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But, if there are steps of growth in generations, we must expect each step to be con- sidered in its day as final ; or at least as absolutely imposed. It * I CorinthiaDS ziii. ii ; Galatians iv. i — 3. HEBREW SACERDOTALISM. 467 will be considered the very revelation; for by no less a view could it acquire due reverence and fixity. But yet the Eternal Grod may all along be training His people beyond their full con- sciousness. Especially, if a great priesthood is to have charge of certain truths or rites, we may expect among them all the faults* incidental to priesthoods. It seems a grand conception to have a body of men in charge of the national temple, more educated than their fellows, and living under the direct influence of the breath of God, sought daily in prayer. Such a body might be expected to mediate as it were between God and man, having the clearest perception of right, as the unwritten law of Him to whose service their lives are dedicated, and again asso- ciating the people together in harmony of inspu-ed prayers and songs. Thus they would give shape and voice to the better in- stincts and aspirations of the people at large, partaking with them the life which the supreme Father upholds, and with clearer consciousness t of its source. Yet we can see, on reflexion, what temptations of form and of literalism, and of professional selfish- ness, and sloth, and even vice and rapacity, must beset such a body ; and if the Jewish priesthood yielded to such, and involved also their nation in a barren literalism, and in obstinacy and in ruin, they only partook of a sinfulness common to mankind. It is evident that many of us in their place would have acted alike. *' But yet there are limits which neither institutions nor men transgress with impunity. An institution must not suffer the idea out of which it came to fade before an absorbing selfish- ness. Nor must men strengthen their passions against their conscience, by crying down every teacher of righteousness, or organising a conspiracy of the crowd against the meek and the truth-speaker. Especially the Jews had received such Divine sanction for the ideas of Truth and Bight, and such experience of great witnesses to them arising firom time to time, that they sinned against great light if they stoned the prophet or crucified * HoBea iy. 6 — 9 ; JeremUh ▼. 31 ; i Samuel ii. t Jeremiah ▼. 4, 5. 30—2 468 JUDAIC SINS OF THE LETTER, the reformer. It had been a promise in the law of Moses*, that God would raise np prophets, reviving the sound of His word in men's hearts. When then He had raised up prophet after pro- phet, and they had stoned one, and slain another with the sword, and sawn another asimderf, they had outraged the better voice of their consciences, and so forfeited the blessing of the spirit, however zealous they might be for the letter of their covenant. The whole argument of St Stephen with his countrymen (in Acts vii.) is, that they had always resisted the Holy Ghost, or stifled the better voice within them. Thus they had not under- stood Moses, when God raised him up as a deliverer out of Egypt, and it was only characteristic of their old dulness of spirit, that they understood not Christ, when God gave Him as a Deliverer of the soul from evil of stain and fear, and from the bondage of written ordinances. Thus, in rejecting Christ, the Jews only brought to its fatal culmination that habit of rejecting spiritual teachers, which is natural to 'animal men},' and which their history had often shewn. They had accustomed themselves to revile the servants when living, though they garnished their tombs when dead ; and at last they rejected the very Son. I do not say that many of us might not have done the same : and in many Christian literalists, especially in those who are most jea- lous for *the historical Christ,' I observe the same stamp of mind which was in the Jews, and which would have tamed as deaf an ear to Christ as they did. For such men ever disparage that spiritual power of the Truth, to which our blessed Lord came into the world to bear witness ; and they make everything depend on the external authority of the book or the temple, not knowing that God can raise in three days out of the Truth a temple not made with hands. Such men undo the work of Christ, while most zealous for His name. For they make war on that witness in man, to which Christ perpetually appealed, • Deut. xviii. lo — 18 ; xiii. i — 3. t Hebrews xi. 37. Such a tradition has been of Isaiah. t I Corinthians ii. 14, where the unhappy mistranslation of natural, far ''the animal man," has been a source of confusion to many. JUDAIC SINS OF THE LETTEB. 469 and break down that freedom of the soul, which Christ esta- blished before Grod. This they do from having a veil of pride and mistrust upon their hearts. For the worst part in us cannot see the good way of persuasion and love, by which our heavenly Father leads us, and puts instead a worse way, with fear, and bondage to precepts, or to names. Hence, in the name of Him who is true, men sometimes rage against the very Truth. Still it is a fact, that such a sinfril tendency of our nature was exem- plified by the Jews in an eminent instance. They had sufiered their sympathies to contract, and their love of truth to fade, before that of their religious system. Thus they put their own nation before humanity, and the letter of the law before the Spirit of God. The temper thus engendered became a fierce bigotry, and brought on them, by natural causation, the last penalties of a fanatical and obstinate pride. Such tendencies would hardly have gone so far, if the men had kept before the eyes of their mind the living God of the spirits of all flesh. They would then have been more sensible of the lessons He taught them from time to time. They would have learnt of the prophets a vnder consciousness of humanity, and have seen with the Psalmists, that * the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit ;* nay even with Solomon, though more clearly with Isaiah, that * the Lord dwelleth not in temples built with hands.' They would not then have been so shocked at hearing the same sen- timent from St Stephen, as to rise up and stone him for sacrilege. Nor would they have entertained so fierce a jealousy of St Paul, for teaching doctrines essentially the same as the most spiritual part of their ancient books. Nor again would they have been hurried into crimes, such as Josephus, their historian, mentions as shortly preceding the fall of their city. For instance, there were the murders of Zacharias, and of others, especially that of Ananus the high priest ; and if Josephus, with some lingering fondness for the country which he had deserted, makes the national guilt consist chiefly in the murder of a high-priest, we may as Christians find the same temper shewn in putting to 470 JEWISH DESTINY. death the Apostle James*, and above all in the crucifixion of James's Master, the Holy and the Just, already spoken o£. By such a succession of tragedies, the Jews shewed that zeal without knowledge, which runs upon judgments. In fact, their attach- ment to the Mosaic system became more passionate, as their understanding of it was less perceptive; and so a zeal for it betrayed them into crimes, of which yet the predisposing causes were certain tempers in themselves. So that, on the whole, I do not indeed justify any persecutions of the Jews by deed or word ; but rather think all such proceedings hateful to our com- mon God, and likely to bring on whoever is guilty of them His ancient curse on whoever cursed His people, and His wrath f against those who afflicted them beyond His will; but still I think your difficulty sufficiently answered; for we have seen that, if the Jews were not infidels to the letter of their system, they did not suffer for fidelity to what was best in its spirit. They had so far a veil upon their hearts, that they saw not the original motive, or ultimate tendency of their religion. Thus they have fallen short in a way of the predestinating counsel of God, which yet, we hope, will complete itself in them ; and we look forward to a building of them with ourselves into one tem- ple of mankind, in which the spirit of the Gt)d of Jacob, and of the living Godf, will dwell. " If now from the ancient unveilings of the Almighty, we turn to the books which record them, the sort of question we have been discussing will reappear.