HEBREWS I. 1-4.
The passage: In earlier ages God spoke to the fathers through the prophets, at many times and in many ways; but in these last days He has spoken to us by a Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, and through whom He made the worlds. This Son is the brightness of God’s glory and the exact image of His being, and upholds all things by His powerful word. When He had by Himself cleansed our sins, He sat down at the right hand of God on high, having become as much greater than the angels as the name He has inherited is greater than theirs.
Christian apologists have perhaps overrated the argument for their faith drawn from its small beginnings and its wide spread. The facts do impress anyone who meets them for the first time. A thoughtful man hears how Jesus, walking by the sea of Galilee, called Simon Peter and Andrew from their nets, and they followed at once. He remembers that he hears this in some Western capital, among people utterly unlike the Galileans in manners, government, and knowledge, yet a people who have for centuries revered the names of Andrew and Peter and treated these records as oracles. Or hearing the Advent Gospel, he reflects how One who rode on an ass into the chief city of a Roman province, cheered by a few of the poorest, then cast out by its rulers as a blasphemer and put to death by their heathen masters, has been acknowledged as King of the World by the most enlightened part of the empire and by nations Tiberius never knew. Such thoughts may lead to the question: whence came this wonder, and to what power should it be traced? But once the surprise wears off, they as often lead the other way. The contrast between Christendom as it now is and the Book it appeals to seems so great as to break all real connection between them. “These Jewish records and this European world of ours — what have they truly in common? They may have left us a legacy, but what can they tell us of the changes worked in our belief by the mixing of races, the progress of society, new discoveries, and greater corruption? How can they explain why Christendom is divided about the very meaning of its own existence — why one body claims the name for itself alone and others denounce that body as having abandoned the very principle the name rests on?” Such questions were often asked in Bishop Warburton’s day; he foresaw they would still be asked in ours; he believed they could be answered. He wished his Lecturers to face the whole difficulty squarely: to defend the truth of Christianity precisely on the ground that the Prophecies of the Old and New Testament correspond to the history of the Christian Church, and not to shrink from the hardest part of the problem — the Romish Apostasy.
These instructions can perhaps be obeyed literally if we treat prophecy as certain words fulfilled in certain isolated events. But the Bishop plainly meant us to examine the character and setting of later history, and I doubt whether we can grasp the Jewish Prophets at all unless we examine the character and setting of their national history. Their chief work is not to unfold the future but first to explain the present: they told their countrymen what their situation meant, how they had abused it, how full of significance everything around them was, and how empty their lives had become. We wrong them badly if we treat their words as oracles blurted out in wild inspiration, or their books as scattered Sibylline leaves. Their power to announce what must be seems bound up with their divine gift of seeing the eternal beneath the temporary, the substance through the shadow. They are certain that God’s purpose will stand; men’s unwillingness to see it will not defeat it; through mercies and judgments He will unfold it ever more clearly to the heart of the true Israelite; and in due time it will be fulfilled.
Fulfilment, then, seems to mean the carrying out of a purpose that was hidden in earlier times, gradually made plain to the divinely taught teachers, and through them to all who learned from them. If so, we are surely right to ask the Scriptures what this divine purpose is, by what education men in the old time were made aware of it, and what results are promised from its full revelation. If we then compare those expected results with the state of the world since the Scripture record ends, we at least show that we do not shrink from the test Warburton wished us to use. This way of applying it also suits a modern historical student better than any other. He usually cares little for coincidences, and those offered by Scriptural interpreters he tends to think either accidental or produced by twisting words and facts. What he wants is a law that connects the various facts of church or general history; he will listen to whether Scripture recognizes such a law, but he will grant its superiority only if it explains the actual course of events better and clears away apparent anomalies more successfully than any law of his own.
Yet such a student may reasonably distrust anyone who claims to draw the whole purpose of Jewish history out of the Biblical documents and to trace its rise from dawn to noon. And no onlooker’s distrust can match what a man who has attempted the task, and failed repeatedly, must feel about himself. So the student may fairly ask: can your New Testament really be a key to the Old if it contains no book especially devoted to this subject? And the man who trusts that God will not leave His creatures without the help they need to know what He has revealed will search hard for a guide through this maze — and, I believe, will not search long.
From the earliest times there have been disputes about who wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews, and even about its place in the canon. But no one, I think, has ever doubted that the writer, whoever he was, meant to set out the relation between a dispensation he believed was passing away and one he believed was beginning. No outside evidence is needed to show this; it appears at every turn to the most careless reader. To an ordinary historian today it does not matter what the book claims for itself; he may view it simply as the work of a very early Christian Jew who knew his country’s institutions thoroughly, loved them, yet was sure a death-sentence lay on them and that they would give place to something better. Seen so, it must be interesting, and may supply the key we want. Those convinced of its authority will read it differently, expecting and gladly finding in it a guiding light on God’s dealings with man. And all will admit its usefulness for my task, since it bears so directly on the chief points between Protestants and Romanists, forces us to consider them historically as well as theologically, and, above all, is so solemn and practical that it reminds us we are dealing with realities that concern our own lives and every human being’s — restraining, if anything can, the mean and spiteful tricks of religious dispute.
In my first three Lectures, then, I mean to show that the writer of Hebrews sets out a principle he says was implied in the Old Testament and fulfilled in the New; that he traces its gradual working through the Old; and that he helps us see what changes its full manifestation would bring.
If I am allowed to give next year’s three Lectures, I mean to show that this same principle, under different aspects, is central to the other books of the New Testament: the first three Gospels, the Epistles of James, Peter, and Paul, and the writings of John.
In the third year I hope to apply this principle to the history of Christendom — in its growth out of the Roman Empire, in its direct conflict with Mahommedanism, and in what is called the Modern Period, dating from the beginning of the fourteenth century.
This inquiry will bring us into direct contact with the Romish system. But to complete the course and fulfil the Founder’s intention, the last three Lectures should consider that system formally, in relation to the Scriptural principle we have been drawing out, to its working in the Church, and to the future of the world.
This plan spares me from having to open with a debate about the Epistle’s author. The learned who reject the usual tradition do so because they think the writer’s purpose, though it harmonizes with Paul’s, is not identical with it; differences of style and the opinions of several early Churches, especially in the West, support their conclusion. On the other side, obvious external differences have not stopped earnest students from still thinking it Paul’s, because they feel, consciously or not, that his life’s aim would be less intelligible if this letter were not one expression of it.
For every reason, then, we should put off this question until we have found the letter’s main character and can compare it with other parts of the New Testament. I am not afraid its credit will suffer while the point stays open, or whatever the answer proves to be. Those who have found by experiment that it binds the books of Scripture to each other and to human history will believe it belongs among those books, whoever wrote it — for its tone and its peculiarities, great and small, fix it in the apostolic age. Those who care nothing for its contents will hardly attend to it even if they thought the whole college of apostles had written it.
The questions to whom the letter was sent and what occasioned it cannot be so set aside, for they bring some of its most striking features into view. Everyone must notice how intensely earnest its practical exhortations are. In a book more systematic and logical than any other in the New Testament, one might have expected these to be kept in the background, not to interrupt the argument. Instead they recur constantly, enter into the very substance of the letter, and everything else seems subordinate to them. They differ in kind from those found elsewhere: they are not merely warnings against particular faults or false opinions, as in Corinthians and Galatians, but express very plainly the writer’s fear that his readers are likely to become apostates from the faith of Christ.
People with exaggerated ideas of the purity of the apostolic churches — ideas certainly not drawn from the one authentic record we have — may well be startled by such warnings. But the surprise deepens when we consider what body was being addressed. Other signs in the Epistle leave no doubt. Its title, if we could trust it, might point to the Jews scattered through the Roman provinces who believed Jesus was the Christ — those Peter addresses. But even if such Jews were not absent from the writer’s mind (and it is hard to think any part of his nation ever was), they were not the ones to whom a letter chiefly about the temple worship, the priesthood, and the holy city would most apply. Distant Jews only imagined these things; those in Palestine saw them daily. We must conclude, then, that these were the members of the mother-church of the world, the successors or survivors of those baptized when the Spirit came at Pentecost — and one who knew and loved them well feared their faith was weakening daily and that they might lose it entirely.
Yet, remarkably, these Hebrew Christians are not charged with openly abandoning any truth their early teachers gave them, nor with plainly deserting the duties of their position. The one complaint is that they had stayed content with their first shallow understanding, had not worked toward fuller and deeper knowledge, and were still taking the food of children when their years should have made them able to eat the food of men. This, the writer hints, was their besetting fault. It may look far from deadly, and their friendly teacher is quite willing to think it is not; still, he could trace too many signs of decaying belief and energy resulting from it to doubt that, if allowed to grow, it would make useless all the teaching they had received from apostles and martyrs.
It is worth finding out the grounds of this fear, both for our own good and to explain the Epistle.
1. We should always remember that the Jews who believed Jesus was the Christ regarded themselves as the true Jews, and accused their countrymen of rejecting the real heir of David, who had come to fulfil the covenant made with their fathers. So when the apostles went up to the temple at the hour of prayer after Pentecost, this was no concession to others’ prejudices, no lapse into old habit. They felt they had more right to that worship than anyone. When priests and Levites let sheep and oxen be sold there, their Master had driven them out, refusing to let His Father’s house be a market. He had warned them that a day was coming when not one stone would stand on another, and every event since made them sure some awful judgment hung over the nation. But they were not to anticipate it: while the Temple stood it was God’s temple, and while the sacrifices were offered they were the sacrifices He had appointed. Stephen may have said words that gave color to the charge that he had spoken against the Temple and the customs of Moses, but nothing in his defence shows he thought either should now be abandoned; rather, he deeply revered them as the shrines of a presence their fathers and they, uncircumcised in heart, had been despising. Peter’s visit to Cornelius changed nothing in this feeling; the opposition to it showed how thoroughly Jewish the disciples were, and even when they yielded to the divine demonstration they saw in it only the fulfilment of the promise that David’s Seed should reign over the Gentiles.
When Greek proselytes mixed with the Hebrews in the church at Antioch, and the heathen there gave them all the name of Christians, the Jerusalem Christians were affected only by being led, perhaps, to make more zealous use of their own privileges. The same happened when they heard that Paul had founded societies of Gentiles more than Jews, had appointed elders and deacons over them, and had called each one an Ecclesia — a body called out or elected — language that seemed strangely to threaten the idea of Abraham’s children as the one elect family. Yet Paul in every city went first to the synagogue; his churches rested on a Jewish base; he too spoke of the promises to the fathers, went up to the feasts, and purified himself in the temple. From the conversation in Acts twenty-one it is clear that James, the presiding apostle at Jerusalem, not only kept the Mosaic law strictly but practised even its voluntary rituals. The Jewish historian and the oldest Christian annalist confirm this and agree that the Jewish people at large deeply revered him; every party in the city felt him to be its righteous man. His practical holiness was the strongest possible witness against the Pharisee’s formalism and the Sadducee’s heathenism — against his nation’s endless religious divisions and moral debasement. It witnessed that the disciples of Jesus were not, as their enemies said, a Nazarene sect binding themselves by a new name; it witnessed to the sacredness of the old dispensation, without which the Gospel would have become mere speculation and its other preachers unintelligible to their warmest admirers.
Yet it is easy to see how men calling themselves James’s disciples, and thinking they were because they zealously took his part, might pervert his very example, even turn it upside down. What in him was a thankful resolve to use all the blessings given him as a Jew so as to come nearer to the Lord of the whole earth would become in them a resolve not to mix with the uncircumcised. What in him was being set apart from a divided, exclusive world would become in them exclusiveness and division under a new pretext. What in him was the confession of his Master as the divine Fulfiller of the covenant with Abraham and David would become in them a notion of Him as merely that covenant’s servant. And this vast difference might be quite invisible to these Jewish Christians. Their phrases might be borrowed from James; their reverence for holy places and love of their Jewish calling might look like an exact copy of his. But the contrast would show in the whole tone of their lives, and above all would reveal itself, after his death, to those who, like him, expected the destruction of the City and Temple and felt that the loss of such an intercessor, and the crime that caused it, must hasten the judgment. Such men would see that while James by word and life was preparing himself and his flock for that day, it would fall on his pretended admirers like a thief in the night. The Jewish institutions they had wrapped all their devotions and hopes in, for whose sake they had stopped assembling as a Christian community, would pass away with a great crash. Where would they be found after such an earthquake? What faith had they that could survive it?
2. But it would be unjust to think these Christian Jews merely wanted to preserve the Jewish state with all its present wretched accidents. They knew the priesthood had been degraded by the Herods and made a mere tool of the Roman procurator; they knew the law had been corrupted by Pharisaic traditions; they knew society was in a worse state than in Jeremiah’s day before the great captivity. But had not Christ come to restore the fallen tabernacle? Had He not declared the true meaning of the law? Had He not, by His poor life, borne witness to a more than patriarchal simplicity?
Thoughts very like these James must often have set before his disciples. In them lay the deepest truth, and they seemed almost impossible to misuse. Yet how easily one could dwell on the words “Reformer” and “Restorer” until their meaning was wholly lost. If Christ were only what those words imply, He might have told certain great truths and hinted at desirable social improvements, but He would have accomplished nothing. He might be greater than all earlier teachers, yet the universe, and men, and their relation to God would still be a riddle. All the questions men had asked for so many centuries, all that laws and governments and priesthoods and sacrifices implied, would not have been really explained by this great Prophet. There had been a vision of something bright and good in the world, which surely could not vanish without leaving some shadows; but it had vanished, and whatever these Hebrew Christians had bound up with it would vanish too. If so, then the covenant with Abraham, and all the institutions they spoke so much of, had been hollow pomp — promising much, performing almost nothing.
Would not such reflections press more and more on those who used this language? Would they not take on an awful meaning, a seeming confirmation, from the day close at hand — so that they must look forward to it not as a day of redemption but as one of defeat and dismay? And when it came, would they not be found to have lost not only their Christian but even their Jewish position?
3. That last cast of mind led the Hebrew Christians to dwell on our Lord’s poverty and humiliation, since these were the great contrast to the pride and pomp He came to purge from their countrymen. But calling themselves James’s disciples, they could not always rest there. They knew their teacher had spoken of Him not only as poor, not only as sharing every human sorrow, but as divine. He had asserted both truths plainly, and did not feel them to be irreconcilable. But how were they to be reconciled? The Jewish Scriptures spoke of angels. Might these not be intermediate beings, hovering between earth and heaven, far below Him who fills all in all, yet far above His creatures here? Might they not, for great ends and at set times, take on real or apparent human flesh and live among men? Might our Lord be one of them — perhaps their chief? Speculations of this kind, closely tied to the idea of the Messiah, occupied the deep-thinking Alexandrian Jews and appeared in cruder, more practical forms among the despised Samaritans. Soon after the fall of Jerusalem they were working powerfully in the minds of believers in Jesus, mingling with the seemingly simple view of Him as the great Reformer, the poor man. In the next Lecture I try to show how little the Angels actually named in the Old Testament belong to this region. These ideas, then, must already have taken hold of the Church in Judæa. But where would they lead?
That middle region between heaven and earth is the home of all the demons of Greek myth, indeed of all the objects of human worship that in any age have shadowed forth men’s deepest wants — their sense of their own evil, their sense of the blessings and curses of the outward world. So the very forms of idolatry the Jewish law had condemned, which the Jews believed the God of Abraham would destroy, were likely to invade the heart and conscience of anyone who entered this strange circle. Those forms had by now lost much of their definiteness and beauty, but not their power. It was an age when men talked much of emanations from the Divinity, when old idolatries were evaporating into personified qualities or natural forces, and shapeless monsters of superstition were bred from atheism joined to the terrors of a guilty conscience, afraid where there was nothing to fear. Even in Rome, where religion had become mere state machinery — where Cicero’s wonder that two augurs could meet without laughing grew daily more reasonable, and the emperor was the one truly acknowledged god — dreams, portents, and Babylonian numbers never had greater sway over tyrant and slave, soldier and matron. Where, then, could a Christian Jew who once began using the invisible world as a playground for fancy be expected to stop? His Lord would soon become one of a crowd of godlike figures, symbols, or emanations, and his plain Christian faith would vanish altogether. And it would carry with it his Jewish reverence for the one Lord Jehovah. Indeed, the paganism left behind would be far less real than the paganism of old — a heap of shadows with scarcely a subject, images with scarcely the dream of an original.
There was ground enough, then, for the fear that seemed so strange at first — that the Christians of Palestine might become, in the fullest sense, apostate. And yet anyone who rudely attacked the notions and habits leading to this would have attacked precious truths and undermined their reverence for the apostles and martyrs from whom they had received them. Unless each of these convictions could be shown to rest on real ground — unless their sense of the sacredness of the Father’s law and covenant could be deepened — unless they could see that Christ had indeed come to fulfil that law and covenant, had actually fulfilled it, and had stamped on it exactly the permanence Scripture said belonged to it — above all, unless their dim sense of something Divine and something Human in their Lord could be lifted out of the cloud-land of fancy and shown to rest on an eternal foundation able to sustain both past and future — they could not be readied for the coming calamities, or saved from utter shipwreck of faith. To these points, then, the writer turns in my text, which I believe is the key to the whole Epistle.
“God,” he says, “who in sundry times and divers manners spake in times past unto the Fathers by the Prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by a Son, whom He hath made heir of all things, by whom also He made the worlds; who being the brightness of His glory, the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high, being made so much better than the angels, as He hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they.”
The balanced, antithetical form of this paragraph is obvious and often noticed. But it is strange to suppose the form was a mere rhetorical trick familiar to a Hellenized Jew trained at Alexandria. We need not refute this by proving the Book’s divine authority. If a writer who believed his country’s last and saddest crisis was upon him, and who feared for the moral state of his readers, could deliberately sit down to balance sentences and make words jingle, we must dismiss him as devoid of truthfulness and human feeling, unable to teach anyone. A good man writing at such a time would have chosen the roughest words that could carry his meaning. But if any part of his truth came out more clearly in this antithetical form, he was bound to use it — for him it was the simplest, most natural way. The charge of artifice really lies against us, who invent rules of composition and canons of taste, calling one style easy and genuine and another laboured, without ever testing a style by the only true measure: its fitness to carry the thought entrusted to it. The more we study this passage, the more we feel that had the writer refused to be antithetical he would have sacrificed not accidents but the very essence of his meaning, and failed utterly to make his purpose plain.
The paragraph opens with two words our translators render “in sundry times and divers manners.” The second phrase is fine. The first is generally felt to be unsatisfactory. Paul’s words, “We know in part, and we prophesy in part,” exactly explain the original. It does include the idea that the prophets’ teaching was fitted to the times in which they appeared: a plague of locusts called for one kind of revelation, an Assyrian invasion another, an approaching captivity a deeper one still. But the leading thought is that there were many parts or divisions in the prophetic harmony; no single utterance held the whole mystery, and each part had its own “manner” — the form of history, discourse, song, or vision best suited to set it forth.
To Hebrews of the Christian age these prophecies appeared as documents to be read, translated, and annotated. The power to view them as parts of a whole was valuable, but could easily become a curse — as the Scribes and Pharisees had made it. For while they worshipped the letter of prophecy, they forgot it had come from the lips of living, suffering men and gone to the hearts of actual men. So it is not idle that the writer keeps reminding his readers throughout that the words were “spoken”: if they were to be felt, they must be felt as spoken words, not merely book-words. Felt so, the phrase “God spake them” would also be recognized as real, not formal. Those who heard the prophet, whether they repented or turned away in rage, confessed his voice a divine voice. It exposed evils in them no human eye could see; it brought what was working confusedly in their spirits into terrible clearness; it set past, present, and future before them as one — one for them and one in Him who is, and was, and is to come. They did not ask how this could be. If they believed a man a prophet at all, they believed God was speaking in him. They had no doubt that He had spoken to their fathers out of the fire and proclaimed the law kept in the ark; it could not be a different voice now driving that law into their inner man, making them sure it was as true for them as for their fathers, that they had broken it as their fathers had, that its blessings and its curses alike applied to them. Indeed, did not this human speaker’s voice seem in one sense even more divine than the thunder? It was less terrible to the ear, but seemed to bring more the assurance of a personal presence to the heart. The whole training of the Jew was meant to draw him away from outward, visible things. The material terrors of the plagues and the wilderness had passed; if renewed, it was in plagues and earthquakes or in Sennacherib’s army. God’s voice might be heard in these, but the words of the man who made that voice intelligible, telling why it spoke and what inner corruptions had provoked it, must seem to come from an even more secret and holy place.
Yet even while their fathers confessed at each crisis that God was speaking in the prophets, it must often have been hard to reconcile this with what they were told — and what the prophets themselves told them — of the Unseen, Eternal Jehovah. Why did holy men arise except to testify that no creature may measure itself against the Creator? How then could these creatures, men of like passions with themselves, seen going in and out among them, dare to say God’s word was in them? This was the great perplexity of the Jew’s life, woven into every thought of his nation, himself, and the divine Lord. His race was taught to think itself elect and holy, yet it was stiff-necked, of unclean lips, guilty of rebellions no heathen could match. Being in the covenant, he must count himself righteous, and when he drew near to God he knew this was no delusion — yet he was conscious of endless evil. He dared not think of God except as the High and Holy One inhabiting eternity, yet dared not doubt that men, that he himself, were meant to bear that High and Holy One’s image.
These are strange contradictions, which, had they rushed on any man all at once, must have crushed him. But they came, like the prophet’s revelation, in separate portions and various ways; and as each new difficulty rose, there came with it the sense of a solution — one he could act on even then, and which would one day be complete and all-sufficient.
That day, says the writer, has come; we are “at the end of those days” the prophets belonged to. Now God has spoken to us by a Son. Here is proof how far the antitheses are from being oratorical ornament, and how essential to the meaning: our translators made a slight, natural oversight that has, I believe, darkened not one sentence but the whole Epistle. By putting the possessive pronoun for the indefinite article — His Son for a Son — they shifted the emphasis from the right word and led readers to take “Son” as a mere synonym for Christ or the Messiah. If that were all, there would be no link between the chapter and this opening, and neither would apply directly to the Hebrew Christians’ case. The Old Testament passages he quotes are not meant to prove that the holy Israelites expected a Messiah; every Pharisee granted that. The Palestinian Christians did not need to be told Jesus was the Messiah of prophecy; every act of their lives professed it. The real question to debate with the first was: what kind of Messiah did your fathers expect? and with the second: what manner of person is the one you call by that name? The writer’s answer is: only to a Son of God belong those Old Testament words that, as you Pharisees agree, mean a Messiah; and only to a Son of God belong those acts that you Christian Jews attribute to Jesus of Nazareth.
I leave the working-out of these two claims, and how he links them, to another Lecture. But for now it matters greatly to notice how he describes the Son in whom God spoke: “whom He hath constituted heir of all things, by whom also He made the worlds.” We often say revelation is progressive, and this writer fully justifies the word. But by progress some mean a continual journeying away from the centre, toward the circumference. Here we are taught that each step brings us nearer the ground of things — nearer the throne of God. Revelation in this sense is truly God unveiling Himself. First He speaks in the mere things He formed, which are furthest from Him; then in men whom He made to rule those things; last in Him who by eternal law is heir of all things, in and for whom they were created. The world’s order and the succession of ages spoke of God’s permanence; here He speaks in Him through whom He framed that order and that succession. At each step we are led into a higher, more awful region — yet not one more remote from humanity and its sympathies; rather into one where humanity has reached its peak, where every faculty and affection has its full growth and fruition. Cold, lifeless things are found to have a personal centre; the dead, abstract course of time is found to have a living Mover. It is the Son of God, “the brightness of His Father’s glory, the express image of His substance.” We have glimpsed His glory in creation, and more brightly in the tenderness of human beings. Here is the source of both; here is the mystery the prophets saw in fragments and spoke in various ways; here is the whole Word of which they uttered separate syllables. Men are told they are made in God’s image, but knew not how. Here is His exact image — shown not in the heaven above nor the earth beneath, but in a man. In Him creation has held together despite all its inner confusion and discord: “He has upheld it by the word of His power.” In Him we see how humanity has been a holy thing, though each man felt himself unholy: the moment He clothes Himself with its vilest accidents, it becomes actually holy, and the sinfulness of each man’s separate nature is purged out of human nature when He inhabits it and takes it to Himself. In Him it is proved that man is meant to dwell with God: having purified the soul and body He took, He “sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high,” claiming for all men the privileges of spiritual beings — the power to rise above the limits of space and time and enter fellowship with Him who fills all in all. And since He, in His human nature, has been made “so much higher than the angels, having by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they,” man must not think himself subject to angels or place them in any middle space between himself and the Lord of all. He must confess that he too is a spirit, as they are, brought into direct relationship with Him before whom they veil their faces.
Such a doctrine was surely an awful one, and the Hebrew Christians must have felt it so — their teacher wished nothing more than that they should. A feeble, frivolous temper had grown in them, glad to lose itself among shadows and unwilling to face realities; they would have hidden among the forms and images of their ritual as Adam hid among the trees. Under pretence of exalting their privileges as Jews, they were shrinking from the greatest privilege of all — knowing Him who had called them to be His people. The writer wants to convince them that they can no longer deny their spiritual rights. They must either acknowledge and walk in them, or sink into a far thicker darkness, a deeper atheism, than their fathers ever knew. That is why fierce rebukes and awful warnings mix so strangely with words of the highest hope and encouragement: in his mind the two were never apart. A spiritual creature must have capacities for the highest vision and infinite love — and also for utter self-concentration and despair. A crisis was near that would test everything. Not earth only but heaven too would be shaken; not an ordinary civil state but the divine polity itself would seem overturned. If the outward forms of that polity were their only proof of a bond between God and His creatures, their belief would vanish. But if through those forms they had risen to grasp a relationship with God — of which all human relations are lower forms, grounded on the divine nature itself, on the union of a Son with a Father in one Eternal Spirit — then they would know there was something that could not be shaken but must remain, and that this something was a resting-place for the hopes of their race and of all creation.