Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

We can see no way in which this could have been done except by terminating that part of the old system which made the letter of every statute, that is to say, the whole organization of society, and every provision of every kind for the maintenance of that organization, of Divine institution; and which, therefore, required that God should execute His own law Himself, here, in this life. Here were two ideas, distinct, but necessarily connected, and now they must be annulled, both of them. Both the legislation, and the enforcement of it, must be transferred from God to the State. Indeed the State—it had been Greek, and now it was Roman—had already got them absolutely into its own hands. The old law had now no existence, except on sufferance, and that only to a limited extent. Legislation could never again be got out of the hands into which it had fallen; and it was, in itself, far better that it should remain in them. Of course it could not have been so with God’s people of old time: but for the future it ought not to be, and it could not be, otherwise.

Henceforth God would be the source in men’s hearts of the principles only of right. Legislators must, themselves, apply those principles to the varying circumstances and needs of their respective times and countries. They must also themselves provide means for enforcing the observance of their applications of these principles. But, of course, though this might answer roughly the purposes of human societies, it would be altogether imperfect and inadequate as a machinery either for fairly and completely rewarding and punishing individuals, or for making men good, or for keeping the heart pure, and gentle, and loving. All this must still result from the relation in which man feels that he stands towards God. Man could have little to do with these matters in his fellow man. This world, in which ‘some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall,’ was clearly not the place for the perfect adjustment of compensations and retributions. The balance for weighing the things that are seen cannot be exactly trimmed here. How, then, could there be any pretence of weighing the more important things, those that set in motion the whole life, that cannot be seen? This necessitated a future life. The world had passed into a state in which heaven-sent, heaven-administered codes were impossible. But religion itself had not become impossible. It would, however, be obliged henceforth to address itself to what God has willed should be the general conscience of mankind, and to find its sanction in what God has enabled man to anticipate of a life to come. This was a higher form of religion. It belonged to higher conditions of humanity.

What was now required was not that law, or that the principles and foundations of law, should be overthrown; but, on the contrary, that those principles of morality, that are universal, and are commonly recognized among mankind, should be made, with the most searching and binding force, the law of the new society; and that the sanction of this law should be changed from the present to the future life. Much that had necessarily been incorporated in the Mosaic Dispensation, because needed for its limited, national, mundane purpose, must now be held to have answered its purpose, and to be terminated as far as the new, universal, society was concerned. Everything that was special belonged to this head; and, à fortiori, everything that was exclusive, and so conflicted with the universal law, which was, above all things, a law of brotherhood. It could be nothing else. In this view, the mother idea of Christianity is the substitution, as the rule of individual life, of the universal natural law for the positive written, municipal law of the Hebrews, and of every other people. It has no written law of its own. It appeals to the unwritten law, which is inscribed not on tables of stone and brass, but on the fleshly tables of the heart; that is to say, to what is in man. And this, we may observe in passing, it is, which enables it to live and grow, and to develop, and accommodate itself to every increase of knowledge, and to the advancing conditions of society.

Still local mundane governments must be maintained; and this also would require a law. Law was, therefore, henceforth divided into two parts: that which is universal, natural, unwritten, which God reveals to men’s hearts, and for the observance of which they will hereafter be accountable to God; and that which is shaped by the wisdom and the folly, the knowledge and the ignorance, the necessities, the circumstances, and the interests of human legislators, and of separate, often hostile, nations. For this latter men would be accountable, primarily, to the State. The State would enact, and must administer and execute it. Only in cases in which the State was Christian (none such then existed, but the time might come when the kingdoms of the world would be the kingdoms of Christ and of God), would the principles of the municipal law not conflict with the principles of the divine, universal law. But even in cases where they were in conflict, the Christian, as human society is ordained of God, would, as a matter of conscience, even when not of right and reason, submit to it. This, however, would be understood as having its limits, for there would be cases in which we must obey God and not man.

(These ideas, by the way, neither condemn nor commend to us the principle of the establishment of national Churches. That is a question of times, of circumstances, and of expediency. We can imagine conditions under which the advantages of such an arrangement, and others, under which the disadvantages would preponderate. Of course, at the time of the promulgation of the religion, the idea of anything of the kind was impossible. What has been before us has, however, obviously a bearing on the questions of what establishments, where they exist, should teach, and of how they should enforce their teaching.)

As to the law, for which a man would be accountable to God, that would be taught him by God. The knowledge of it and the desire to fulfil it would result from the working of a Divine Spirit within his heart. The teaching of that Spirit would be always in harmony with the knowledge to which man had been enabled to attain, and with the social conditions to which he had been raised. That knowledge and these conditions are progressive. So, therefore, would be the teaching of this Spirit. We know in what mode it spoke, in old times, through prophets and holy men; and what it was, at a later period, in the words of Christ, Whom God sent. Under the Mosaic Dispensation it had promulgated municipal law, which requires in all cases, and had required, in an especial degree, in the case of so rude a people as the Hebrews, immediate rewards and punishments; and this, under the circumstances, the most important particular of these being that God was Himself executing the law, here and now, had excluded the doctrine of a future life. Under the Christian Dispensation it promulgated natural, universal, unlocalized law, and so required the doctrine of a future life; and this necessitated the abrogation of the doctrine that God is Himself executing the law, here and now.

The argumentative position and aims of the Divine Master can not be understood, unless these differences are attended to. He taught that His kingdom was not of this world. It could not have been so taught by them of old time. He taught that men must render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s. Formerly it could only be taught that God was all in all. When these, and many other similar statements of Christ and of His Apostles are interpreted in accordance with the then existing condition of the chosen people and of the world, we see that they involve the entire abandonment to the civil power of the whole domain of positive legislation, and of the entire and unqualified right of maintaining such legislation; of course, without at all exempting legislators or magistrates from obedience, in the exercise of their legislative or executive functions, to the principles of right, and from ultimate accountability to God. The authority of the old civil and criminal code having thus been transferred from God to man, that of the ceremonial code followed the same rule: though, indeed, these are distinctions which were hardly recognised in early times. The law was not hereby absolutely and necessarily abrogated, but only the idea that it is imposed, enforced, and maintained by God in this life. That was the idea which had given its form and character to the old Dispensation, and upon which it had been founded, and to which the multitude, learned and unlearned, clung, because they could not understand either how polity, religion, or morality could be maintained without it, or how, in these matters, there could be any advance. What, therefore, the promulgators of the new Dispensation had to show was that the abandonment of these old ideas about law was not tantamount to the abandonment of law itself. Man did not cease to be accountable, and accountable to God. The old form of law, as a heaven-originated code, and for that reason containing religion, was abolished; but a higher and better form of law was substituted for what had been abolished. The thing intended could now be fulfilled more completely than before. An expansion and elasticity were given to it, which might enable it to keep pace with every enlargement of our moral consciousness, and of our purest and loftiest aspirations. It was exalted, perfected, and made of universal application. What, though necessary in its day, had, all along, been crippling, distorting, and obscuring it, was now annulled. What was abolished was the old letter, and its sanction; the old heaven-sent, heaven-administered, heaven-executed code. Life and immortality could not be preached, nor understood if that were maintained. What was not abolished, but to which a freer and more enlarged course was given, was the living and life-giving Spirit: the consciousness of right that is in man. That had been in bondage under the old letter. It must now be emancipated: otherwise it would die altogether. There was now, in the observance of that old letter, a veil over their hearts. That must be torn away, and then life and immortality would become distinctly visible. True, henceforth, man would not have to give an account here, in this life, to God, receiving his punishment or reward in this life very imperfectly: the perception, however, of this would make visible the necessity of his having to give an account in the world to come, in an after life, when not a few overt acts, which are all that can be attended to in this world, and those few only very inadequately either rewarded or punished, but when even every word and every thought, as well as deed, could be called into judgment; when everything could be fully revealed and known; and exact recompense and retribution assigned.

In this way were things revealed, some of which had been kept secret from the chosen people throughout the whole of their national existence, and some of which had been kept secret from all people from the foundation of the world. In this way would every scribe, who was fully instructed unto the kingdom of heaven, bring forth out of his treasures things new as well as old. This was the connexion and the opposition of the two Dispensations. Divine wisdom was justified in both.

We have now before us the very pith and marrow of His teaching. It is not in this world, as it had been taught by them of old time, that God’s assize is held. It was not because those Galilæans, whose blood Herod had mingled with their sacrifices, had been greater sinners than other Galilæans, that they had suffered those things; nor had those eighteen, on whom the Tower of Siloam had fallen, been sinners above other men that dwelt in Jerusalem. Then follows the Parable of the Unfruitful Fig-tree, which, instead of being destroyed, was spared again and again. God’s arm is not now ever bare, and visible, to execute judgment on the evil-doer. The Parable of the Wheat and the Tares is to the same purpose, only more explicitly. What! does not God punish now as of old? Is the Almighty’s arm shortened? Can He allow the wicked to prosper in the earth? The answer is the end, the day of account and settlement, is not now. The meaning of the prosperity of the wicked is not that they are being set in slippery places, in order that they may be suddenly and fearfully cast down. For the present God does allow the tares to grow together with the wheat. There was more in this than met the ear. Let him whose ears have understanding hear it. For them it had an inner, an historical, and in the religious order, both a destructive and a reconstructive meaning: and so we might go on with other forms of the great lesson. The affliction the poor blind man laboured under was not a judgment—neither he nor his parents had sinned. This is not the life for judgment. And so does God make His rain to fall on the land of the just and of the unjust, and His sun to shine on the good and on the bad indifferently. The rich man, though most undeserving, had possessed, and enjoyed, undisturbed, and to the full, all of good that this world can give; while Lazarus, though most deserving, had suffered, without any mitigation, all of evil this world could inflict. The balance of condition and desert had not been adjusted in any sense, or degree, here, but was completely and thoroughly in the after-life. It had not so been taught by them of old time, nor could it have been. Such teaching was directly subversive of—and, as a matter of historical fact, did subvert—the old doctrine, for the indispensable sanction of that law was its immediate execution here in this world. Then God could only make His rain to fall, and His sun to shine, on the land of the just; and must withhold them from the land of the unjust. It could have been maintained by no other teaching. But now that the complete execution of the law was removed from this world, a foundation was thereby laid for the establishment of the great, but omitted, doctrine; and, together with it, of its corollary of time and motive for repentance being in God the reason, and for man the use, of this forbearance and of this even-handed goodness.