It is said, in the one form, that Judæa was a theocracy, and then the inference is drawn that, by this fact, it is isolated from other nations, and for them has no immediate significance. The word theocracy, in this connection, is traced from Josephus, a Jew of an imperial age, and if it represents the isolation of one nation from another in the divine government of the world, or the exclusion of any nation from the universal law manifested in that government, then it is the assumption against which the prophets constantly contended.

And the principles in which Judæa is formed, are represented as the universal and immutable laws which are the condition of the life of a nation. If it had not a divine origin and unity, if there had not been in it the presence of an invisible King, it would then have been the exception, and its course the singular circumstance, the abnormal condition in history.

It is said, however, that the divine vocation of the people, and the foundation of the nation in a righteous Will which was manifest in Judæa, is limited to the past, to the prophetical ages, but with the coming of the Christ, in whom those ages are fulfilled, it ceases to be real. There is no more a divine presence and guidance of the people, nor the foundation of its unity in a righteous Will, nor the condition of the being of the nation in righteousness. Then in the later manifestation the divine power is further removed. Judæa was a nation called and chosen in history, but in the fuller years there are none. The end is changed from the beginning, that history is to be read as the letters in the Hebrew books. But the Christ is represented in his coming as the only King, and as nearer to humanity than in the earlier ages, and as revealing in his own life the foundation of its eternal relationships. The Christ is called the only King, the Deliverer, in obedience to whom the freedom of the individual and the nation consists. And as there has been in nations the recognition

of the Christ as the King, there has been the formation of a national life, and the unity in which alone the divisions of races are overcome; and as the nations have rejected the Christ as the King, no more a power in his Kingdom, they have passed from history.

It is because Judæa was a real theocracy that it is not detached from the government and history of the world, and its record is of worth for every nation, and the presence of which it is the witness is not more distant but nearer than of old, the Christ is the King from whose authority no nation is excluded. But it is allowed that, in a certain conception, the Christ is the King, and then the conception is assumed to be one to which the nation may give no further heed. It is held as an abstraction, and withdrawn from the actual lives of men and nations. It is referred to the province of the dogmatist and the ecclesiast, and is presumed no longer to concern the man of affairs; the statesman may recognize it only as in some rhetorical phrase, he strengthens his appeal in conformance to popular impressions not yet worn out; the journalist is to dismiss it as belonging to the dream of the mystic, but having no relation to events as the days go by; the economist, apprehending the nation only as the commonwealth, may insist upon a sustained indifference to it, as alone consistent in politics, until there comes some crisis, when the maxims of economy are unheeded, and the craft of parties is confounded, and the systems of theorists and the devices. of legists are burned as stubble in the flames that try all things.

The nation is constituted not in a formal but a real theocracy, and there is nothing more to be considered in certain phases of modern thought than the negation of the real theocratic idea in connection with the avowal of its abstract postulate and abstract conclusion. It eliminates the whole content of the Gospels in their constant representation of the Christ as the King, while deferring to its abstract conception.

If further it be assumed that Judæa, in the recognition and presence of the divine King, becomes the anomaly in history, this is controverted by the fact that it is a nation.1 This is its historical condition, whatever may be the drift of historical abstractions. The laws of the life of nations are illustrated in it, but it is not exempt from them. There is no presentation of the formulas of political science, in the construction of a system, but there is the being of the nation in history. There is no formal organization defined in necessary correspondence to the nation; but it exists in its identity under the lawgiver, the judges, the kings; and the peril, which is always near, is that the people will lose the consciousness of the unity and continuity of the nation in its invisible king, and apprehend it only as a formal and external organization.

In the opposite form to this,-in which the representation of Judæa as a theocracy has been made the premise of its detachment in history, its representation as a nation. is made the premise of the same conclusion.

It is admitted that Judæa was a nation, but there is the conception of the nation as only in identity with an exclusive form or principle, and the denial of its universality. The nation is regarded as formed only in a separative

1 "The true spiritual life of the world commenced in the chosen people. He who denies this would seem to deny not a theory of inspiration, but a great and manifest fact of history. But the spiritual life commenced under an earthly mould of national life, similar in all respects, political, social, and literary, to those of other races. The Jewish nation, in short, was a nation and not a miracle. Had it been a miracle, it might have shown forth the power of God, like the stars in Heaven, but it would have been nothing to the rest of mankind, nor could its spiritual life have helped to awaken theirs."— Goldwin Smith, The Bible on Slavery, etc., p. 5.

Spinoza represents the position of Judæa as isolated in history. The second inquiry in the introduction to the Tractatus Theologico Politicus is, "Why the Hebrews were called and chosen of God?" to which the answer is, "When I saw that this meant nothing more than that God gave them a certain spot of the earth, where they might dwell securely and commodiously, I learned that the laws revealed to Moses by God, were nothing but the laws of the special Hebrew empire, and therefore that none except the Hebrews were bound to receive them; nay, that even they were not bound by them, except so long as their empire in Palestine lasted."

principle. It is the local and transient, and is a subject of concernment to a certain people, and therefore of no further concernment. It is only the special circumstance of history, and is comprehended in the special characteristics of a people..

But it is, as containing the revelation of the being of the nation-it is as national, that the Hebrew Scriptures are of worth to every nation. If they represented the being of the nation with indifference, or as simply a formal organization, then they would have no immediate worth for this or for any nation. It is because they reveal the foundation of the unity and continuity of the first nation in history, that they may become also the book of the last.

Mr. Lowell speaks of the mind of Cromwell in certain higher moments, as "working free from Judaic trammels." But in the age to which Cromwell was called, in the battle with unrighteousness in the land and with the allied imperialism and ecclesiasticism of which Spain was the front, it was not trammels which were forged for him in the Old Testament which he knew so well, and had studied as none of England's kings before or since. Would a knowledge of what is described as Aryan civilization have been a substitute for the record of that national life, so deep and so intense and linked to the Throne of God, and finding its unity in Him? There have been those whose thought was without "these trammels"- Julian, with a fair and catholic culture, whose aim was an intellectual imperialism, into which all nations were to be merged, as their images and divinities were to be gathered in one hall;-Spinoza, whose ideal of the state was, that "it should leave the philosophers free to think;"— Goethe, as the courtier at a little principality, who complained that "in the state, no one was willing to live and enjoy, every one wanted to be ruling;" - would Cromwell, working still in the type of his own individuality, have found in the riddance of "Judaic trammels," with these,

elements of freedom? If we study the mind of Cromwell, every element of strength was wrought in the faith in which these words become an inspiration. There was another his secretary-in the same work, who knew these Hebrew Scriptures not as a boy but as a man knows, but in that type of strength and freedom which is only of more worth if it have traces also of an Hellenic spirit, "the Samson Agonistes," still so perfect an expression of undying faith in the triumph of the nation over all its enemies, is there the restraint of old trammels, the defect of Milton's freedom? They may not always have separated that which in the earthly vesture of the nation is local and transient, from its real being, but there have been few holding a conception so clear. It is not as men enter into the consciousness of the spirit of the nation that their march is trammelled and their fetters are forged. It is with the free that we are free. There has been no nation but as the mind enters more deeply into its spirit it is imbued with larger freedom. It was not in the Judaic, nor the Roman, nor the Hellenic life, that there was the forging of bonds for men. Thus there is a value for a people, in the study of the literature and art of Greece and Rome, beyond the study of the style and thought of their several poets and historians. It is the contact with the life of the nation which transcends the life of the individual, and is deeper than any separate work in literature and art. This representation of Judaic or Roman or Hellenic trammels has its source in the assumption of a negative notion of freedom.1

1 The Bible has been removed from the course of study in universities, and then from academies, and has no place, corresponding simply as a history and literature, to the history and literature of Greece and Rome. A well-known missionary in Syria, a recent graduate of Yale College, said to me, that scarcely any scholars left their schools in Syria, but with a more thorough knowledge of the Bible than the larger number of the recent graduates of Yale College. This omission of its study is partly the result of the principle which has referred it exclusively to the sphere of the dogmatist and the ecclesiast. The one regards it primarily as a system of dogmas and a collection of isolated proof-texts detached to sustain