It is commonly acknowledged by religious persons, that the Bible is remarkably unsystematic. Sometimes this admission is made thankfully and even triumphantly; it is urged as a proof that the Bible is mainly intended to supply the daily wants, and to meet the ever-changing circumstances of the spiritual man. Sometimes it furnishes the ground of an argument for the necessity of that being done by others which is not done here; by those who lived nearest the age of the Apostles, or at the Reformation, or in a more advanced period of civilization. Sometimes it is alleged as a reason for denying that there is any book possessing the character which Christians have attributed to this one; for asserting that it is a collection of documents belonging to a particular nation, accidentally strung together, and invested by the superstition of after-times with a fictitious entireness.
All these notions, it seems to me, assume that the words system and method are synonymous, and that if the first is wanting in the Scriptures the last must be wanting also. Now to me these words seem not only not synonymous, but the greatest contraries imaginable: the one indicating that which is most opposed to life, freedom, variety; and the other that without which they cannot exist. If I wished to explain my meaning, I should not resort to a definition; I should take an illustration, and, of all illustrations, I think the most striking is that which is afforded by the Bible itself. While the systematizer is tormented every page he reads with a sense of the refractory and hopeless materials he has to deal with, I am convinced that the person who is determined to read only for his own comfort and profit is haunted with the sense of some harmony, not in the words but in the history, which he ought not to overlook, and without reference to which the meaning of that in which he most delights is not very certain. And, while this sense of a method exists, the fact that these works were written at different periods, in different styles, and by men of totally different characters, increases the impression that there is something most marvellous in the volume they compose. The most skilful and laborious analyst cannot persuade his disciples to abandon the use of the word Bible, he cannot divest himself of the feelings with which it is associated.
I. Perhaps it may be useful for the purpose at which we are aiming, that we should examine a little into this phenomenon. Everyone who reads the Old Testament must perceive that the idea of a covenant of God with a certain people is that which presides in it. In plain history, in lofty prayers and songs, in impassioned denunciations of existing evil, and predictions of coming misery, this idea is still at the root of all others. Take it away, and not merely is there no connexion between the different parts, but each book by itself, however simple in its language or in its details, becomes an incoherent rhapsody. A person, then, who had no higher wish than to understand the character and feelings of that strange people which has preserved its identity through so many generations, would of course begin with examining into the account of this covenant. He would feel that the call of Abraham, the promise made to him and to his seed, and the seal of it which was given him, were the most significant parts of this record. But one thought would strike him above all: This covenant is said to be with a family; with a man doubtless in the first instance, but with a man expressly and emphatically as the head of a family. The very terms of the covenant, and every promise that it held forth, were inseparably associated with the hope of a posterity. It is impossible to look upon the patriarchal character of Abraham as something accidental to his character as the chosen witness and servant of the Most High. These two positions are absolutely inseparable. The fact of his relationship to God is interpreted to him by the feeling of his human relations, and his capacity of fulfilling them arose from his acknowledgment of the higher relation. A little further reflection upon the subordinate parts of the narrative (which, when this fact is felt to be the centre, will all acquire anew value and meaning) must convince us, that sensuality, attended of necessity with sensual worship, was the character of the tribes among which Abraham was dwelling; that in this sensuality and sensual worship was involved the neglect of family bonds; that the witness for an invisible and righteous God, against gods of nature and mere power, was, at the self-same moment and by the same necessity, the witness for the sacredness of these bonds. The notion of a Being exercising power over men, seen in the clouds, and heard in the winds, this was that which the world entertained, and trembled, till utter corruption brought in utter atheism. That there is a God related to men and made known to men through their human relations, this was the faith of Abraham, the beginner of the Church on earth. But this truth could not be exhibited in one individual faithful man; it must be exhibited through a family. The rest of Genesis, therefore, gives us the history of the patriarchs who followed Abraham. But what if these, or any of these, should not be faithful? What if they should not maintain the principle of family relationship, or retain a recollection of the higher principle involved in it? What if the world should find its way into the Church? The historian does not wait for the question to be asked him; his narrative answers it. The great majority of the sons of Jacob were not faithful men, they did not maintain the principle of family life, they did not recollect the Being who had revealed Himself through it. Perhaps then, Joseph, the true believer, separated himself from his godless brethren, and established a new and distinct fellowship. Had he done so he would have acted upon the principle of Ishmael or Esau; he would have founded a society which was built upon choice, not upon relationship. The historian declares, that he followed a different course, that he was indeed separated from his brethren, but by their act, not his: that he continued a witness for God’s covenant, not with him, but with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; not with an individual, but with a family. According then to the Jewish Scriptures, the Abrahamic family, though cut off by their covenant from the other families of the earth, was so cut off expressly that it might bear witness for the true order of the world; for that order against which all sensible idolatry, and all independent choice or self-will, is rebellion; for that order in which alone men can be free, because to abide in it they must sacrifice those inclinations which make them slaves; for that order, in and through which, as we might have guessed from the Gentile records, the idea of God can alone be imparted. The promise of the covenant therefore was, that in the seed of Abraham all the families of the earth should be blessed.
II. But, whatever sentimentalists may say about the patriarchal condition of the world, its essential purity, and the misery of departing from it, the Scriptures give no countenance to such dreams. It was part of the promise that the children of Jacob should enter into another state. They were to possess the Canaanitish nations. They were to become a nation. And although the history, in strict conformity to all experience, describes the middle passage between these two conditions as a grievous one, though the children of Abraham are said to have sunk into moral debasement and actual slavery, yet their redemption is connected with a more awful revelation than any which had been imparted, or, as far as we can see, could have been imparted, to them in their previous state; and leads to new and most wonderful discoveries respecting the relations between men and God. The God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob declares that He remembers His covenant, and has seen the affliction of His people. But He declares Himself to the appointed guide and deliverer by another name than this—that name upon which the Jewish covenant stands, which is the foundation of all law, I am That I am. And as soon as the judgments upon natural worship, and upon a tyranny which set at naught all invisible and righteous government, had been accomplished, and the people had been taught to feel that an unseen Power had delivered them, that awful code was proclaimed amidst thunders and lightnings, which spoke straight to the individual conscience of each man, even while it reminded him in the most direct and solemn manner that he was related to God and his brethren. I will not enter here into an explanation of the manner in which the tribe institutions, those which speak of family relationship, were so embodied in the Jewish constitution that they gave a meaning to this law and yet did not deprive it of its awful personal character. That observation must needs strike everyone who studies with the slightest attention the Jewish institutions, as they are described in the Pentateuch. It is more necessary to notice those which led the thoughts of the Jews above the bonds of family and of law, though they were inseparably intertwined with both; I mean the tabernacle, the priesthood, and sacrifices. That these were the shrines of an undeveloped mystery every thoughtful Jew was conscious; but he was equally certain that this mystery was implied in all his acts, in all his family relations, in the national order, in his legal obedience. That there was an awful self-existent Being from whom all law came, was declared by the commandments: the Tabernacle affirmed that this Being was present among His people, and that it was possible in some awful manner to approach Him. The family covenant bore witness that there was a relation between Him and His worshippers; the Priesthood from generation to generation witnessed that this relation might be actually realised, that it might be realised by the whole people, in a representative. The National Constitution and punishments awakened in each person the feeling of moral evil, and taught them that that evil arose from violating his relations with God and his countrymen, and that the effect of it was a practical exclusion from these blessings; the sacrifices intimated that the relation was restored, when he had personally, and through the priest, given up something, not selected by himself as the most appropriate, or the most precious, but appointed by the law; and when he had given up that self-will which caused the separation. Such thoughts were wrought gradually into the mind of every humble and obedient Jew; they were brought directly home to him by the parting instruction of his great Lawgiver; they were confirmed and illustrated by all his subsequent experience, and by the teachers who shewed him the purpose of it.
The national polity of the Jews was in its essence exclusive. We dwell upon this fact, as if it destroyed all connexion between this polity and that of the Pagans, or of modern Europe. But every nation, as such, is exclusive. Athens was exclusive, Rome was exclusive; nevertheless, we have admitted, all persons admit, that more of humanity came out in the exclusive nations of Athens and of Rome, than ever showed itself in the savage tribes of the earth, which have never attained to a definite polity. Before we can ascertain whether the exclusiveness of the Jews was an inhuman exclusiveness, we must find out what it excluded; and here the same answer must be given as before. It excluded the worship of sensible, natural things; it excluded the idea of choice and self-will. The covenant with an invisible Being made it treason for men to choose the objects of their worship. This worship of the one Being was the bond of the commonwealth, and, if this were broken, it was dissolved. The covenant with an invisible Being obliged them to look upon all kings as reigning in virtue of His covenant, as representing His dignity, as responsible to Him; upon all other officers, the priestly, the prophetical, the judicial, as in like manner directly receiving their appointments and commissions from Him. By its first protest it affirmed that there are not a set of separate gods over each territory, various, according to the peculiarities of soil and of climate; but that there is one Almighty and Invisible Being, who is the Lord of all. The God of Israel is declared to be the God of all the nations of the earth; the Israelites are chosen out to be witnesses of the fact. By the second protest the exclusive Hebrew witnessed, that no king, no priest, no judge, has a right to look upon himself as possessing intrinsic power; that he is exercising office, under a righteous king, a perfect priest, an all-seeing judge; that, in proportion as he preserves that thought, and in the strength of it fulfils his task, the character of that king, and priest, and judge, and the relation in which he stands to men, reveal themselves to him; that these offices are continued from generation to generation, as a witness of His permanence who is Lord of them all, and who abides for ever and ever.
As then in the patriarchal period the Divine Being manifested Himself in the family relations, and by doing so manifested on what these relations depend, how they are upheld, and wherein their worth consists: so in the national period He was manifested to men through all national offices; thereby explaining their meaning and import, how they are upheld, and wherein their worth consists. But we are not to suppose that the family relations had less to do with this stage of the history than with the former. As they were embodied in the national institutions, as the existence of these institutions depended upon them, so their meaning in connexion with national life and national sins, and with a Being of whom both witnessed, became continually more apparent.
I need not point out to anyone who reads the prophets, what is their uniform method of awakening the conscience of the Jew, and of imparting to him the highest truths. I need not say that the Lord is throughout presented in the character of the husband of the nation; that acts of apostacy and false worship are constantly referred to as adulteries; and that the greatest pains are taken to convince us, that these are no poetical flourishes or terms of art, by connecting the actual human relation and human offence with the properly spiritual one. Oftentimes the verbal commentator is at fault, from the apparent confusion of the two. He cannot make up his mind whether it is the infidelity of the nation to her God, or of actual wives to their actual husbands, which the holy man is denouncing. And such perplexity there must needs be in the thoughts of all persons who are determined to separate these two ideas,—who do not see that it is the main object of the prophet to show their bearing upon one another,—who will not enter into his mind, by feeling that human relationships are not artificial types of something divine, but are actually the means and the only means, through which man ascends to any knowledge of the divine; and that every breach of a human relation, as it implies a violation of the higher law, so also is a hindrance and barrier to the perception of that higher law,—the drawing a veil between the spirit of a man and his God.
But how did this idea of a human constitution harmonize, or come into collision, with those attempts at universal empire, which appeared to be the necessary consummation or termination of the ancient polities? The Asiatic monarchies have been sometimes called patriarchal, and beyond a doubt the patriarchal feeling—the belief that the king was a father—did lie at the foundation of them, and did constitute all that was sound and healthful in the acts of the monarch, or the reverence of the people. But if we are to believe the Bible, the king is not merely a father, he is something more; his position has its ground in the acknowledgment of an unseen absolute Being, whose relations to men lead up to the contemplation of Him in Himself. The effort therefore to make the paternal relation all in all is, according to this shewing, a false effort, one necessarily leading to false results. In this case the result is very apparent. The power of the monarch not having any safe ground to rest upon, soon becomes reverenced merely as power. No conscience of a law, which they ought to obey, is called forth in the minds of the subjects or the monarch; he may have kindly affections towards them, which may be reciprocated, but that is all. There is nothing to preserve the existence and sanctity of the family relationship, upon which the sovereign authority is built; nothing to resist the tendency to natural worship, which destroys it; nothing to hinder the monarch from believing that he reigns by his own right. Hence, these so-called patriarchal governments, besides that they awaken neither the energies of the human intellect nor the perception of right and wrong, soon are changed into the direct contraries of that which they profess to be. The father becomes an oppressor of his own people, a conqueror of others; all idea of the invisible is swallowed up in a reverence for him. Ultimately he is looked up to as the God of gods and the Lord of lords. It is no false feeling which leads us to rejoice when these patriarchal kings were driven back by the little national bands at Marathon or Platæa. No one who reveres invisible more than visible strength, will restrain his pains at that discomfiture. It is a hateful and godless thing to check them, or to stir up our sympathy on behalf of the Eastern tyrant. He who cherishes such a habit of feeling, will not be able to rejoice, whatever he may fancy, when Pharaoh and his host sink like lead into the waters, or when Sisera with his six hundred chariots is put to flight by the prophetess of Israel.
If we look at the history of the Jews, we shall find that their distinct polity was a witness, through all the time it lasted, against these Babel monarchies; that in them the Jew saw that world concentrated in its worst form, out of which the covenant with the Abrahamic family, and with the Israelitish nation, had delivered him. To be like this world, however, to share its splendours, to adopt its worship, was the perpetual tendency of his evil nature, a tendency punished at length by subjection to its tyranny. But it was not merely by punishment that this inclination was resisted. The wish for fellowship with other nations was a true wish inverted; the dream of a human polity was one which the true God had sent to the Jew, though he had been taught how to realise it by an evil spirit. To bring out the true idea of such a polity, to show how it lay hid in all their own institutions, and how it would at length be brought out into full manifestation, this was the great office of the Hebrew Seer. Side by side with that vision of a Babylonian kingdom, which he taught his countrymen to look upon as based upon a lying principle, the contrary of their own, and as meant to be their scourge if they adopted that principle into their own conduct, rose up another vision of a king who did not judge after the sight of his eyes or the hearing of his ears, but who would rule men in righteousness, and whom the heathen should own. And as each new step in the history of the covenant—the first call of the patriarch which made them a family, their deliverance under Moses which made them a nation—was connected with a fresh revelation of the Divine King through these different relations, neither displacing the other but adopting it into itself; this glorious vision would have been utterly imperfect, if it had not involved the prospect of such a discovery as had not been vouchsafed to any former age. The prophet, trained to deep awful meditation in the law, the history of his land, but above all in the mysterious services of the temple, was able by degrees to see, as one sin after another, one judgment after another, shewed him what were the dangers and wants of his nation, that the heir of David’s throne must be a Man, in as strict a sense as David was, capable, not of less but of infinitely greater sympathy with every form of human sorrow than he had been capable of, and yet that in Him, the worshipper must behold God less limited by human conceptions, more in His own absoluteness and awfulness, than even in the burning bush, or amidst the lightnings of Sinai. How these two longings could be both accomplished; how idolatry could be abolished by the very manifestation which would bring the object of worship more near to all human thoughts and apprehensions; how the belief of a Being nigh to men, could be reconciled with that of one dwelling in his own perfection; how unceasing action on behalf of His creatures consists with eternal rest; how He could be satisfied with men, and yet be incapable of satisfaction with anything less pure and holy than Himself; these were the awful questions with which the prophet’s soul was exercised, and which were answered, not at once, but in glimpses and flashes of light coming across the darkness of his own soul, and of his country’s condition, which even now startle us as we read, and make us feel that the words are meant to guide us through our own confusions, and not to give us notions or formulas for disguising them. One part of his teaching must have been derived from that polity which was the great contrast to his own. The universal monarchs, the Sennacheribs and Nebuchadnezzars, were Men-gods. They took to themselves the attributes of the Invisible; and just in proportion as they did so, just in proportion as they hid the view of anything beyond humanity from the eyes of men, just in that proportion did they become inhuman, separate from their kind, dwelling apart in an infernal solitude.
This black ground brought the perfectly clear bright object more distinctly within their view; they felt that the God-man, in whom the fulness and awfulness of Godhead should shine forth, might therefore have perfect sympathy with the poorest and most friendless, and might at the same time enable them to enter into that transcendent region which their spirits had ever been seeking and never been able to penetrate.
III. Now, when we open the first book of the New Testament, the first words of it announce that the subject of it is the Son of David and the Son of Abraham. As we read on, we find that, according to the belief of the writer, this person came into the world to establish a Kingdom. Every act and word which is recorded of Him has reference to this kingdom. A voice is heard crying in the wilderness that a kingdom is at hand. Jesus of Nazareth comes preaching the Gospel of the kingdom. He goes into a mount to deliver the principles of His kingdom. He speaks parables to the people, nearly every one of which is prefaced with, “The kingdom of heaven is like.” He heals the sick; it is that the Jews may know that His kingdom is come nigh to them. His private conferences with His disciples, just as much as His public discourses, relate to the character, the establishment, and the destinies of this kingdom. He is arraigned before Pontius Pilate for claiming to be a king. The superscription on the cross proclaims Him a king.
That there is a difference of character and style in the different Evangelists, and that a hundred different theories may be suggested as to their origin, their coincidences, their varieties, no one will deny. But that this characteristic is common to them all, that the most sweeping doctrine respecting the interpolations which have crept into them could not eliminate it out of them, that it would not be the least affected if the principle and method of their formation were ascertained, is equally true. The kingdom of Christ is under one aspect or other the subject of them all. But this peculiarity, it will be said, is easily accounted for. The writers of the New Testament are Jews; language of this kind is essentially Jewish. It belonged to the idiosyncrasy of the most strange and bigoted of all the people of the earth. To a certain extent, the reader will perceive, these statements exactly tally with mine. I have endeavoured to shew that the habit of thinking, which this perpetual use of a certain phrase indicates, is Jewish, and why it is Jewish. But there is a long step from this admission, to the one which is generally supposed to be involved in it, that this phrase is merely connected with particular accidents and circumstances, and has nothing to do with that which is essential and human. According to my view of the position of the Israelite, he was taken out of all nations expressly to be a witness of that which is unchanging and permanent, of that which is not modal, of the meaning of those relationships which belonged to him in common with the Pagans and with us, and which, as every Pagan felt, and as every peasant among us feels, have a meaning, and of the ground and purpose of national institutions and of law, which the Pagans acknowledged, and which most of us acknowledge, to be the great distinction between men and brutes. And since beneath these relationships, and this national polity, the Pagans believed, and we believe, that some other polity is lying, not limited like the former, not exclusive like the latter, I cannot see why we are to talk of the prejudices and idiosyncrasies of the Jew, because he expresses this universal idea in the words which are the simplest and the aptest to convey it. That, say the Evangelists, which we have been promised, that which we expect, is a Kingdom; this Jesus of Nazareth we believe and affirm to be the King. Either proposition may be denied. It may be said, “Men are not in want of a spiritual and universal society.” It may be said, “This person has not the credentials of the character which he assumes.” But it must, according to all ordinary rules of criticism, be admitted that this was the idea of the Evangelists, and we ought surely, in studying an author, to seek that we may enter into his idea, before we substitute for it one of our own.
I am aware, however, that the objector would be ready with an answer to this statement, and that it is one which will derive no little countenance from the opinions which are current among religious people, and therefore will have no inconsiderable weight with them. It will be said, “We have an excuse for this attempt to separate the inward sense of the Gospels from their Jewish accidents, in the inconsistency which we discover in the use of those very phrases to which you allude. Do not the Evangelists constantly represent this kingdom as if it were an outward and visible kingdom, just like that of David and Solomon, nay, that very kingdom restored and extended? as something to supersede the government of Herod, ultimately perhaps that of the Cæsars? And do they not at the same time introduce such words as these and attribute them to their Master,”The kingdom of God cometh not with observation,” “The kingdom of God is within you,” “My kingdom is not of this world”—words which indicate that He taught (at least commonly) another doctrine, which has become leavened with these coarser and more sensual elements? If so, are we not justified in decomposing the mass and taking out the pure ore?”
I think the reader, who has gone along with me thus far, will not be much staggered by this argument. The kingdom of David, the kingdom of Solomon, was distinguished from the kingdoms of this world. It did not come with observation. It stood upon the principle which other kingdoms set at naught—the principle that the visible king is the type of the invisible, that he reigns in virtue of a covenant between the invisible king and the nation, that he is subject to a divine law. This principle, which was practically denied in all the great nations of the earth—denied then especially and emphatically when they became kingdoms (the ordinary, apparently the necessary, consummation of them all)—the Israelitish kingdom existed to enforce. All through the history, the tendency of the nation and its kings to set at naught the constitutional principle, to forget the covenant, is manifest; but this very tendency proved the truth of the idea against which it warred. If this be so, what contradiction was there in affirming that the new kingdom was the kingdom promised to David, the kingdom of his son, and yet that it was in the highest sense a kingdom not to be observed by the outward eye, a kingdom within, a kingdom not of this world?
Do I mean that there was nothing startling in such announcements to all or to most of those who first heard them? If I did, I should be rejecting the express testimony of the Evangelists. They tell us that the leading members of the Jewish commonwealth, and all the most admired and popular sects which divided it, were continually perplexed and outraged by this language. But they tell us also, that these same persons had lost the family and national character of Hebrews, that they perverted the express commands of God respecting the honouring of fathers and mothers, that they had no feelings of fellowship with Israelites as Israelites, but glorified themselves in their difference from the rest of their countrymen either on the score of righteousness or of wisdom; that individual self-exaltation, on one or the other of these grounds, was their distinguishing characteristic. They tell us, in strict consistency with these observations, that these men were never so scandalised as when Jesus spoke of His Father, of His coming to do His will, of His knowing Him, and being one with Him. The idea of a relation between men and their Maker, which was the idea implied in the Abrahamic covenant, had wholly departed from them; and therefore, the hope of a complete manifestation of the ground upon which this relationship rested, the hope which had sustained every suffering Israelite in every age, which was expressly the hope of Israel, could not be cherished by them. Their idea of God was the heathen one of a Being sitting in the clouds or diffused through the universe, entirely separated from His worshippers, incapable of speaking through men to men, only declaring Himself by signs, like those of the red sky in the morning and the lowering sky in the evening. And therefore the king they expected was the counterpart of the absolute Emperor. It is true that the awful words, “We have no king but Caesar,” would not have been uttered at any other moment than the one which called them forth; that it required the most intense hatred and all the other passions which then had possession of their hearts, to induce the priests formally to abandon the dream of Jewish supremacy; and that they probably reserved to themselves a right of maintaining one doctrine in the schools, another in the judgment-hall. Still these words expressed the most inward thought of the speakers; the king of Abraham’s seed whom they wanted was a Caesar and nothing else.
But those who amidst much confusion and ignorance had really claimed their position as members of a nation in covenant with God; those who had walked in the ordinances of the Lord blameless, finding in every symbol of the Divine Presence, which seemed to the world a phantom, the deepest reality, and in what the world called realities, the merest phantoms; those who were conscious of their own darkness, but rested upon the promise of a light which should arise and shine upon their land; those who, uniting to public shame a miserable sense of moral evil, looked for a deliverer from both at once; those to whom the sight of the Roman soldier was oppressive, not because it reminded them of their tribute, but because it told them that the national life was gone, or lasted only in their prayers; those who under the fig-tree had besought God that the clouds which hid His countenance from them might be dispersed, that He would remember the poor, and that men might not have the upper hand: these, whether or no they could reconcile in their understandings the idea of a kingdom which should rule over all with one which should be in their hearts, at least acknowledged inwardly that only one to which both descriptions were applicable could meet the cries which they had sent up to heaven. And whatever they saw of Him who was proclaimed the king, whatever they heard Him speak, tended to bring these thoughts into harmony, or at all events to make them feel that each alike was necessary. He exercised power over the elements and over the secret functions of the human body, (of course I am assuming the story of the Evangelists, my object being to shew that the different parts of it are thoroughly consistent, when they are viewed in reference to one leading idea,) but this power is exercised for the sake of timid fishermen, of paralytics and lepers. He declares that His kingdom is like unto a grain of mustard-seed, which is indeed the least of all seeds, but which becomes a tree wherein the fowls of the air lodge; He declares also that this seed of the kingdom is scattered over different soils, and that the right soil for it is an honest heart. His acts produce the most obvious outward effects, yet their main effect is to carry the persuasion home to the mind of the prepared observer, that a communion had been opened between the visible and the invisible world, and that the one was under the power of the other. His words were addressed to Israelites as the children of the covenant, yet every one of them tended to awaken in these Israelites a sense of humanity, a feeling that to be Israelites they must be more. And all this general language was preparatory to the discoveries which were made in that last supper when, having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them unto the end,—to the announcements that they were all united in Him, as the branch is united to the vine, that there was a still more wonderful union between Him and His Father, to the knowledge of which they might through this union attain, and that a Spirit would come to dwell with them and to testify of Him and of the Father. All which discourses to men are gathered up in the amazing prayer, “That they all may be one, as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they may be one in us.”
Either those words contain the essence and meaning of the whole history, or that history must be rejected as being from first to last the wickedest lie and the most awful blasphemy ever palmed upon the world. And if they do contain the meaning of it, that meaning must be embodied in acts. The Evangelists therefore go on to record in words perfectly calm and simple the death of their Master and His resurrection. As events they are related; no comment is made upon them; few hints are given of any effects to follow from them. We are made to feel by the quiet accurate detail, “He certainly died, who, as we believed, was the Son of God, and the King of Israel; He actually rose with His body, and came among us who knew Him, and spake and ate with us: this is the accomplishment of the union between heaven and earth; it is no longer a word, it is a fact.” And of this fact, the risen Lord tells His Apostles that they are to go into the world and testify; not merely to testify of it, but to adopt men into a society grounded upon the accomplishment of it. In connexion with that command, and as the ultimate basis of the universal society, a Name is proclaimed, in which the name that had been revealed to Abraham, and that more awful one which Moses heard in the bush, are combined and reconciled.
To a person who has contemplated the Gospel merely as the case of certain great doctrines or fine moralities, the Acts of the Apostles must be an utterly unintelligible book. For in the specimens of the Apostles’ preaching which it gives us, there are comparatively few references to the discourses or the parables of our Lord. They dwell mainly upon the great acts of death and resurrection as evidences that Jesus was the king, as expounding and consummating the previous history of the Jewish people, as justifying and realising the truth which worked in the minds of the heathen, “that we are His offspring.”1 On the other hand, a person who really looks upon the Bible as the history of the establishment of a universal and spiritual kingdom, of that kingdom which God had ever intended for men, and of which the universal kingdom then existing in the world was the formal opposite, will find in this book exactly that without which all the former records would be unmeaning.
The narrator of such transcendent events as the ascension of the Son of Man into the invisible glory, or the descent of the Spirit to take possession of the feelings, thoughts, utterances of mortal men, might have been expected to stand still and wonder at that which with so entire a belief he was recording. But no, he looks upon these events as the necessary consummation of all that went before, the necessary foundations of the existence of the Church. And therefore he can quietly relate any other circumstances, however apparently disproportionate, which were demanded for the outward manifestation and development of that Church, such as the meeting of the Apostles in the upper room, and the completion of their number. If the foundation of this kingdom were the end of all the purposes of God, if it were the kingdom of God among men, the human conditions of it could be no more passed over than the divine; it was as needful to prove that the ladder had its foot upon earth, as that it had come down out of heaven. As we proceed, we find every new step of the story leading us to notice the Church as the child which the Jewish polity had for so many ages been carrying in its womb. Its filial relation is first demonstrated, it is shewn to be an Israelitic not a mundane commonwealth; then it is shewn that, though not mundane, it is essentially human, containing a principle of expansion greater than that which dwelt in the Roman empire.
And here lies the apparent contradiction, the real harmony, of those two aspects in which this kingdom was contemplated by the Apostles of the Circumcision and by St. Paul. The one witnessed for the continuity of it, the other for its freedom from all national exclusions. These, we may believe, were their respective offices. Yet, as each fulfilled the one, he was in fact teaching the other truth most effectually. St. Peter and St. James were maintaining the universality of the Church, while they were contending for its Jewish character and derivation. St. Paul was maintaining the national covenant, while he was telling the Gentiles, that if they were circumcised Christ would profit them nothing. Take away the first testimony and the Church becomes an earthly not a spiritual commonwealth, and therefore subject to earthly limitations; take away the second, and the promise to Abraham is unfulfilled. In another sense, as the canon of Scripture shows, St. Paul was more directly carrying out the spirit of the Jewish distinction, by upholding the distinctness of ecclesiastical communities according to tribes and countries, than the Apostles of Jerusalem; and they were carrying out the idea of the universality of the Church more than he did by addressing the members of it as of an entire community dispersed through different parts of the world.
But we must not forget that while this universal society, according to the historical conception of it, grew out of the Jewish family and nation, it is, according to the theological conception of it, the root of “That,” says Aristotle, 2 “which is first as cause is last in discovery.” And this beautiful formula is translated into life and reality in the letter to the Ephesians, when St. Paul tells them that they were created in Christ before all worlds, and when he speaks of the transcendent economy as being gradually revealed to the Apostles and Prophets by the Spirit. In this passage it seems to me lies the key to the whole character of the dispensation, as well as of the books in which it is set forth. If the Gospel be the revelation or unveiling of a mystery hidden from ages and generations; if this mystery be the true constitution of humanity in Christ, so that a man believes and acts a lie who does not claim for himself union with Christ, we can understand why the deepest writings of the New Testament, instead of being digests of doctrine, are epistles, explaining to those who had been admitted into the Church of Christ their own position, bringing out that side of it which had reference to the circumstances in which they were placed or to their most besetting sins, and shewing what life was in consistency, what life at variance, with it. We can understand why the opening of the first of these epistles, of the one which has been supposed to be most like a systematic treatise, announces that the Gospel is concerning Jesus Christ, who was made of the seed of David according to the flesh, and marked out as the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection of the dead. The fact of a union between the Godhead and humanity is thus set forth as the one which the Apostle felt himself appointed to proclaim, which was the ground of the message to the Gentiles, and in which all ideas of reconciliation, of a divine life, justification by faith, sanctification by the Spirit, were implicitly contained. We can understand why the great fight of the Apostle with the Corinthians should be because they exalted certain notions, and certain men as the representatives of these notions, into the place of Him who was the Lord of their fellowship, and why pride, sensuality, contempt of others, abuse of ordinances, should be necessarily consequent upon that sin. We can understand why St. Paul curses with such vehemence those false teachers who had denied the Galatians the right to call themselves children of God in Christ in virtue of the new covenant, and had sent them back to the old. We may perceive that those wonderful words in which he addresses the Ephesians, when he tells them that they were sitting in heavenly places in Christ Jesus, are just as real and practical as the exhortations at the end of the same letter, respecting the duties of husbands and wives, fathers and children, and that the second are involved in the first. We may see what connexion there is between the entreaty to the Colossians not to stoop to will-worship and the service of angels, and the assertion of the fact that Christ was in them the hope of glory, and that He is the head in whom dwell all the riches of wisdom and knowledge. We may see how possible it was for some of the Philippian Church to be enemies to the cross of Christ, their god their belly, their glory their shame, not because they had not been admitted to the privileges of being members of Christ, but because they had not pressed forward to realize their claim. We may enter a little into the idea of the letters to the Thessalonians, however we may differ about the particular time or times of its accomplishment, that there must be a coeval manifestation of the mystery of iniquity and of the mystery of godliness; that the two kingdoms, being always in conflict, at certain great crises of the world are brought into direct and open collision. We shall not need any evidence of the Apostolical derivation of the epistle to the Hebrews, to convince us that it unfolds the relations between the national and the universal dispensation, between that which was the shadow and that which was the substance of a Divine humanity; between that which enabled the worshipper to expect a perfect admission into the Divine presence, and that which admitted him to it; between that which revealed God to him as the enemy of evil, and that which revealed Him as the conqueror of it. Nor is it inconsistent with any previous intimation which has been given us, that the writer of this epistle should in every part of it represent the sin of men as consisting in their unbelief of the blessings into which they are received at each stage of the Divine manifestation, and that he should with solemn earnestness, mixed with warnings of a fearful and hopeless apostacy, urge those whom he is addressing to believe that the position into which they had been brought was that after which all former ages had been aspiring, and as such, to claim it. From these exhortations and admonitions, the transition is easy to those Catholic epistles which some have found it so hard to reconcile with the doctrine of St. Paul. And doubtless, if the faith which the epistle to the Romans and the epistle to the Hebrews adjured men, by such grand promises and dire threats, to exercise, were not faith in a living Being, who had adopted men into fellowship with himself on purpose that being righteous by virtue of that union they might do righteous acts, that having claimed their place as members of a body the Spirit might work in them to will and to do of his good pleasure, the assertions that faith without works saves, and that faith without works cannot save, are hopelessly irreconcileable. But if the idea of St. Paul, as much as of St. James, be, that all worth may be attributed to faith in so far forth as it unites us to an object and raises us out of ourselves, no worth at all, so far as it is contemplated simply as a property in ourselves; if this be the very principle which the whole Bible is developing, one does not well see what either position would be good for, if the other were wanting. If our Lord came among men that He might bring them into a kingdom of righteousness, peace, and joy, because a kingdom grounded upon fellowship with a righteous and perfect Being, the notion that that righteousness can ever belong to any man in himself, and the notion that everyone is not to exhibit the fruits of it in himself, would seem to be equally contradictions. And therefore I believe that without this consideration we shall be as much puzzled by the sketch of a Christian man’s life, discipline, and conflicts, in the epistle of St. Peter, and by the doctrine of St. John, that love is the consummation of all God’s revelations and all man’s strivings, as by any former part of the book. For that men are not to gain a kingdom hereafter, but are put in possession of it now, and that through their chastisements and the oppositions of their evil nature they are to learn its character and enter into its privileges, is surely taught in every verse of the one; and that love has been manifested unto men, that they have been brought into fellowship with it, that by that fellowship they may rise to the fruition of it, and that this fellowship is for us as members of a family, so that he who loveth God must love his brother also, is affirmed again and again in express words of the other. With such thoughts in our mind, I believe we may venture, with hope of the deepest instruction, upon the study of the last book in the Bible. For though we may not be able to determine which of all the chronological speculations respecting it is the least untenable, though we may not decide confidently whether it speaks to us of the future or of the past, whether it describes a conflict of principles or of persons, of this we shall have no doubt, that it does exhibit at one period or through all periods a real kingdom of heaven upon earth, a kingdom of which the principle must be ever the same, a kingdom to which all kingdoms are meant to be in subjection; a kingdom which is maintaining itself against an opposing tyranny, whereof the ultimate law is brute force or unalloyed selfishness; a kingdom which must prevail because it rests upon a name which expresses the perfect Love, the ineffable Unity, the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.