trying to subside rather than rise into Brahma the Absolute as a river reunites with the ocean. In their earlier Brahmanas their fathers knew nothing of Brahma as deity, and at no time did Brahma mean to the Indian what deity meant to the Western Aryan. Polytheism in India never became theism in the old Greek sense, nor even Pantheism in our nineteenth-century sense. The mysterious all-pervading Presence was indeed early detected by the Indians as the “Breath” of all things, but the name employed by them to distinguish it signified only the universal self. In no sense was it the conscious author, but only the irrepressible source of things because reflected upon by illusion. Brahma Atman was neither the infinitely intelligent nor the perfectly blessed, in our sense of the word. It was simply thought without cognition, beatitude without consciousness. “The Hindu never thinks of asserting that Brahma knows or even has consciousness, but always that Brahma is knowledge.” “It is simply impersonal being, absolute unity contrasted with disruption, from which existence, as an emanation wholly and onlyevil, because originating in a mistake, must move through endless cycles of change, until the way of escape be discovered and followed by which the erratic spark may be absorbed in the central fire.”[97]
Such a speculation was manifestly an advance upon Vedic materialism, which sought to bring down the gods to the side of man as useful guardians, and upon early Brahmanism which sought by sacrifice to force them to do man’s will, and by and by to elevate man to their level. In endeavouring, however, to abstract its disciples from the superstitions of the priests, it tampered with the foundations of religion. It never attempted to propitiate the gods—for, even if superior to man, they were as much involved in the labyrinth of transmigration as he was himself,—but it professed in a universe of illusion to have discovered the only real. It dared to name the Absolute; so, withdrawing from the world, it practiced austerities for the sake of illumination, gave itself up to meditation to reduce the personal self to an abstraction, and endeavoured thus to escape from the necessity of existence in time and space into “passionless, characterless being.”
All this is expounded in the Upanishads, the special scriptures of philosophical Brahmanism.[98]Though translated by Professor Max Müller, andlucidly interpreted by Professor Gough, readers of ordinary philosophical culture find them very hard to understand, and in spite of the high commendation of them by Rammohun Roy and Schopenhauer, they will be inclined to question whether these “beginnings of thought,” “conceptions hardly formed,” though essential to a proper knowledge of Indian philosophy, “should be ranked among the outstanding productions of the human mind.”[99]Throughout their long and most tedious verbiage, however, one dominant idea is ever discoverable—that the chief end of the wise man is to know, not the forms of things, but the great self of all things, and seek his deliverance not by practice of religion but by pursuit of Gnosis.[100]Religion would indeed secure rewards, but they would only be transient; religion might regulate and modify the course of migration, but only Gnosis could break its adamantine chain. “The vision of Atman is the only deliverance, for by it all ties are loosened”; “the vision of the self is the light of the world, to which only the purest minds attain.” To reach it not only the bonds of desire must be broken, but of ignorance too. “For Atman is highly exalted above all reverence and effort, above holiness and unholiness.” “It, the uncreated, is beyond all good and evil,” andupon rewards and punishments, upon both good and evil, the sage must turn his back, for he alone who knows the Universal is free, from Karman and from Kâma (action and desire) which hold captive the self in the net of the impermanent.[101]
This is said to be the last outcome of Brahmanic belief, and “indeed the highest point reached by Indian philosophy.”[102]Manifestly, it can never be designated a gospel. It was a deliverance impossible for the many, and possible only for the few; a promise not to the suffering millions, but to the mystic and the sage, and to them it came not with the hope of a nobler character to be attained, and of a purer, higher life to be reached, but only with that of a dreamless repose—“the sleep eternal in an eternal night”—when the soul ceases to be soul, merged “like the weariest river” in a shoreless and waveless sea. And this was the system in which the wisest and saintliest in Buddha’s days were nurtured. He was no Brahman by caste, but as pure Kshatrya he would be instructed in his youth by Brahmans, and in early manhood he for long consorted with them. He had mental capacity, and spiritual energy, more than adequate to the task of comprehending as fully as they did their very abstruse theosophies. Fromtheir speculation he derived much of his terminology, like Karma and Nirvana; and even Buddha, words which, till recently, it was considered he had to coin. Many doctrines which were once regarded as peculiarly his own were taught in their jungle schools by learned Brahmans centuries before he was born. Without the Brahmans he could not have been produced, and yet his system will be found to be original and distinct. They furnished the phraseology in which he expressed himself, the methods by which he wrought, the institutions like that of the wandering Bikkhu, by which his system was spread; but in essentials we will find that his teaching was not only different from but antagonistic to theirs, and that, had the principles which he enunciated been truly accepted and consistently carried out, this noblest of the Reformers of Hinduism would have reformed it out of existence.
During this pre-Buddhistic era, much longer, perhaps, than is generally supposed, another process of development was going on among one section of the Semitic stock, in a small handbreadth of a land on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. The several stages of that development have also been unconsciously recorded in a literature so peculiar in its motive, and method, and character, as to separate it from the national literatures of all the world. It is not that it claims to be inspired, for the sameclaim is advanced by the Indian, and indeed by or for every collection of religious writings extant; but while in the literature of India we see represented the struggles of man to reach the Deity, that of Palestine professes to represent the endeavour of Deity to reach and to communicate with men. Intensely patriotic as a people, the sacred literature of the Hebrews is essentially religious. Their historians are not permitted to record, and the poets are not allowed to sing their own national achievements, but only the mighty works and the praises of Jehovah their God. The shame of their many defeats, and of their final destruction, is ascribed always to their own sin, but any national success or prosperity is due to the Divine favour. Alike through all their victories and disasters, an Almighty Hand is acknowledged to be shaping their destiny, and to be working out a purpose which, often entirely hidden, and at best only very imperfectly understood by them, is seen toward the close of their sad and eventful history, to comprehend the larger destinies of mankind in a salvation of God which “all the ends of the earth” were to see.
The relative antiquity of the Hebrew and Indian scriptures is not a matter which we are called upon to discuss. It is possible that some hymns in the Rig-Veda may be older than anything which we possess in the Bible, but it is almost absolutelycertain that most of the books of the Hebrew Bible were in circulation as scriptures, and that the whole of it was in the shape in which we have it now, before any ancient Indian sacred book was reduced to writing. The Pentateuch, in the form in which we have it now, is probably not the most ancient of the Hebrew writings. It appears to be a very composite production, containing works of different authors, written originally at different places and at different times. The most destructive criticism, however, admits that it embodies very ancient traditions—many of them not peculiar to the Hebrews,—which were open to a succession of very talented narrators. These traditions may indicate their derivation from a once common ancestral home, or acquirement by later contact with foreign nations, but they are in nowise incorporations; for in the Hebrew books they are not only presented in forms far more refined, but they are employed to suggest or to unfold a spiritual teaching quite beyond the capacity of the peoples among whom it is alleged they originated. No one denies that we have in the Pentateuch writings as old as the time of Moses, and probably fragments of writings much older still. Ewald[103]ascribes an important portion of it to the times of the later judges, another still more important section to a priest of Solomon’sreign, and the Book of Deuteronomy to the time of Hezekiah. Even if we are compelled to accept later dates than these, it follows that they are older than any Upanishad, or even any of the Brahmanas. There was a Law, a Book of the Covenant, a Book of Origins, in currency probably before the authors of any of the Brahmanas was born; and even if we are to regard the contents of these works as only traditional, we may surely assume that the Hebrew traditions are as credible as the Indian. It is quite true “that religion exists long before it is expressed in a canon, and that law runs and rules long before it is written in a code,”[104]but in regard to accuracy neither suffers from being so definitely registered. Hitherto the maxim affecting such matters has been, and for a long time henceforth we may be certain it will be, notlitera locuta, butlitera scripta manet.
Again, we are not called upon to maintain in this lecture the chronological exactness or the historical faithfulness of the sacred annals of Israel; all that is asserted is that in them we have as faithful a mirror of the ages which they profess to reflect as we have in the Indian. The characters in the scenes which they produce are neither puppets nor shadows, but very living and substantial realities. The personages at least are men whose idiosyncrasiesare sharply but naturally defined, and whose speech, and manners, and conduct, and beliefs, accord wonderfully well with the places and the periods in which they meet us. We have to examine the Hebrew annals however, not to verify the details of ancient transactions which they record, but simply to ascertain the beliefs which they contain and illustrate. The truth or the error of these beliefs we need not discuss, for the beliefs themselves are facts of great importance, and so are the consequences that flowed from them; and when we compare these beliefs with those which we have been considering, we will find a development parallel indeed, but of an entirely different class of ideas or religious thoughts.
In the Rig-Veda we have reflected the immigration of a higher race into what has been called the Holy Land of India. The Rig-Veda dates from about the times of the Exodus or the invasion of the Holy Land of Palestine. The Hebrew traditions, like the Indian, tell of an earlier immigration of their fathers into the same Palestine some five centuries previous. When we examine the narratives in which this earlier immigration is recorded, we find the patriarchs moving along among similar conditions, but representing a much higher level of religious thought than the Aryans when they reached the Ganges. Though everywhereliving among nature-worshippers, and though showing the taint of that worship in their own conduct, their religion is neither that of physiolatry nor idolatry.[105]Abraham was not a polytheist; he came out of Ur of the Chaldees—whether that be a designation of a geographical region or a description of a religious state—not as one who trembled before the forces of Nature, afraid to inquire what they meant or whence they came; not as one who had discovered behind them the Infinite Self, out of which, because of ignorance or illusion, he and they had emanated, but as a man who believed in a Personal Deity who had created and continued to control them, and who, though El-Elion and Shaddai, yet watched over and communicated with Abraham as his best of friends. We need not ascribe to the patriarch an intelligence which he did not possess. God may have been in his thought too much the almighty Protector of himself and of his descendants—for in that age the family of the chief would be all-important, and the idea even of the nation had not yet germinated,—butthat he apprehended God under a strictly moral aspect is vouched for by his life, as the founder of a new epoch to which his latest descendant looked back with thankfulness.[106]We may not be able to prove that Abraham’s conception of Deity was monotheistic in our conception of the word. It lacked the sublimity of Isaiah’s conception and the definiteness of that of Moses. There was naturally a great deal of darkness clinging about it, but his ideas of duty and religion and worship were far higher than entered the thoughts of a Vedic or Brahmanic sage. The rite of Blood Covenant, universal in the Semitic tribes, he felt divinely impelled to offer Godward; and the same impulse is said to have led him to offer in proof of his allegiance to his unseen and almighty Friend the sacrifice of his only son. But there was unmistakably imparted by Abraham to the ancient rite of circumcision a far higher and more spiritual idea, and it is noteworthy that while the spiritual part of his awful sacrifice was accepted, the slaying of the son was rejected, with the effect of stamping, in the very morning of Hebrew history, the Divine abhorrence upon that form of propitiation to which the unrestrained instinct of man has everywhere been prone. His worship, his sacrifice, his whole service, instead of being regarded as a means of making Deity serviceableto man, or of raising man to the comfortable condition of Deity, meant the surrender of the heart and of the whole life to His will, not as only mightier, but juster and more merciful than he was himself, and therefore perfectly worthy of trust and love. And so it is plain that whether the patriarchs represent a race fallen because of sin, from purer knowledge and more intimate communion with God, or one providentially educated from the very lowest animalism, they indicate a religious stage to which the greatest things became possible. They are stammering at least the glorious Name, comprised in three letters, whose significance millennial ages of study can never exhaust. They believe in God, who, behind and beyond Nature, and greater than it, is revealing Himself as one infinitely worthy of their allegiance and adoration, and their faith becomes righteousness.
When we reach the Mosaic period we find that though clouds and darkness are round the throne of the Eternal, the light that streams from it into the minds of men reveals, just more clearly, the same one living and true God. According to the Book of Origins, a period of four hundred and eighty years separated the patriarchal from the Mosaic age, and during that period the Hebrew tribes had first been sheltered, and then for long enslaved, by the most civilised of all peoples in the ancientworld. Astonished by the grandeur of Egypt, they at last succumbed to its religion; and while oppression in the pent-up Egyptian cities deteriorated fearfully their physical condition, slavery and idolatry wrought with terrible effect upon their character. They came out of Egypt a cowardly horde, leprous in body, childish and brutish in their disposition. Their children however entered Palestine, more than a generation after, a powerful and consolidated and victorious force, whose fear was upon all the surrounding tribes; and their annals ascribe all this to revival and reformation due to Divine revelation and training under the plastic genius of one of Egypt’s wisest men, and one of the greatest prophets of the human race.
The oldest Hebrew historian states that Moses wrote two tables of the Covenant, and one entire, though small, Book of Laws besides; and though it were proved to universal satisfaction that he never wrote anything else than the Ten Words, and the preface[107]: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one,” it will be admitted that no one in all the old world has ever contributed more than he did to man’s stock of the highest of all knowledge. The truth communicated by the patriarchs in the word Creator was of supreme moment and promise for the human race, for by it man wassaved from the sin and folly of confounding the Deity with His works. The idea of a Creator occurs indeed in the Vedas,[108]but not as an idea that ever got hold of the popular mind, or ever ripened into the conception of Creator which we have in the Bible. The Brahman expounders of Vedic thought made deity the sum of all that is, a being that is ever becoming, a universe that is never completed. The Hebrew, on the contrary, conceived of the universe as God’s work—not God. It was but a part of His ways, and as nothing before Him. In the Indian creed emanation continues indefinitely, and their sacred books record a never-ending genesis. In the Hebrew Bible two pages suffice to relate the genesis of the world and man. Between the deities of the Vedas and the Jehovah of Moses there is no natural progression, and we never in any series, however prolonged, can reach from the one to the other. The Indian deities are simply one with Nature, and like itsforces they are multitudinous, capricious, evanescent; but the Deity of Moses is One, Supreme, Invisible, not to be likened to anything we can see or hear—eternal as One who alone is, and causes to be: “I Am that I Am!” The effect of such a belief was to raise all men who learned of Moses above the worship and tyranny of Nature, before which so many of the tribes of mankind have prostrated themselves. It made them regard the animal creation especially as existing not for their adoration but for their use; and Nature itself and all its forces as powers to be studied, subdued, and governed. The germs of man’s faith in his own imperishableness, implanted from the first, began to sprout the moment he found himself capable of knowing and serving this Eternal and Invisible One as the Author and Controller of his being.
Comparisons are often instituted between the Mosaic ethical code and that of other religions, with the view of showing that there is nothing peculiar in it, and that instead of being fuller it appears to be even defective when placed side by side with some of them. The peculiarity of the Mosaic code is in its first table, which nearly all the others lack. The Mosaic is an interpretation of the law written in men’s hearts by the light of religion: it is the manifestation of religious truth as the real foundation of ethics. Morality has solong been associated with religion in our thought that we speak at times as if it had been always so; but among no ancient people, save among the Hebrews, did any worshipper expect morality from their deities. On the contrary, they conceived of them as having all their own appetites and passions and vices, so that as civilisation advanced men were often far nobler and purer than the gods which they worshipped. When we remember that physiolatry, from its lowest to its highest form, tolerates and even consecrates the vilest impurities by its worship, we can realise what a new and creative power was communicated when the conviction had laid hold of man that Deity is one who is Himself all that man ought to be, one who can only be propitiated by righteousness and appeased by truth. Human progress became not only possible then, but it was secured. So pure an idea of God meant a loftier idea of man. It involved the poorest and the humblest of men in vast responsibilities, and therefore it implied for them rights and dignities equal to those of the highest of men; for the supreme all-holy Lord God was no respecter of persons, and the beggar on the dunghill was in His eyes as precious as the prince upon the throne.[109]
From the period when Vedic speculation first began its course to that in which it produced itsearliest Upanishad, these moral and spiritual truths were not kept secret among the philosophic few, but were prophesied in the gates and streets of every Hebrew city. No one can say that they were thankfully received and loyally obeyed by the people of Israel; on the contrary, their whole history represents the struggle of a stubborn and rebellious race against a revelation too pure and spiritual to be acceptable to them. Their religion was always higher than themselves, but while towering above them, it perpetually hovered round them, contradicting their most cherished inclinations, and condemning their most deeply rooted habits. The invisible God, of whom no likeness was to be tolerated, who was not to be worshipped even in the greatest of His works, was too far removed from their sympathies. It took centuries of severe handling to uproot their strong tendency to Nature-worship; yea, the Divine detestation of it had to be branded in the national conscience by their final overthrow. Eventually, however, the truth got rooted in the mind of a “remnant” of them that God is not to be worshipped under any symbol, and cannot be enshrined in temples made with hands; that the heaven of heavens cannot contain Him; that in gifts and offerings He takes no pleasure, but that He dwells with the meek and lowly, and finds a pleasing sacrifice inthe contrite spirit and broken heart. The divinity of the revelation seems attested by the fact that it continued all throughout their history above them, rebuking and condemning, but never suffering them altogether to fall away from it. And this is still its relation to ourselves: it is a creed contradicting our life, a Divine law in direct opposition to all that claims to be popular; for where even yet is the Christian who can be said fully to realise all that is summed up in the truth, “God is not to be worshipped by man as though He needed anything;” “God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth”?
The universality as well as the purity and spirituality of this fundamental article of the Hebrew faith separates it from and elevates it above the Indian beliefs. Nature-worship has always been local and ethnic in its range; the gods of the hills are not the gods of the valleys, and the deities of Assyria command no reverence in Egypt. To the Hebrew was first communicated the catholic faith that the one Lord over all is rich in mercy unto all. The treasure was received, it is true, in an earthen vessel, by a people who could only apprehend as children what we are expected to hold in the comprehensions of men.[110]In patriarchal times by the people generally the One Lord was conceived of too much as just the protector of the family. In Mosaic times the great and terrible God who avenged Himself on Egypt was thought of too much as the champion of the tribes. Under David and the kings He was too much the sovereign of the nation and of the Holy Land; and so it was down to the times of the Captivity. All throughout this period, however, there were perpetual protests against this attempt to ethnicise a faith essentially catholic. They were reminded that the Holy One was Lord over all the earth; that though they were a peculiar people, they were not His only people. The prophets of other nations were brought to testify to them; their own prophets were sent to warn the heathen that they should not die. All through their history they were admonished that their gift was too large for their little nation to contain; that it was theirs only in proportion as it was imparted or shared, and that as a nation they could only exist if all nations were blessed in them.
Alas however for them, all this seemed in vainin its effect upon the nation at large; the treasure was forgotten in their estimate of the vessel; their own destiny loomed largest in their conceptions of Providence. It was not the holy Lord God who was to have universal dominion, but they His favourites, and therefore their king would reign over all lands and keep his feet on the neck of their foes. Out of this fatal error, and out of the childish superstition akin to it, that material prosperity was the sole or chief reward of devotion, came all their unbelief and apostasy, and so when the succession of prophets had in vain testified to them that the Lord alone was to be exalted—that before Him, not before them, must all peoples bow,—the threatenings long uttered were fulfilled: the nation was shattered, its palladium, the temple, was destroyed, and they were driven beyond the Euphrates.