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. From their 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 same claim 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 absolutely certain 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’s reign, 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, not litera locuta, but litera 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 idiosyncrasies are 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 everywhere living 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,—but that 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 serviceable to 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 ancient world. 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 was saved 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 its forces 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 so long 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 its earliest 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 in the 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.