The Hermit Nation (Continued)

“For from the top of the rocks I see him, and from the hills I behold him: lo, the people shall dwell alone, and shall not he reckoned among the nations.” — Numb, xxiii. 9.

In last Lecture we saw how the Patriarchal passed into the Hebrew dispensation. It was needful to narrow the channel in order to save the stream. For our present purpose we do not require to ask, What became of the residue? What became of those little rills which were not included in the great artificial canal, but which were allowed to run off into the great expanse of humanity? It is an interesting inquiry, and justice has hardly been done it. Too frequently, and in forgetfulness of what the Bible tells, it has been assumed that the whole of that primeval revelation evaporated and left no trace. But although the trace may be minute or the stream may be muddy, there is nevertheless an appreciable tincture of primeval truth in almost all the religions of Paganism. It may not be sufficient to make men better; nay, like that pure element which carries health and exhilaration in its free and open current, but which in its stagnant overflow converts into a pestilent swamp what before was but a barren wilderness, the corruption of a truth may be more offensive and more deadly than simple ignorance, yet still they are not without significance, those vestiges of primeval verity. What means this tradition, so prevailing, of a golden age that was, this longing, so universal, for a better time not seen as yet? Whence this dark discomfort, this conscience of sin, this dreary feeling that God and man are disagreed, and whence this general effort to get anew into a right relation? those peace-offerings and vows and sacrifices which confess transgTCSsion, and plead for pardon and for mercies otherwise unmerited? Are they not the relics of a better religion that once existed? a few fragments, rusty and corroded perhaps, of that earlier truth which in ISToah’s ark was transported from the old world to the new? — so many little pools or runnels which in their choked and struggling course are still derived from the fountain which started so clear and strong on Ararat?

But for the present we take leave of this primeval and catholic revelation, with its fast-disappearing and corrupting remains. We need not even discuss the question how far it was possible for the Gentiles to come to the saving knowledge of God with the light that in some places lingered after the Mosaic dispensation was established. Our business now lies with that little country which, for fifteen centuries, was the Goshen of the earth; the one illumined region in a world whose spiritual gloom was deepening age by age, till at last it had become a darkness that might be felt. We are to contemplate that system which at first sight is to many of us cumbrous and uncouth, but which, on nearer inspection, we shall find, like the other works of Jehovah, a masterpiece of wisdom wonderful.

And looking at Judaism, the first thing that strikes us is its local limitation. Here is a little spot of 10,000 square miles,^ about one five-thousandth part of the globe’s terrestrial surface, or a fifth of ^England’sarea; and in this little nook we find locked up the peculiar people, the privileged possessors of the only authentic religion, the exclusive guardians of the one Divine revelation. The people dwell alone, and are not reckoned among the nations. And it is not only that their territory is small, for, like the eagle whose home is a crag, but whose hunting field is the entire domain of ocean, earth, and air, Macedonia, Carthage, and Rome nestled on a narrow ledge, but made the flap of their pinions heard afar; but, with the fire of ambition blazing in his eye, Israel is an eagle whose

1 The area of the Holy Land was about 10,000 square miles. The terrestrial area of the globe is upwards of 48,000,000 of square miles.

wings have been shorn. Without horses, without a navy, without the talent for conquest or command, he is forced to tarry at home; and religion requires what Providence indicates: for he must not lose sight of the Temple, he must not mingle among strangers, whose very touch is defilement, he must not lodge in their tainted dwellings nor sit down at their idolatrous boards. And therefore, only known to his neighbours for his strange unsocial ways, he dwells apart, like the cony of his own overshadowing Lebanon, a hermit nation, a mysterious recluse, a sequestered and separate community, building his houses on the rock, and chiefly protected by his isolation. Of purpose. Such was the design of the Most High. He desired to isolate the people. To intrust the forthcoming revelation to the world at large would have been to lose it, but to secure its conservation He prepared a place and a people. That revelation should not again be water spilt upon the ground, but, collected into this reservoir, it should be guarded with religious care by a race who knew that their national existence was bound up with its integrity, and who, instead of courting foreign alliances or aspiring to imperial dominion, felt that they had a mission still more august, and that, as custodiers of God’s oracles, and guardians of His temple, they had a distinction above all the peoples that dwell on the face of the earth.

Hence everything was done to keep them at home, and to keep them separate. Hence was it that a dietary was prescribed which made the Hebrew a tronblesome guest and an uneasy traveller in the land of the Gentiles. Hence was it that his means of locomotion were taken away, and that a few days’ radius from the Temple became the necessary limit of Hebrew horn es. Hence was it that the heart of the Jew was taught to cling with a tremendous tenacity to his Holy Land, till exile became the sorest of judgments, and a grave in the sacred soil was deemed almost essential to a joyful resurrection.

But looking again at Judaism, we are struck with the minuteness of its rubric and the rigidity of its ritual. Not only was the isolation of the peculiar people a great contrast to the catholic patriarchism which went before, and to the world-embracing gospel which followed; but their singular system was a striking antithesis to the law of liberty which marked primeval and apostolic times. With the Jew, religion was itself a business. Almost every movement was fettered by certain rules and prescriptions, and it required much circumspection to pass unscathed through a single day. To take the most obvious example: Our Lord has taught Christians to eat whatever is set before them, thanking God, and asking no questions; and the meal is now religious if he who partakes it eats and drinks to the glory of God. But in order to be a safe meal to the Hebrew, it was needful that the viands should be of a certain description, and that they should be prepared according to a certain formula. On particular days it would have been a trespass to eat bread with leaven, and on any day it would have been a serious offence to partake of delicacies much prized among the neighbouring nations: so that the Shadrachs and Meshachs, the truly conscientious, were sometimes constrained to send away uutasted dainties from a royal feast, and appease their hunger with pulse and lentils. And even after every precaution had been observed, although it was known that the viands were all authorized and properly prepared, various accidents might mar the meal and disperse the famished group from around the polluted table. And then if, all his circumspection notwithstanding, the Israelite were betrayed into some transgression, it was both a laborious and expensive ordeal to expiate the offence and eliminate its consequences. There was the bathing, and there was the costly sacrifice, and there was the exclusion from the society of one’s friends, so irksome, and often so inopportune. And in order to have some idea of the Hebrew’s trammelled life, we have only to read their great directory, Leviticus, which, with its meats and drinks and divers washings and carnal ordinances, still stands upon the record to teach us, among other lessons, from what a yoke of bondage the Saviour has set His people free. It was a burdensome institute; but there was a meaning in its very burdensomeness. o doubt, to many its very chains grew golden, and its yoke became a proud badge of distinction; and as if its fetters were not sufficiently felt, the later Jews busied themselves in contriving new prohibitions and in multiplying ritual minutiae. Still, to the freer spirits of that legal economy, especially when it was waxing old and ready to vanish away, there was an irksome restraint in its ceremonial routine and punctilious regulations; and, like the winged creature developing within the crust of the creeping thing, they panted for larger fields and a higher flight. They groaned and travailed till the Son of God was manifest; and when at the resurrection - word, “Loose him and let him go,” the cerements burst and the grave-clothes fell off, it was with an exulting shout that Pauline spirits hailed the liberty wherewith Christ had made His people free, and refused to be again entangled with the yoke of bondage.

In its limited locality, and in its punctilious ritual, Judaism differed from both the Patriarchism which preceded it and the Christianity which followed. For fifteen centuries Jerusalem was the focus of all light, the magnet of all piety, the one place for acceptable worship. Arid during all that period the Levitical code was binding, — a code so difficult that few could observe it except those born and brought up under it, and who had for its details something of a hereditary instinct.

But if in these respects Judaism was unique, when we look at it again we observe one feature in which it closely resembled the dispensation that followed, and that is, in the possession of a written revelation. It had now been ascertained that the true faith could not be kept alive by tradition. Man’s memory was too treacherous to be intrusted with a matter so distasteful to his fallen spirit as the true character of God; and even where there was a traditional theology, like the stream wdiich flows through many soils, and which takes a bitter taste from one and a dusky tint from another, in its transmission from race to race it was found that the oral revelation grcAV dark and offensive. In this stagnant swamp, weltering with reptiles and fuming with pestilence, who can recognise the stream which bounded from the Alpine crag, pure as the melted snow and salubrious as Heaven’s own precipitate? And in these Gentile religions, all alive with hideous pagods and deadly with abominable idolatries, who could believe that this is what man has made of that Revelation which started on its course from Ararat so clear and peUucid? But by consigning it to a written record, the Most High took care that, uncorrupted and undiminished, His oracles should continue lively to the last; and He made it at once the duty and the distinction of the Jews that to them these oracles were committed: their distinction to have a treasure so unique confided to their keeping, their duty to preserve it unimpaired. Ages of ignorance or error might intervene; but here in the volume of the Book was the well of wisdom undefiled, and though a thousand years might have passed away since the thunders of Sinai fell silent, here evermore the worshipper who prays, “I beseech Thee, show me Thy glory,” sees God’s stately goings and hears that very Name which was proclaimed unto Moses; and although it has wandered many a sultry mile since it left the heights of Zion, though to reach these Avillows of Babylon it has had to cross a weary desert, this is the very brook from which the panting Psalmist drank, at which the soul, thirsting for God, the living God, now drinks and is refreshed.

The pre-eminence of a written revelation is unspeakable. It is a permanent provision not only for the satisfying of every longing soul, but for the constant reviving of the Church. When, like Patriarchism, a traditional revelation has once grown turbid, man possesses no filter which can clarify it again; but written down, however bad the times may grow, the book preserves it pure and limpid to the last. And like the Wycliffes and Luthers of the Christian time, when the Church was dead and faith almost extinct, the Josiahs and the Ezras of the Hebrew time had only to bring out the Book of the Law, and Jehovah spake once more, and the people trembled before Him.

But if, in its written records, its documentary and enduring revelation, Judaism anticipated the Christian dispensation, it was a prolongation of Patriarchism in its continued use of ty2:)es and emllems. There were types in Paradise: for the tree of life was an emblem of Him who grows in the midst of God’s garden, and of whom partaking the soul lives for ever. There were types before the Flood: for the Sabbath is a type of the rest which remains for the people of God; and Sacrifice was a foreshadowing of that Lamb of God whose one offering should for ever take away sin. And if the Flood itself was not a type, assuredly the Ark was one, in which “the church of the saved” was rescued from a doomed world, and deposited in safety beneath the bow of God’s covenant. But in the Mosaic dispensation these types grew so numerous that time would fail should we reckon the whole; those objects and observances and incidents which all had a shadow of good things to come: the High Priest, the Tabernacle, the Temple, the Veil, the Ark of the Covenant, the Table of Shewbread, the Cities of Refuge, the Morning and Evening Sacrifice, the Day of Atonement, the Passover, the Feast of Tabernacles, the Law of the Leper, the Healing of Marah, the Descent of the Manna, the Smitten Rock, the Guiding Pillar, the Passage of Jordan, the Destruction of Jericho. And without descanting at present on all the advantages or drawbacks of this mode of instruction, it will be conceded that it was one well adapted to the earlystate of society. If it was not so precise or expository as writing, it was more arresting, and in an age when few could read it was a universal language. In fact their system of types gave the Jews the benefit of a twofold Bible. They had a written Bible and they had a pictorial Bible. They had a Bible, written on the parchment rolls, which the scribes and the scholars could read; and they had another blazing on Aaron’s breastplate, and curling up in the smoke of the altar, and hovering over the mercy-seat, a Bible which the runner could read, and which the infant and peasant could spell; whilst to the Master in Israel both Bibles were patent, and the one expounded the other. For instance, if a Hebrew believer had been looking at his pictorial Bible, and the question had arisen. What mean these endless washings? what means this laver in the Temple, and this constant resorting of the ceremonially unclean to the running river? He had only to open his written Bible and read, “In that day there shall be a fountain opened to the house of David and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, for sin and for uncleanness.” “Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do well. Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.” Or if he had been reading in his written Bible about Jehovah’s majesty or sin-excluding sanctity, “God is greatly to be feared in the assembly of the saints. Lord, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? who shall dwell in thy holy hill?” most likely the words would make faint impression on his mind; but when he went up to the house of God, and joined the adoring company, as afar off he descried the mystic curtain and remembered that within that Shekinah dwelt which on the intrusive foot would flash instant and devouring flame, — as he marked how anxiously these Levites observed each minute prescription, and how careful was Aaron’s successor not to approach the awful shrine save with incense and with blood, — he felt the force of the Psalmisfs question, and his spirit was subdued to reverence. Thus did the two Bibles illustrate and

interpret one another. Thus what was dark in the type was made clear in the text, and what failed to impress in the written word struck the sense and filled the imagination in the dramatic or pictorial oracle.