Epistle to the Hebrews (A Sequel to Sophia Solomontos).
In a Theocracy the birth of a new God was not the mere new generalization that it might be in our secularized century,—a deification of the Unknowable, for instance,—of not the slightest practical or moral interest to any human being. Judea was the bodily incarnation, even more than Islam is now, of a deity who said, “I am the Lord and there is none else; I form the light and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil; I the Lord do all these things.” The denial of such a deity, the substitution of one who required neither prayers, sacrifices, nor intercessions, could not be merely theoretical. It must involve the overthrow of a nationality which had no bond of unity except a book, and the institutions founded on that book.
Nor did the theocratic principle admit of a mere philosophical opposition to its institutions. He who touched that system was dealing with people who, in the language of “Sophia Solomontos” were “shut up in a prison without iron bars.” The natural advent of the anti-Jahvist was in the Temple and with the words—
He hath sent me to herald glad news to the poor,
He hath sent me to proclaim deliverance to captives,
And recovering of sight to the blind,
To set at liberty them that are bruised.
These miseries had no real relation to the social or political conditions amid which their phrases and hymns were born, but to a burden of debts to a jealous and vindictive omnipotence; a burden not of actions really wrong, but of mysterious offences, related to incomprehensible ordinances and heavenly etiquette. No human vices are so malignant as inhuman virtues.
Bunyan, in depicting Christian’s burden, has, with a felicity perhaps unconscious, made it a pack strapped on. It is not a hunch, not any part of the pilgrim, and had he possessed the courage to examine it there must have been found many spiritual nightmares of the race, and many robust English virtues turned to sins when the merry and honest tinker turned retrospective Rip Van Winkle, and dreamed himself back into the year One. The burden of sins on the poor Israelites had been gradually getting lighter under the scepticism of the Wisdom school, in view of the failure of Jahveh to fulfil the menaces and sentences of the priesthood. Conformity was secured mainly for actual advantages bestowed by the synagogue, or its terrors. But the discovery of the doctrine of a future life and a day of judgment, when all the mysterious “sins” were to be settled for, while smiled at by the Saducees, made the burden of the ignorant poor intolerable. Life was passed under suspended swords. The priesthood had a cowering vassal in every ignorant human being. The time, the labour, the flocks of the peasantry were devoted, but it was all a “sweating” process,—the debts were never paid, and there was always that “certain fearful expectation of judgment, and a fierceness of fire which shall devour the adversaries.” No doubt even the learned supposed these superstitions useful to keep the “masses” in order.