they can not set aside. vances for escaping His judgments. They are declared which to be His signs and pledges of reconciliation with His subjects; the worshipper gives up some dead thing as a witness that he gives up himself; that he repents of any acts which have had their root in self-will and disobedience. So the belief which was latent in the Greek sacrifices is brought clearly to light; the falsehood which produced their direst superstitions and crimes as it has produced the darkest superstitions and crimes in every age and country of the world—is also detected and exposed. I shall be told that the interest in these Jewish These devotions has nothing whatever to do with our English would not appeal to Devotions individual if they did not appeal to national feelings. The man without mentscan not care for them. The Sect age of Jewish risees. belonging to some school or sect, or only as a cosmopolite-then I say that if he mumbles these Psalms twenty times a day, they will be merely dead sounds to him; if he would extract any meaning from them he must reduce them into feeble allegories; he may talk about them, but they will not speak to him; he may try to think about them, but they will not express his thoughts. So I apprehend it was with the Jew himself when he like the Greek became incapable of national life. existence. Incapable of it, I say; for when he had lost all the signs and pledges of it he may yet have longed for it, and then no utterances will have been more real and dear to him than those of the Psalms. But there did assuredly fall upon the most conspicuous men in his The Pha- land-upon those who were highest in religious reputation, those who were so numerous a sect that a popular writer ridicules our ignorance for describing them as a sect at all*—such a contempt for the people of the land, such a sense of their own superiority to the ordinary child of the Covenant, as must have made. them wholly incapable of entering into the belief of the Psalmist in a Lord God of Israel. They might glorify themselves for not worshipping the Gods of the countries in which they settled or with which they * See the celebrated article on the Talmud in the Quarterly Review. The eulogist of the Pharisees clenches his position by saying that it is as absurd to call them a sect as to call Roman Catholics a sect in Rome, or Protestants a sect in London. I do not see the force of the argument. I do feel the point of the sarcasm. That a sect loses its venom by becoming numerous and powerful appears to me the most extravagant of paradoxes. That Protestants and Roman Catholics may be most sectarian when they are most numerous and powerful I sorrowfully believe. Law. traded. They might, in the Reviewer's phrase, be "men of progress"-men who belonged to the present not the past, who had quite outgrown the pastoral or agricultural habits of a previous period, who believed in Commerce and applied a commercial standard to all their transactions with Heaven as well as earth. But Their rethe Law for them was one graven in stones; one to be spect for exceedingly reverenced because it was their law—not a law proceeding from the mouth of a Deliverer whom they could trust. Words must have shrivelled into letters-as letters to be honoured and called divine. Loyalty: toward whom was that to be exercised? To Their the Priest perhaps, if he was of the proper sect; but Loyalty. chiefly to the oracle of the Sect; to him who could best adapt old traditions to modern circumstances. A Thoughts prince of the house of David might possibly arise; if of a King the Herodian family was in the ascendant the question liverer. how far it should be accepted as a fact or resisted by intrigues must be an open one. The Lord of Hosts might still be an object of wild irregular hope to the poor, a charm for some brigand champion to work with; the rich and comfortable would be thankful to the Roman Governor for quelling such disturbers. The Sectarian Morality in this case, as in all cases, was certain to extinguish the National Morality, unless that received some unlooked-for renovation; unless the prayers which Psalmists had poured forth for a deliverer of the nation and of all nations received an answer. and De Such an answer might be as needful for the Conqueror of the Jew as for the Jew himself. I said that Roman I should have occasion to speak of the Roman faith Faith. as a political faith in the best and the worst sense of that word. You will not wonder now that I should acknow Essenledge a "best" sense. A faith which is not political, which tially National. has nothing to do with Law, with Language, with Government, with Battles, is, it seems to me, not a faith in a righteous Being, a distinguisher of Right and Wrong, not faith in a Being who is true and who seeks truth in men, not faith in an object of trust and loyalty, not faith in a Source of valour or courage. Let it be ever so domestic-and I have said that the first element of Roman faith was domestic, the authority of the Father; let it make ever so much effort at universality—and we shall see hereafter how Roman worship in later days aspired to this merit; there will be in it no groundwork for that kind of character which we describe as manly, which was comprehended in the Virtus of the Republic. Virtus. Cicero ; his sin. cerity. His in Cicero is thoroughly sincere when he connects worship with Laws; so doing, though he may derive phrases or illustrations from his Greek teachers, he speaks as a Roman. As an Academician he could see certainty in nothing, least of all in any speculations about the divine nature. As a Citizen he felt the most unshaken conviction that there must be a ground for social life and social morality, that what is most right must be most divine. Fables about the Gods which he might accept or reject as a fit drapery for his belief did not touch the core of it; that was in a Lawgiver and Judge whom no fancy, no intellect, could make or unmake. But in his heart, as in the hearts of his countrymen, sincerity. the profoundest insincerity lay hard by this honest and ineradicable conviction. There must be a divine ground of Law, said the inner conscience of the nation and of the patriot. How necessary it is to assume such a ground that Law may be upheld, that men generally to make men true. may respect it, said the lower nature of the man justifying itself by the calculations of a sordid expediency. We must make men observers of their words by feign- Lies used ing to recognise a God of truth! We must cheat men into loyalty, seeing how little there is to awaken it in self-seeking rulers, by threatening them with the vengeance of the Gods if they are disloyal! We must ask the augurs, scarcely able to refrain from laughing at each other as they meet, to invent supernatural reasons for rushing into wars or avoiding them; else how shall the soldier keep his oath to his commander, or not forget his discipline, or not shrink from the enemy when he should face him? Here was the hateful and accursed side of the worship, that which made it acceptable to the mere Magistrate, that which made it incredible to such men as Lucretius, who were sure that there must be in Nature if there was not among men some order which was not based upon trickery and lies. Not the philosophy of Epicurus but the dissolution of the Republic was to demonstrate the hollowness of such a system. A nation cannot stand upon fictions. An Empire may demand them as its necessary sup- of Na. ports. But an Empire introduces another division of Social Morality. The Battle of Actium signified not to Italy only but to Egypt, to Greece, to Palestine, to every country under heaven, that nations for a while. were at an end. A world in which nations should be buried had been long preparing. It now came forth with the hero of proscriptions as its monarch and its God. That is the first form under which Universal Transition The death tions. Age. Society presents itself to us in Modern History. We to the new shall have to consider what Morality was implied in it, and whether any other Universal Society is possible. |