The Epistle to the Hebrews

BEING THE SUBSTANCE OF

THREE LECTURES

DELIVERED IN THE CHAPEL OF THE HONORABLE SOCIETY OF LINCOLN’S INN

ON THE

FOUNDATION OF BISHOP WARBURTON.

Lecture I. How the New Testament Fulfils the Old

HEBREWS I. 1-4.

God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by a Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds; who being the brightness of his glory, and 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.

Christian apologists have perhaps been inclined to overrate the effect of the argument for the divine origin of their faith which is deduced from its small beginnings and its wide diffusion. No doubt the facts upon which this argument is founded must make a great impression upon any one to whom they are presented for the first time. A thoughtful man listens to the words: “Jesus, walking by the sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishers. And he saith unto them, Follow me and I will make you fishers of men. And they straightway left their nets, and followed him.” He remembers that he is hearing this narration in the capital perhaps of some country in the West, inhabited by a people altogether unlike in manners, government, knowledge, to that which dwelt beside the sea of Galilee; a people nevertheless which has for centuries reverenced the names of Andrew and Peter, and received these records of their lives as oracles. Or as he hears the Gospel for Advent Sunday, he may reflect how One who entered upon an ass into the chief city of a section of a province of the Roman empire, amidst the shouts of a few of its poorest inhabitants,—to be cast out presently after as an ignominious and blasphemous pretender by its rulers and great men,—to be mocked and put to death by their heathen masters, has been acknowledged as King of the World by the most enlightened part of the empire which Tiberius ruled, and by nations unknown to him. Thoughts of this kind may lead to the questions: Whence came this wonder? To what power should it be attributed? But quite as often, when the sensation of surprise has worn off, they suggest a very different kind of speculations. The contrast between the actual state of Christendom and the character of the Book to which it appeals as the charter of its foundation, seems so great as to destroy all practical connection between them. “These Jewish records,” it is asked, “and this European world of ours, what have they really in common? Something may have been bequeathed by them to us,—but what can they tell us of the changes which have taken place even in that belief which we have received from them? How can they give us any information respecting the effects which mixture with the habits and feelings of different races, the progress of society, new discoveries, and greater degeneracy, may have wrought in it? How, for instance, can they explain the secret, that Christendom should be divided about the meaning of its own existence,—that one portion of the European nations should confine the name to themselves—that the others should denounce these as having departed from the principle upon which the name rests?” Such questions were often put in Bishop Warburton’s days. He foresaw that they would not cease to be put in ours. He believed that they could be answered. He desired that his Lecturers should resolutely face the whole difficulty; that they should assert the truth of the Christian Religion on the very ground of the correspondence between the Prophecies of the Old and New Testament and the history of the Christian Church; that they should not shrink from what might seem the most embarrassing part of the problem, but should especially devote their attention to the subject of the Romish Apostasy.

These injunctions may perhaps be literally complied with if we consider prophecy as contained in certain words, and look for the fulfilment of it in certain isolated events. But the Bishop seems certainly to have intended that we should examine the character and context of later history; and I question whether we can enter much into the meaning of the Jewish Prophets unless we examine the character and context of their national history. It is not their main office to unfold the future: first of all they explain the present; they told their countrymen what was implied in their actual position, and how they had abused it; with what significance every thing about them was pregnant; how unmeaning their lives had become. We wrong them grievously when we deal with their words as if they were oracles uttered in some moment of wild inspiration; with their books as if they were a collection of Sibylline leaves. The power which they possess of announcing that which must be, seems to be involved in their divine gift of perceiving the eternal under the temporary—the substance through the shadow: for they are certain that the counsel of the Lord will stand; the unwillingness of men to recognize his purpose will not frustrate it; in acts of mercy and judgments he will unfold it more and more clearly to the Heart of the true Israelite; in due time it will be fulfilled.

This fulfilment then would seem to be the accomplishment of a purpose or idea which had been latent in earlier times; which had been gradually making itself manifest to the divinely instructed Teachers; through them to as many as profited by their teaching. If this be the case, we cannot be wrong if we ask the Scriptures to tell us what this divine purpose is; by what process of education men in the old time were made conscious of it; what effects are promised from the full revelation of it. If we are willing to compare these expected results with the condition of the world since the time when the Scripture records leave us, we at least show that we do not shrink from the test which the founder of these Lectures wished us to use. And this mode of applying it may, I think, better than any other, meet the demands of a modern historical student. In general he does not care much for coincidences; those which are presented to him by Scriptural interpreters he is apt to regard either as merely fortuitous, or as produced by an ingenious distortion of words and facts. What he seeks for is some law, which may connect together the different facts he has observed in ecclesiastical or general history; he is willing to hear whether Scripture recognizes such a law; he will admit only this proof of its superiority to any which has occurred to himself in the course of his meditations, that it better explains the actual course of events, and more successfully clears away apparent anomalies.

Such a student, however, may feel a reasonable distrust of any one who professed to extract from the whole series of Biblical documents the purpose or idea of Jewish history, and to watch its rising from dawn to noonday. Nor, I think, can the distrust of a looker-on possibly equal that which every one who has undertaken the task, and experienced repeated discomfitures in it, must feel of himself. The first, therefore, may naturally ask, Can your New Testament be what it professes to be—a key to the meaning of the Old—if it contains no book especially devoted to the illustration of this subject? The latter, being confident that God will not leave his creatures without the necessary helps for knowing that which it has pleased Him to reveal, will seek diligently to ascertain where he is to look for a guide through this labyrinth. And I believe he will not be long in finding what he seeks.

There have been differences of opinion from the earliest times respecting the authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews; even its right to a place in the canon of Scripture has been disputed. But it has never, I think, been doubted that the writer, whoever he was, whatever weight is due to his testimony, intended to set forth the relation between a dispensation which he believed was passing away and one which he believed was commencing. No external evidence is required to show that this was his object; it exhibits itself at every turn to the most careless reader. To an ordinary historical student of our day, it is a matter of indifference what the outward claims of the book are; he may look upon it merely as the production of a very early Christian Jew, thoroughly acquainted with the institutions of his country, loving them affectionately, yet convinced that a sentence of death was upon them, and that they would not perish without giving place to something better. Considered in this light, it must, I conceive, be very interesting; it may supply that key to the interpretation of the other parts of Scriptures which we desire. Those who are thoroughly convinced of its authority will, of course, examine it with quite another feeling. They will expect to find, and gladly recognize in it if they do find, a guiding light to their own inquiries respecting the dealings of God with man. What help may it afford to one performing the office which has been committed to me, all I think will acknowledge who know how directly it bears upon the leading points of controversy between Protestants and Romanists; how it forces us to consider those points, in their historical as well as their theological import; above all, how solemn and awful and practicable its character is, reminding us that we are occupied with realities which concern our own lives, and the life of every human being; and restraining, if any thing can restrain, the disposition to indulge in the hateful chicaneries and pettinesses of religious disputation.

I propose then, in my first three Lectures, to show that the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews sets forth a principle which he affirms was implied in the Old Testament, fulfilled in the New; that he traces its gradual working and development through the former; that he helps us to understand what changes would be wrought by the full manifestation of it.

If I am permitted to deliver the three Lectures of next year, I propose to show that under different aspects this principle is the central one in the other books of the New Testament; in the first three Gospels, in the Epistles of St. James, St. Peter, and St. Paul, and in the different writings of St. John.

In the third year, I shall hope to apply this principle to the history of Christendom, in the period of its growth out of the Roman Empire,—in the period of its direct conflict with Mahommedanism, and in what is commonly called the Modern Period, dating from the commencement of the fourteenth century.

This inquiry will have brought us into direct contact with the Romish system. But, in order to complete the course, and carry out the intentions of the Founder, it will be expedient, in the last three Lectures, to consider that System formally, in reference to the Scriptural principle we have been elucidating, to the working of that principle in the Church, and to the future destinies of the world.

The plan which I have laid down relieves me from the necessity of introducing my inquiry into the scope of the Epistle, by a discussion respecting its author. Those learned men who reject the ordinary tradition, have done so because they think the purpose of the writer, though it may harmonize with that which they discover in St. Paul’s writings, is yet not identical with it; diversities of style and the opinions of several early Churches, especially in the West, come in to corroborate the conclusion which they have formed upon this ground. On the other hand, the most obvious external differences have not prevented earnest students from continuing to think of it as the work of the Apostle to the Gentiles, because there has been a persuasion consciously or unconsciously in their minds, that the object of his life would be less intelligible if this letter were not regarded as one expression of it.

On every account, therefore, we should postpone this inquiry till we have ascertained what the main characteristic of the Epistle is, and are able to compare it with other parts of the New Testament. Nor am I at all afraid that the credit of the letter should suffer while this point remains undecided, or even whatever the decision upon it may be. Those who have convinced themselves by experiment that it binds the different books of Scripture to each other and to the history of mankind, will believe that it is entitled to a place among those books, let the writer of it be who he may (for the tone of the Epistle, its most obvious, as well as its most minute peculiarities, determine it to the apostolical age); those who do not care for its contents will scarcely devote any practical attention to it, though they supposed that the whole college of apostles had been engaged in the composition of it.

The questions—to whom was this letter addressed, and what was the occasion that suggested it—cannot be thus passed over, for they bring some of its most striking peculiarities immediately under our notice. Among these, every one must have observed the exceedingly earnest tone of the practical exhortations. In a book possessing more of a systematical and logical character than any of the writings of the New Testament, it might have been supposed that these would be thrown into the background, that they would not be allowed to interrupt the course of the argument. But they recur at every turn, they enter into the very substance of the letter, every thing else seems subordinate to them. In their character they are different from those we find elsewhere. They are not simply warnings against certain evil tendencies or false opinions, such as we meet with in the Epistles to the Corinthians and Galatians; they express very distinctly the writer’s fear that those whom he is addressing are likely to become apostates from the faith of Christ.

Persons who have formed exaggerated notions of the purity of the apostolical churches—notions certainly not derived from the only authentic record which we possess respecting them—may well be startled when they read such warnings as these. But surely the surprise is much heightened when we consider what body it was which was thus addressed. Other indications in the Epistle leave us in no doubt. Its title—if we could depend certainly upon its authority—might lead us to think of those Jews dispersed over the different provinces of the Roman empire, who had believed Jesus to be the Christ, those whom St. Peter addresses in his Epistle. But if these Jews were not absent from the mind of the writer (and it is difficult to suppose any part of his nation absent from his mind), they were not the persons to whom a letter especially concerning the worship of the temple, the priesthood, and the holy city, would most apply. Such objects might be present to the imagination of the distant Jew; they were constantly present to the eyes of those who dwelt in Palestine. We must then believe they were the members of the mother-church of the world, the successors or survivors of those who were baptized when the Spirit descended on the day of Pentecost, of whom the fear was entertained by one who knew them and loved them well, that their faith was becoming daily weaker, and that they were in danger of losing it altogether.

And yet it is remarkable that these Hebrew Christians are not charged with open and conscious departure from any truth which had been delivered to them by their early teachers, with any apparent abandonment of the duties belonging to their own peculiar position. The one complaint of them is, that they had been content with their first imperfect apprehensions, that they had not labored after a fuller and deeper knowledge; that they were still eating the food of children, when, by reason of their years, they ought to be capable of that which nourishes men. This, the writer of the letter intimates, was their characteristic vice. It may seem to be any thing but of a deadly kind; their friendly teacher is most willing to believe that it is not; still he could trace too many indications of the decay of Christian belief and energy, which had been the effect of it, to doubt that if it were suffered to grow, all the culture they had received from apostles and martyrs would be utterly in vain.

The grounds of this fear it must be well worth while to ascertain for our own profit, as well as for the illustration of the Epistle.

1. We should always recollect that the Jews who believed Jesus to be the Christ, looked upon themselves as the real Jews; their countrymen they charged with rejecting the true heir of David, Him who had come to fulfil the covenant made to their fathers. When, therefore, the apostles, after the day of Pentecost, went up into the temple at the hour of prayer, this was no concession to the prejudices of others, no conformity to an inveterate habit. They felt that none could have more share in the worship of that Temple than they had. While the Priests and Levites permitted sheep and oxen to be sold in it, their Master had driven them all out, because He would not have his Father’s house turned into a house of merchandise. He had warned them indeed that the time would come when not one stone of this building should remain upon another; and every thing which had taken place since the prediction was given, made them sure that some awful judgment must be overhanging their nation. But they were not to anticipate this judgment: while the Temple stood, it was God’s temple; while the sacrifices were offered, they were the sacrifices which he had appointed. St. Stephen, undoubtedly, may have uttered words which offered an excuse for the charge, that he had said the Temple and the customs which Moses had delivered would be abolished; but we cannot in the least gather from his defence that he thought the present use of either was to be abandoned: rather, we perceive his deep reverence for them, as the shrines of a presence which their fathers and they, because they were uncircumcised in heart, had been despising. No change was produced in this feeling by St. Peter’s visit to Cornelius; the opposition to it showed how thoroughly Jewish the disciples were; nor, when they yielded to the Divine demonstration, did they recognize in it any thing else than a fulfilment of the promise, that the Seed of David should reign over the Gentiles.

The mixture of Greek proselytes with the regular Hebrews in the Church of Antioch, and the common name of Christians which was given to them, doubtless by the heathen inhabitants, no further affected the Jerusalem Christians than as they were led, perhaps, more zealously to avail themselves of the privileges of their own position. This effect was certainly produced by the report which reached them that St. Paul had founded societies composed even more of Gentiles than of Jews; that he had ordained elders and deacons over them, had addressed each of them as an Ecclesia, a body called out or elected, language which seemed strangely to interfere with the idea of the children of Abraham as the elect separated family. Yet St. Paul had in every city gone first into the synagogue; the ground of his churches was Jewish; he, as much as any apostle, had spoken of the promises made to the fathers; he too went up to the feasts and purified himself in the temple. From the conversation which is recorded in the twenty-first chapter of the Acts, it is evident that St. James, who was the presiding apostle over the Jerusalem church, not only obeyed strictly the injunctions of the Mosaic law, but practised those portions of the ritual which were merely permissive and voluntary. The testimonies respecting him, from the Jewish historian and the oldest Christian annalist, abundantly confirm this conclusion. They agree in representing him as one for whom the Jewish people at large had the deepest reverence. He was felt to be the righteous man of the city by all the parties which existed in it. His practical holiness was assuredly the strongest witness which could have been borne against the formalism of the Pharisee, and the heathenism of the Sadducee—against the infinite religious divisions and deep moral debasement of his nation. It was a witness that the disciples of Jesus were not, as their adversaries called them, a Nazarene sect, seeking to bind themselves by a new name. It was a witness for the sacredness of the old dispensation; the absence of which would have turned the Gospel into a mere speculation, and would have made the other preachers of it unintelligible to those who most professed to admire them.

Yet it is not difficult to understand how persons calling themselves the disciples of St. James, and fancying themselves such, because they were vehement partisans of what they supposed to be his doctrine, might pervert, nay, invert, his example. What in him was a thankful determination to use all the blessings which had been given him as a Jew, that he might enter into closer communion with the Lord of the whole earth, would become in them a determination not to associate with uncircumcised people. What was in him sanctification from the habits of a divided and exclusive world, would be in them exclusiveness and division in another form and under another pretext. What in him was the acknowledgment of his Master as the Divine Fulfiller of the Covenant to Abraham and David, would be in them a notion of Him as merely the servant of that Covenant. And yet this mighty difference may have been quite imperceptible to these Jewish Christians. The phrases which denoted their state of mind might be those which they had borrowed from St. James; their feelings of reverence for holy places, and of affection for their Jewish calling, might seem to be the very transcript of his. But the contrast would appear in the whole tone of their lives; above all, it would reveal itself after his death to those who expected, as he did, the destruction of the City and Temple—who felt that the loss of such an intercessor, and the crime which had occasioned it, must hasten the coming judgment. These persons will have seen that while he by his words and life was preparing himself, and, so far as he was able, his flock, for this judgment, it would overtake his pretended admirers as a thief in the night. Those Jewish institutions which they had been connecting with all their devotions, all their hopes,—for the sake of which they had forsaken the assembling of themselves together as members of a Christian community, would pass away with a great noise. Where would they be found after such an earthquake? What faith had they which could survive it?

2. But it would be doing these Christian Jews great injustice to suppose that they merely contemplated the preservation of the Jewish polity, with all the miserable accidents by which it was now surrounded. They knew how the priesthood had been degraded by the Herodian family, and how continually it had been a mere tool of the Roman procurator; they knew that the law had been depraved by Pharisaical traditions; they knew that the whole of society was in a more thoroughly evil condition than it had been in the days of Jeremiah, before the great captivity. But had not Christ come to restore the tabernacle which was fallen down? Had he not declared the true sense and spirit of the law? Had he not, by the poverty of his life, borne witness for a more than patriarchal simplicity?

Thoughts exceedingly like these must often have been presented by St. James to his disciples. In them lay the deepest truth. It seemed as if they could scarcely be turned to an evil use. And yet how easy it was to dwell on the words—Reformer and Restorer—till the significance of these same words was utterly lost. If Christ were only what they intimated, He might have told certain great truths; He might have hinted at great and desirable improvements in men’s social condition: but He had accomplished nothing. He might be greater than all previous teachers: but the universe, and men, and their connection with God, were still a riddle. All the questions which men had been asking themselves for so many centuries—all that had been implied in the existence of laws and governments, of priesthoods and sacrifices, had not been practically explained by this great Prophet. There had been a vision of something bright and good in the world, which could not, doubtless, pass away, without leaving some shadows behind. But it had passed away, and that with which, in the minds of these Hebrew Christians, it was inseparably interwoven, would pass away also. If it were so, then the Covenant with Abraham, and all the institutions of which they spoke so much, seemed to have been but pompous inanities; they had promised much, and performed almost nothing.

Would not these reflections force themselves more and more upon the minds of those who used this language? Would not they receive an awful interpretation, a seeming confirmation, from the day which was at hand. Must they not look forward to that day, not as a day of redemption, but as one of discomfiture and dismay? When it actually came, would they not be found to have lost, not only their Christian, but even their Jewish position?

3. The habit of mind I spoke of last, led the Hebrew Christians to dwell upon our Lord’s poverty and humiliation, because these were the great contrasts to the pride and pomp from which they supposed He came to purify their countrymen. But it was impossible, while they called themselves St. James’s disciples, always to rest in these thoughts. They knew that their teacher had spoken of Him, not only as poor, not only as entering into every human sorrow, but also as divine. Both truths had been distinctly asserted by him. They knew that he did not feel them to be irreconcilable. But how were they to be reconciled? The Jewish Scriptures spoke of angels. Might not these be intermediate beings, floating between earth and heaven, far below Him who filled all in all, far above His creatures in this world? Might they not be permitted, for certain great ends and at certain times, to put on actual or apparent human flesh, and to dwell among men? Might not our Lord be one of them: perhaps the chief of them all? Speculations of this kind, closely connecting themselves with the idea of the Messiah, occupied the minds of the deeply-thinking Alexandrian Jews, and presented themselves in more vulgar and practical forms to the despised Samaritan. Shortly after the fall of Jerusalem they were found working mightily in the minds of those who had believed in Jesus; and, blending themselves with those views, apparently so simple, which represented Him as the Great Reformer, as the poor man.¹ I have endeavored to show in the next lecture how little the Angels actually spoken of in the Old Testament belong to this region. They must therefore have already taken hold of the Church in Judæa. But whither would they lead?

That middle region between heaven and earth is the home of all the demons of Greek Mythology, yea, of all the objects of human worship which in later or earlier times have shadowed forth the deepest wants of man’s spirit, his sense of his own evil, his sense of the blessings and curses of the outward universe. The forms of idolatry, therefore, which the Jewish law had denounced,—which the Jews had believed that the God of Abraham would destroy, were likely at once to invade the heart and conscience which entered into this strange circle. And though these forms had at this time lost their definiteness and much of their beauty, they had not lost their potency. It was a time when men were beginning to talk largely about emanations from the Divinity—when old idolatries were evaporating into impersonations of Spiritual qualities or natural powers—when shapeless monsters of Superstition were produced from a union of Atheism with the terrors of an evil conscience, fearing where no fear was. Even in Rome, though the religion had become a mere state machinery,—though the wonder which Cicero expressed, that two augurs could meet each other with grave faces, was daily becoming more reasonable,—though the emperor was the one really acknowledged god of the world—dreams and portents, and Babylonian numbers, never exerted a greater influence over the mind of the tyrant and the slave, the soldier in the camp, and the matron in her closet. Where then could a Christian Jew, who once began to look upon the invisible world as a region for his fancy to work in, be expected to stop short? His Lord would soon be regarded as one of a multitude of godlike personages or symbols, or emanations; his direct Christian faith would disappear altogether. But it would carry along with it his Jewish reverence for the one Lord, the Jehovah. Nay, the very Paganism which was left as a deposit, would be something infinitely less real than the Paganism of former times,—a collection of shadows, with scarcely the hint of a subject,—of images, with scarcely the dream of an archetype.

There was ground enough then for the apprehension which at first seemed so strange, that the Christians of Palestine might become, in the strictest and largest sense of the word, Apostate. And yet any one rudely attacking those notions and habits of mind which were rapidly leading to this point, must have attacked precious truths,—must have undermined the reverence which these Christians entertained for the Apostles and Martyrs, from whom they had received them. Unless every one of these convictions could be shown to have a real ground,—unless their belief in the sacredness of the law and covenant of the Father could be deepened,—unless they could be made to see that Christ had indeed come to fulfil, and had actually fulfilled, this law and covenant, and stamped them with precisely that kind of permanence which the Scriptures had said was belonging to them, above all, unless their dim notions of something Divine and something Human in the Person of their Lord, could be taken out of the cloud-land of fancy, and be proved to have an eternal basis, adequate to sustain both the past and the future,—they could not be prepared for the calamities which were threatening them, or be saved from an utter shipwreck of faith. To these points, therefore, the writer of the Epistle addresses himself in the words I have taken for my text, which are, I believe, a 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 antithetical character of this paragraph has been often noticed, and is very obvious. But it has been strangely supposed that this form was adopted as a rhetorical artifice, such a one as would be familiar to a Hellenized Jew, bred in the schools of Alexandria. Surely it is not necessary to refute such an hypothesis, by proving or assuming the Divine authority of the Book. If a writer who believed that the last and saddest crisis of his country’s history was at hand, and who had awful apprehensions of the moral state of the persons whom he was addressing, could deliberately set down for the purpose of balancing sentences, and making words jingle,—we must at once dismiss him, as destitute of all truthfulness and all human feeling, as incapable of conveying instruction to his own age or to any other. The rudest utterance which could convey his meaning was the one which a good man, writing at such a time and under such impulses, would have chosen. But if any truth, or portion of the truth, he had to deliver, was brought out with greater clearness in this antithetical form, he was bound to use it—for him it was the most simple and natural. The charge of artifice lies against us who invent what we call rules of composition, or canons of taste; calling this style easy and genuine, that recondite or elaborate, without bringing either to the only test by which the worth of any style can be tried,—its fitness to embody the thoughts which are entrusted to it. The more we study this passage, the more, I think, we shall feel that if the writer had refused to be antithetical, he must have sacrificed, not some accidents, but the very essence of his meaning; must have utterly failed to make his design in the letter intelligible.²

The paragraph opens with two words, which our translators have rendered “In sundry times and divers manners.”³ The last phrase is open to no objection. The first is generally allowed to be unsatisfactory. The words of St. Paul, “We know in part, and we prophesy in part,”⁴ exactly explain the original expression. In it, no doubt, is included the idea of an adaptation in the teaching of the prophets to the times in which they appeared. A plague of locusts might require one kind of revelation, an Assyrian invasion another, actually approaching captivity, a still deeper one. But the leading thought seems to be, that there were many parts or divisions in the prophetical harmony; that no one utterance embraced the entire mystery, and that each portion had its own “manner”—that form of history or discourse, of song or vision, which was fittest for setting it forth.

To the Hebrews of the Christian age these prophecies presented themselves as a series of documents which could be read, translated, commented on. The power of contemplating them as parts of a whole was, no doubt, a valuable one; but it might easily be turned into a curse—the Scribes and Pharisees had actually made it one. For while they worshipped the letter of the prophecy, they forgot that it had proceeded from the lips of living, suffering men, and had gone to the hearts and consciences of actual men. It is not idly then, or without a meaning, that the writer reminds his readers very frequently throughout the Epistle that the words were “spoken:” if they were to be felt, they must be felt as spoken words, not merely as the words of a book. If they were so felt, the language, “God spake them,” would be also acknowledged as real, and not mere formal language. The people who heard the prophet, whether they were awakened to repentance, or whether they turned away in rage from the reprover, confessed his voice to be a Divine voice. It discovered evils within them which no mortal eye could have seen. It brought out that which was working confusedly in their spirits into awful clearness; it brought past and present and future before them, as one for them and one in Him, who is, and was, and is to come. There was no questioning in their minds how this could be. If they believed a man to be a prophet at all, to be speaking true words to them, they believed God was speaking in him. They had no doubt that He spoke to their fathers out of the midst of the fire; that voice had proclaimed the law which was laid up in the ark of the tabernacle. It could not be a different voice which was carrying home this law to their inner man; which was making them sure that it was as true for them as for their fathers; that they had broken it as their fathers had; that they were within the scope of all its blessings; that its curses were about to be fulfilled in them. Nay, did not the voice of this human speaker seem, in one sense, to be even more divine than that which came forth amidst the thunders? It was less terrible to the outward ear; it seemed to convey more the assurance of a personal presence to the Heart. The whole education of the Jew was designed to withdraw him from outward and visible things. The material terrors which the people saw in the plagues and wilderness had passed away—if they were renewed, it was in pestilences and earthquakes, or in the hosts of Sennacherib. In these the voice of God might be heard, but the words of him who made that voice intelligible, who declared why it was uttered, what internal corruptions had provoked it, must seem to come from even a more secret and holy place.

But though their fathers, at each actual crisis of their history, might have confessed that God was speaking in the prophets, it must often have been a sore difficulty to them to reconcile this conviction with what they had been told—with what these prophets told them—of the Unseen and Eternal Jehovah. Why did holy men arise except to testify that no creature might measure itself with the Creator; how was it then that these creatures, these men of like passions with themselves, whom they saw going in and out among them, could dare to say that the word of God was in them? It was a mighty perplexity, the perplexity of the Jew’s life: mingling itself with every thought of his nation, of himself, of the Divine Lord. His race was taught to consider itself elect and holy. Yet they were a stiff-necked people, a people of unclean lips, guilty of rebellions which no heathen could be charged with. Being in the covenant, he must look upon himself as righteous, and whenever he drew nigh to God, he knew that the belief was no delusion: yet he was conscious of infinite evil. He dared not think of God, except as the High and Holy One who inhabited eternity; he dared not doubt that men, nay, that he himself was intended to bear the image of this High and Holy One.

Strange contradictions these, which, if they had rushed at once upon the mind of any man, must have crushed it. But they came, like the revelation of the prophet, in sundry portions and divers manners; and as each new difficulty arose, there came with it the sense of a solution, of one upon which it was possible to act even then, and which would be complete, all sufficient, one day.

That day, says the writer of the Epistle, has come; we are “at the end of those days” to which the prophets belonged. And now God hath spoken to us by a Son. If a proof were wanting how little the antitheses of this passage had been introduced for the purpose of oratorical effect, what essential and pregnant parts they are of the meaning, we should find it in an oversight of our translators respecting this clause: an oversight so slight and natural, that one could hardly have attributed any mischief to it, and yet which has, I believe, darkened the sense, not of a single sentence, but of the whole Epistle. By substituting the possessive pronoun for the indefinite article—His Son, for A Son—they have removed the emphasis from the right word; they have led readers to take the word “Son” as a chance synonyme of Christ or the Messiah. Were it only this, there would be no connection between the rest of the chapter and this introduction, nor would either have any direct application to the circumstances of the Hebrew Christians. The passages which the writer quotes from the Old Testament are not meant to prove that a Messiah was expected by the holy Israelites. Every Pharisee would have admitted that assertion. The Christians of Palestine did not require to be told that Jesus was the Messiah of whom the prophets spoke; every act of their lives involved that profession. The real question to debate with the first was, What kind of Messiah did your fathers look for? with the second, What manner of person is he whom you recognize under that name? The writer of the Epistle says: Only to a Son of God belong those words of the Old Testament, which denote, as you Pharisees believe, a Messiah; only to a Son of God belong those acts which you Christian Jews attribute to Jesus of Nazareth.

The illustration of these two assertions, and of the method by which he establishes and connects them, I reserve for another Lecture. But for our present purpose it is very needful to observe how he describes that Son in whom God was speaking; “Whom he hath constituted heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds.” We often say that Revelation is progressive, and the writer of this Epistle abundantly justifies the language. But by progress, some seem to understand a continual journeying away from the inmost centre; a movement towards the circumference. Here we seem to be taught that each step of it is bringing us nearer to the ground of things—nearer to the throne of God. The revelation of God in this sense is truly the unveiling of himself. First, He speaks in that which is most distant from Him, the mere things which He has formed; then in men whom He created to rule over these things; lastly, in Him who by the eternal law is the inheritor of all things, in whom and for whom they were created. The order of the world, the succession of ages, spoke of the permanence of God. Here He speaks in Him by whom He framed the order of the world, the succession of times. At each step we are led into a higher, more awful region; yet not into a region more remote from humanity and human sympathies: rather, into one where humanity has reached its highest point; where every faculty and affection and energy has its full expansion and fruition. Things, in themselves cold and inanimate, are found to have a personal centre; the course of time, in itself dead and abstract, to have a living Mover. It is the Son of God, “the brightness of his Father’s glory, the express image of his substance.” Glimpses of his glory we have seen in his creation, brighter glimpses in the love and tenderness of human creatures. Here is He from whom they have both proceeded; here is the mystery which the prophets perceived in different portions, and expressed in divers manners; here is the whole Word, of which they uttered different syllables. Men are told that they are made in the image of God: how it could be they knew not. Here is his express image, not shown in the heaven above, nor in the earth beneath, but in a man. In Him creation has subsisted, in spite of all the elements of confusion and discord within it. “He has upholden it by the word of his power.” In Him we find how humanity has been a holy thing, though each man felt himself to be unholy. For the moment He clothes himself with all its vilest accidents it becomes actually holy; the sinfulness which belongs to each man’s separate nature is purged out of human nature when He inhabits it, and takes it unto Himself. In Him it is proved that man is meant to have his dwelling with God; for He having purified the soul and body which he had taken, “sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high,” claiming for all men the privileges of spiritual beings, the power of rising above the limitations of space and time—of entering into fellowship with Him who filleth 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 look upon himself as subject to angels; must not think of them as occupying any intermediate space between himself and the Lord of all. He must confess that He is a spirit, even as they are; that he is brought into a direct relationship with Him before whom they veil their faces.

Such a doctrine was surely a very awful one. The Hebrew Christians must have felt it to be so. Their teacher desired nothing so much as that they should feel it. A feeble frivolous tone of mind, which was glad to lose itself among shadows, which would not confront realities, had grown up among them; they would have hid themselves among the forms and images of their ritual, as Adam hid himself among the trees of the garden. Under pretence of exalting their privileges as Jews, they were shrinking from the great privilege of all, that of knowing Him who had called them to be His people. The writer of the Epistle wishes to convince them that it was no longer possible thus to deny their spiritual rights. They must either acknowledge them and walk in them, or sink into a much thicker darkness, a deeper atheism than any which their fathers had ever known. Hence vehement objurgations and awful warnings mix so strangely with language of transcendant encouragement and hope. The two were never separated in the writer’s mind. A spiritual creature must have capacities of highest vision, of infinite love. He must be capable again of utter self-concentration and despair. A crisis was at hand which would bring all to the test. Not earth only, but also heaven would be shaken; not an ordinary civil polity, but the Divine polity, would seem to be subverted. If, in the outward forms of that polity, lay the only proof to them of a relationship between God and his creatures, their belief would vanish altogether. If, through the forms of that polity they had risen to the apprehension of a relationship with God, of which all human relations were lower forms, a relationship grounded upon the Divine nature itself; upon the union of a Son with a Father in one Eternal Spirit; they would know that there was something which could not be shaken, but must remain, and that something a resting-place for the hopes of their race and of the whole creation.