We can no more then compare Isaiah and the Psalms with Homer, than we can compare David’s heroism with Diomed’s, or the prowess of the Israelites when they drove Philistia before them with the valour of the Greeks at Marathon or Platæa, at Issus or Arbela. We shall most nearly do justice to each by observing carefully the boundary lines of their respective provinces.
Providential uses of the Homeric poems.
It appears to be to a certain extent agreed that Rome has given us the most extraordinary example among all those put upon record by history, of political organization; and has bequeathed to mankind the firmest and most durable tissue of law, the bond of social man. Greece, on the other hand, has had for its share the development of the individual; and each has shown in its own kind the rarest specimen that has been known to the world, apart from Divine revelation. The seeds of both these, and of all that they involved, would appear to be contained in the Homeric poems[1015]. The condition of arts, manners, character, and institutions, which they represent, is alike in itself entire, and without any full parallel elsewhere. It is for the bodily and mental faculties of man, that which the patriarchal and early Hebrew histories are for his spiritual life.
Of the personal and inward relations of man with God, of the kingdom of grace in the world, Homer can tell us nothing: but of the kingdom of Providence much, and of the opening powers and capabilities of human nature, apart from divine revelation, everything. The moral law, written on the tables of stone, was in one sense a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ, because it demonstrated our inability to tread the way of righteousness and pardon without the Redeemer. And perhaps that ceremonial law, which indulged some things to the hardness of heart that prevailed among the Jews, was by its permissions, as some have construed a very remarkable passage in Ezekiel[1016], a schoolmaster in another sense; because it witnessed to the fact that they had greatly fallen below the high capacities of their nature. And again, in yet a third sense, we may say with reverence that these primeval records are likewise another schoolmaster, teaching us, although with another voice, the very same lesson: because they show us the total inability of our race, even when at its maximum of power, to solve for ourselves the problems of our destiny; to extract for ourselves the sting from care, from sorrow, and above all, from death; or even to retain without waste the vital heat of the knowledge of God, when we have become separate from the source that imparts it.
They complete the code of primitive instruction.
It seems impossible not to be struck, at this point, with the contrast between the times preceding the Advent, and those which have followed it. Since the Advent, Christianity has marched for fifteen hundred years at the head of human civilization; and has driven, harnessed to its chariot as the horses of a triumphal car, the chief intellectual and material forces of the world. Its learning has been the learning of the world, its art the art of the world, its genius the genius of the world, its greatness, glory, grandeur, and majesty have been almost, though not absolutely, all that in these respects the world has had to boast of. That which is to come, I do not presume to portend: but of the past we may speak with confidence. He who hereafter, in even the remotest age, with the colourless impartiality of mere intelligence, may seek to know what durable results mankind has for the last fifteen hundred years achieved, what capital of the mind it has accumulated and transmitted, will find his investigations perforce concentrated upon, and almost confined to that part, that minor part, of mankind which has been Christian.
Before the Advent, it was quite otherwise. The treasure of Divine Revelation was then hidden in a napkin: it was given to a people who were almost forbidden to impart it; at least of whom it was simply required, that they should preserve it without variation. They had no world-wide vocation committed to them; they lay ensconced in a country which was narrow and obscure; obscure, not only with reference to the surpassing splendour of Greece and Rome, but in comparison with Assyria, or Persia, or Egypt. They have not supplied the Christian ages with laws and institutions, arts and sciences, with the chief models of greatness in genius or in character. The Providence of God committed this work to others; and to Homer seems to have been intrusted the first, which was perhaps, all things considered, also the most remarkable stage of it[1017].
Christianity supplied a centre to history.
Without bearing fully in mind this contrast between the providential function of the Jews and that of other nations, we can hardly embrace as we ought the importance of the part assigned, before the Advent of our Lord, to nations and persons who lived beyond the immediate and narrow pale of Divine Revelation. The relation of the old dispensation to those who were not Jews, was essentially different from that of Christendom to those who are not Christians. Only the fall of man and his recovery are the universal facts with which Revelation is concerned; all others are limited and partial. The interval between the occurrence of the first, and the provision for the second, was occupied by a variety of preparations in severalty for the revelation of the kingdom of God. Until the Incarnation, the world’s history was without a centre. When the Incarnation came, it showed itself to be the centre of all that had preceded, as well as of all that was to follow: and since the withdrawal of the visible Messiah, the history of man has been grouped around His Word, and around the Church in which the effect and virtue of His Incarnation are still by His unseen power prolonged.
The picture thus offered to our view is a very remarkable one. We see the glories of the world, and that greatest marvel of God’s earthly creation, the mind of man, become like little children, and yield themselves to be led by the hand of the Good Shepherd: but it seems as though the ancient promise of His coming, while just strong enough to live in this wayward sphere, was not strong enough to make the conquest of it; as if nothing but His own actual manifestation in the strength of lowliness and of sorrow, and crowned by the extremity of contempt and shame, was sufficient to restore for the world at large that symbol of the universal duty of individual obedience and conformity, which is afforded by the establishment of the authority of the spiritual King over all the functions of our nature, and all the spheres, however manifold and remote they may seem to be, in which they find their exercise. Nor is this lesson the less striking because this, like other parts of the divine dispensations, has been marred by the perversity of man, ever striving to escape from that inward control wherein lies the true hope and safety of his race.