and the hand from doing injury to a brother man,these are main tenets of her moral law. And neither in her case nor in the case of Egypt is the explanation far to seek. It lies in an ultimate law of the mind of man. Conscience only begins with an act of prohibition; it does not exist until we do wrong. I know nothing of good health till I have felt my first physical pain; before that time good health is my nature, and no man recognises his nature. To be recognised, it must be broken, sickness must come, disease must come, the vision of death must come. So is it with holiness; it is only revealed in the breaking. That is why Egypt, that is why Judea, has seen the power of morality rather in that which forbids than in that which impels; they have sought her on the threshold, and the threshold is an act of prohibition. Yet the threshold is neither in Egypt nor in Judea, but in the heart of man. It is older than Egypt, it is older than Judea, for it belongs to the life of the soul, and is therefore distinctive of no land.

A third view is that which regards Judaism as having had for its mission to reveal the ways of Providence. Now, it cannot be denied that the life of Judea is a marvellous illustration of the existence of a Power that makes for righteousness. Whatever be the order of that life, whether it be the old traditional order recognised by our fathers or the new sequence proposed by the light of modern criticism, the result is the same. It matters not to

the question in hand whether we say that the law preceded the prophets, or that the prophets preceded the law; on either view the central fact remains unaffected. We see a nation, of very insignificant extent, of very circumscribed position, of very limited natural resources, assuming a commanding, and ultimately a dominant, attitude on the earth. Without large armies, without much wealth, without a knowledge of secular philosophy, without those arts of polish and finesse which constitute the astute statesman, this little nation has aimed at and virtually received universal dominion. She has set up an ideal of world-conquest most powerfully asserted in the days of her deepest calamity; and, in a way she never dreamed of, she has carried it through. As a matter of fact, she has given to the world a life which has ruled all civilised nations -a life after whose pattern and model all other lives have sought to mould themselves. Nor is it less remarkable that the life by which she has conquered has not been her own ideal of greatness, has been in direct antagonism to that ideal. She has repudiated the crown which has made her despotic, she has abjured the weapon which has proved her victorious. All this seems to denote a force beyond herself. It seems to indicate the presence and the superintendence of a divine instinct which, as with the bee, has led, by a series of undesigned acts, to the construction of a kingdom of consummate order.

But when all has been said, we must still ask, Is this the message of the nation? Is it not rather its completed result, its exit, its terminus? When this result came, did not the nation as a nation cease to be? Can we say that its function was only to come with its death, that its use was only to be discovered in the hour of its dissolution? Had it no value for its time, no meaning for the thousand years during which it had a local habitation as well as a name? Did it differ from all other lands in being without an influence on its contemporaries? Had it, in short, no place in history as long as its own history lasted, and only the office of giving a lesson to posterity when the curtain had fallen over its own career? This we cannot believe. It is contrary to nature; it is contrary to analogy. It is contradicted even by the continued life of the people without a country-a people who have refused to accept the conclusion derived from their national drama, and have denied its final act to be a part of their destiny. We must look elsewhere for a solution of the problem, What is the message of the Jewish nation?

If we would find that solution, we must look for the most pervading element in the records of the Hebrew race. What is that which from beginning to end permeates its literature most persistently and most unwaveringly? Clearly it must be something of a Semitic caste. I said in the previous chapter

that the Semite is distinguished from the Aryan by the predominance of the sense of mystery. We saw that the mystery of Egypt was virtually the mystery of evolution-the process by which one thing passes into another thing. What is the mystery of Judea ? Let us listen to one of the latest voices of the nation, and I think we shall find the clue for which we are searching. In the first Epistle to Timothy we read, "Great is the mystery of godliness." The words bore a different meaning then to what they do now, and they must be paraphrased, not translated. A mystery then meant something invisible-something which could not be detected by the sense. The mystery of godliness, therefore, is equivalent to the unseenness of godliness; it really amounts to the statement that the path by which we approach the throne of God is the path of the internal. According to this writer, the great message of Judea is the power of inwardness in the religious life. Now, if we fall backward and examine the earlier voices, we shall find that they present a wonderful consistency. We shall find that the power of the internal is the thought on which the Old Testament rings its changes from morn to noon, from noon to dewy eve. It is the moral of all its history, the secret of all its poetry, the burden of all its song. It covers the whole area of its teaching; it permeates the entire course of its development; it runs in a continuous refrain through its endless variations. Other

messages may vary with the hour, other thoughts may be modified with the place; but this is independent of time and impervious to locality; it is the same yesterday and to-day and for ever.

Perhaps at the outset one is disposed to be struck with the paradox of such a statement. We have been in the habit of regarding the message of Judea as antagonistic to the message of Christianity. We hear the first Christian teachers distinguishing between the flesh and the spirit, and calling men to abandon the mean and beggarly elements of the letter. We naturally conclude that Judaism must have been a most external faith, and her message a most sensuous hope. But we forget altogether that the men who thus denounce the letter are themselves Jews. The voice of the New Testament is not one nation calling against another; it is a nation summoning itself. The disciple of Christ is crying to his countryman, Be true to yourselves, true to your message, true to your national ideal. It is no new voice; it is the cry of all the prophets. What is Jewish prophecy but a great protest in favour of return to the national ideal? It reminds the men of Israel that, in seeking the flesh in preference to the spirit, they are deserting their own standard and abandoning their own landmarks; that is the reason why their watchword is so constantly "return." It is a going back to the primitive type which the prophets of Israel desired; and that primitive type

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