RELATION BETWEEN THE CIVIL AND SPIRITUAL POWERS FROM ADAM TO CHRIST.
1.—The Divine and Human Society founded in Adam, refounded in Noah.
In one of the most ancient books of the world, which, in addition to its
antiquity, all Christians venerate as containing the original tradition
of man’s creation, guaranteed in purity and accuracy by divine assistance
given to the writer, we read the following words:—“God made the beasts of
the earth according to their kinds, and cattle, and everything that
creepeth on the earth after its kind. And God saw that it was good. And
he said: Let us make man to our image and likeness: and let him have
dominion over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and the
beasts, and the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon
the earth. And God created man to his own
image: to the image of God he
created him: male and female he created them.” And further: “The Lord God
formed man of the slime of the earth; and breathed into his face the
breath of life, and man became a living soul.... And the Lord God took
man and put him into the paradise of pleasure, to dress it and to keep
it. And he commanded him, saying, Of every tree of paradise thou shalt
eat; but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat.
For in what day soever thou shalt eat of it, thou shalt die the death.
And the Lord God said, It is not good for man to be alone; let us make
him a help like unto himself. And the Lord God having formed out of the
ground all the beasts of the earth, and all the fowls of the air, brought
them to Adam to see what he would call them: for whatsoever Adam called
any living creature, the same is its name. And Adam called all the beasts
by their names, and all the fowls of the air, and all the cattle of the
field; but for Adam there was not found a helper like himself. Then the
Lord God cast a deep sleep upon Adam: and when he was fast asleep he took
one of his ribs and filled up flesh for it. And the Lord God built the
rib which he took from Adam into a woman: and brought her to Adam. And
Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall
be called Woman, because she was taken out of man. Wherefore a man shall
leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they shall be
two in one flesh. And they were both naked, Adam and his wife, and were
not ashamed.”
Such is the account of the origin of man, of woman, of marriage, as the
root of human society, and of that society itself, beginning in the
absolute unity of one who was father and head of his race, created in
full possession of reason and language, and exercising both by an
intuitive knowledge of the qualities of living creatures as they are
brought before him by his Maker. This account stands at the head of human
history, and has been venerated as truth by more than a hundred
generations of men since it was written down by Moses, not to speak of
those many generations among whom it had been a living tradition before
he had written it down. Human language scarcely possesses elsewhere such
an assemblage of important truths in so few words. Perhaps the only
parallel to it is contained in the fourteen verses which stand at the
opening of St. John’s Gospel, wherein are recorded the Godhead and
Incarnation of the Divine Word. The first creation has its counterpart
only in the second; and the restoration of man by the personal action of
God alone surpasses, or, perhaps, more truly may be said to complete, the
Idea of his original formation by the same personal action of the same
Divine Word, who, great as He is in creating, is yet greater in
redeeming, but is one in both, and in both carries out one Idea.
For the creation of man as one individual, who is likewise the head and
bearer of a race, is the key to all the divine government of the world.
The fact rules its destinies through all their evolution. The world, as
it concerns the actions, the lot, and the reciprocal effect of
men upon
each other, would have been quite a different world if it had not sprung
out of this unity. If, for instance, mankind had been a collection of
human beings in all things like to what they now are, except in one
point, that they were independent of each other and unconnected in their
origin. This unity further makes the race capable of that divine
restoration which from the beginning was intended, and with a view to
which man was made a race: which in restoring man likewise unspeakably
exalts him, for He who made Adam the father and head of the race, made
him also “the figure of One that was to come.”
Let us briefly enumerate the parts of the divine plan as disclosed to us
in the narration just given.
In the council held by the Blessed Trinity it is said, “Let us make man
to our image and likeness;” not, Let us make men, but man: the singular
number used of the whole work indicates that the creation to be made was
not only an individual but a family. From the beginning the family is an
essential part of the plan. This is no less indicated in the single
creation of Adam first, not the simultaneous creation of the male and
female, as in the case of all other creatures, but the creation by
himself of the head alone, from whom first woman by herself, and then
from the conjunction of the two his family is drawn. In Adam first, while
as yet he is alone, the high gifts of reason, speech, and knowledge
indicated in the twofold and also congenital possession of reason and
language, are exhibited as residing as in a fountain-head, when all
creatures of the earth and the
air are brought before him by his Maker,
and he with intuitive understanding of their several qualities and uses
imposes on them the corresponding name. Thus Adam is created complete, a
full-grown man, in whom the divine gift of thought finds expression in
the equally divine gift of language, both exerted with unerring truth,
for it is intimated that the names which he assigns to the creatures thus
passed in review render accurately their several natures. It is not said
that the Lord God intimated to Adam the names which he should give; but
the knowledge by which he gave the names was part of his original
endowment, like the gift of thought and language, which answer to each
other and imply each other, and in a being composed of soul and body
complete by their union and joint exercise the intellectual nature. “The
Lord God brought all beasts and all fowls before Adam to see what he
would call them; for whatsoever Adam called any living creature, the same
is its name.”
This presentation of the creatures before Adam, and their naming by him,
is the token of the dominion promised to him “over the fishes of the sea,
and the fowls of the air, and the beasts, and the whole earth,” as the
result of his being made to “the image and likeness” of the Triune God.
Only when he has thus taken possession of his royalty is the creation of
the family completed out of himself. For when “for Adam there was not
found a helper like himself,” the Lord God took not again of the slime of
the earth to mould a woman and bring her to man, but “He cast a deep
sleep upon Adam, and built the rib which He took from Adam into a woman,
and brought her to Adam.” And then He uttered the blessing which should
fill the earth with the progeny of the woman who had been drawn from the
man her head, saying, “Increase and multiply and fill the earth, and
subdue it, and rule over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air,
and all living creatures that move upon the earth.”
What, then, is the image and likeness of the Triune God? The image
consists in the soul, with its two powers of the understanding and the
will, proceeding out of it, indivisible from it, yet distinct. May we not
infer that the likeness is the obedience of the soul, with its powers, to
the eternal law? This law, viewed in the Triune God, the prototype of
man’s being, is the sanctity of the Divine Nature; but in man, thus
created, the obedience to it was the gift of original justice superadded
to his proper nature: the gift by which the soul, in the free exercise of
the understanding and the will, was obedient to the law of God, its
Creator.
This was an image and likeness which belonged to Adam in a double
capacity, firstly, as an individual, secondly, as head of a family; for
it was to descend to each individual of the family in virtue of natural
procreation from Adam. The man created after the image and likeness of
the Triune God was, according to the divine intention, to be repeated in
every one of the race.
But what of the family or race which was to be evolved out of Adam alone?
Not the individual only
but the race also is in the divine plan. Is
there a further image of the Triune God in the mode of the race’s
formation?
To give an answer to this question, we must first consider what is the
prototype of that singular unity according to which the first parents of
the race are not formed together out of the earth, male and female, like
the inferior creatures. For in most marked distinction from all these man
is formed by himself, and alone; receives the command to eat of all trees
in the garden except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, under
penalty of death if he take of it; and then is shown exercising the
grandeur of his knowledge and the fulness of his royalty in the naming of
the subject creatures. But inasmuch as none of them could supply him with
a companion, and as “it was not good for him to be alone,” a council of
the Triune God is held again, and a help like to himself is taken out of
himself. Is there not here, with that infinite distance which separates
the created from the Increate, a yet striking image of the Divine
Filiation?
Again, from the conjunction of the two, from Adam the head, and from Eve
when she has been drawn out of him, proceeds, in virtue of the blessing
of God, the human family. Is there not here, again, at that distance
which separates divine from human things, an image of the procession of
the Third Divine Person, the Lord, and the Giver of life, from whom all
life proceeds?
May we not then say with reverence, that from the
council of the Triune
God, “Let us make man to our image and likeness,” proceeds forth the
individual man, an earthly counterpart in his memory, understanding, and
will to the divine Creator, and likewise man, the family, a created image
of the primal mystery, the ineffable joy of the Godhead, the ever blessed
Trinity in Unity? And since the origin of creation itself is the free act
of God, it ought not to surprise us that the chief work of His hands in
the visible universe should reflect in the proportion of a creature the
secret life of the Divine Nature, the Unity and Trinity of the Godhead.
But next to this primal mystery, which is the source of all creation,
stands that unspeakable condescension, that act of sovereign goodness, by
which God has chosen to assume a created nature into personal unity with
Himself, and to crown the creation which He has made. As to this the
first Adam, in all his headship, with the privileges included in it, the
transmission to his family of original justice, and of that wonderful
gift of adoption superadded to it, is “the figure of Him who was to
come.” But more also, St. Paul tells us, is indicated in the formation of
Eve out of Adam during the sleep divinely cast upon him. This was the
“great sacrament of Christ and of His Church” (Eph. v. 32), to which he
pointed in reminding his hearers of the high institution of Christian
marriage. And thus we learn that God, in the act of forming the natural
race, supernaturally endowed, was pleased to foreshadow by the building
of Eve, “the mother of all living,” out of the
first Adam, the building
of another Eve, the second and truer mother of a divine race, out of the
wounded heart of the Redeemer of the world asleep upon the cross. As then
in Adam’s headship we have the figure of the Headship of Christ, so in
the issuing of Eve from him in his sleep we have the Passion of Christ
and the issuing forth of His Bride from it, when His work of redemption
was completed and His royalty proclaimed.
Thus the mysteries of the blessed Trinity, that is, of God the Creator,
and of the Incarnation and Passion of Christ, that is, of God the
Redeemer, lie folded up, as it were, in the Mosaic narrative of the mode
in which Adam was created, and in the headship of the race conferred upon
him.
Before we approach the sin of Adam and its consequences to human society,
let us cast one glance back upon the beauty and splendour of the divine
plan in the original creation as it is disclosed to us in the narrative
of Moses. As the crown of the visible creation is placed a being who is
at once an individual and the head of a family, representing in his
personal nature the divine Unity and Trinity, and in the race of which he
is to stand at the head the same divine Unity and Trinity in their aspect
towards creation; representing the royalty of God in his dominion over
the creatures, a dominion the condition of which is the obedience of his
own compound nature to the law given to it by the Creator; representing
again in the vast number to which his race shall extend the prolific
energy of the
Lord of Hosts; representing also in that secret and
altogether wonderful mystery, out of which the multiplication of his race
springs, the yet untold secret of the divine mercy, in virtue of which
his fathership is the prelude to a higher fathership, the first man is
the pattern of the Second, and the royalty of his creation but a
rehearsal at the beginning of the world of the reparation which is to
crown its end.
The whole work of creation as above described, depends in its result upon
the exercise of man’s free-will. His value, before God, lies simply in
the way in which he exerts this great prerogative of his reasonable
nature. Without it he would be reduced from one who chooses his course,
and in that choice becomes good or evil, to the condition of a machine
devoid of any moral being. To test this free-will man was given a
commandment. We know that he failed under the trial; that he broke the
commandment. His disobedience to his Creator was punished by the
disobedience of his own compound nature to himself. That divine grace,
which we term the state of original justice, and in virtue of which his
soul, with its understanding and will, illuminated and fortified, was
subject to God, and the body with all its appetites was subject to the
soul, was withdrawn. He became subject to death, the certain death of the
body, with all that train of diseases and pains which precede it; and the
final separation of the soul from its Creator, unless by the way which
God indicated to him he should be restored. Becoming a sinner, his refuge
was penitence; henceforth his life was to be the life of a penitent;
he
had lost the grace which was bestowed royally on the innocent; he was
left the grace which was to support and lead on the penitent. From the
garden of pleasure he is expelled, to go forth into a world which
produces thorns and thistles, unless he water it with the sweat of his
brow. To all this I only allude, since my proper subject is to trace the
first formation of human society as it came forth from the fall. But the
primal state of man could not be passed over, because the state in which
he grew up, and the state in which he now stands, cannot be understood
nor estimated rightly without a due conception of that original
condition.
With the loss of original justice Adam does not lose the headship of his
race. All men that are to be born remain his children, and continue to be
not a species of similar individuals, but a family, a race. All the
dealings of God with them continue to be dealings with them as a race.
Adam’s fathership, had he not fallen, would have been to them the source
of an inestimable good, would have secured to them the transmission of
original justice, crowned as it further was by a wholly gratuitous gift,
the gift of adoption to a divine sonship. But that fathership, in
consequence of his sin, actually transmitted to them a nature penally
deprived both of the original endowment and of the superadded adoption;
and, as a fact, all the difficulties which occur to the mind in the
divine government of the world spring out of this treatment by God of man
as a family, a race. But likewise through this continuing fathership of
Adam, the Fathership of Christ appears as the completion
of an original
plan, devised before the foundation of the world, and actually carried
out at the appointed time. He was to be son of David and son of Abraham
in order that He might be Son of man. This original plan of God is not
frustrated but executed by the fall of Adam. The yet undisclosed secrets
of human lot have their origin in Adam and their solution in Christ. We
are allowed to see that they belong to one plan. No doubt the hidden
things of God in this dispensation baffle our scrutiny: they remain for
the trial of faith until faith passes into sight, but we are allowed to
see the fact of a vast compensation; and over against the fathership
which brought death and corruption and the interminable ills of human
life, we see all the supernatural blessings of the new covenant,
consisting in the triple dowry of adoption, betrothal, and consecration,
come to man as a spiritual race descending from the Second Adam.
Thus, not only the primary but the actual state of man in society springs
out of an absolute unity. We have here to note two great truths. Adam, as
he was expelled from paradise to till the earth and subdue it, was the
head of his race in two particulars: first, as to natural society, whence
springs civil government; and secondly, as to the worship of God, and the
promises included in that worship, whence springs priesthood and all the
fabric of religion. The two unities, the social and the religious, had in
him their common root; and man thus comes before us in history as a
family in which the first father stands at the head of the civil and
religious order in most intimate intercourse with God. The only
description which we possess of that first period of human society from
the Fall to the Deluge, suggests to us a state which seems absolutely
walled round by God with securities, both as concerns human life in the
intercourse between man and man, and as concerns the purity of their
worship of God. As to the first, have we not said all which can be said
when we say that they were a family? The king of the human race was the
father of every one in it. Certainly if any king could ever command the
love and respect of his subjects it must have been Adam in that royalty.
But let us very briefly consider the bearing of man’s condition before
the fall, as set forth to us in the sacred records which have been so far
followed, upon his knowledge of divine and human things, and his moral
state in his first society after the fall.
We have seen Adam in possession of a great dignity, created in the
maturity of reason, exercising the full power of thought and speech as
directed to truth by an inward gift, which conveys to him the knowledge
of the creatures surrounding him; moreover, taught by God as to his
present duties and future hopes. We have seen a wife bestowed upon him,
who is, as it were, created for him and drawn from him, and a vast family
promised to him. He is thus made father and head of his family and his
race, and his Creator is his immediate Teacher. After his fall these
privileges do not become to him as if they had never been. The memory of
them all is
complete in him, but a very large portion of their substance
remains. Let us take three points, which are enough for our purpose. He
receives, at the fall itself, firstly, a great promise of God; secondly,
he becomes the Teacher and, thirdly, the Priest of his race. As to the
promise, God declares to him that, as the result of the serpent seducing
the woman to sin, He will create enmity between the serpent and the
woman, the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman; the seed of the
woman should crush the serpent’s head; the serpent should lie in wait for
his heel. All human history is gathered up in that division of the race,
between the seed of the woman, from which springs the City of God, and
the seed of the serpent, from which springs the City of the Devil. That
is a communication of fresh knowledge to Adam, knowledge of good and
evil, a mixture of consolation and sorrow. That is a disclosure of the
issue of things stretching to the very end of the world, which comes to
sustain Adam in his penitence, to complete the knowledge which he
previously had of God and of himself.
In this first great prophecy, which embraces all the religion, the hope,
and the destiny of man, the consequences of which are not yet worked out,
man is treated as a race. The punishment falls on him as a Father; the
Woman through whom it comes, the Mother of his children, points to
another Woman and Mother, through whom it is to be reversed, and the
Deliverer is to come to him as a Descendant.
Adam, then, was cast out of paradise, but not without
hope, still less
without knowledge, for he carried with him the knowledge which God had
given to him, and the lesson of a great experience. Thus he became the
great Teacher of his family. Through him from whom they received natural
being and nurture, they received the knowledge of God, of their own end,
of all which it behoved them to know for the purpose of their actual
life. The great Father was likewise the great Penitent; and the first
preacher of God’s justice to men told them likewise of His mercy: a
preacher powerful and unequalled in both his themes.
But, by the fall, Adam became likewise the Priest in his family. We learn
from the narrative of Cain and Abel that the worship of God by sacrifice
had been instituted, and it is not obscurely intimated that it was
instituted even before he was cast out of paradise, since God Himself
clothed Adam and Eve with skins of beasts, which, doubtless, were slain
in sacrifice, since they were not used for food.[7]
The rite of bloody sacrifice, utterly unintelligible without the notion
of sin, and inconceivable without a positive divine institution, so
precise in its formularies about the statement of sin, and the need of
expiation, is an everliving prophecy of the great sacrifice which God had
intended “before the foundation of the world,” and a token of the
knowledge which He had communicated to
Adam before he became a father.
Unfallen man needed to make no sacrifice, but only the triple offering of
adoration, thanksgiving, and prayer. These Adam would have given before
he fell; after his fall he became a priest, and the bloody sacrifice to
God of His own creatures, a mode of propitiating God which man could
never have invented or imagined of himself, is a token of the ritual
enjoined upon him, and of the faith which it symbolised and perpetuated.
Such, then, was the condition of the children of Adam, the first human
society, in those “many days” which passed before Cain rose up against
Abel: the state of a family living in full knowledge of their own
creation, being, and end, in vast security, for who was there to hurt
them? worshipping God the Creator by a rite which He had ordained in
token of a great promise, at their head the Father, the Teacher, and the
Priest, with the triple dignity which emanates from the divine
sovereignty, and makes a perfect government.
The two powers which were to rule the world rested as yet undivided upon
Adam after his fall.
It is evident that nothing could be further from a state of savagery or
barbarism, from a state of defective knowledge of God and man, and his
end, than such a condition as this, which suggests itself necessarily to
any one who considers attentively the sacred narrative.
But as Adam in paradise was left to the exercise of his free-will, and
fell out of the most guarded state of innocence by its misuse, so the
first-born of Adam broke out of this secure condition of patriarchal life
through
the same misuse, and begun by fratricide the City of the Devil.
We are told that God remonstrated with him when he fell under the
influence of envy and jealousy, but in vain. He rose against his brother
and slew him; he received in consequence the curse of God; “went out from
his face, and dwelt a fugitive on the earth at the east side of Eden.”
There it is said that he built the first city, on which St. Augustine
comments: “It is written of Cain that he built a city; but Abel, as a
stranger and pilgrim, built none.”
The fratricide of Cain leads to a split in the human family. The line of
Cain seems to depart from Adam and live in independence of him. It
becomes remarkable for its progress in mechanical arts, and for the first
example of bigamy. The end of it is all we need here note. In process of
time, “as men multiplied on the earth,” two societies seem to divide the
race of Adam—one entitled that of “the sons of God,” the other that of
“the daughters of men.” But the ruin of the whole race is brought about
by the blending of the better with the worse: the bad prevail, the two
Cities become mixed together in inextricable confusion. God left to man
throughout his free-will, but when the result of this was that “the
wickedness of men was great upon the earth, and that all the thoughts of
their heart was bent upon evil at all times,” that is, when the City of
the Devil had prevailed over the City of God in that patriarchal race
which He had so wonderfully taught and guarded, He interfered to destroy
those whose rebellion was hopeless of amendment, and to make out of one
who
had remained faithful to Him a new beginning of the race.
The race had been cut down to the root because in the midst of knowledge
and grace it had deserted God; and Noah, as he stepped forth from the
ark, began with a solemn act of reparation. He “built an altar to the
Lord and offered holocausts upon it of all cattle and fowls that were
clean.” God accepted the sacrifice, inasmuch as it was in and through
this act that He bestowed the earth upon Noah and his sons, and gave him
everything that lived and moved on it for food. He consecrated afresh the
life of man by ordaining that whoever took human life away, that is, by
an act of violence, not of justice, should himself be punished with the
loss of his own life; and He grounded this great ordinance upon the fact
that man was made after the image of God. At the same time God repeated
to Noah and his sons the primal blessing which had multiplied the race,
and was to fill the earth with it, and made a covenant with him and with
his seed for ever, a covenant to be afterwards developed, but never to be
abrogated. It is to be noted that the sacred narrative dwells rather upon
the sacrifice made by Noah immediately upon issuing from the ark than
upon the original sacrifice offered by Adam. Of the first institution of
sacrifice it makes only incidental mention, referring with great
significance to those skins of beasts, of which God provided a covering
for the nakedness of Adam and Eve. It is as if the rite of sacrifice,
instituted as a prophecy of the future expiation of sin, might fitly
supply from the skins of its victims a covering for that nakedness which
sin alone had revealed and made shameful. The mention of this fact ensues
immediately upon the record of the fall, before Adam is cast out of
paradise. And again, by the mention of the sacrifice of Abel, and of its
acceptance, it is shown that the rite already existed in the children of
the first man. But now the sacrifice of Noah, and the covenant made in
it, as being of so vast an import to every succeeding generation, is
described at length as the starting-point of the whole renewed, that is,
the actual race of man. In this sacrifice it is emphatically declared
that “the Lord smelled a sweet savour,” since it stood at the beginning
of man’s new life, coming after the waters of the deluge as the image and
precursor of the Sacrifice on Calvary, which was to purify the earth, and
which those waters typified.
As, then, we considered lately the position of man as to his knowledge of
God and of himself in the “many days” which ensued after the fall before
the death of Abel, so let us glance at his condition in these same
respects at the starting-point of this new life of man. First of all, out
of the wreck of the old world Noah had carried the two institutions, one
of which makes the human family in its natural increase, while the other
constitutes its spiritual life—marriage and sacrifice. In marriage we
have the root of society; in sacrifice the root of religion. These had
not perished, neither had they changed in character. They were the
never-displaced foundation of the race, an heirloom of paradise never
lost; marriage, as established in the primeval
sanctity before man fell,
sacrifice as superadded to man’s original worship of adoration,
thanksgiving, and prayer immediately upon his fall, in token of his
future recovery. God, in selecting Noah to repair the race, made him, in
so far like to Adam, the head of the two orders, King and Priest, and
from that double headship the actual government of the world through all
the lines of his posterity descends.
Thirdly, we find in Noah’s family the divine authority of government
expressly established; for in the protection thrown over human life the
power to take it away in case of grievous crime is also given. Authority
to take life away belongs of right to the giver of life alone. He here
bestows the vicarious exercise of it upon that family which was likewise
the first State, and the fountain-head of actual human society. “At the
hand of every man, and of his brother, will I require the life of man:
whosoever shall shed man’s blood, his blood shall be shed, for man was
made to the image of God. But increase you, and multiply, and go upon the
earth, and fill it.” We have then the charter here of human society;[8]
the delegation to it of supreme power by the Head of all power, to be
vicariously exercised
henceforward over the whole race as it went out,
conquered, and replenished the earth; the sacredness of man’s life
declared, in virtue of that divine image according to which he alone of
all creatures upon the earth was made, yet power over that life for the
punishment of crime committed to man himself in the government
established by God. An absolute dominion over all beasts was given at the
same time to man; first for himself, in virtue of his distinction from
the beast, in virtue of the divine image resting upon him, a delegation
of divine power was set up in the midst of him, the supreme exercise of
which is the power of life and death. Civil government therefore was no
less created by God than marriage, and sacrifice, with the religious
offices belonging to it. Like them it was ratified afresh in the race at
this its second starting-point.
But, fourthly, it was as Father and Head of the race that the first act
of Noah leaving the ark was to offer sacrifice; he offered it for himself
and for all his children. With him, as offering in a public act the
homage of his race, the great covenant of which we have been speaking was
made. Besides the divine things bound together in the institution of
sacrifice—the accord of four acts, adoration, thanksgiving, prayer, and
expiation, which express man’s knowledge of his condition of God’s
sovereignty, and of his own last end, as well as the dedication of his
will to God—great temporal promises, such as the dominion over all other
creatures, and the filling the earth with his race, promises which belong
to man as one family and one race, were made to Noah in
this solemn
covenant ratified in sacrifice. The common hopes of the whole community
for the present life and the future also were jointly represented in it.
It is, in fact, the alliance of the civil government with religion, of
which we see here the solemn ratification. Noah the Father, the King, and
the Priest, sacrifices for all, where all have a common hope, a common
belief, a common knowledge, a life not only as individual men, but as a
family, as a race, as a society.
Thus in marriage, in sacrifice, in the vicarial exercise of divine power
by civil government, and in the alliance of that government with the
worship of God, we have the four central pillars on which the glorious
dome of a sacred civilisation in the human family, when it should be
conterminous with the whole earth, was intended to rest. These four
things date from the beginning of the race; they precede heathenism, and
they last through it. Greatly as man in the exercise of his free-will may
rage against them, grievously as he may impair their harmony, and even
distort by his sin the vast good which that harmony ensures and guards
into partial evil, yet he will not avail to destroy the fabric of human
society resting upon them before the Restorer comes.
Noah having lived 600 years before the flood, and having been the
preacher of justice for 120 years to a world which would not listen to
him, has his life prolonged for 350 years after the flood. During this
time he is to be viewed as the great Teacher of his family, like Adam
when he came out of Paradise. What the Fall was in the mouth of Adam the
Deluge was in the
mouth of Noah, a great example of punishment inflicted
on man for the disregard of God as his end. It is hard to see how God
could have more completely guarded those two beginnings of human society
from the corruption of error and the taint of unfaithfulness than by the
mode in which He caused them to arise, in that He formed them both
through the teaching of a family by the mouth of a Parent, and the
government of a race by the headship of its Author. For the larger
society sprung actually out of brethren as the brethren themselves out of
one parent. “They have,” to use Bossuet’s striking recapitulation, “one
God, one object, one end, a common origin, the same blood, a common
interest, a mutual need of each other, as well for the business of life
as for its enjoyments.” And one common language, it may be added, serves
as the outward expression, the witness, and the bond of a society so
admirably compacted, based, as it would seem, on so immovable a
foundation.
Let us sum up in three words the history so far as it has yet been
recorded. The foundation of all is man coming forth by creation out of
the hand of God. He comes forth as one family in Adam. Falling from his
high estate by his Father’s sin, he receives a religion guarded and
expressed by a specific rite of worship, which records his fall, and
prophesies his restoration. After this the family springs from parents
united in a holy bond, which, as it carries on the natural race, is
likewise the image of a future exaltation. As he increases and multiplies
the divine authority is vicariously
exercised in the government of the
race as a society. That government is strictly allied with his religion.
It is most remarkable that the last end of man dominates the whole
history; that is, all the temporal goods of man from the beginning depend
on his fidelity to God. Disregard of this works the Fall; the same
disregard works the Deluge. It remains to show how that compact and
complete society instituted under Noah depended, as to the maintenance in
unimpaired co-operation of the great goods we have just enumerated, upon
the free-will of man to preserve his fidelity to God; that is, to show
how in the constant order of human things there is an inherent
subordination of the temporal to the spiritual good, as for the
individual so for the race.
2.—The Divine and Human Society in the Dispersion.
The divine narrative of the beginning of human society ends with an event
of which the consequences remain to the present day, and from which all
the actual nations of the earth take their rise. The blessing and command
given to Noah and his family were, “Increase and multiply and fill the
earth.” It would seem that the family of man continued in that highly
privileged and guarded state which has just been described during five
generations, comprehending perhaps the life of Noah and Shem. Of all this
time it is said, “The earth was of one tongue and the same speech.” The
division of the earth among the families of a race by
virtue of a
natural growth, which was itself the effect of the divine blessing and
command, did not carry with it as a condition of that growth the
withdrawal of so great a privilege as the unity of language. God had
formed the human family out of one; had built it up by marriage; cemented
it by a religious rite of highest meaning; crowned it with His own
delegated authority of government, and sanctified that government by its
alliance with religion. Unity of language is as it were the expression of
all these blessings. The possession of language by the first man, the
outer vocalised word, corresponding to the inner spiritual word of
reason, was a token of the complete intellectual nature inhabiting a
corporeal frame—a fact expressed by the doctrine that the soul is the
form of the body—which constituted his first endowment. And in a
proportionate manner the possession of one language as the exponent of
mind and heart by his race, was the most effective outward bond of inward
unity which could tie the race together, whatever its numerical and local
extension might be. It is to be noted that though the cause of the deluge
was that “the earth was corrupted before God, and was filled with
iniquity” (Gen. vii. 11), yet God had not withdrawn from man the unity of
language, perhaps because the revolt of man had not hitherto reached to a
corruption of his thought of the Divine Nature itself. But now ensued an
act of human pride and rebellion which led God Himself to undo the bond
of society, consisting in unity of language, in order to prevent a
greater evil. The sin is darkly recorded, as if some peculiar
abomination
lay hid underneath the words; the punishment, on the
contrary, is made conspicuous. “And the earth was of one tongue and the
same speech. And when they removed from the east, they found a plain in
the land of Sennaar and dwelt in it. And each one said to his neighbour,
Come, let us make brick and bake them with fire. And they had brick
instead of stones, and slime instead of mortar. And they said, Come and
let us make a city and a tower, the top whereof may reach to heaven: and
let us make our name famous before we be scattered abroad into all lands.
And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children
of Adam were building. And He said, Behold it is one people, and all have
one tongue; and they have begun to do this, neither will they leave off
from their designs till they accomplish them indeed. Come ye, therefore,
let us go down and there confound their tongue, that they may not
understand one another’s speech. And so the Lord scattered them from that
place into all lands, and they ceased to build the city. And therefore
the name thereof was called Babel, confusion, because there the language
of the whole earth was confounded; and from thence the Lord scattered
them abroad upon the face of all countries.”
It may be inferred that the city and the tower thus begun point at a
society the bond of which was not to be the worship of the one true God.
As a matter of fact, thenceforth and to all time the name of Babel has
passed into the languages of men as signifying the City of Confusion, the
seat of false worship, the headship of the
line of men who are the seed
of the serpent, and of that antagonism which the primal prophecy
announced as the issue of the fall.
But the severity of the punishment and its nature seem further to
indicate that we are here in presence of the beginning of the third great
sin of the human race, in which, as in the former, the free-will of man,
his inalienable prerogative and the instrument of his trial, runs athwart
the purpose of God. The first was the sin of Adam’s disobedience
resulting in the Fall; the second the universal iniquity of the race
punished by the Deluge; the third is the corruption of the idea of God by
setting up many gods instead of one, a desertion of God as the source of
man’s inward unity, which is punished by the loss of unity of language in
man, the voice of the inward unity, as it is also the chief stay and bond
of his outward unity. The multiplication of the race and its propagation
in all lands was part of the original divine intention. When the bond of
living together in one place and under one government was withdrawn,
there remained unity of worship and unity of language to continue and to
support the unity of the race. Man was breaking his fealty to God not
only by practical impiety, as in the time before the flood, but by denial
of the Divine Nature itself as the One Infinite Creator and Father; God
replied by withdrawing from rebellious vassals that unity of language
which was the mark and bond of their living together as children of one
Parent. With the record of this event Moses closes his history of the
human race as one family, which he had up to
this point maintained. He
had hitherto strongly marked its unity in its creation, in its fall
through Adam, in its first growth after the fall, and in the common
punishment which descended upon it in the flood, and again in its second
growth and expansion from Noah. Language is the instrument of man’s
thought, and the possession of one common language the most striking
token of his unity; and here, after recording the withdrawal of that
token by a miraculous act of God in punishment of a great sin, Moses
parts from all mention of the race as one. He proceeds at once to give
the genealogy of Shem’s family as the ancestor of Abraham, and then
passes to the call of Abraham as the foundation of the promised people.
He never reverts to the nations as a whole, whom he has conducted to the
point of their dispersion and there leaves.
Through this great sin the division of the earth by the human family
started not in blessing, but in punishment. “The Lord scattered them
abroad upon the face of all countries.” He who had made the unity of
Noah’s family, Himself untied it, and we may conceive that He did so
because of that greatest of all crimes, the division of the Divine Nature
by man in his conception of it, his setting up many gods instead of one.
Let us see how this sin impaired, and more and more broke down, that
privileged civilisation brought by Noah from before the flood, and set up
by him in his family.
If God be conceived as more than one, He ceases by that very conception
to be self-existing from eternity, immense, infinite, and
incomprehensible, he ceases also
to have power, wisdom, and goodness in
an infinite plenitude; and, further, He ceases to be the one Creator,
Ruler, and Rewarder of men.
Thus the conception of more gods than one carries with it an infinite
degradation of the Godhead itself, as received in the mind and heart of
man.
But it likewise unties the society of men with each other, and lays waste
the main goods of human life. Thus it was in the case of Noah’s family.
As it was planted by God after the deluge, it possessed a distinct
knowledge and worship of Him, as the one end and object of human life.
This knowledge and worship were contained, as we have seen, in the rite
of sacrifice and its accompaniments. Proceeding from this, it possessed
the love of God, obliging men to mutual love, a precept the more easy
because it was given to those who, as members of one family, were
brethren. From these it followed that no man was stranger to another man;
that every one was charged with the care of his brother; and that a unity
of interest itself bound men to each other.[9]
But all these goods are dependent on the first. For if men do not worship
one and the same God, as the Creator, the Ruler, and the Rewarder of all,
their life ceases at once to have one end and object; their love to each
other is deprived of its root, for they suppose themselves to be the
creatures of different makers, or not to be made at all, to spring out of
the earth, or to come into the world no one knows how, whence, or
wherefore. Again, the natural brotherhood of man depends on his origin
from one family, which must be the creature of one maker. And if the root
of this natural affection and brotherhood be withered, men become strange
to each other, rivals in their competition for the visible goods of life;
they cease to care for others, and cease to be united in one interest.
When the family which had formed a patriarchal state became by natural
growth too large to live together, the natural process for it was that it
should swarm, and each successive swarm become a patriarchal state. Here
was in each the germ of a nation, as they occupied various countries.
Naturally, they would have parted in friendship, and if the bond of
belief and of language had continued unbroken, they would have become a
family of nations; they would each have carried out and propagated the
original society from which they sprang without alloy or deterioration.
What actually took place was this. The division of the race into separate
stems, and the corruption of the conception of God into separate
divinities, pursued a parallel course, until the deities became as
national as the communities over which they presided. As there ceased to
be in their thought one God of the whole earth, they ceased to believe in
one race of man, nor does any good seem to have more utterly perished
from the peoples who sprung out of this dispersion than the belief in the
universal brotherhood of man; and the conduct which should spring out of
that belief, the treatment of each other as brethren.
That their having lost the consciousness of such brotherhood is no proof
that it never existed, has been established for us by the new science of
comparative grammar in our own day in a very remarkable instance. The
careful study of a single family of languages in the great race of Japhet
has proved beyond question that those who came after their dispersion to
speak the Sanscrit, the Persian, the Greek, the Latin, the Celtic,
Slavic, and Teutonic tongues, all once dwelt as brethren beside a common
hearth, in the possession of the same language. Yet, in ancient times, it
never crossed the mind of the Greek that he was of the same family with
the Persian, by whose multitudinous inroad he was threatened; to him the
barbarian, that is the man who did not speak his tongue, was his enemy,
not a brother. As little did the Saxon, when he displaced the Celt, and
gave him, too, the name of barbarian,[10] as not understanding his
tongue, conceive that he was of the same family. It was with no little
wonder that the first French and English students of Sanscrit found in it
uneffaced the proofs of its parentage with Greek and Latin.
The study of the comparative grammar of various languages, when carried
out as fully in other directions, may have in reserve other surprises as
great as this; but the proof of unity in this case, where yet the
divergence has proceeded so far, of unity in a family from which the
greatest nations of the earth have sprung, and whose descendants stretch
over the world, tends to
make the unity of the original language of man
credible on principles of science, independently either of historical
tradition or of revelation, while it shows into what complete and
universal oblivion a real relationship may fall.
With the belief in one God, then, fell the belief in one human
brotherhood as well as the existence of one human society. Each separated
stem became detached from the trunk, and lived for itself. It is true
that each state, as it began, was patriarchal; but identity of interests
was restricted to the single state; beyond its range there was war, and
within it, in process of time, war led to conquest, and after conquest
the conquering leader became head of the conquered. Thus the patriarchal
state, in which the head of the family was its priest, passed into
kingdoms compacted by war and its results, in an ever-varying succession
of victories and defeats.
But it is our special task to see what portion of the goods, which
belonged to the race when undivided, passed on to its several stems in
the dispersion with which Moses closes his account of the one human
family.
The universal society stops at Babel, and national existence begins; that
is, a number of inferior local unities succeed to the one universal. It
would be well if we had a Moses for guide through the long period which
follows, but he restricts his narrative to Abraham and his family, and to
such incidental notice of the nations with whom they come in contact as
their
history requires. When we reach the beginnings of history in the
several peoples who took their rise at the dispersion, a long time has
intervened. The bond of one society in a race seems to consist in unity
of place, of language, of religion, and of government. Now for man in
general the unity of place was taken away by the dispersion itself. As to
language, the lapse of a thousand years was more than sufficient to make
the inhabitants of various countries strange to each other and
barbarians. Men of different lands had long utterly ceased to acknowledge
each other as brethren. As to religion, the worship of the one true God
had passed into the worship of many false gods in almost every country
each one of which had its own gods, generally both male and female, whom
it considered as much belonging to itself as its kings or its cities.
This diversity of deities in each nation, and the appropriation of them
by each to itself, was become a most fertile principle of division and
enmity among men. But if man had lost the unity of religion he had
created for himself in every land an institution which might be said to
be universal: the division of men into bond and free, the institution of
slavery. That condition of life whereby man ceased to be a member of a
family invested with reciprocal obligations and rights, came in fine to
be regarded, not as a person, but as the thing of another man, that is
the institution which man had made for himself in the interval between
the dispersion of Babel and the commencement of authentic history in each
nation. Man, who had divided the unity of the Godhead, had not
only
ceased to recognise the one ineffaceable dignity of reason as the mark of
brotherhood in all his race demanding equality of treatment, and the
respect due to a creature who possesses moral freedom, but had come to
deprive a vast portion of his kindred of the fruit of their labour, and
to confiscate their toil for his own advantage.
There remains the fourth bond of unity, government, whether national,
tribal, or municipal, without which social existence is not possible; and
this, as the nations emerge into the light of history, appears everywhere
among them standing and in great vigour. In the vast majority of cases
that government clothes itself in the form of royalty; the king is
undoubtedly the most natural descendant of the patriarchal chief, the
father passing by insensible gradation into the sovereign. But whether
monarchy or republic, whether the rule of the many or of the few,
government, by which I mean the supreme dominion in each portion of the
race over itself, of life and death over subjects, is everywhere found.
Nowhere is man found as a flock of sheep without a shepherd.
Over these unrecorded years of human life, which want their prophet and
their bard, sounds yet the echo of perpetual strife. If mighty forms loom
among their obscurity, and come out at length with fixed character and a
strong and high civilisation, such as the Assyrian and Egyptian, the
Indian and Chinese monarchies, and so many others of more or less extent
and renown, we know that states have suffered change after change in a
series of wars. The patriarchal ruler has given
way to the conquering
chief; conquest has humiliated some and exalted others. What remains
intact in each country, and after all changes, is government itself. This
carried on the human race.
But if we examine more closely this race which is thus scattered through
all countries, which speaks innumerable tongues, has lost the sense of
its own brotherhood, worships a multitude of local gods, is divided, cut
up, formed again, and torn again with innumerable wars, and has degraded
a large part of itself into servitude, so as to lose as it would seem all
semblance of its original unity, we yet find running through it, existing
from the beginning as constituent principles which the hand of the
Creator has set in it, four great goods.
1. For what hand but that of the Creator could have impressed
ineffaceably upon a race, misusing as we have seen to such a degree the
faculty of free-will, such an institution as marriage, in which the
family, and all which descends from the family, is contained? The
dedication of one man and one woman to each other for the term of their
lives, for the nurture and education of the family which is to spring
from them, is indeed the basis of human society, but a basis which none
but its Maker could lay. It exists in perpetual contradiction to human
passion and selfishness, for purposes which wisdom or the pure reason of
man entirely approves, but which human frailty is at any time ready to
break through and elude. If we could so entirely abstract ourselves from
habit as to imagine a company of men and women thrown together, without
connection with
each other, without any knowledge, any conception
beforehand of such an institution, and left to form their society for
themselves, we should not, I think, imagine them one and all choosing to
engage themselves in such a union, resigning, respectively, their
liberty, and binding themselves to continue, whatever might happen to
either party, however strength and vigour might decline on one side, or
grace and attractiveness on the other, in this bondage for life. Yet this
institution of marriage is found established, not, as was just imagined,
in a single company of human beings thrown together, but in a thousand
societies of men separated by place, by language, by religion, and by
government. The most highly policied among them are the strictest in
maintaining its purity; and the higher you are enabled by existing
records to ascend in their history, the stronger and clearer appears the
conception of the duties of the married state. It is surrounded with all
the veneration which laws can give it, and the blessing of religion
consecrates it. Take marriage among the Romans as an instance. Their
commonwealth seems to be built upon the sanctity of marriage and the
power of the father. The like is the case with China, the most ancient of
existing politics. There is not one nation which has gained renown or
advanced in civilisation but shows, as far back as you can trace its
history, this institution honoured and supported. I leave to
mathematicians the task of calculating what are the chances of such an
institution springing up in so great a multitude of nations according to
an identical rule, guarded
in all of them with whatever protection
religion and law could afford, except by the fiat of a Creator in the
manner described by Moses. The signet of God impressed on Adam at his
origin could alone create such a mark on his race; the Maker alone lay
such a foundation for it.
We find this institution in the course of time and in various countries
debased by polygamy, and corrupted by concubinage. These aberrations
testify to the force of human passion, and the wantonness of power and
wealth ever warring against it, but they only enhance thereby the force
of the institution’s universal existence from the point of view from
which I have regarded it.
2. Take, secondly, the rite of bloody sacrifice. It would be hard to find
anything more contrary to reason and feeling than the thought that taking
away the life of innocent creatures by pouring out their blood could be
not only acceptable to the Maker of those creatures, but could be
accepted by Him in expiation of sin committed by man. Yet this is the
conception of bloody sacrifice; this was expressed in the rites which
accompanied it; and besides this particular notion of expiation, which is
the correlative of sin, the most solemn duties of man, that is,
Adoration, Thanksgiving, and Petition, the whole expression of his
obedience to God, and dependence on God, were bound up with this rite,
and formed part of it. And we find this rite of sacrifice existing from
the earliest times in these various nations; continued through the whole
of their history, solemnised at first by their kings and chief men, and
then by an
order of men created for that special purpose, and in every
nation themselves holding a high rank in virtue of their performing this
function. What, again, are the chances of a rite so peculiar being chosen
spontaneously by so many various nations, and chosen precisely to express
their homage for their own creation and continuance in being, to make
their prayers acceptable, and above all, to cover their sin, to serve as
an expiation, and to turn away punishment. This is the testimony which
Assyria and Egypt, which Greece and Rome, which India and China bear to
their original unity. If God instituted this rite, at the fall itself, as
a record and token of the promise then made, its existence through the
many changes of the race becomes intelligible; on any other supposition
it remains a contradiction both to reason and feeling, which is like
nothing else in human history.
The institution of sacrifice comprehends with its accompaniments the
whole of religion. It suffered the most grievous corruption in that it
was offered to false gods, to deified men, to powers of nature, to those
who were not gods but demons. Again, its meaning was obscured, and the
priests who offered it were not pure in their lives. But whatever
abominations were at any time or in any place connected with it, its
peculiarity, its testimony to the unity of the race, to the power which
established it, remain without diminution.
3. Thirdly, let us take the great good of civil government. The human
race is scattered over all countries, in divisions which range as to
amount of population
from the smallest independent tribe to the largest
empire. God suffered them to pursue their own course, to engage in
numberless wars, and to pass through a succession of the most opposite
circumstances, but He implanted in them from the beginning, and preserved
in them throughout, the instinct of society, which develops in
government. And He established that government in possession by the
patriarchal constitution of life, which each portion of the race at its
first start in independence took with it. By this He maintained order and
peace, as a rule, in the bosom of each community; the smallest and the
greatest alike possessed the commonwealth in the midst of them, which was
thus, independent of walls and forts, a citadel of safety. Not even the
most savage tribe in the most desolate northern wilderness, barren shore,
or inland lake, was left in its self-wrought degradation without this
support. In cultured nations, such as the Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians,
Indians, Chinese, the State attained a high degree of perfection; while
from the practice of the Hellenic cities Plato and Aristotle could draw
principles of government which are of value for all time; and Rome, the
queen-mother of cities, has been the teacher of state-wisdom to mankind.
But what I wish to note here is that civil government was everywhere
throughout the dispersion of the nations a dam, constructed by Divine
Providence, sufficiently strong to resist the inundation of evils brought
about by man’s abuse of his moral freedom. It was the moon in heaven
which shone as a stable ordinance of God amid the storms and darkness
of
human life in the fall of heathendom. It belonged to man as man and never
departed from him; because as conscience was given to the individual, the
witness and mark of God, sovereignty was given to the community, a
delegation of the divine kingship. “It is entirely by the providence of
God that the kingdoms of men are set up,” says a great father.[11] “He
gave to every one of them, said the Son of Sirach, commandment concerning
his neighbour. Their ways are always before him, they are not hidden from
his eyes. Over every nation he set a ruler, and Israel was made the
manifest portion of God” (Ecclus. xvii. 12-15).
The human race, from its beginning and through all its dispersion, was
never in any of its parts without civil government. The headship of Adam,
repeated in Noah, itself a vicarious exercise of divine authority,
rested, amid its dispersion and partial degradation, upon each portion of
the race, so that it might never be kingless and lawless: never a herd,
always a society.
This great good had also its corruption, into which it very frequently
fell; the corruption of tyranny. Against this the Book of Wisdom (vi.
2-5) warned: “Hear therefore ye kings and understand: learn ye that are
judges of the ends of the earth. Give ear, you that rule the people, and
that please yourselves in multitudes of nations. For power is given you
by the Lord, and strength by the most High, who will examine your works,
and search out your thoughts: because being ministers of his kingdom, you
have not
judged rightly, nor kept the law of justice, nor walked
according to the will of God.” But this corruption of tyranny no more
destroys the good of government or its testimony as the mark of the
Creator, than the corruption of marriage by concubinage, or the offering
of sacrifice to false gods, impairs the testimony of those institutions.
4. The fourth good which I shall note as running through all the nations
of the dispersion, is the alliance between government and religion.
Distance of place, diversity of language, division of the idea of God
into separate divinities, which become the guardians of their several
peoples, these causes all co-operate to sever from each other the various
peoples and to make them enemies. But observe, at the same time, with
this hardening and estrangement of the peoples from each other, the
enlacement of all human life, public and private, by the rites and ties
of religion in each society. At the head of the new race we have seen
Noah offering sacrifice for his family, and a covenant with the whole
earth struck in that sacrifice between God and man. That aspect of the
public society towards religion was not altered during the whole course
of heathendom, and in all its parts. It is a relation of the strictest
alliance. No nation, no tribe of man, up to the coming of Christ,
conceived any condition of society in which the Two Powers should not
co-operate with each other. “If it be asked,” says Bossuet,[12] “what
should be said of a State in which public authority should be
established
without any religion, it is plain at once that there is no
need to answer chimerical questions. There never were such States.
Peoples, where there is no religion, are at the same time without policy,
without real subordination, and entirely savage.” It is a fact which we
see stretching through all the times and all the nations of the
dispersion, that however tyrannical the government, and however corrupt
the belief, still the separation of government from religion was never
for a moment contemplated. A Greek or a Roman, and no less an Egyptian or
an Assyrian, an Indian or a Chinese, must have renounced every habit of
his life, every principle in which he had been nurtured, to accept such a
divorce. For all of them alike, “ancestral laws” and “ancestral gods,”
went together. He who was traitor to the city’s worship was considered to
overthrow its foundation. In this point of view heathendom in all its
parts continued to be profoundly religious. It risked the life of a
favourite of the people when the statues of a god at Athens were
mutilated, as it was supposed, with the connivance of Alcibiades; and
Marcus Aurelius, stoic philosopher as he was, offered countless
sacrifices for the Roman people, as Noah offered sacrifice for his
family; and the Chinese Son of Heaven is to this day the father of his
family who unites religious and civil power in his sacred person, and
calls upon his people for the obedience of children.
The corruption of this relation between civil government and religion,
which was an original good of the race, was the forcible maintenance of
the polytheistic
idolatry with all the moral abominations which it had
introduced. But the corruption does not belong to the relation itself; it
issues, as in the preceding cases, from the abuse of his free-will by
man.
Here then are four goods, marriage, religion, as summed up in sacrifice,
civil government, and alliance between civil government and religion,
which we find embedded in the whole human society from the beginning,
going with it through all its fractions, untouched by its wars,
dissensions, and varieties of belief, suffering indeed each one of them
by man’s corruption, but lasting on. The force of any one of them as
testimony to the unity of God who alone could have established it in the
race, and so through Him to the unity of the race in which it is found
established, and so, further, to the whole account of Moses, would be
very great and not easily resisted by a candid mind seeking nothing but
the truth. But how great is the cumulative evidence of the four together
to the exactness of the account of the race’s origin, establishment, and
education, which we receive through Moses.
How strangely also are these goods of the race contrasted each one of
them and all together with a great evil, universal like them, but man’s
own invention, the result of his wars and of the destruction of the
feeling of brotherhood, in the various portions into which the race
divided. The hideous plague-spot of slavery, which yet is one institution
running through the race, attests also its unity, attests by its contrast
with the four goods, by its practical denial of their beneficent action
so far as the slave is concerned, the degradation of the race from that
condition of a family having one end in the worship of one God, one
brotherhood, a common care and charge of its members, a common interest
in which it started.
The sum then of the whole period which begins from the dispersion of
mankind at Babel and runs on to the coming of Christ is the progressive
moral degradation of a race founded in the unity of a family. That unity
itself rested upon the fidelity of the race to the belief and worship of
the God who created it. The race voluntarily parted from this belief and
worship; its own division followed; mutual enmity supplanted brotherhood,
and the end is to create two classes of men, dividing society in each
nation into the bond and the free. The nations themselves have lost all
remembrance that they were once actually brothers by one hearth. Yet they
still contain in themselves indisputable proof of that original unity.
There is not only the common nature which language, the token of reason,
raises to a dignity utterly incommensurable with the condition of any
other animal; but great divine institutions planted at the beginning
endure amid the corruption which has dimmed their original beauty, and
testify to the providence which has preserved them amid the surging flood
of heathenism for future restoration of the race.
3.—Further Testimony of Law, Government, and Priesthood in the
Dispersion.
The account of the human race in its origin and its
dispersion thus
presented allows for the existence of tribes in every part of the world,
who, through their isolation, the effect of nomad life, war, and
severities of climate, but most of all by that tendency to degrade
itself—to fall from known truth to error—which is the characteristic of
the race, and through the impairing of social life which thus ensues,
have left records of their uncultivated or even savage condition, which
an eager search is continually discovering. These records have been taken
as aids to a theory which, rejecting the scriptural and traditional
account of man’s origin, would wish him to start from men of different
races, or from universal savagery, or even from the ape as an ancestor.
But, while on the one hand the existence of such tribes is no difficulty
in the scriptural record of the dispersion, where they may be fully
accounted for by the causes above-mentioned, the universal existence of
the four great goods in the most ancient nations, where they appear also
purest at the most remote time, is quite incompatible with either of the
three invented origins of the human race. Neither different races of men,
originally distinct and separated, nor universal savagery, and far less
fathership of the ape, will develop into simultaneous existence four
uniform institutions found through the widest range of divided nations,
such as marriage, a religion based on sacrifice, civil government, and
the alliance between government and religion. An original language
accounts for the proofs of unity embedded in the primary structure of the
Aryan tongues, and science professes its full belief in such unity. It
is
but a parallel to this to say that a creative hand impressing itself
on the plastic origin of the race accounts for the existence of these
goods in the most-widely severed branches of it. But that scattered
savages should emerge from savagery into cultivation of the same ideal,
or different races in their dispersion pitch upon the same very marked
peculiarities of social life, or the ape teach his offspring the highest
requirements of human society, such imaginations are contrary to the
collective testimony of reason, experience, and history. Perhaps one must
go altogether beyond the bounds of true science to account for their
arising, and attribute them to that passionate dislike of a creating God,
which is the recoil from the condition of a creature subject to
responsibility for his actions.
On the contrary, pure historical inquiry, going back in the dry light of
science to the archaic society of nations as they first appear to us at
the beginning of written records, shows this remarkable chain of facts. A
condition of things is found existing, of which the only explanation is
that family was the nidus out of which sprung forth the House, then the
Tribe, then the Commonwealth with its patriarchal government. When
property is traced to its origin it seems to be first found in the family
as joint-ownership; and further, its succession is blended inexplicably
with the existence and state of the family. Again, the close union of
government with religion finds its root in the family. No testimony can
be more unsuspicious than that of the learned author of “Ancient Law,”
who observes (p. 4),
that “the earliest notions connected with the
conception of a law or rule of life are those contained in the Homeric
words θεμις and Themistes.” “The divine agent, suggesting judicial awards
to kings or to gods, the greatest of kings, was Themis.” She is the
assessor of Zeus, the human king on earth, not a law-maker, but a judge.
The Themistes are the judgments, in fact, of a patriarchal sovereign,
“whose judgment, when he decided a dispute by a sentence, was assumed to
be the result of direct inspiration.” And Themis and Themistes were (p.
6) “linked with that persuasion which clung so long and so tenaciously to
the human mind of a divine influence underlying and supporting every
relation of life, every social institution. In early law, and amid the
rudiments of political thought, symptoms of this belief met us on all
sides. A supernatural presidency is supposed to consecrate and keep
together all the cardinal institutions of those times, the State, the
Race, and the Family. Men, grouped together in the different relations
which these institutions imply, are bound to celebrate periodically
common rites and to offer common sacrifices; and every now and then the
same duty is even more significantly recognised in the purifications and
expiations which they perform, and which appear intended to deprecate
punishment for involuntary or neglectful disrespect. Everybody acquainted
with ordinary classical literature will remember the Sacra Gentilicia
which exercised so important an influence on the early Roman law of
adoption and of wills. And to this hour the Hindoo Customary Law, in
which some of the
most curious features of primitive society are
stereotyped, makes almost all the rights of persons and all the rules of
succession hinge on the due solemnisation of fixed ceremonies at the dead
man’s funeral, that is, at every point where a breach occurs in the
continuity of the family.”
Thus every king, as history begins, appears in a position which recalls
the memory of Adam or of Noah, as the divinely appointed judge, whose
office springs out of his fathership. The original consecration, which
rested on the government of the race when it begun, is seen not yet to
have parted from its scattered members in their tribal or national
insulation.[13]
It is observed of Homeric Greece that “the people in its orderly
arrangement of family or clans, or tribal relationships coming down from
the patriarchal form of life, derives its unity from its king, whose
power as little springs from the people as that of the father from his
children.” Thus he possesses this power not in virtue of compact or
choice, but simply from Zeus.
Οὐ μέν πως πάντες βασιλεύσομεν ἐνθάδ’ Ἀχαιοί.
οὐκ ἀγαθὸν πολυκοιρανίν· εἷς κοίρανος ἔστω,
εἷς βασιλεὺς, ᾧ δῶκε Κρόνου παῖς ἀγκυλομήτεω
σκῆπτροντ’ ἠδὲ θέμιστας, ἵνα σφίσιν ἐμβασιλέυῃ.
—Iliad, 2. 203.
This conception shows itself not merely on occasion in the poet, as
perhaps in the well-known epithets, Jove-born, Jove-nurtured, friend of
Jove, or in the genealogies which connect with the gods the princely
races by
ties of blood, but he has a distinct theory on the subject
variously expressed.
ἐπεὶ οὔποθ’ ὁμοίης ἔμμορε πμῆς
σκηπτοῦχος βασιλὲυς, ᾧ τε Ζεὺς κῦδος ἔδωκε.
Agamemnon’s sceptre, the symbol of his rule over the Peloponnesus, is
referred to the immediate gift of Jupiter.
The effect of this evidence, says the author just before cited, derived
from comparative jurisprudence, is to establish that view of the primeval
condition of the human race which is known as the “Patriarchal Theory.”
This is, “that the eldest male parent—the eldest ascendant—is absolutely
supreme in his household. His dominion extends to life and death, and is
as unqualified over his children and their houses as over his slaves;
indeed, the relations of sonship and serfdom appear to differ in little
beyond the higher capacity which the child in blood possesses of becoming
one day the head of a family himself. The flocks and herds of the
children are the flocks and herds of the father; and the possessions of
the parent, which he holds in a representative rather than a proprietary
character, are equally divided at his death among his descendants in the
first degree, the eldest son sometimes receiving a double share under the
name of birthright, but more generally endowed with no hereditary
advantage beyond an honorary precedence.” “The sum of the hints given us
by legal antiquities” is that “men are first seen distributed in
perfectly insulated groups, held together by obedience
to the parent.
Law is the parent’s word. When we go forward to the state of society in
which those early legal conceptions show themselves as formed, we find
that they still partake of the mystery and spontaneity which must have
seemed to characterise a despotic father’s commands, but that at the same
time, as they proceed from a sovereign, they presuppose a union of family
groups in some wider organisation. The next question is, what is the
nature of this union and the degree of intimacy which it involves? It is
just here that archaic law renders us one of the greatest of its
services, and fills up a gap which otherwise could only have been bridged
by conjecture. It is full in all its provinces of the clearest
indications that society, in primitive times, was not what it is assumed
to be at present, a collection of individuals. In fact, and in the view
of the men who composed it, it was an aggregation of families. The
contrast may be most forcibly expressed by saying that the unit of an
ancient society was the Family, of a modern society, the Individual.”
“In most of the Greek states, and in Rome, there long remained the
vestiges of an ascending series of groups, out of which the State was at
first constituted. The Family, House, and Tribe of the Romans may be
taken as the type of them; and they are so described to us that we can
scarcely help conceiving them as a system of concentric circles which
have gradually expanded from the same point. The elementary group is the
family, connected by common subjection to the highest male ascendant. The
aggregation of Families forms the
Gens or House. The aggregation of
Houses makes the Tribe. The aggregation of Tribes constitutes the
Commonwealth. Are we at liberty to follow these indications, and to lay
down that the commonwealth is a collection of persons united by common
descent from the progenitor of an original family? Of this we may at
least be certain, that all ancient societies regarded themselves as
having proceeded from one original stock, and even laboured under an
incapacity for comprehending any reason except this for their holding
together in political union. The history of political ideas begins, in
fact, with the assumption that kinship in blood is the sole possible
ground of community in political functions; nor is there any of those
subversions of feelings, which we term emphatically revolutions, so
startling and so complete as the change which is accomplished when some
other principle—such as that, for instance, of local
contiguity—establishes itself for the first time as the basis of common
political action. It may be affirmed, then, of early commonwealths that
their citizens considered all the groups in which they claimed membership
to be founded on common lineage.”
“The conclusion, then, which is suggested by the evidence is, not that
all early societies were formed by descent from the same ancestor, but
that all of them, which had any permanence or solidity, either were so
descended, or assumed that they were. An indefinite number of causes may
have shattered the primitive groups; but wherever their ingredients
recombined, it was on the model or principle of an association of
kindred. Whatever was the fact, all thought, language, and law adjusted
themselves to the assumption” (p. 131).
“On a few systems of law the family organisation of the earliest society
has left a plain and broad mark in the life-long authority of the Father,
or other ancestor, over the person and property of his descendants, an
authority which we may conveniently call by its later Roman name of
Patria Potestas. No feature of the rudimentary associations of mankind is
deposed to by a greater amount of evidence than this, and yet none seems
to have disappeared so generally and so rapidly from the usages of
advancing communities” (p. 135).
“It may be shown, I think, that the Family, as held together by the
Patria Potestas, is the nidus out of which the entire Law of Persons has
germinated” (p. 152).
“When we speak of the slave as anciently included in the Family, we
intend to assert nothing as to the motives of those who brought him into
it or kept him there; we merely imply that the tie which bound him to his
master was regarded as one of the same general character with that which
united every other member of the group to its chieftain. This consequence
is, in fact, carried in the general assertion already made, that the
primitive ideas of mankind were unequal to comprehending any basis of the
connection inter se of individuals apart from the relations of Family”
(p. 164).
“The point which before all others has to be apprehended in the
constitution of primitive societies, is that
the individual creates for
himself few or no rights and few or no duties. The rules which he obeys
are derived first from the station into which he is born, and next from
the imperative commands addressed to him by the chief of the household of
which he forms part” (p. 311).
Then as to the union of government with religion:—“A stage occurs in the
history of all the families of mankind, the stage at which a rule of law
is not yet discriminated from a rule of religion. The members of such a
society consider that the transgression of a religious ordinance should
be punished by civil penalties, and that the violation of a civil duty
exposes the delinquent to divine correction” (p. 23). At the time of the
Code of the Twelve Tables, “Roman society had barely emerged from that
intellectual condition in which civil obligation and religious duty are
inevitably confounded” (p. 18).
For, in fact, originally, “Law is the parent’s word” (p. 125), and “the
civil Laws of States first make their appearance as the Themistes of a
patriarchal sovereign” (p. 166); that is, “as separate, isolated
judgments, which, consistently with the belief in their emanation from
above, cannot be supposed to be connected by any thread of principle” (p.
5). Moreover, as to the origin of Property:—“It is more than likely that
joint-ownership, and not separate ownership, is the really archaic
institution, and that the forms of property which will afford us
instruction will be those which are associated with the rights of
families and the groups of kindred” (p. 259), as shown in the Indian
village-community,
the Russian and Slavonic village. And “we have the
strongest reasons for thinking that property once belonged not to
individuals, nor even to isolated families, but to larger societies
composed on the patriarchal model” (p. 268). Thus the author conjectures
“that private property, in the shape in which we know it, was chiefly
formed by the gradual disentanglement of the separate rights of
individuals from the blended rights of a community” (p. 269).
He remarks “a peculiarity invariably distinguishing the infancy of
society. Men are regarded and treated not as individuals, but always as
members of a particular group. Everybody is first a citizen, and then, as
a citizen, he is a member of his order—of an aristocracy or a democracy,
of an order of patricians or plebeians; or in those societies which an
unhappy fate has afflicted with a special perversion in their course of
development, of a caste; next he is member of a gens, house, or clan; and
lastly he is member of his family. This last was the narrowest and most
personal relation in which he stood; nor, paradoxical as it may seem, was
he ever regarded as himself, as a distinct individual. His
individuality was swallowed up in his family. I repeat the definition of
a primitive society given before. It has for its units not individuals,
but groups of men united by the reality or the fiction of
blood-relationship” (p. 183). “The history of jurisprudence must be
followed in its whole course, if we are to understand how gradually and
tardily society dissolved itself into the component atoms of which it is
now constituted; by
what insensible gradations the relation of man to
man substituted itself for the relation of the individual to his family,
and of families to each other” (p. 185).
Such is the strong—may we not say irrefragable?—testimony which the
condition of human society, as it emerges into the light of history,
bears to the family as the cradle of man’s life. It is in the original
soil of the family that the four goods we have noted, marriage, religion,
government, and the alliance between religion and government, spring up
together. Further, also, they are seen to be not separate, one here and
another there, but bound together in the strictest coherence. For if this
human race be thrown up and down throughout the world, divided and
insulated in its several parts by vast distances and by thousands of
years, even the scattered limbs are shaped in the mould stamped upon it
at its birth, and in them government, law, property in its origin and its
succession, and religion bear witness to the family character. This
archaic society, from the Pacific to the Atlantic Oceans, from Scythia in
the north to India in the south, is never a crowd of individuals but an
organic structure: Adam and Eve prolonged and living in their race. We
see that in the beginning the fathership of God created a human plant
which should reveal Himself in its development, bearing in its structure
and fruit an undying witness to His nature; and serving, in spite of
corruption and decline, for the future exhibition of His fathership in a
yet higher degree, even to the communication of the divine nature.
Whatever may be the interval of time which runs out between the
dispersion of the family at Babel, and the appearance of each separate
member on the platform of history—and the longer this time, the greater
the marvel we note—the family remains in each as a sort of universal
θεσμός upon which the commonwealth, the government, property viewed in
itself and in its descent, law, and religion itself rest. The “natural
state” and the “social compact” when inquired into become unsubstantial
fictions; “theories plausible and comprehensive,” as the author of
ancient law observes, “but absolutely unverified” (p. 3). Man is seen to
be the child of Adam; and all the relations of men to each other to have
been originally determined by that origin, and persistently maintained in
its mould.
Now let us return to the relation between the Spiritual and the Civil
Power, which forms part of this original constitution of the race.
At the head of the human race we have seen, first in Adam and then in
Noah, the junction of the two orders, sovereignty and priesthood. There
never was a time when the race was without government; there never was a
time when the race was without sacrifice. The delegated authority of God
rested ever upon the former for the prosperity of man’s life upon earth;
the worship of the one God, man’s Creator and End, was summed up in the
latter. All human life consists of the tissue formed by the two; and as
in his first abode man’s condition was subject to his obedience to the
divine command, so throughout his course his worship of God
ruled his
temporal condition. The lot of the antediluvian world bore witness to
that truth. With Noah the experience began afresh. Then once again the
covenant with Noah and his seed after him was made in sacrifice, in which
the unity of God and the religion of man stand recorded, and man’s
earthly lot is made dependent on the purity of his worship. Thus the two
orders are seen in their origin to be both of divine institution; just as
the life of man upon earth was from the beginning subordinate to his
ultimate end, so government, which was created for the former, was
subordinate to worship, which was created for the latter.
Let us follow rapidly the relation between man’s social state and his
religion, arising out of such origin, that we may note how the
degradation of worship entailed the degradation of society.
In Noah and his sons, so long as the earth continued of one tongue and
speech, the priesthood belonged to the head of the family. That was its
natural descent. We may suppose that the dispersion began with the same
rule, but we are not able to say how long that rule continued in force.
There was intended to be one priesthood offering one sacrifice over all
the earth to the one God. How prodigious became the degradation when the
divine unity was lost! A variety of gods was introduced; a similar
variety of priesthoods followed: and the sacrifice, which was the
rendering of supreme homage to the one Creator and Lord of life, in which
was contained the everliving prophecy of man’s future restoration, was
prostituted to a number of deities, the
offspring of man’s sensual
imagination, or of perverted tradition, or of worship of natural powers,
or of demoniacal trickery.
As soon as the patriarchal State was changed by war into the State
founded by conquest, the natural appurtenance of the priesthood to the
head of the family must at least have been modified. It was probably
often attached to the actual head of the State. But it does not need to
trace step by step the debasement of worship and the multiplication of
deities which took place in the Gentile world. It is enough to see how
the whole mass of nations had by the time of Christ become divided from
each other in their civil societies and their religious belief. But we
may note that as with the loss of belief in one God the nations
originally lost the belief in their own brotherhood, so their national
gods became the stronghold of national prejudices and hatreds. Thus a
debased religion was turned into a source of cruelty to man, who had no
bitterer enemy to his life and welfare than a foreign god; and instead of
human life being sacred to man, it was sometimes even an act of worship
to immolate him to an idol.
It is not too much to say that the profound enmity of the Gentile nations
to each other was grounded in the variety of their gods; and in this
instance religion, which in its purity is the bond of human society, had
become a main cause of alienation between the members of the race.
The alliance of the State in each nation with its religion was, as we
have seen, an original good of the
race; and it continued through all
the debasement of worship. Had that worship maintained its original
purity, the alliance would have been an unmixed good. But as the belief
became corrupt, it ended in the public force being ever at the command of
error. The final issue of this alliance seems to have been when the State
had laid hold of religion to deify, as it were, itself. The Roman
emperors were the most complete, but by no means the sole, bearers of
this corruption. They were considered to embody in their single persons
the united majesty of the gods. Whoever refused obedience to their
worship was guilty of the double crime of sacrilege and treason.
If this be a correct summary of the relation between the Two Powers as it
issued in the final condition of Gentilism, it is clear that the State
had far less declined from the high purpose for which it was instituted,
that is, the preservation of human society, than the priesthood from the
corresponding purpose which belonged to it, that is, the worship of God
and the sanctification of human life. The civil power was still in every
respect a lawful power. And obedience was due to it for conscience’ sake,
as expressly declared by our Lord and His Apostles. But the priesthood
had been so utterly debased by its worship of false gods, which tore from
it the crown of unity, and by the abominations which its rites in too
many instances carried with them, that it had ceased to be a lawful
power. It had moreover fallen, at least in the Roman empire, and from the
time of the Cæsars, under the dominion of the State.
Yet down to the very coming of our Lord the veneration which had belonged
to the original character and institution of the priesthood is made
manifest by the clear acknowledgment that the authority of the priest was
not derived from the king. The Gentiles in the lowest depths of their
moral degradation referred the excellency of the priesthood to its divine
origin. The honour due to God, and the thought of the future world, were
so imbedded in the original constitution of human society everywhere,
that even in a pantheon of false gods, and in a service paid to
numberless male and female deities, the priest’s office itself was held
to be divine.[14]
In the case of the Romans, it is true that when the free state was
suppressed by the empire, the priesthood and the imperial power were
improperly conjoined in the same person. But this conjunction was at once
a novelty and an usurpation. Thus the office of Pontifex Maximus, first
seized by Lepidus after the death of Julius Cæsar, and after Lepidus
assumed by Augustus, and then kept in succession by the following Cæsars,
whether through the adulation of the people or their own pride, seemed to
pass as a proper title of their principate, and was numbered among the
honours, even of the Christian emperors, down to Gratian, who refused and
prohibited it. Nevertheless the functions of these two powers were
reckoned as distinct; but in the time of the Kings and the free
Commonwealth this distinction was much more marked.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus thus describes the Roman Pontifical
College:—“They have authority over the most weighty affairs; they are
judges of all sacred causes, whether among private persons, or
magistrates, or ministers of the gods; they legislate for all sacred
things which are not written or prescribed by custom, enacting laws and
customs as seems to them good; they examine into all magistracies to
which sacrifice and worship of the gods belong, and scrutinise all
priests; they keep watch over the ministers which these use in their
sacred office, so that the sacred laws be not transgressed; they instruct
and interpret for lay persons who do not understand what concerns the
worship of gods or genii. If they observe any disobedient to their
commands, they punish them according to the due of each. They are
themselves exempt from all trial and punishment. They render account
neither to senate nor to people. It would be no error to call them
priests, or sacred legislators, or custodians, or, as we should prefer,
rulers of sacred things. On the death of any one another is elected to
his place, not by the people, but by themselves, whoever of the citizens
they judge the most meet.”[15] From this account of the historian, says
Bianchi, we may deduce the following conclusions:—Firstly, how great was
the power of the Roman Sacerdotes in judging matters of religion, in
which the magistrates were subject to them. Secondly, their authority to
punish those who transgressed their
laws, independently of kings and
magistrates. Thirdly, their immunity from the civil power, even of the
Commonwealth itself, to which they were not bound to render an account of
what they did. Fourthly, the distinction which existed between the power
of the priests and that of the civil magistrates, which results not
merely from the points recited, but also from the reflection that the
Pontiffs were perpetual, while the magistrates under the free
Commonwealth were temporary. The latter were created by the suffrages of
the people; in the former vacancies were filled by the College of
Pontiffs itself. This custom lasted from Numa’s time to the year of Rome
601, when Cneius Domitius, tribune of the people, transferred the right
of filling vacancies from the College to the people; this was abolished
by Sylla in his dictatorship; but again restored by the Tribune Titus
Labienus during Cicero’s consulship. But finally the right of electing
its members was given back to the College of Pontiffs by Augustus.
The Pontifex Maximus, though created by the suffrage of the people, was
always taken from the College of Pontiffs, and his office was perpetual.
Augustus would not take it from Lepidus during his life, though he took
it after his death. Thus the power of the Supreme Pontiff was by no means
confused with that of the magistrate or the prince; and the assumption of
this priesthood by the Cæsars makes it evident that they recognised it
not to be part of the prince’s power to intrude into matters of religion;
and that they needed
a sacerdotal power in order to superintend sacred
things. It was for the sake of this superintendence, Dio observes, that
the emperor always assumed the office of Pontifex Maximus, in virtue of
which he became master of all religious and sacred things.
The example of Cicero pleading before the College of Pontifices for the
restoration of his house, which had been dedicated by Clodius to Concord,
a plea involving their power to revoke a tribunicial law passed by
Clodius, is a remarkable testimony to the pontifical authority: “If
ever,” he said, “a great cause rested on the judgment and power of the
Priests of the Roman people, it is this; in which all the dignity of the
commonwealth, the safety, the life, the liberty, the public and private
worship, the household gods, the goods, the fortunes, and the homes of
all seem intrusted to your wisdom and integrity.”[16]
The fair conclusions from these facts, says Bianchi again, are that the
Romans knew religion to be directed to a higher end than temporal
felicity, though they did esteem it also necessary for the preservation
of the State; that the power of the priesthood was distinct from the
civil power of the magistrate; that it had the right to judge in all
cases of religion without interference from the magistrate; that immunity
and exemption from the civil power belonged to it.
It is needless to go through the various nations of antiquity in order to
show the veneration which everywhere belonged to the office of the
priest. That is
shown likewise in the frequent connection of the royal
power with the priesthood; but though thus connected, they were not
confused; kings were priests, not in virtue of their kingship, but by a
distinct appointment. Plato asserts that in some nations the priesthood
was reputed so excellent that it was not considered to be properly placed
save in the person of the king; and that among the Egyptians it was not
lawful for any king to command the people without being first consecrated
to the priesthood. By this fact is seen how the sacerdotal dignity was
esteemed by antiquity, even in the darkness of idolatry; and, at the same
time, how the power of the priest was considered to be distinct from the
power of the sovereign. Plato gives his own judgment when he says that
the creation of priests should be left to the care of God; and that they
should be elected by lot, in order that the person destined to so high an
office may be divinely chosen.[17]
All that it is requisite here to point out seems to be that, however
great was the degradation of worship produced by the character of the
gods worshipped, as well as by the divisions of the godhead which the
multiplying of divine beings brought with itself, yet two things survived
in the minds of men: one the intrinsic excellence of worship in itself,
as the homage paid by man to a power above himself; and the other, the
sense that this worship was a thing of divine institution, coming down
from heaven upon earth, quite distinct in character from civil rule, and
if exercised by
kings, exercised not because they were kings, but in
virtue of a separate consecration. Thus, if the patriarchal origin of
property, law, and government is borne witness to by the most ancient
institutions, customs, and feelings of men, which witness likewise
extends to the unity of the race, so likewise the original independence
of the priestly order as to all its sacred functions and the sense of its
divine origin, which runs through so many nations, bear joint witness to
the unity of the race and to the truth of the Mosaic record. They convey
a manifest contradiction to the theory that man sprung originally from a
number of different races, and likewise to the theory that he grew up
originally in a state of savagery.
The force of the testimony consists in this: first, a priesthood appears
everywhere; secondly, it is connected with the rite of sacrifice;
thirdly, it usually comprises an order of men devoted to the purpose of
divine worship, or at least having special functions which by no means
belong to the civil ruler as such, so that if he performs them, it is as
priest and not as king; fourthly, this order has a special authority from
the Divine Being or Beings whom it represents, not subject to the civil
rule; fifthly, injury to the priest’s person or contravention to his
order in divine things is esteemed as an injury done to the God whom he
represents.
The peculiarity of a priesthood must therefore be added to the
peculiarity of the rite of sacrifice upon which his office rests, and
both together form an order of ideas so marked and distinctive as to
establish the
unity of the race in the several portions of which they
appear; and at the same time it establishes, as the common inheritance of
that race, an overwhelming sense of human life being founded, preserved,
and exalted by a communion between heaven and earth: it is, in short, a
sense of man lying in the hand of God.
We have hitherto followed the dispersion of Babel in its Gentile
development down to that ultimate issue in which a long and unbroken
civilisation is combined with an extreme moral corruption; now let us
revert to the divine plan which was followed to repair this evil.
At a certain point of time, when forgetfulness of the divine unity was
becoming general, God chose one man out of whom to form a nation, whose
function should be the preservation of a belief in this unity. Abraham,
the friend of God and the forefather of Christ, was called out of his own
country that he might preserve the religion of Noah, and that “in him all
the kindreds of the earth might be blessed” (Gen. xii. 3). In the second
generation his family was carried down into Egypt, and became, in the
security of that kingdom, a people, but it likewise fell into bondage.
From this it was redeemed in a series of wonderful events under the
guidance of Moses, was led by him into the desert, and there formed into
a nation by the discipline of a religious, which was also a civil code.
In the law given on Mount Sinai we see once more the constitution of the
society established in Noah. The whole moral order of the world contained
in the ten commandments is made to rest upon the sovereignty of God: “I
am the Lord;
thou shalt have no strange gods.” From this precept, which
fills the first table, proceed the precepts which, in the second,
maintain the order of society: “Honour thy father and thy mother; thou
shalt not kill; thou shalt not steal,” and the rest. Such, says Bossuet,
is the general order of all legislation. The ten words of God form the
core of a complete religious and civil code, in which the two Powers
exist in an ideal no less than a practical union. The individual and the
national worship is the same, and the society springs out of it, the root
being, “I am the Lord;” but the persuasiveness of redemption is added to
the power of creation: “I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of
the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” Abraham, the father of
the people, had exercised the patriarchal priesthood and the patriarchal
sacrifice in his family; but just as God had not chosen Abraham because
he was the first-born, so Moses, taking the patriarchal priesthood, with
a special sanction, set it not in the first-born of the tribes, but in
another tribe, and in a family of this tribe. He took, further, the rite
of sacrifice, which had existed from the beginning, only developing its
meaning in a series of ordinances, which, as St. Paul tells us, all
pointed to Christ: “Almost all things according to the law are cleansed
with blood, and without shedding of blood is no remission” (Heb. ix. 22).
But while there is here a complete union in faith, in practice, and in
worship, for every true Israelite and for the whole people, while there
is one source of authority to the three, the bearers of the dignities
which represent this triple life of man
are separated. Moses instituted,
in the person of Aaron, a high priesthood which from that time stands
through the whole history of his people at the head of their worship,
superior in all that concerns it to the civil authority, which is bound
to consult it and obey it, not only in the things of God, but in the
chief civil acts which regard the nation. The outcome of this work is the
creation of a people whose function is to bear on the worship of the one
true God and faith in the Redeemer to come, a royal, prophetic, and
priestly nation, the special domain of the promised Messias.
I have no need here to follow this people through the trials, revolts,
chastisements, and humiliations of 1500 years. It is sufficient to
observe the result at the coming of Christ. The nation at length, as the
fruit it would seem of captivity and suffering, has accepted with one
mind and heart the doctrine and worship of one God; the Jewish
priesthood, uncorrupted in its essence by any of the abominations of
polytheism, offers the daily morning and evening sacrifice, which
typified the Lamb of God, in the spirit of Adam, Noah, Abraham, and
Moses. The power of the State had indeed just passed to a Roman lord, but
it left the rites and practices and doctrines of the Jewish faith
untouched in the hands of the High Priest and the Great Council, which
sat in this respect in the chair of Moses,—a great and manifest
distinction, perhaps, from the condition in this respect of the whole
Gentile world. In Rome, at least, the worship “of the Immortal Gods,”
though blended with the whole growth of the
State, and seated
triumphantly in the Capitol, was simply subservient to the Civil Power:
in Judea, a small and despised province of Rome, the religion was the
life of the people, which had been made a people that it might be God’s
domain, and, with all its divisions, was filled from the highest to the
lowest with an universal expectation of the promised Christ, who was to
be Prophet, Priest, and King.
In the relation between the two Powers, Gentilism required a total
reconstruction, in order that the priesthood, existing in it from the
beginning, might be completely purified, derived afresh from God, and
receive from Him an independence which it had lost from the moment that
it lost its fidelity to the One Creator,—and such a gift would be a token
of divine power. Judaism, on the contrary, made, after the programme of
God, an image in the nation of what the Christian people was to be in the
world, required only to acknowledge in the Christ the purpose for which
it was appointed, that the law might go forth from Sion and the word of
the Lord from Jerusalem.