Relation Of Jewish To Christian Morality

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We have thought it best, therefore, in the view of this unwonted unanimity of diverse schools, to separate the case of Judaism from the case of Gentile forms of thinking, and to assume that the essence of the Old Testament is identical with the essence of the New.

We have in the first instance allowed Judaism to make common cause with Christianity in the proclamation of a great moral law adequate to embrace the ethical wants of all nations, and we have confined ourselves solely to the inquiry : What has been the historical relation between the Gentiles and this moral law?

We must now, however, take a more internal view of the relations of Christianity.

It often happens, to one looking on the starry heavens, that what to the naked eye appears a united mass of light breaks up through the telescope into a multitude of luminous points, with myriad miles between them.

Some such analogy as this is seen in the contemplation of Judaism and Christianity.

At a distance they are one; viewed from the distance of heathendom they present the appearance of an united and compact body, in whose members there is no discord and in whose nature there is no division.

But when we draw nearer we find that this unity was an optical delusion.

The one begins to break up into the many, and the compact body reveals dissonance in the heart of its members.

The two systems, which to the distant gaze seemed to constitute one doctrine and one life, are seen in their

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277, immediate prospect to be animated by mutual antagonisms, Whatever may be said of the ideal relation between Judaism and Christianity, there can be no doubt at all as to their relation in actual history.

The Jew from the very beginning looked} upon the Christian as his enemy.

Christianity ' declared in so many words that her mission was the fulfilment and not the destruction of Judaism, but the older system uniformly refused the proffered reconciliation.

The religion of Christ had to fight its way to empire over the prostrate form of its rival, and the unity which it professed in thought was never realised in fact.

Nay, in the very statement, "Think not I came to destroy the law," there may be detected already the germ of a disunion.

There was implied in that sentence a perception of the fact that there was something in the attitude of Christianity which seemed to oppose the advance of Judaism, that to the eye of nature at least, which is the eye of history, there is an element in the Cross which seems to resist the progress of the Law, and threatens to bring to an end the moral precepts of the code of Moses.

Now, this was no mere prejudice on the part of Judaism; it was the instinctive perception of a real danger.

The danger of Judaism lay in the very promise of Christianity—I came to fulfil.

For let us remember that there is a kind of fulfilment which implies destruction; the butterfly is the destruction of the caterpillar, the man is the

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destruction of the child.

So in like manner is moral love the destruction of moral law: "When that which is perfect is come, that which is in part is done away."

When St. Paul declares that Christ has abolished the law of ordinances contained in precepts, he is speaking of a destruction through fulfilment.

The nearest approach we can find to an illustration is the idea of a blind man restored to sight.

Let us imagine this man reading with the eye the same words which he used to read with the fingers.

Wherein would consist the difference?

Clearly it would not lie in the result, that in each case would be the same—the acquisition of a certain point of knowledge; but there would be a complete difference in the manner in which the result would be achieved.

In the old days it was reached by touching the letters one by one; it would now be gained by seeing the word asa whole.

In the former case it came by an enumeration of materials; it would now come in a flash, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.

In the first instance it was the result of a process of reasoning; 1t would now be the fruit of an intuition, the product of an immediate light.

Something like this is certainly in St. Paul's mind when he speaks of the abolition of the precepts.

The man under the Jewish law reads by touch and not by sight.

He cannot grasp the word as a whole, and therefore he counts the letters one by one.

He cannot lay hold of the general principle of love, and therefore he tries by arith-

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metical calculation to number and perform' the various acts which a loving man would do; he seeks to make the hand supply the defects of the heart, and he lays down rules to guide the hand.

Now, _ what St. Paul says is this: the moment you get a heart the rules for the hand will go for nothing; the moment love comes law will vanish.

Let but the light of that positive command illumine your soul, "Bear ye one another's burdens," and there will be no longer any need for the negative mandates, "Thou shalt not kill," "Thou shalt not steal," "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour;" they will be at once fulfilled and abolished in the spirit of universal love.

Let but your heart be kindled into the warmth of human feeling for your brother, and there will be no longer any need to learn from the schoolmaster the rules of social etiquette; the innate graciousness of the spirit will render such rules superfluous for evermore.

The law is but your schoolmaster to teach you the acts of life; but when life itself shall open upon you, you shall perform the old acts by a short and easy method, and reach the old result by a way which to the schoolmaster was unknown.

Christianity, then, is by its own profession the supplement of Judaism, and in this lies its power at once to fulfil and to destroy.

The question now arises, What are the elements in Judaism which are supplemented in Christianity ? They are precisely those three ethical duties which we found in the

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previous chapter to constitute the sum of Christian morals—the love of self, the love of our neighbour, and the love of God; the doctrine of the Epicurean, the doctrine of the Stoic, and the doctrine of the Platonist.

The thought which is forced upon us by the preceding inquiry is the fact that Judaism is defective in not giving sufficient prominence to any of those Gentile systems which Christianity has united; it has not allowed sufficient weight to the instinct which created Epicureanism ; it has not given scope enough to the instinct which awakened

Stoicism ; it has not found adequate room for the instinct which necessitated Platonism.

In the supplementing of these deficiencies lies Christianity's superiority over Judaism, and therefore we must look in turn at each of A First, The creed of the Jew was defective in this

—that it did not allow sufficient prominence to the instinct of self-love.

The statement must appear at first sight the wildest of paradoxes.

If there is one thing which more than another we are wont to associate with Judaism, it is its tendency to foster an Epicurean selfishness.

We think of the Israelite as a man whose moral code impelled him to seek his own material glory; we think of him as one who did good only that he might receive individual pleasure, who abstained from doing ill only that he might avoid individual pain.

The truth is, the popular notion about Judaism is a delusion.

There never was a religion, excepting

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perhaps that of the Brahmans, in which the claims of the individual were so little recognised.

That there are glittering promises of material gold to the performance of virtue is a point that cannot be denied.

But it is a great mistake to think that these promises were held out to the Jew as an individual; they were spoken not to the man but to the nation.

The first commandment which carries temporal promise with it refers to the relation of the family:

'' Honour thy father and _ thy mother, that thy days may be long in the land."

Whose days are to be long in the land?

Not those of the isolated unit, but those of the national family of Israel itself.

To the eye of the moral Law-giver the whole nation is pictured as one man.

The life of the nation, the immortality of the nation, the perpetually increasing greatness of the nation— these were to be the objects of every Israelite's care, the sum of all his hopes, the goal of all his desires.

He was to live for the family.

His greatest joy was to be the faith that a covenant had been made with his house; his greatest grief was to be the fear lest his iniquities should be visited on his children.

His aim would have been sublime, if the national prosperity for which he strove had been a spiritual prosperity.

But his idea of the prosperity of his descendants was the advent of an age of wealth, of luxury, of physical conquest, of universal dominion—an age when his children's children would be clothed in purple and fine linen, and fare

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sumptuously every day.

'To give up his individual life to this, was to surrender himself to an impersonal materialism, it was to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage; the object was unworthy of the sacrifice, the goal was the triumph of the flesh.

And the result, as Hegel says, was a dimness in the individual hope of immortality.* The Jewish hope in a state of future glory was during all the years of the nation's greatness exclusively a national aspiration.

It was when the nation as a nation began to decline that the individual as an individual began to rise; the Pharisee pointed to ~ the resurrection of the dead when there was no longer any prospect of political glory for the living.

As long as the nation remained in strength it allowed no man to preach any immortality but its own.

'The individual was to live for the sake of the race, and for the sake of the race was he to die.

There was always the hope indeed in the heart of each man that he might be alive at that coming of the Messiah which was to complete the national glory, but a coming so long deferred must have made the heart sick.

No man can read the Old Testament without feeling that on-the whole the individual is depressed.

The harp of the minstrel rarely strikes a chord of unmingled joy.

There are psalms which alternate between light and darkness, but where the singer tells of himself the shades predominate. very note speaks of a sense of * Philosophy of History, p. 205, Lond. 1857.

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individual weakness; every cadence breathes the feeling of personal insufficiency ; every song is to some extent a song in the night, and the refrain which echoes through its chords is this;

'* What is man. that Thou art mindful of him ?"

Now the first aim of Christianity—the first in order of time—was to inspire the individual man with a sense of his own claims, in other words, to create a just self-love.

It is popularly believed that Christianity did this by revealing immortality ; it would in our view be more correct to say that it revealed immortality by doing this.

What kept the Jew from realising his immortality was the fact that he did not realise himself.

Christianity for the first time spoke to his individual soul.

It told him that his soul was in the sight of Heaven an infinitely grand thing, so erand that there was nothing he could take in exchange for it.

It told him that the acquisition of that whole material world, which he coveted for his country, was not in importance to be compared for one hour with the culture and development of his personal life, that the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them were a poor and insignificant possession when weighed against the glory of an individual contemplation of God; and if it be asked how Christianity taught the soul of each man to think thus highly of itself, there can from any side of religious opinion be only one reply—it taught individual men by the revelation of an individual

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man.

The glory of personality was first learned by its exhibition in a personal life, a life from which all extraneous ornaments were extruded in order that it might reveal its own native light.

In Him whom they called the Son of Man men beheld a new species of power—the power of individual purity, of personal sacrifice, of private virtue.

- They saw that there is in the life of each man the possibility of an infinite glory, which would be his, though he were alone in the universe; that the human spirit is in itself, and amidst the meanest surroundings, capable of rising to the Divine; and that the rise into the Divine is reached by stooping to the limits that environ the human soul.

Second, If Judaism was deficient in self-love, it was also deficient in brotherly love.

The exclusive character of the religion is one of the commonplaces of history.

Butit is by no means so clearly understood wherein this exclusiveness really consisted.

Warburton seems to think that the idea of the Jew was national isolation, and he says that its providential design was to preserve Monotheism.* Kalisch, on the other hand, has shown that there never was a time in Jewish history in which a cosmopolitan element did not mingle with the national separatism.t The truth is, the Jew was not only prepared, but was deszvrous to call all men his brethren ; the goal to which he looked forward

* Divine Legation, II. 419. t Bible Studies, Part II. p. 29, sq.

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was the time when all the ends of the earth should desire the salvation of the Lord.

But then his was only a prospective brotherhood.

He would compass sea and land to make one proselyte, but as long as the proselyte was not made he recognised no brotherhood.

It was not a geographical limit that confined his charity, it was a moral one.

He could) not love his enemy as his enemy—while yet he) remained his enemy; that was not only foreign to| his practice, but foreign to his thought.

In the palmy days of his nation he was no separatist, he desired above all things an universal religious communion; but he desired that the concessions | should be all on one side—the side of his enemies. |

He kept his love in reserve against the coming of that time when all flesh together should see the glory of the Lord.

It did not occur to him that there is a charity which beareth all things—that there is a love which hopeth all things—that there is a place in the heart for those who are out of the way.

That revelation was given to a nobler faith.

That faith was Christianity.

The leading thought in the religion of Christ is this—love to the sinner while he is yet in his sins.

The love which Christianity reveals to the world is a love in one respect quite unique; it is a redemptive love.

Judaism can tell men to fix their hearts on the welfare of those who are like themselves in life and doctrine; Christianity says that the heart has a wider province than that.

It says that love ought }

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not to be suspended until we have made others like ourselves; it ought to reach down to them even in their unlikeness.

It should not wait until we have brought up the erring from the valleys; it should itself go down to the valleys to seek them.

Love in the Christian system is not a power by which I am to claim brotherhood with humanity when humanity shall have reached my standard of moral purity; it is a power by which I am to claim brotherhood with men in their impurity, and through which I am to struggle to make them pure,

The sense of human brotherhood is itself to be the lever by which I am to lift the fallen.

I am to realise the fact that those who are lying by the wayside, unworthy to join in the march of life, are still even in their prostration my brothers and my sisters, are still members of the same family of which I am a member, are still the legitimate objects of my solicitude and of my care.

I am forced to feel like Paul, that under the influence of this new faith I am debtor not only to the Jew but to the Greek—not only to the wise but to the unwise.

'The love that loves against lovelessness, the love that, as the writer to the Hebrews expresses it, can endure a contradiction against itself: that is the inheritance which Christianity has bequeathed to me, and it is an inheritance which imposes a responsibility to which Judaism was a stranger.

It makes me neighbour to the Samaritan, to the Gentile, to the outcast, to the

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unbeliever ; I owe them all a debt of gratitude, because from the mere fact of being men they have wakened within me the spirit of love.* The sphere, then, of Christian brotherhood is wider than the sphere of Jewish brotherhood.

It would be a great mistake, however, to suppose that even within its own sphere the brotherhood of Judaism reaches the intensity of the brotherhood of Christianity.

St. Paul certainly had a different opinion; when he says, "Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ," he clearly means to imply that we cannot reach this goal by merely fulfilling the law of Moses.

And indeed it may be said that, as a whole, and making allowance ~ for isolated exceptions, the law of Moses exhorts not so much to bear as to forbear.

It is not so much a command to confer benefit, as a prohibition to inflict injury.

It does not so much aim at the glorification of humanity, as at the prevention of any act which would maim or mutilate humanity.

Hence its most powerful watchword is not, Thou shalt, but, Thou shalt not!

It seeks to refrain the hand from doing wrong rather than to nerve the heart for doing right.

It forbids to kill, to steal, to perjure, to covet ; and though in this last instance it reaches something like an inward state, it is at best only a negative inwardness.

It tells a man not to desire that: his brother's wealth may be transferred to him, but it does not tell him to * This point will be treated in more detail in Chapter X.

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desire that the good which is possessed by him may be equally possessed by his brother; the command to "covet the best gift"—the spirit of charity—was reserved for another dispensation.

Nor is the religious side of the Decalogue more positive than its practical side; the duties of the sanctuary are, like the duties of the community, prohibitions from doing wrong.

To worship no other God, to make no image of God, to take not God's name in vain, to do no work on God's Sabbath—this is the sum and substance of the religious code of Judaism.

'The one positive precept of its moral law is assigned neither to its sanctuary nor to its community, but to that relation of the family which is its symbol of all sacredness:

"Honour thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long in the land."

Third, We have already in part anticipated the final deficiency in the code of Jewish ethics.

It is not only defective in its provision for self-love and for brotherly love, it also falls short in its effort to reach Divine love.

Judaism has not only an individual want and a social want, it has also a distinctively religious want; for it is quite true, as Hegel has pointed out, that there is a chasm between the God of Judaism and the world of nature.* God is outside of His works.

It is felt that to bring Him into direct and immediate contact with anything He has made, would be to lower our

* Philosophy of History, p. 204.