But there was another and more direct manner, in which the work of history interlaced with what we have indicated as the work of the law. In the formation of the temper of chastened confidence which is so characteristic of later Israel, a part must evidently be given to the discipline of national experience saddened by departed glory, and with the shadows thickening over it. Just as we can see that the populations of the Empire were in a sense more ready to learn of Christ than the young self-reliant Greeks of Sparta or Athens could have been, so we can see in such language as that of the 119th Psalm or of the 9th chapter of Daniel a temper to which the meek and lowly Christ would make an appeal which might have been lost upon the rough times of the judges or the prosperous age of the monarchy. Old age has come and with it the wisdom of a chastened spirit. This is not difficult to see, and it is important to take it into account. It means that the comparatively normal discipline of life has brought with it (as doubtless it is meant to do alike in personal and national life) a spiritual gain. But it is important to see how much of the process and the effect remains unexplained. The chastening is obvious, but whence the confidence?
It is in some far less normal cause, in something which seems distinctive of Israel, that we have to find the adequate explanation of the whole result. We have to ask (as Pascal so keenly felt[187]) why a nation records its failures and misfortunes as being chastisements of wilful, repeated, and disgraceful fault, and then jealously guards the record as its most cherished possession. It would be easy to suggest that there is in this an egotism clothing itself in humility: and to point out that this egotism would explain the confidence which still looked forward to the future, which anticipated greatness for an 'afflicted and poor people,' and a blessing to all the nations of the earth from its own history. Only this is just to slur the difficulty, and under the invidious word 'egotism' to disguise that wonderful instinct of a destiny and a mission which is so strangely unlike egotism, and which allowed, or even produced, in so profound a form the self-condemnation which egotism refuses.
Doubtless the effects of these preparing forces were felt, and their meanings discerned, only by a few. Not only were they 'not all Israel that were of Israel,' but the bulk of the nation and its representative and official leaders were blind. They were off the way, down the false tracks of literalist Rabbinism, or of one-sided Essene asceticism, or of earthly visions of a restored kingdom, or (as in Alexandria) of a philosophized Judaism. The issues were the crucifixion of the Lord, and all which Judaism, without and within the Church, did to extinguish the Gospel and persecute its followers in its first age. It is right to refer to this, but there are probably few to whom it would cause any difficulty. To the observer of the world's history it is a common sight that the true issues and the distinctive work of a people is worked out not by the many or by the prominent, but by the few, and often the obscure. To the student of Jewish history that which has made Israel what it is in world-significance appears throughout the course of its history as a gold thread running through a web of very different texture. It can be no surprise that the end should be of a piece with the rest. There, in a climax of sharpest contrast, we see the antithesis which marks the history throughout. The training issues in a S. Mary, a Simeon, in those who 'waited for the consolation of Israel' on the one side, and in the 'Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites,' on the other. The natural issue of Israel's life and tendencies is seen in the cold and sterile impotence which, because it is the 'corruption of the best,' is the most irreversible spiritual ruin; while beside and amidst this there was fashioned by a grace and power above nature, though in a perfectly natural way, the true Israel which realize all that 'Israel according to the flesh' professed yet betrayed, guarded yet obscured. And if we have at all rightly discerned as a principle of Divine preparation that it should be negative as well as positive, and should demonstrate to the world before Christ was given, how little the world's own wisdom or effort could supply His place: we shall not wonder that time was thus given for Israel to try out as it were its second experiment, and to shew that by its selfishness and arrogance, by its 'carnalness,' it could warp and distort its later spiritual constitution, even more than its former temporal one, out of all likeness of what God would have it be. 'The last state of the man' was 'worse than the first[188].'
But the observation of these predominant currents and forms of Jewish life and thought and religion has this further value, that it shews the variety, the energy, and the unlikeness to one another of the tendencies present in Israel. They emphasize the fact that the history of Israel was in no sense working itself out towards the production by its own forces of the true religion which went forth from the midst of it. They remind us how intractable the problem of finding by human ingenuity the solution which could harmonize in one issue elements so powerful and so alien from each other; which with a perfect spiritual liberty could combine an assertion of the permanent value of the law; which with no withdrawal from and despair of the world could secure all that was sought by Essene purity and self-denial; which, itself utterly unworldly, could satisfy the idea of a restored monarchy and a glory for Israel; which while bringing no philosophy could achieve what Jewish philosophizing had desired, in a capture of the world's reason by Jewish truth.
III. In the last words we touch that with which this essay may perhaps fitly end. If its drift has been in any sense true, there stands before us, as perhaps the most striking feature of the whole situation, the co-existence of the two preparations, the one general, indirect, contributory, and consisting only in an impressive convergence and centering of the lines of ordinary historical sequences; the other special, directly introductory, and characterized by the presence of a distinctive power, call it what we may, a genius for religion, or more truly and adequately a special grace of the Spirit of God, which is new and above ordinary experience, even as life is when it enters the rest of nature, and reason is when it appears in the world of life. The two preparations pursue their course unconscious of one another, almost exclusive of one another. Greek wisdom and Roman power have no dream of coming to receive from the narrow national cult of humbled and subject Israel. And Israel, even taught by the great prophets, could hardly find a place in her vision of the future for any destiny of the nations of the world. To this antagonism, or more strictly this ignoring of one another, there are exceptions, exceptions of the kind which emphasize the character of the situation which they hardly modify. Two streams of such force and volume as those of Jewish religion and classical life or culture could not touch and leave one another altogether uninfluenced, though the influence was characteristically different. On the side of the world the spiritual needs of individuals caused numbers, not inconsiderable, to receive influences which made them ready to act as seeding ground and ferment for the Gospel. On the side of Israel, the strong sense of mission and of truth made the contact with Greek culture suggest the ambition to use it as a great instrument, to teach it to acknowledge and witness to the God of Israel, who was God of the whole earth: and the results, in the Greek of the Septuagint and in the Helleno-Judaic writings of Alexandria and elsewhere, were invaluable in fashioning language and thought for Christ's service. But all the more distinctly, in the first case, does the antagonism, the gulf fixed, the mutual aversion, the impossibility humanly speaking of fusion between Jew and Gentile come out before our eyes. And, in the second case, the unreal romancings of the Sibylline works, the apparently isolated work of Philo, and the opportunism of a politician like Josephus, have all the character of hybrids, and shew no sign of the vital fusion by which out of a great wedlock a new thing comes to be.
The two preparations stand apart: they go their own way. There is indeed in them a strange parallelism of common human experience and human need. Both have tried their experiments, made their ventures, won their successes, gone through their disciplines of disenchantment and failure. Both are conscious of the dying of life: in Israel there is 'no prophet more'; outside it philosophy has not the creativeness and energy of youth but the quiet acquiescence and mild prudence of age, and life, public and private, is without adequate scope or aim. In both the 'tendencies towards' a Gospel are as far as possible from making a 'tendency to produce' one. In both there is the same desire for which the Jew alone can find conscious expression: it is 'Quicken me!' Both need life. Both have no help in themselves. But in the lines which they follow and the hopes which they frame there is neither likeness nor compatibility. 'The Greeks seek after wisdom[189].' The intellect, and those who are distinctively men of the intellect, can hardly imagine human advance otherwise than in terms of the intellect. Philosophy conceives of it as a conquest of philosophical result, or even as an increase of philosophical material. It is the pain of an advanced and critical time, like that of which we speak, to feel this, and yet to feel that the experiments of speculation have gone far enough to shew that by none of their alternative ways can there be any way out to the peace of certain truth. And yet it seems that, without abdication of reason, there is no possibility of going any other way: the Greeks (and in this sense all the world was Greek) could only look for what they wanted in the form of a new philosophy.
But 'the Jews require a sign.' Totally different, but equally exclusive, were the conditions under which the Jew could conceive of a new epoch. The dread of exhausted resources did not haunt him, for he looked not to human capacity but to Divine gift and interposition. But he thought that he knew the form in which such interposition would come; it was not to be primarily a teaching, (it is the Samaritan and not the Jew who is recorded as expecting in Messiah one who, 'when He is come, will tell us all things[190]'); it must appear in action, 'with observation[191],' with pomp and scenic display, with signs, and signs which, in a very visible and tangible sense, should seem to be from heaven[192], in particular with circumstances of triumph and conquest, and with an exaltation of Israel to the glories of her monarchy many times enlarged.
Such are the demands; the things sought and needed; the conditions prescribed; definite, severally uncompromising, mutually unlike, and even conflicting. And then from out of Israel, without moral or political earthquake, without overwhelming display of supernatural force, nay even, to a superficial eye, with all the appearance of weakness and failure, without any rescue for Israel, with no attempt to present itself in philosophical form, with none of the strain and elaboration of a conscious effort to combine many in one, but rather with a paradoxical and offending 'simplicity' and 'foolishness' of mere assertion:—there comes forth a Thing in which on the one side Jews—whom we all recognise to be the best Jews, Jews in the truest and deepest sense—find the whole spirit and meaning, even down to its detail, of the life and the hope of Israel summed up and fulfilled; which left them no sense of disappointment, but rather a consciousness of having had hopes only too narrow and low; which gave them the exulting sense of 'reigning as kings,' with a 'King of Israel': while on the other side this same Thing was felt by 'Greeks' as a 'wisdom' flooding their reasons with a light of truth and wisdom (sophia), which met the search of philosophy (philo-sophia)[193], but also in simple and wise alike drew forth and ministered to needs which philosophy had but half seen and wholly failed to satisfy, enabling conscience to be candid and yet at peace, building up a new cosmopolitan fellowship, and restoring to human life dignity and value, not only in phrase and theory, but in truth. 'There came forth a Thing,' or rather there came forth One, in Whom all this was done. The question rises, 'Whom say we that He is?' And though the answer must be reached in different ways by different men, and the witness to Him in Whom is the sum of all, must needs be of many kinds; yet the convergence of many lines (as we have been permitted to trace it) to One in whom they are all combined and yet transcended, to One whom they can usher in but were powerless to produce, may be no slight corroboration of the answer which was accepted, as we have to remember, by the lowly Jesus with significant solemnity: 'Thou art the Christ,' the Fulfiller of all high and inspired Jewish hope; 'the Son of the Living God[194],' His Son,—as the Son of Man, in whom all that is human reaches fulness; and as the Son of God, who brings down to man what he has been allowed to prove to himself that he cannot discover or create.
[150] S. Matt. xiii. 52; v. 17.
[151] S. Matt. xxi. 33-38.