The Mosaic law is full of minute ceremonial regulations, and of rigorous conditions, which attach to the performance of certain external acts, in certain appointed places, the duty of adoration and of prayer. Not only does Jesus object to the Scribes and Pharisees that they place all their faith and their piety in the acts alone; he does more; he gives his disciples personally a lesson of striking simplicity by teaching them the Lord's Prayer; and when the Samaritan woman, whom he meets near the well of Jacob, says to him: "Our fathers worshipped in this mountain; and ye say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship. … Jesus saith unto her, Woman, believe me, … the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him. God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." [Footnote 32]
[Footnote 32: John iv. 20, 21, 23, 24.]
Thus Jesus, not to abolish but to accomplish the ancient law, and to make it harmonise with the new and universal work which he is about, separates from the law that which the imperfection of man had introduced in it in other times, and for a more limited work; he leaves in it nothing but the divine element in all its purity and empire. He only leaves to the divine element its religious and moral empire, for it is in its name alone that he speaks; the religious and moral law is the only law revealed by Jesus, and extended over the entire world; no other thought mixes itself with his doctrine, no other motive influences his action; political science, human science, have absolutely no place at all in the New Testament; Jesus does not think of satisfying either social ambition or intellectual curiosity; he desires to make neither kings nor doctors; as soon as he finds such pretensions advanced, he sets them aside; "Render unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar's; and unto God the things that are God's." "I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes." [Footnote 33]
[Footnote 33: Matthew xxii. 21; xi. 25.]
Jesus occupies himself with man's soul alone, with the human being in his native simplicity; the relations of man, of every man, with God; the state and destiny of the human soul, of every human soul, in the present and in the future: this is the sole idea, the sole mission, of the New Testament. Jesus knows that when once accomplished this will bring with it its own salutary consequences: "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you." [Footnote 34]
[Footnote 34: Matthew vi. 33.]
I do not hesitate, then, to affirm, that human science, in its different and special objects,—whether astronomy, geology, geography, chronology, physics, historical criticism,—is as foreign to the object as it is to the source of the sacred Volumes. In the sciences we have the domain of the mind of man left to itself, and to itself alone. They are the fruits, assiduously cultivated and slowly acquired by the laborious exertions of the human intellect during a succession of ages. If, then, you meet, in Scriptural texts, not treating of acts declared miraculous, terms and assertions apparently repugnant to facts recognised as truths in these different sciences, feel no disquietude. It is not there that God has set up His divine torch; it is not there that God has spoken. The language is the language of the men of the different epochs, men who speak according to the measure of their knowledge or of their ignorance, the language which they are obliged to speak in order to be understood by their contemporaries. I feel surprised that men should require to be told this, so simple, so clear is it. In matters of religion and of morality there have always existed, and in every place there have existed, spontaneous instincts, aspirations, and ideas common to all men, which lead them to employ a similar language,—a language comprehended and received by all who hear it, whatever in other respects may be their inequality in attainments and civilization; whereas, in matters purely scientific we find nothing at all like this; men in the mass see and speak of these, not as they are to the eye of science, but according to their appearances, and so men comprehend or do not comprehend them, hear them or do not hear them, according to the degree of scientific knowledge or of ignorance prevalent at the time and place at which they live. What would the Hebrews in the Desert, or the Jews about the person of Christ, or the savages of the Pacific have said to his missionaries, if they had been told that it is the earth which turns round the sun, that its shape is that of a spheroid, that it is habitable and inhabited at opposite points of its circumference? What is more natural, what more inevitable, than that the language of the Scriptures should agree with the scientific imperfection of men upon all these matters, even where that language is full of divine inspiration as to the religious or moral law of humanity?