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moral of all Jewish history is that the elder should serve the younger-that the natural man, who comes first, should be superseded by the spiritual man, who comes last. This is the burden of all its teaching from the beginning to the end. Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Joseph and Reuben, Saul and David, are only landmarks of a tendency that runs along the whole line of the national life. There are evidences that it was not unopposed by the nation, there are traces that it had to be taught by stern experience. Eve says of her firstborn, Cain, "I have gotten a man from the Lord;" and Abraham prays for the more warlike of his sons, "O that Ishmael might live before Thee." But none the less, nay, all the more, is it the message of the children of Israel. If it is not the result of estheticism, if it is not the fruit of inborn admiration, if it has persisted through opposition and survived in spite of prejudice, it furnishes only an additional proof that Judea was impelled by a destiny higher than her own will.

CHAPTER XV.

THE SUBJECT CONTINUED.

THE second point of interest in the life of Judea is its theology. And in its theology as in its history, the central article is inwardness. That article is expressed in the second commandment of the Jewish law, "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, nor any likeness of anything that is in heaven above nor in the earth beneath nor in the waters under the earth; thou shalt not bow down thyself to them nor serve them." The command is more comprehensive than is popularly supposed. It includes two parts. On the one hand, the Jew is forbidden to make a reverential likeness of any object of creation; on the other, he is forbidden to make any object of creation a likeness of God Himself. The design is therefore to prevent both idolatry and nature-worship—in other words, to exclude from the true faith all symbolism whatYou will observe at once the analogy and the difference between this and Egypt. Egypt, like

soever.

Judea, has no special symbol of God, but why? Just that the whole universe may be His symbol. To the Egyptian the important part of every object is the point where it fades into another object; the image of God must to him be the world as a whole. But to the Jew not even this was to be God's image; God was to have no image.1 The heaven of heavens could not contain Him; He charged His very angels with folly. To the eye of the lawgiver, as to the eye of the psalmist, the aspect of united nature was but one of the changes in the vesture of the Eternal; he would say of a thousand universes, "They perish, but Thou remainest; they all wax old as doth a garment, and as a vesture shalt Thou fold them up, and they shall be changed; but Thou art the same, and Thy years shall have no end."

I would not have it thought, however, that the Hebrew notion of God was one of impersonality; this is one of the points in which, I think, Mr Matthew Arnold has erred. The creed of Judaism is a protest in favour of an inward God; but to the Jew inward meant human. Let us never forget that the act forbidden to him was not the conceiving of God after a likeness, but the conceiving of God after the likeness of a thing. The root of Jewish religion is placed in the belief that man was made in the image of God. If man is not to image God, it is because he is not to stoop below himself. 1 Compare Isaiah xl, 18,

He contains within himself the inward principle, and that principle is not only God-given but Godbreathed; it is itself an integral part of the life of the Eternal. Judaism is not so far from Christianity as is commonly supposed. It is founded on the identity of the human and the divine. The distance is one of miles, not of nature. If the Creator is placed beyond the direct reach of the creature, it is in the same sense that a king is beyond the direct reach of a peasant. There is never such a distance as would make mind one thing in God and another thing in man. To the son of Israel the mind of man was the miniature of the mind of God. To him the divinest thing in the universe was willthe innermost force, the force behind nature, the force that can say "Thou shalt; thou shalt not." The image of God in man was the power of choice. When the soul received its first alternative, it received its first likeness to the divine; for that which unites the human to the divine is the voice of personality-the power to say "I will." Hence to the son of Israel the voice and not the form becomes the likeness of God.1 "The Lord saith” is the formula which expresses the Jewish sense of the nature of God. The Greek would have clothed Him in all the glories of the morning; but to the Hebrew the glories of the morning were nothing to the glory of personality. What the Jew magnified in God 1 See specially Psalm xxix.

was His law. It was not merely that it was a moral law, but that it was a law-an expression of will, a voice of command. The prerogative of God was to reign, and the majesty of reigning lay in its manifestation of a will. Hence to the Jew the most glorious of all things became the possession of a kingdom. His most secular life had its root in his most religious, in his most internal life. He sought a kingdom not from ambition but from veneration. -to be like God. If his God had been a representative of beauty, he would have carved statues in His praise; but his God is a representative of will, and therefore he carves for Him a kingdom. His search for universal empire is in its root an act of worship the worship of the innermost thing in human nature, contemplated as the likeness of the · divine Life.

I cannot quit this part of the subject without pointing out that nowhere has Judaism been so little superannuated as in this worship of the will. It is the one point in which modern science can still unite itself with theological study. This science is in its essence a recognition of Force as the supreme entity. Force is a mental conception. It is an idea derived from the exercise of will, and derivable from no other source. If there be an ultimate force in the universe, so far as our present knowledge extends, it can only be a will force. When I speak of the power of gravity, the power of cohesion-nay,

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