Читать книгу Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom - The Original Classic Edition - Allies T - Страница 1
ОглавлениеCHURCH AND STATE AS SEEN IN
THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM.
BY
T. W. ALLIES, M.A.
AUTHOR OF
"PER CRUCEM AD LUCEM, THE RESULT OF A LIFE,"
"A LIFE'S DECISION," "JOURNAL IN FRANCE AND LETTERS FROM ITALY," "THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM," ETC.
LONDON: BURNS AND OATES.
1882.
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
PROLOGUE.
PAGE
The Kingdom as Prophesied and as Fulfilled, xix
CHAPTER I.
Relation Between the Civil and the Spiritual Powers from Adam to Christ.
1. The Divine and the Human Society, founded in Adam, refounded in Noah. The origin of man, of woman, of marriage, and of the human family, 1
Archetypal character of the fact that man is created a Race, 3
Sole creation of Adam in the maturity of thought and speech and the perfection of knowledge, as shown in the naming of creatures,
4
Subsequent building of woman from man, 5
The divine Image and Likeness in the individual man, 5
A further Image of the ever-blessed Trinity in the Race, 6
Indication of the Headship and the Passion of Christ in the original creation, 8
Beauty and splendour of the divine plan, 9
The part in the divine plan which belongs to man's free-will, 10
The divine treatment of man as a Race not broken by the Fall, 11
Adam after the Fall the head of the civil and the religious order, 12
Bearing of man's condition before the Fall upon his subsequent state, 13
Adam receives in a great promise a disclosure of the future, 14
1
He becomes the Teacher and likewise the Priest of his Race, 15
The rite of sacrifice, 15
Triple dignity of Adam in this first society, 16[Pg vi]
Man breaks up this society by the misuse of his free-will, 17
Resumption of the unity of the Race and its reparation in Noah, 18
Condition of man, individual and collective, at this new beginning of the race; marriage and sacrifice, 19
Express establishment of civil government by divine authority, 20
Union of religion with civil government from the beginning, 21
Parallel between Adam and Noah, 22
2. The Divine and Human Society in the Dispersion.
Unity of human language withdrawn on account of a great sin, 24
Coeval with which the various nations spring forth out of the one original society, 26
Injury to human society by the degradation of the conception of God, 28
Loss of belief in the divine unity followed by loss of the sense of man's brotherhood, 29
Proof of this brotherhood recovered by science in the case of the Aryan family of nations, 31
The one universal society becomes many nations at enmity with each other, 32
Their state after a long lapse of time, when their several histories begin, 33
Original goods of the race still remaining--
1. Marriage, 35
2. Religion as centered in the rite of sacrifice, 37
3. Civil government, 38
4. Alliance between government and religion, 41
Cumulative testimony of the four in their contrast with slavery to the unity of man's Race, as its origin is recorded by Moses,
43
Summary of the course of mankind from the Dispersion to Christ, 44
3. Further Testimony of Law, Government, and Priesthood in the Dispersion.
The fiction of universal savagery, or different races, or simial descent, 45
The author of "Ancient Law" upon original society,46
Proof from comparative jurisprudence of the patriarchal theory, 47
Law and government in their commencement, 48
Family the ancient unit of society, 49
Universal belief or assumption of blood-relationship, 50[Pg vii]
The Roman Patria Potestas a relic of the original rule, 52
Family everything, the individual unknown, 52
Original union of religion with government, 53
Origin of law and property, 54
Summary of the foregoing witness, 55
The Two Powers from the beginning, 56
Degradation of worship and degradation of society in Gentilism, 57
Deification of the State, 58
Which, however, remains a lawful power, 59
The distinction between sacerdotal and civil power in the Roman republic, 60
The power of the Pontifex Maximus united to that of the Principate, 62
The College of Pontifices reversing a tribunitial law, 63
The distinction between Sacerdotal and Civil Power running through all ancient nations, 64
Witness of the heathen priesthood to the unity of man's Race, 65
The providence of Abraham's call, 66
Relation of the Two Powers in the Mosaic law, 67
The actual result of the coming of Christ, 68
CHAPTER II.
Relation between the Spiritual and the Civil Powers after Christ.
2
1. The Spiritual Power in its Source and Nature.
The Spiritual Power not only allied but subordinate to the Civil throughout the Gentile world at the death of Christ, 70
1. Its independence in Israel alone, as acknowledged by the people, a result of the creation of the Aaronic priesthood, 72
Special offices of the High Priest, 73
2. The part of the High Priest through the whole history from Moses to Christ, 75
3. The actual jurisdiction of the High Priest under the Roman Empire, 77
4. The High-priesthood and the system of worship over which it presided viewed as a prophecy and preparation for Christ, 80[Pg viii]
Bearing of the High-priesthood to Christ at His coming, 82
The undisputed circumstances of Christ's death, 83
Extreme antecedent improbability of what followed, 84
Its dependence upon a supernatural and miraculous fact, 85
As the Race springs from Adam in Paradise, so the Spiritual Power from Christ at His Resurrection, 86
The inward cohesion of Priesthood, Teaching, and Jurisdiction, 87
The two forces of the Primacy and the Hierarchy from the beginning, 90
The unity and triplicity of power in the regimen of the Church an image of the Divine Unity and Trinity, 92
2. The Spiritual Power a Complete Society.
The supernatural society exists for a supernatural end, 93
To which the present life is subordinated, 94
And which is beyond the provision of temporal government, 95
Analogy between the Two Powers, 96
Complete philosophical basis on which the Spiritual Power rests, 98
How the inward life which it imparts is united with the Person of Christ, 99
From whom, in worship, belief, and conduct, the Christian people derives, 101
The King and the Kingdom not of this world but in it, fulfilled in thirteen particulars, 103
1. A kingdom ruling all the relations of man Godward, 103
2. Having an end outside this life, 103
3. Deriving all authority from Christ as Apostle and High Priest, 103
4. Producing its people from its King, 103
5. Imparting grace from the King in its sacraments, 104
6. Transmitting the King's truth by the order of its regimen, 104
7. Having a complete analogy with civil government, 104
8. Fulfilling man's need of supernatural society, 105
9. Generating an universal law for all relations of public and private life, 105
10. Possessing independence of the Temporal Power, 106
11. Not limited in space, 106
12. Not limited in time, 107
13. A kingdom of charity through union with its King, 107
3. Relation of the Two Powers to each other.[Pg ix]
Principles which ruled the relation between the Two Powers before Christ, 108
A new basis given to the Spiritual Power by Christ, from which every relation to the Temporal Power springs, 110
1. All Christians subject to the Spiritual Power, 112
2. And likewise to the Temporal Power as God's Vicegerent, 112
3. The relation between the Two Powers intended by God is amity, 114
4. A separate action of the Two Powers, without regard to each other, not intended, 115
5. Persecution of the Spiritual by the Temporal not intended, 119
6. Contrast between human kingdoms and the divine kingdom, 120
The end the ground of the subordination of the one to the other, 122
Doctrine of St. Thomas to that effect, 123
The indirect power over temporal things, 124
Sum of the foregoing chapter; Orders of Nature and Grace, 125
Co-operation of the Two Powers as stated by St. Gregory VII., 126
The image of marriage, as describing the ideal relation and the various deflections from it, 128
3
CHAPTER III.
Transmission of Spiritual Authority from the Person of our Lord to Peter and the Apostles, as set forth in the New Testament. The Church a kingdom subsisting from age to age by its own force, but its original records to be considered, 131
Institution of the Priesthood; St. Paul's and St. Luke's testimony, 132
St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. John, 133
Transmission of Spiritual Power as recorded by St. Matthew, 136
The same according to St. Mark, 138
The same according to St. Luke in his Gospel, 139
And in the Acts, 139
His record of a peculiar promise made to Peter, 141
Conversation which forms his main addition to the narrative, 141
Contrast between Gentile and Christian rule, 143
The kingdom disposed to the Apostles, 144[Pg x] The confirmation of the brethren, 145
The time of the confirming marked out, 146
St. Luke distinguishes Peter as markedly as St. Matthew and St. John, 148
Testimony of St. John as to the promises made to the Apostles, 149
And as to the universal pastorship bestowed on St. Peter, 152
Two classes of passages, 153
Comparison of the two, 154
And of the testimony of the four Evangelists, 156
Caution that what is recorded is not all that passed, 157
Perfect instruction of the Apostles in the forty days, 158
The powers comprising the Apostolate, 159
The powers bestowed on Peter, 160
Testimony of St. Paul; conception of the Church as the Body of Christ, 161
Of the one ministry by which the Body is compacted together, 162
Of mission from this Body as necessary to every herald of the gospel, 164
Of the grace given by ordination, 165
Mow the unity set forth by St. Paul bears witness to the Primacy of St. Peter, 166
Of the inseparable bond of unity, truth, and government in St. Paul's mind, 167
Six names by which he designates the principle of his own authority, 168
The great vision of our Lord and His Church in the Apocalypse in accordance with St. Paul and the Evangelists, 171
Four qualities of Spiritual Power in this Scriptural testimony, 175
1. The coming from above, 175
2. Its completeness, 176
3. Its unity, 179
4. Its independence, 181
How the idea of perpetuity pervades all these qualities, 182
CHAPTER IV.[Pg xi]
Transmission of Spiritual Authority, as Witnessed in the History of the Church from A.D. 29 to A.D. 325. The letter of St. Clement of Rome, 184
Description of this letter by St. Irenaeus, 185
St. Clement urges the Roman military discipline as an example for Christian obedience, 186
Minute regulations given by Christ as to religious ordinances, 187
The descent of all spiritual order from above, 188
Example of Moses in establishing the Jewish Pontificate, 189
How the Apostles appointed everywhere Bishops with a rule of succession, 190
St. Clement fills up details omitted in the Gospel record, 190
How he attests the continuation of the Mosaic hierarchy of high priest, priest, and levite in the Christian Church, 191
How he says that Christian ordinances are to be observed more accurately than Mosaic, 193
How the Apostles carried out the descent of power from above, 194
4
Why St. Clement instances the origin of the Jewish hierarchy, 195
How St. Clement exercises the Primacy, 197
St. Ignatius of Antioch supplements St. Clement of Rome, 200
His statement as to Bishops throughout the world, combined with his statement as to the authority of the local Bishop, 201
The complete testimony of St. Clement and St. Ignatius, 203
The historian Eusebius notes three periods in the first ninety years, 205
Sum of his testimony as to the great Sees and the Episcopate, 206
How Tertullian describes the first propagation of the Church, 211
And how Irenaeus, 213
Concordance with the Gospels of these statements of St. Clement, St. Ignatius, Eusebius, St. Irenaeus, and Tertullian, 215
Bishops in every city and town of the Empire before the peace of the Church, 216
St. Peter, St. Paul, and the Apostles appointed everywhere local Bishops, 217
The Bishop universally said to wield a government, 218
Bishops sent out from Rome to convert the nations, 219
Episcopal government universal, 220
But the One Episcopate much more than this, 222[Pg xii]
St. Cyprian's One Episcopate illustrated by St. Leo the Great, 223
What the One Episcopate adds to the universal establishment of Bishops, 224
The special character of the miracle which St. Chrysostom and St. Augustine proclaimed, 227
St. Augustine's criterion in the fourth century applied to the nineteenth, 229
St. Chrysostom's epitome of the Church's course preceding his time, 230
Christ's special miracle is that He founds the race of Christians, 231
Contrast of the race with that out of which it was formed, 232
The incessant conflict amid which it was done, 233
A reflection upon this picture of the Church, 236
CHAPTER V.
The One Episcopate Resting upon the One Sacrifice.
St. Clement's assertion of the care with which our Lord instituted the government of His Church, 238
Christ's High-priesthood consisting in two acts, 239
1. The assumption of a created nature, 240
2. The offering that nature in sacrifice, 241
His union of these two acts in instituting the Priesthood of His Church,242
The institution of bloody sacrifice in the world before Christ, 243
Lasaulx's statement how it enters into all the acts of human life, 245
What the ceremonial of Gentile sacrifice was, 250
Union and correspondence of prayer and sacrifice, 253
The sense of guilt in bloody sacrifice, 254
Bloody sacrifice a positive divine enactment, 254
Statement of St. Augustine to this effect, 255
St. Thomas on sacrifice as offered to God alone, 256
Bloody sacrifice the most characteristic fact of the pre-Christian world, 257
The practice of human sacrifices running through the history of ancient nations, 259
Conclusion as to the divine appointment of sacrifice, 261[Pg xiii] The Christian Sacrifice the counterpart of the original institution, 263
And the compendium of the whole dispensation, 265
Containing in itself all the original force of sacrifice, 267
But besides it is guardian of the Divine Unity, 268
And of the Divine Trinity, 268
And of the Incarnation, 269
And of the Redemption, 270
And of the adoption to Sonship, 271
It contains also the fountain of spiritual life, 272
And the source of sanctification, 273
And the medicine of immortality, 274
The presence of Christ's physical body, St. Chrysostom, 275
5
The unity of the Christian people its result, St. Augustine, 276
How our Lord impressed His High-priesthood on the world, 276
Jurisdiction necessary to constitute a kingdom, 278
Jurisdiction in the diocese and in the whole Church, 279
The fulfilment of the parable, "I am the true vine," 280
The Eucharistic Sacrifice the centre of life in the Church during eighteen hundred years, 283
CHAPTER VI.
Independence of the Ante-Nicene Church shown in her Organic Growth.
The Church's triple independence in government, teaching, and worship as actually carried out, 287
Occasion of the Nicene Council's convocation, 289
The Emperor thereby recognised the Church as a divine kingdom, 290
This kingdom, as it appeared in A.D. 29 and in A.D. 325, 291
The Emperor also acknowledged the solidarity of the Episcopate, 292
The Christian Council and the Roman Senate, 293
Force of the Council as to the relation between Church and State, 294
A. Independence of the Church's government shown in five points, 295
1. The ordered gradation of the hierarchy in mother and daughter churches, 296
Recognised as original in the 6th canon of the Council, 297
This principle carried through the whole structure of the Church, 298[Pg xiv]
Symbolised in the building of the great medieval cathedrals, 301
2. Development of Provincial Councils, 302
3. Action of the Church in hearing and deciding causes, 303
Her proper jurisdiction in the exterior and interior forum, 304
The episcopal magistracy exercised in a fourfold gradation, 306
4. Election of Bishops and the inferior ministers, 307
St. Cyprian's testimony, 308
Outcome of the three centuries in this respect, 309
The principle upon which all this practice was built,310
5. Administration of temporal goods, 311
Three states as to these goods in the early Church, 312
Acquisition and usage of temporal goods, 313
Temporal goods in A.D. 29 and in A.D. 325, 315
B. Independence of the Church's teaching, 316
The first teaching purely oral, based upon authority,317
Three classes of truths forming the divine and the apostolical tradition, 319
Importance in this period of exclusively oral teaching in exhibiting the Church's office of teacher, 320
Seen in the rite of baptism, 321
In the Eucharistic Liturgy, 322
Picture of the Eucharistic Sacrifice by an Apostle, 324
Further exhibition in the rite of Ordination, 328
Fullness of the Magisterium expressed in these rites, 329
The Church's teaching office neither changed nor diminished by the writings of the New Testament, 331
Shown by the nature of the office in itself, 331
By the circumstances under which these writings came, 331
By their internal arrangement, 332
By their own positive testimony, 335
The living personal authority an unchangeable principle, 335
Things in the Church which preceded the publication of the New Testament, 336
The written record of our Lord's words and acts, 337
The various parts of ecclesiastical tradition, 338
CHAPTER VII.[Pg xv]
Independence of the Ante-Nicene Church shown in her mode of Positive Teaching and in her mode of Resisting Error.
6
Germ of the Church in the missionary circuits of our Lord, 340
The mission carried on by the Apostles, 341
Its two parts: work of positive teaching and defence against error, 343
As to the first--
1. The system of catechesis, 344
2. The employment of a Creed, 347
3. The dispensing of Sacraments, 349
4. The system of Penance, 351
5. The Scriptures carried in the Church's hand, 352
This mode of promulgation continued during fifteen centuries, 355
Substitution of a private interpretation of Scripture by the individual attempted in the sixteenth century, 356
Summary of the mode in which the Church promulgated the faith, 358
As to the second, the Church's defence against error lay in the principle of her own authority, 360
The first conflict with unbelieving Judaism, 362
Three incidents of it--
The proclaiming Jesus to be the Christ, 362
The receiving the Gentiles without Circumcision, 363
The protection of being Jews enjoyed by the first preachers of Christ, 364
Gradual severance of the Christian Church from the Synagogue, 369
Circumstances and peculiar difficulties of the Ante-Nicene Church, 371
The first condition of Christians one of simple faith, 376
The two opposed principles of orthodoxy and heresy, 378
Contest between them indicated in the Apostolic writings, 380
Character of the first writings after the Apostles, 381
Christian learning in the second century; conversions of heathens who became Christian apologists, 382
Extension of education given in great catechetical schools, 385
The defence against error lodged in the Magisterium, 387
The Magisterium lies in the Church's divine government and concrete life, 388
Athanasius as the expounder of it; his fundamental idea, 389
His Statement as to the authority of Scripture, 391[Pg xvi]
As to the Rule of Faith, 392
As to private judgment, 393
His tests of heresy, 393
Definitions, 394
How the Magisterium embraces Scripture and Tradition, and employs them as a joint rule, 395
Testimony of the Council of Arles to the above principles, 397
And Constantine's public recognition that the Magisterium of Christ is lodged in the Bishops, 398
CHAPTER VIII.
The Church's Battle for Independence over against the Roman Empire.
Alliance of the Two Powers in the Roman Empire at the Advent of Christ, 400
The Emperor official guardian of all religions, 401
The Christian religion a singular exception, 403
Its cause the position of Christians towards heathendom, 404
Contradiction in belief, worship, and government, 405
The Christian people as the outcome of these three constituents, 411
The course of the Roman Empire and the Christian Church in three hundred years, 414
The ten persecutions from Nero to Diocletian, 417
The Martyrs champions of a great army, 421
St. Paul's account of this army's creation, 422
The wonder of this creation, 424
Supernatural character of the conversion wrought in these times, 426
Accounted for only by the internal action of the Holy Ghost, 427
Power of the kkkkkmk insisted on by Clement of Alexandria, 429
Contrasted by him with the impotence of philosophy, 430
Sufferings which followed on conversion according to Tertullian, 431
7
Martyrs enduring or God what heroes endured for goods of nature, 432
Origen insists on the divine power shown in converting sinners, 434
On miracles of conversion as greater than bodily miracles, 435
The spread of the Church and the conversion of sinners viewed together, 436
Miracles only could account for the spread of the Church, 437[Pg xvii] Statement of Irenaeus as to miraculous powers exercised in his time, 438
Athanasius on the cessation of idolatry, oracles, and magic, 440
And on the greatness of the conversion wrought by Christ, 442
The necessity of miracles in proof of our Lord's mission, 444
The connection between miracles and martyrdom, 445
Parallel between them as to their principle, witness, power, and perpetuity, 449
How the liberty of the Church was gained against the empire, 455
How the Martyrs constructed a basis for civil liberty, 456
The five conflicts of the Church with Judaism, Heresy, Idolatry, Philosophy, and the Roman State, 459
PROLOGUE.
THE KINGDOM AS PROPHESIED AND AS FULFILLED.
[Pg xix] This volume, though entire in itself, is also the continuation of a former work, the "Formation of Christendom," already written and published by me in three volumes. It is, in fact, the further unfolding of the subject under a particular aspect. In truth, the relation between Church and State leads perhaps more directly than any other to the heart of Christendom; for Christendom, both in word and idea, means not only one and the same Church subsisting in all civil governments, but also a community of Christian governments, having a common belief and common principles of action, grounded upon the Incarnation of the Son of God, and the Redemption wrought thereby. For this reason, the Formation of Christendom can hardly be described, unless the relation which ought by the institution of God to subsist between the two great Powers, the Spiritual and Civil, appointed to rule human society, is first clearly established.
In this volume, therefore, I treat first of the relation of these two Powers before the coming of Christ. Secondly, of their relation as it was affected by that coming, in order to show what position the Church of [Pg xx] Christ originally took up in regard to the Civil Power, and what the behaviour of the Civil Power towards the Church was. And, thirdly, the question of principles being thus laid down, the remainder of the volume is occupied with the historical exhibition of the subject during the first three centuries; that is, from the Day of Pentecost to the Nicene Council. The supreme importance of that period will appear to all who reflect that
the Church from the beginning, and in the first centuries of her existence, must be the same in principles with the Church of the
nineteenth and every succeeding century. And this volume is, in fact, a prelude to the treatment of the same subject in the last three centuries, down to the Ecumenical Council of the Vatican.
The subject which I am treating is, then, strictly historical, being the action of a King in the establishment of a kingdom; the action of a Lawgiver in the legislation which He gave to that kingdom; the action of a Priest in founding a hierarchy, whereby that kingdom consists; but, moreover, which is something much more--the action of One who is Priest, Lawgiver, and King at once and always, and therefore whose work is at once one and triple, and indivisible in its unity and triplicity, and issuing in the forming of a people which is simply the creation of its King.
1.--The Kingdom as Prophesied.
As an introduction to it, let me refer to the distinct and explicit prediction of such an event at a point of [Pg xxi] time six centuries before it took effect, as well as now distant from us almost 2500 years, under circumstances upon which it is most instructive to look back. For not only did the secular and the religious histories of mankind then meet together, as they had met before, but they began to stand in a certain relation to each other, which continues from that time to this. The intersection of two societies which work themselves out in the one human history became permanent. At that moment a revelation was given, which is perhaps the most definite detailed and absolute prophecy concerning the whole compass of human society, as viewed in its relation to God, which is
to be found in the Old Testament. And the occasion upon which it was given makes it even more significant, for it was like a burst
of sunlight suddenly scattering the darkness of a storm and bathing the whole landscape in radiance.
That darkness indeed was terrible, for the ancient people chosen by God to support His name among apostate nations no longer lived apart from those nations in their own land which God had provided for them, with an independence based upon the law especially given to them, but lay prostrate under the feet of a heathen invader, who had placed a vassal upon the diminished throne of Solomon, and the royal line of David seemed on the eve of expiring in a degenerate descendant. For the continued infidelities of four hundred years had worn out even the divine patience. In vain had the ten tribes of schismatic Israel been carried into captivity
8
by Assyria. It needed that [Pg xxii] the remaining kingdom of Judah should be broken up and its chiefs deported to Babylon, whose
monarch was now the heir of Assur's great empire, the king of kings, the sceptred head of heathendom. Moreover, in a few years he was to punish the vassal, rebellious to himself, but yet more faithless to the God of Israel, whom he had placed on David's seat, and to burn that glorious Temple which the wisest of kings had erected to the majesty of the one true God. And with that fall of Zedekiah the line of David would cease for ever to sit upon a temporal throne.
A darker moment in the history of the chosen people could not be found, nor a more hopeless prospect, to all seeming, for the carrying out the promises made to Abraham and his seed. What was a divine judgment on the breakers of a special covenant with the one true God appeared to be the triumph of a heathendom which had set up many false gods. Yet it was the moment chosen to send to that very king, who was the executor of the divine chastisements upon a faithless people, a revelation which contained the future lot not only of the people which he had humbled, but of the heathendom of which he was the crown. As he lay upon his bed, Nabuchodonosor had a dream, "and his spirit was terrified, and the dream went out of his mind." He strove in vain to recover it, either by the efforts of his own memory or by the skill of the wise men and soothsayers of Babylon. But among the captives in the imperial city was a youth of David's lineage, nourished at the king's court, and a member of [Pg xxiii] his household. And when Daniel heard the decree of the great king ordering the death of the wise men who failed to interpret a dream which the king could not disclose to them, Daniel turned himself and his three fellow-captives and companions to prayer and supplication, "to the end that they should ask mercy at the face of the God of heaven concerning this secret. Then was the mystery revealed to Daniel by a vision in the night: and Daniel blessed the God of heaven, and speaking he said: Blessed be the name of the Lord from eternity and for evermore: for wisdom and fortitude are His. And He changeth times and ages: taketh away kingdoms and establisheth them,
giveth wisdom to the wise, and knowledge to them that have understanding: He revealeth deep and hidden things, and knoweth what is in darkness, and light is with Him. To Thee, O God of our fathers, I give thanks, and I praise Thee; because Thou hast given me wisdom and strength: and now Thou hast shown me what we desired of Thee, for Thou hast made known to us the king's discourse. After this Daniel went in to Arioch, to whom the king had given orders to destroy the wise men of Babylon, and he spoke thus
to him: Destroy not the wise men of Babylon: bring me in before the king, and I will tell the solution to the king. Then Arioch in haste brought in Daniel to the king, and said to him: I have found a man of the children of the captivity of Judah that will resolve the question to the king. The king answered and said to Daniel, whose name was Baltassar: Thinkest thou indeed that thou canst
tell [Pg xxiv] me the dream that I saw, and the interpretation thereof ? And Daniel made answer before the king and said: The secret
that the king desireth to know, none of the wise men, or the philosophers, or the diviners, or the soothsayers can declare to the king. But there is a God in heaven that revealeth mysteries, who hath shown to thee, O king Nabuchodonosor, what is to come to pass
in the latter times. Thy dream, and the visions of thy head upon thy bed, are these: Thou, O king, didst begin to think in thy bed what should come to pass hereafter: and He that revealeth mysteries showed thee what shall come to pass. To me also this secret
is revealed, not by any wisdom that I have more than all men alive, but that the interpretation might be made manifest to the king, and thou mightest know the thoughts of thy mind. Thou, O king, sawest, and behold there was as it were a great statue: this statue, which was great and high, tall of stature, stood before thee, and the look thereof was terrible. The head of this statue was of fine gold, but the breast and the arms of silver, and the belly and the thighs of brass: and the legs of iron, the feet part of iron and part of clay. Thus thou sawest, until a stone was cut out of a mountain without hands, and it struck the statue upon the feet thereof that were of iron and of clay, and broke them in pieces. Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of a summer's threshing-floor, and they were carried away by the wind, and there was no place found for them: but the stone that [Pg xxv] struck the statue became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth. This is the dream: we will also tell the interpretation thereof before thee, O king. Thou art a king of kings: and the God of heaven hath given thee a kingdom, and strength, and power, and glory: and all places wherein the children of men and the beasts of the field do dwell: he hath also given the birds of the air into thy hand, and hath put all things under thy power: thou therefore art the head of gold. And after thee shall rise up another kingdom, inferior to thee, of silver: and another third kingdom of brass, which shall rule over all the world. And the fourth kingdom shall be as iron. As iron breaketh into pieces and subdueth all things, so shall that break and destroy all these. And whereas thou sawest the feet and the toes part of potter's clay, and part of iron: the kingdom shall be divided, but yet
it shall take its origin from the iron, according as thou sawest the iron mixed with the miry clay. And as the toes of the feet were part
of iron and part of clay, the kingdom shall be partly strong and partly broken. And whereas thou sawest the iron mixed with miry clay, they shall be mingled indeed together with the seed of man, but they shall not stick fast one to another, as iron cannot be mixed with clay. But in the days of those kingdoms the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, and His kingdom shall not be delivered up to another people, and it shall break in pieces and shall consume all these kingdoms, and itself shall stand for ever. According as thou sawest that the stone was cut out of [Pg xxvi] the mountain without hands, and broke in pieces the clay, and the iron, and the brass, and the silver, and the gold, the great God hath shown the king what shall come to pass hereafter, and the dream is true, and the interpretation thereof is faithful."
No one can study the vision and its interpretation without seeing that the fabric of a great temporal empire, whose ruler is called a king of kings, and whose seat is the city wherein Nimrod, "the great hunter before the Lord," set up the first kingdom, to stand for ever at the head of human history a kingdom symbolical not of justice but of force, is therein contrasted with the fabric of a kingdom which the God of heaven should set up. And it is specially noted that He should set up this kingdom in the times of the
9
empires denoted by the statue. And of the kingdom so to be set up four things are predicated in, as it were, an ascending scale. First, there is its divine institution: "the God of heaven shall set up a kingdom," and that in a manner wholly unexampled, which is expressed by "a stone cut out of a mountain without hands." Secondly, "the kingdom shall never be destroyed." Thirdly, and further, "it shall not be delivered up to another people;" a process which, according to the interpretation of the vision, was to take place
three times in the empires represented by the statue. Fourthly, "that it should break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, while itself should last for ever."
Moreover, as the earthly kingdom was really a kingdom, so the force of the similitude running through the [Pg xxvii] whole, and heightened by the effect of contrast, declares that the heavenly should be a kingdom. As the seat of the earthly kingdom was this world, so evidently the seat of the heavenly is this same world. As the earthly kingdom should be destroyed, so the heavenly should be exempt from destruction. As the earthly kingdom was to pass from one people to another, so the heavenly kingdom should not pass from one people to another. But then comes a culmination which no one could anticipate. For not only is there an antagonism between the earthly and the heavenly kingdom, but by force of it, and in consequence of it, the heavenly should consume and break in pieces the earthly. Whereby the hearer is given to understand that the earthly kingdom, terrible and grand and all-powerful as it seemed to be, was created for the sake of the heavenly, which in due time should be set up in it, but not of it nor from it.
It is no less implied through the whole tenor of the vision that the authority which constitutes the essence of a kingdom--that is, supreme and independent authority, which is expressed in legislation and administered in government--subsists as much in the heavenly as in the earthly kingdom, with this marked distinction, that it is transitory in the one case and permanent in the other.
And, finally, the power by which all this should be done was something beyond human power, and without parallel, very strange and astonishing, "a stone cut out of a mountain without hands," which should not only strike the statue upon its feet, but itself grow, "until it became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth."
[Pg xxviii] Thus the filling of the whole earth with the stone which struck the statue and then became a great mountain terminates the vision. But it is no less its scope and object. The statue exists before that the stone may come after. The statue and the stone, as thus exhibited, indicate the respective value in the divine counsels of the powers which they represent; that is, the subordination of the human kingdom to the divine, both in the order of causality and in duration, is distinctly laid down. And the end of both accords with this. The great statue, when struck by the stone, became like the chaff of a summer's threshing-floor; but the stone which struck it filled the whole earth. And the vision leaves it in possession.
The vision also reaches from end to end. It begins with the first empire, which is human, and runs back by the place in which it is seated to the commencement of actual things; and it ends with the last, which is divine, and which shall consume all the other kingdoms recorded, and itself last for ever. Thus the vision grasps the whole organism of society in the human race, as it lies unrolled before the providence of God.
2.--The Kingdom as Fulfilled.
Such was the prophecy. Now let us pass over a thousand years, and take the first fulfilment of the vision as it presented itself to an ancient saint at the beginning of the fifth century. We will only note that in the interval Nabuchodonosor and Cyrus and Alexander and Caesar had set up the four world-empires. [Pg xxix] They were four indeed, for they passed three times from one people to another--from Chaldean to Persian, from Persian to Grecian, from Grecian to Roman, as the variety of metals in the statue was
interpreted to mean. Yet were they also one--a unity which, as that of a single person, the great statue so faithfully represented. For they were one with each other in the character and unbroken tradition of the same civilisation, and in the principle of their authority, which was conquest. They were filled with the same spirit of heathen domination, which was in truth the voice and the power of
a false worship, as with the spirit of one man who rose in Babylon to set in Rome.[1] Two Apostles, special friends and constant
fellow-workers, had marked this identity by giving the mystical name of Babylon to heathen Rome--St. Peter[2] in the epistle which he dates from Babylon, St. John in his vision of the woman drunk with the blood of saints and martyrs, and seated upon the seven hills, whom he himself interprets to be "the great city which had kingdom over the kings of the earth." These empires had run their appointed course, and the last and greatest of them, which was likewise the heir and successor of the three preceding in power and thought, as well as in the body of their territories and the soul which ruled therein, was ending in disgrace and dissolution. For at length the tribes of the North [Pg xxx] had broken through the long-guarded frontiers of Roman power. Alaric with his Goths had taken Rome, and a deep cry of distress arose through all the vast provinces of her empire. Every city in that wide domain trembled with the sense of insecurity for the present and fear for the future which the fall of Rome inspired. Just at this moment the great Western Father, whose voice sounded like the voice of the Church herself, wrote thus to a heathen inquirer:--
"Faith opens the door to intelligence, while unbelief closes it. Where is the man who would not be moved to belief, simply by so vast an order of events proceeding from the beginning; by the mere connection of various ages, which accredits the present by the past,
10
while it confirms antiquity by what is recent? Out of the Chaldean nation a single man is chosen, remarkable for a most constant pi-ety. Divine promises are disclosed to this man, which are to find their completion after a vast series of ages in the last times, and it is predicted that all nations are to receive a benediction in his seed. This man being a worshipper of the one true God, the Creator of the universe, begets in his old age a son, of a wife whom barrenness and age had long deprived of all hope of offspring. From him
is propagated a most numerous people, which multiplies in Egypt, whither a divine disposition of things, redoubling its promises
and effects, had carried that family from eastern parts. From their servitude in Egypt a strong people is led forth by terrible signs and miracles; impious nations are driven out before it; it is [Pg xxxi] brought into the promised land, settled therein, and exalted into a kingdom. Then it falls more and more into sin; it perpetually offends the true God, who had conferred upon it so many favours, by violating His worship; it is scourged with various misfortunes; it is visited with consolations, and so carried on to the incarnation and manifestation of Christ. All the promises made to this nation, all its prophecies, its priesthoods, its sacrifices, its temple, in a word,
all its sacred rites, had for their special object this Christ, the Word of God, the Son of God--God that was to come in the flesh,
that was to die, to rise again, to ascend to heaven, that by the exceeding power of His name was to obtain in all nations a population
dedicated to Himself; and in Him remission of sins and eternal salvation unto such as believed.
"Christ came. In His birth, His life, His words, His deeds, His sufferings, His death, His resurrection, His ascension,--all the predictions of the prophets are fulfilled. He sends forth the Holy Spirit; He fills the faithful who are assembled in one house, and who by their prayers and desires are expecting this very promise. They are filled with the Holy Spirit; they speak suddenly with the tongues
of all nations; they confidently refute errors; they proclaim a most salutary truth; they exhort to penitence for the faults of past life;
they promise pardon from the divine grace. Their proclamation of piety and true religion is followed by suitable signs and miracles. A savage unbelief is stirred up against them. They endure what had been foretold; [Pg xxxii] hope in what had been promised; teach what had been commanded them. Few in number, they are scattered through the world. They convert populations with marvellous facility. In the midst of enemies they grow. They are multiplied by persecutions. In the straits of affliction they are spread abroad over vast regions. At first they are uninstructed, of very low condition, very few in number. Their ignorance passes into the bright-est intelligence; their low ranks produce the most cultivated eloquence; their fewness becomes a multitude; they subjugate to Christ
minds the most acute, learned, and accomplished, and convert them into preachers of piety and salvation. In the alternating intervals of adversity and prosperity, they exercise a watchful patience and temperance. As the world verges in a perpetual decline, and by exhaustion expresses the coming of its last age, since this also is what prophecy led them to expect, they with greater confidence await the eternal happiness of the heavenly city. And amid all this the unbelief of impious nations rages against the Church of Christ, which works out victory by patience, and by preserving unshaken faith against the cruelty of opponents. When the sacrifice unveiled by the truth, which had so long been covered under mystical promises, had at length succeeded, those sacrifices which prefigured this one were removed by the destruction of the Temple itself. This very Jewish people, rejected for its unbelief, was cast out of its own seat, and scattered everywhere throughout the world, to carry with it the sacred writings; so that the testimony [Pg xxxiii] of prophecy, by which Christ and the Church were foretold, may not be thought a fiction of ours for the occasion, but be produced by our very adversaries--a testimony in which it is also foretold that they should not believe. The temples and images of demons, and the sacrilegious rites of that worship, are gradually overthrown, as prophecy foretold. Heresies against the name of Christ, which yet veil themselves under that name, swarm, as was foretold, in order to call out the force of teaching in our holy religion. In all these things, as we read their prediction, so we discern their fulfilment, and from so vast a portion which is fulfilled we rest assured of what is still to come. Is there a single mind which yearns after eternity and feels the shortness of the present life, that can resist the light and the force of this divine authority?"[3]
St. Augustine wrote thus to his friend Volusian, the uncle of St. Melania, a Roman nobleman of high reputation, who was then, as he continued for many years [Pg xxxiv] to be, a heathen. But we must also take note that he wrote at a point of time scarcely less remarkable than that of the vision interpreted by Daniel. The old world with its sequence of world-empires was passing away. And
so soon as it passed another travail of extraordinary severity was preparing for the Church, such a travail as even the eagle eye of the
Bishop of Hippo could not discern as he stood before the beginning of its accomplishment. When he wrote there was a Catholic Church, the fulfilment of a long train of prophecies in that "connection of ages" which he has so wonderfully drawn out, but there was not yet a Christendom. Nor could he the least foresee what was to take place before that Christendom could be formed. Only, as he spoke, the iron of Roman discipline--the inflexible Romulean mind--which had held together the miry clay of so many various and divergent nationalities, European, Asiatic, African, so that "the kingdom took its origin from the iron," was losing its tenacity. That vast structure of Roman power, the breaking up of which had been feared in the wars and insurrections arising upon the death of Nero, and extinction of the family of Augustus, was in truth dissolving.[4] The western and eastern limbs of the statue were parting away from each [Pg xxxv] other, and the toes were crumbling. But though Augustine heard the sound of the advancing tide, he saw not yet the full flood of the deluge from the north; and still less could he foresee the counter desolation from the south; Teuton flood and Arab desolation which in their joint effect would blast utterly the Roman Peace, and break the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold in pieces together, until they became like the chaff of the summer's threshing-floor.
As little could he anticipate another sight, the further fulfilment of the vision, when the provinces, those crumbling toes of the
statue, which lay before him in an impending dissolution, were to be formed into great independent kingdoms, having for the com-
11
mon foundation of their power "the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us." Then in that "connection of ages" which should be drawn out after the time of Augustine in even greater distinctness than before him, and with greater claim upon the believing mind, which "yearns after eternity," a grander fulfilment of the vision would be disclosed. The royalties set up by barbarian chiefs of tribes among incoherent populations of victors and vanquished were to educate mature nations with individual character in the one Christian faith, and shine as distinct stars set in the crown of the Successor to Peter's pastorship. For as the Word made flesh created Christian monarchies and Christian nations in their several being, so the charge of the Word to a disciple by the lake of Gennesareth, "Feed My Sheep," created the great unity of Christendom which bound them [Pg xxxvi] together. In Constantine one empire had acknowledged the reign of Christ, and bent the neck of heathen domination to raise the cross upon a heathen crown. But then a group of nations should base the fabric of their laws, and the whole civilisation which redeemed them from barbarism, upon the truth that God assumed flesh for man's sake, and should acknowledge in Peter's Successor the Vicar of that God, who by and in that pastoral rule of Peter made them members of one Body, and in so making them "took the Gentiles for His inheritance, and the utmost parts of the earth for His possession."
This was a second and further fulfilment of the vision, which as yet Augustine saw not, nor even anticipated; but after thus writing he set himself in the last years of his life to a great task, even that of comparing together from their origin to their end the course of the two societies, not national, but world-wide, which run out through human history, intermingled together, and claiming possession of the same man. First, the natural society of the human race played upon by all the passions and infirmities which are the effect
of man's original Fall; and secondly, that other society chosen by God from the beginning in view of His Son's Incarnation, for the purpose of repairing and counterworking that Fall. It was the capture of Rome by Alaric, and the deep despondency which thence arose in the minds of many, both Christian and heathen, that moved him originally to this design, of which the first tracing is seen in the letter to Volusian just quoted. He sought to meet [Pg xxxvii] conclusions unfavourable to the Christian faith, which were drawn by weak, or narrow, or unbelieving minds from the fall of the imperial city. His plan accordingly led him to take a complete view of
all human history; and the result has been that one of the last representatives of the old world, and certainly the greatest of all as thinker, philosopher, and theologian, the most universal genius of the patristic ages, whether among Greeks or Latins, has left us a Philosophy of History, the first in time, and as yet unequalled in ability; for it supplies a key to the acts of man and the providence of God in that masterly comparison between the City of God and the City of the devil in their origin, their course, and their end.
The leading thought of this great work gives me a final text bearing on the subject of this volume.
"Thus, then, two Cities have been created by two loves: the earthly, by that love of self which reaches even to the contempt of God; the heavenly, by the love of God which reaches even to the contempt of self. The first has its boast in self; the second in its Lord. For the first seeks its glory from men; whereas to the second, God, the witness of conscience, is the greatest glory. The first in that glory which it has made for itself exalts its own head; the second says to its God, 'Thou art my glory and the lifter up of my head.'
In the first the lust of domination sways both its rulers and the nations which it subjugates. In the second a mutual service of charity
is exercised by rulers who consult the good of subjects, and by subjects who [Pg xxxviii] practise obedience to rulers. The first loves in its own potentates its own excellence; the second says to the God of its choice, 'I will love Thee, O Lord, my strength.' And thus in the first its own wise men, living after human fashion, pursue the goods of their body or their mind, or both at once, or they who might have known God, have not 'glorified him as God nor given thanks, but became vain in their thoughts, and their foolish heart was darkened; professing themselves to be wise,' that is, extolling themselves in their own wisdom through the pride that mastered them, 'they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of a corruptible man, and of birds, and of four-footed beasts, and of creeping things;' for they either led their peoples or followed them in the adoration of
such-like images; and 'worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever.' But in the second there is no wisdom of man save piety, by which the true God is rightly worshipped, awaiting its reward in the society of saints, not men only, but angels, that God may be all in all."[5]
I put together these three facts of human history, the vision of the King of Babylon interpreted by Daniel six hundred years before Christ, the summary of its fulfilment down to his own age written by St Augustine four hundred years after the coming of Christ, and his delineation, a few years later, of the Two Cities, as set forth by him in a work on which the Christian mind [Pg xxxix] has now been nurtured for fourteen hundred and fifty years. The simple juxtaposition of these shows how Babylon stretches to Rome, and Rome is heir of Babylon; and the heathen man thus formed illustrates "the Man who is born in Sion, the city of the great
King."[6] It is true that the two great Powers of Civil and Spiritual government, the relation between which forms the subject of this
volume, are not exactly represented as concerns that relation in the vision of Daniel; but only the heathen growth of the Civil Power, and the miraculous rise, permanent rule, and progressive growth of the Spiritual Power in the midst of it; yet the mighty promise is recorded that in presence of the Civil Power the Spiritual shall never pass away; rather that it shall last unchanged, while the other is shifting and transitory; and also the cognate truth, that the great and terrible Power represented by the Statue is, in the counsels of God, subordinate in its scope to the Power represented by the Stone.
It is true, again, that the vivid contrast of the Two Cities as drawn by St. Augustine does not represent the legitimate relation of the
12
Two Powers to each other, but only the perversion of the one Power from its true end and object, and the perfect antagonism of the other to that perversion.
But the kingdom set up by the God of heaven in the vision interpreted by Daniel, and the connection of ages dwelt upon by St. Augustine, which leads up to the Person of Christ, and then starts afresh from Him, and [Pg xl] the Divine City delineated by St. Augustine, fit exactly into each other, and so they seem to me to form together an appropriate introduction to that most remarkable period of history with which the present volume is occupied, when the Stone cut out without hands struck the Statue, and became a great mountain, in preparation for that further growth when it would fill the whole earth.
The Statue presented in vision to the heathen king has indeed been swept away, but in every country a reduced likeness of it, "the look whereof is terrible," stands over against "the Man born in Sion." And the Two Cities everywhere run on in their predestined course until the end contemplated by Augustine takes effect. But as he did not discern the second fulfilment of the divine kingdom which followed upon the wandering of the nations, so neither can we discern the third and yet grander fulfilment when the divine kingdom shall become to the whole world what once it was in the Roman Empire. For, to repeat St. Augustine's words, "In all these things as we read their prediction, so we discern their fulfilment, and from so vast a portion which is fulfilled we rest assured of what is still to come." And "the stone that struck the statue became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth."
February 12, 1882. CHURCH AND STATE AS SEEN IN
THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. CHAPTER I.
RELATION BETWEEN THE CIVIL AND SPIRITUAL POWERS FROM ADAM TO CHRIST.
1.--The Divine and Human Society founded in Adam, refounded in Noah.
[Pg 1] In one of the most ancient books of the world, which, in addition to its antiquity, all Christians venerate as containing the original tradition of man's creation, guaranteed in purity and accuracy by divine assistance given to the writer, we read the following words:--"God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds, and cattle, and everything that creepeth on the earth after its kind. And God saw that it was good. And he said: Let us make man to our image and likeness: and let him have dominion over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and the beasts, and the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth. And God created man to his own [Pg 2] image: to the image of God he created him: male and female he created them."
And further: "The Lord God formed man of the slime of the earth; and breathed into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul.... And the Lord God took man and put him into the paradise of pleasure, to dress it and to keep it. And he commanded him, saying, Of every tree of paradise thou shalt eat; but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat. For in what day soever thou shalt eat of it, thou shalt die the death. And the Lord God said, It is not good for man to be alone; let us make him
a help like unto himself. And the Lord God having formed out of the ground all the beasts of the earth, and all the fowls of the air, brought them to Adam to see what he would call them: for whatsoever Adam called any living creature, the same is its name.
And Adam called all the beasts by their names, and all the fowls of the air, and all the cattle of the field; but for Adam there was not
found a helper like himself. Then the Lord God cast a deep sleep upon Adam: and when he was fast asleep he took one of his ribs and filled up flesh for it. And the Lord God built the rib which he took from Adam into a woman: and brought her to Adam. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man. Wherefore a man shall leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they shall be two in one flesh. And they were both naked, Adam and his wife, and were not ashamed."
[Pg 3] Such is the account of the origin of man, of woman, of marriage, as the root of human society, and of that society itself, beginning in the absolute unity of one who was father and head of his race, created in full possession of reason and language, and exercising both by an intuitive knowledge of the qualities of living creatures as they are brought before him by his Maker. This account stands at the head of human history, and has been venerated as truth by more than a hundred generations of men since it was written down by Moses, not to speak of those many generations among whom it had been a living tradition before he had written
it down. Human language scarcely possesses elsewhere such an assemblage of important truths in so few words. Perhaps the only parallel to it is contained in the fourteen verses which stand at the opening of St. John's Gospel, wherein are recorded the Godhead and Incarnation of the Divine Word. The first creation has its counterpart only in the second; and the restoration of man by the
13
personal action of God alone surpasses, or, perhaps, more truly may be said to complete, the Idea of his original formation by the same personal action of the same Divine Word, who, great as He is in creating, is yet greater in redeeming, but is one in both, and in both carries out one Idea.
For the creation of man as one individual, who is likewise the head and bearer of a race, is the key to all the divine government of the world. The fact rules its destinies through all their evolution. The world, as it concerns the actions, the lot, and the reciprocal effect of [Pg 4] men upon each other, would have been quite a different world if it had not sprung out of this unity. If, for instance, mankind had been a collection of human beings in all things like to what they now are, except in one point, that they were independent of each other and unconnected in their origin. This unity further makes the race capable of that divine restoration which from the beginning was intended, and with a view to which man was made a race: which in restoring man likewise unspeakably exalts him, for He who made Adam the father and head of the race, made him also "the figure of One that was to come."
Let us briefly enumerate the parts of the divine plan as disclosed to us in the narration just given.
In the council held by the Blessed Trinity it is said, "Let us make man to our image and likeness;" not, Let us make men, but man:
the singular number used of the whole work indicates that the creation to be made was not only an individual but a family. From the beginning the family is an essential part of the plan. This is no less indicated in the single creation of Adam first, not the simultaneous creation of the male and female, as in the case of all other creatures, but the creation by himself of the head alone, from whom first woman by herself, and then from the conjunction of the two his family is drawn. In Adam first, while as yet he is alone, the high gifts of reason, speech, and knowledge indicated in the twofold and also congenital possession of reason and language, are exhib-
ited as residing as in a fountain-head, when all creatures of the earth and the [Pg 5] air are brought before him by his Maker, and
he with intuitive understanding of their several qualities and uses imposes on them the corresponding name. Thus Adam is created complete, a full-grown man, in whom the divine gift of thought finds expression in the equally divine gift of language, both exerted with unerring truth, for it is intimated that the names which he assigns to the creatures thus passed in review render accurately their several natures. It is not said that the Lord God intimated to Adam the names which he should give; but the knowledge by which
he gave the names was part of his original endowment, like the gift of thought and language, which answer to each other and imply each other, and in a being composed of soul and body complete by their union and joint exercise the intellectual nature. "The Lord God brought all beasts and all fowls before Adam to see what he would call them; for whatsoever Adam called any living creature, the same is its name."
This presentation of the creatures before Adam, and their naming by him, is the token of the dominion promised to him "over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and the beasts, and the whole earth," as the result of his being made to "the image and likeness" of the Triune God. Only when he has thus taken possession of his royalty is the creation of the family completed out of himself. For when "for Adam there was not found a helper like himself," the Lord God took not again of the slime of the earth to mould a woman and bring her to man, but "He cast a deep [Pg 6] sleep upon Adam, and built the rib which He took from Adam into a woman, and brought her to Adam." And then He uttered the blessing which should fill the earth with the progeny of the woman who had been drawn from the man her head, saying, "Increase and multiply and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures that move upon the earth."
What, then, is the image and likeness of the Triune God? The image consists in the soul, with its two powers of the understanding and the will, proceeding out of it, indivisible from it, yet distinct. May we not infer that the likeness is the obedience of the soul, with its powers, to the eternal law? This law, viewed in the Triune God, the prototype of man's being, is the sanctity of the Divine Nature; but in man, thus created, the obedience to it was the gift of original justice superadded to his proper nature: the gift by which the soul, in the free exercise of the understanding and the will, was obedient to the law of God, its Creator.
This was an image and likeness which belonged to Adam in a double capacity, firstly, as an individual, secondly, as head of a family; for it was to descend to each individual of the family in virtue of natural procreation from Adam. The man created after the image and likeness of the Triune God was, according to the divine intention, to be repeated in every one of the race.
But what of the family or race which was to be evolved out of Adam alone? Not the individual only [Pg 7] but the race also is in the divine plan. Is there a further image of the Triune God in the mode of the race's formation?
To give an answer to this question, we must first consider what is the prototype of that singular unity according to which the first parents of the race are not formed together out of the earth, male and female, like the inferior creatures. For in most marked distinction from all these man is formed by himself, and alone; receives the command to eat of all trees in the garden except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, under penalty of death if he take of it; and then is shown exercising the grandeur of his knowledge and the fulness of his royalty in the naming of the subject creatures. But inasmuch as none of them could supply him with a companion, and as "it was not good for him to be alone," a council of the Triune God is held again, and a help like to himself is taken out of
14
himself. Is there not here, with that infinite distance which separates the created from the Increate, a yet striking image of the Divine
Filiation?
Again, from the conjunction of the two, from Adam the head, and from Eve when she has been drawn out of him, proceeds, in virtue of the blessing of God, the human family. Is there not here, again, at that distance which separates divine from human things, an image of the procession of the Third Divine Person, the Lord, and the Giver of life, from whom all life proceeds?
May we not then say with reverence, that from the [Pg 8] council of the Triune God, "Let us make man to our image and likeness," proceeds forth the individual man, an earthly counterpart in his memory, understanding, and will to the divine Creator, and likewise man, the family, a created image of the primal mystery, the ineffable joy of the Godhead, the ever blessed Trinity in Unity? And since the origin of creation itself is the free act of God, it ought not to surprise us that the chief work of His hands in the visible universe should reflect in the proportion of a creature the secret life of the Divine Nature, the Unity and Trinity of the Godhead.
But next to this primal mystery, which is the source of all creation, stands that unspeakable condescension, that act of sovereign
goodness, by which God has chosen to assume a created nature into personal unity with Himself, and to crown the creation which
He has made. As to this the first Adam, in all his headship, with the privileges included in it, the transmission to his family of original justice, and of that wonderful gift of adoption superadded to it, is "the figure of Him who was to come." But more also, St. Paul
tells us, is indicated in the formation of Eve out of Adam during the sleep divinely cast upon him. This was the "great sacrament of Christ and of His Church" (Eph. v. 32), to which he pointed in reminding his hearers of the high institution of Christian marriage. And thus we learn that God, in the act of forming the natural race, supernaturally endowed, was pleased to foreshadow by the building of Eve, "the mother of all living," out of the [Pg 9] first Adam, the building of another Eve, the second and truer mother of a divine race, out of the wounded heart of the Redeemer of the world asleep upon the cross. As then in Adam's headship we have the figure of the Headship of Christ, so in the issuing of Eve from him in his sleep we have the Passion of Christ and the issuing forth of His Bride from it, when His work of redemption was completed and His royalty proclaimed.
Thus the mysteries of the blessed Trinity, that is, of God the Creator, and of the Incarnation and Passion of Christ, that is, of God the Redeemer, lie folded up, as it were, in the Mosaic narrative of the mode in which Adam was created, and in the headship of the race conferred upon him.
Before we approach the sin of Adam and its consequences to human society, let us cast one glance back upon the beauty and splendour of the divine plan in the original creation as it is disclosed to us in the narrative of Moses. As the crown of the visible creation is placed a being who is at once an individual and the head of a family, representing in his personal nature the divine Unity and Trin-
ity, and in the race of which he is to stand at the head the same divine Unity and Trinity in their aspect towards creation; representing the royalty of God in his dominion over the creatures, a dominion the condition of which is the obedience of his own compound nature to the law given to it by the Creator; representing again in the vast number to which his race shall extend the prolific energy
of the [Pg 10] Lord of Hosts; representing also in that secret and altogether wonderful mystery, out of which the multiplication of
his race springs, the yet untold secret of the divine mercy, in virtue of which his fathership is the prelude to a higher fathership, the first man is the pattern of the Second, and the royalty of his creation but a rehearsal at the beginning of the world of the reparation which is to crown its end.
The whole work of creation as above described, depends in its result upon the exercise of man's free-will. His value, before God, lies simply in the way in which he exerts this great prerogative of his reasonable nature. Without it he would be reduced from one who chooses his course, and in that choice becomes good or evil, to the condition of a machine devoid of any moral being. To test this free-will man was given a commandment. We know that he failed under the trial; that he broke the commandment. His disobedi-
ence to his Creator was punished by the disobedience of his own compound nature to himself. That divine grace, which we term the state of original justice, and in virtue of which his soul, with its understanding and will, illuminated and fortified, was subject to God, and the body with all its appetites was subject to the soul, was withdrawn. He became subject to death, the certain death of the body, with all that train of diseases and pains which precede it; and the final separation of the soul from its Creator, unless by the
way which God indicated to him he should be restored. Becoming a sinner, his refuge was penitence; henceforth his life was to be the life of a penitent; [Pg 11] he had lost the grace which was bestowed royally on the innocent; he was left the grace which was to support and lead on the penitent. From the garden of pleasure he is expelled, to go forth into a world which produces thorns and thistles, unless he water it with the sweat of his brow. To all this I only allude, since my proper subject is to trace the first formation of human society as it came forth from the fall. But the primal state of man could not be passed over, because the state in which he grew up, and the state in which he now stands, cannot be understood nor estimated rightly without a due conception of that original condition.
With the loss of original justice Adam does not lose the headship of his race. All men that are to be born remain his children, and continue to be not a species of similar individuals, but a family, a race. All the dealings of God with them continue to be dealings
15
with them as a race. Adam's fathership, had he not fallen, would have been to them the source of an inestimable good, would have secured to them the transmission of original justice, crowned as it further was by a wholly gratuitous gift, the gift of adoption to
a divine sonship. But that fathership, in consequence of his sin, actually transmitted to them a nature penally deprived both of the original endowment and of the superadded adoption; and, as a fact, all the difficulties which occur to the mind in the divine government of the world spring out of this treatment by God of man as a family, a race. But likewise through this continuing fathership of Adam, the Fathership of Christ appears as the completion [Pg 12] of an original plan, devised before the foundation of the world, and actually carried out at the appointed time. He was to be son of David and son of Abraham in order that He might be Son of man. This original plan of God is not frustrated but executed by the fall of Adam. The yet undisclosed secrets of human lot have their origin in Adam and their solution in Christ. We are allowed to see that they belong to one plan. No doubt the hidden things
of God in this dispensation baffle our scrutiny: they remain for the trial of faith until faith passes into sight, but we are allowed to
see the fact of a vast compensation; and over against the fathership which brought death and corruption and the interminable ills of human life, we see all the supernatural blessings of the new covenant, consisting in the triple dowry of adoption, betrothal, and consecration, come to man as a spiritual race descending from the Second Adam.
Thus, not only the primary but the actual state of man in society springs out of an absolute unity. We have here to note two great truths. Adam, as he was expelled from paradise to till the earth and subdue it, was the head of his race in two particulars: first, as to natural society, whence springs civil government; and secondly, as to the worship of God, and the promises included in that worship, whence springs priesthood and all the fabric of religion. The two unities, the social and the religious, had in him their common root; and man thus comes before us in history as a family in which the first father stands at the head of the civil and [Pg 13] religious
order in most intimate intercourse with God. The only description which we possess of that first period of human society from the
Fall to the Deluge, suggests to us a state which seems absolutely walled round by God with securities, both as concerns human life in the intercourse between man and man, and as concerns the purity of their worship of God. As to the first, have we not said all which can be said when we say that they were a family? The king of the human race was the father of every one in it. Certainly if any king could ever command the love and respect of his subjects it must have been Adam in that royalty.
But let us very briefly consider the bearing of man's condition before the fall, as set forth to us in the sacred records which have been so far followed, upon his knowledge of divine and human things, and his moral state in his first society after the fall.
We have seen Adam in possession of a great dignity, created in the maturity of reason, exercising the full power of thought and speech as directed to truth by an inward gift, which conveys to him the knowledge of the creatures surrounding him; moreover, taught by God as to his present duties and future hopes. We have seen a wife bestowed upon him, who is, as it were, created for him and drawn from him, and a vast family promised to him. He is thus made father and head of his family and his race, and his Creator is his immediate Teacher. After his fall these privileges do not become to him as if they had never been. The memory of them all
is [Pg 14] complete in him, but a very large portion of their substance remains. Let us take three points, which are enough for our
purpose. He receives, at the fall itself, firstly, a great promise of God; secondly, he becomes the Teacher and, thirdly, the Priest of his race. As to the promise, God declares to him that, as the result of the serpent seducing the woman to sin, He will create enmity between the serpent and the woman, the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman; the seed of the woman should crush the serpent's head; the serpent should lie in wait for his heel. All human history is gathered up in that division of the race, between the seed of the woman, from which springs the City of God, and the seed of the serpent, from which springs the City of the Devil. That is a communication of fresh knowledge to Adam, knowledge of good and evil, a mixture of consolation and sorrow. That is a disclosure of the issue of things stretching to the very end of the world, which comes to sustain Adam in his penitence, to complete the knowledge which he previously had of God and of himself.
In this first great prophecy, which embraces all the religion, the hope, and the destiny of man, the consequences of which are not yet worked out, man is treated as a race. The punishment falls on him as a Father; the Woman through whom it comes, the Mother of his children, points to another Woman and Mother, through whom it is to be reversed, and the Deliverer is to come to him as a Descendant.
Adam, then, was cast out of paradise, but not without [Pg 15] hope, still less without knowledge, for he carried with him the knowledge which God had given to him, and the lesson of a great experience. Thus he became the great Teacher of his family. Through him from whom they received natural being and nurture, they received the knowledge of God, of their own end, of all which it behoved them to know for the purpose of their actual life. The great Father was likewise the great Penitent; and the first preacher of God's justice to men told them likewise of His mercy: a preacher powerful and unequalled in both his themes.
But, by the fall, Adam became likewise the Priest in his family. We learn from the narrative of Cain and Abel that the worship of God by sacrifice had been instituted, and it is not obscurely intimated that it was instituted even before he was cast out of paradise, since God Himself clothed Adam and Eve with skins of beasts, which, doubtless, were slain in sacrifice, since they were not used for food.[7]
16
The rite of bloody sacrifice, utterly unintelligible without the notion of sin, and inconceivable without a positive divine institution, so precise in its formularies about the statement of sin, and the need of expiation, is an everliving prophecy of the great sacrifice which God had intended "before the foundation of the world," and a token of the knowledge which He had communicated to [Pg
16] Adam before he became a father. Unfallen man needed to make no sacrifice, but only the triple offering of adoration, thanksgiv-
ing, and prayer. These Adam would have given before he fell; after his fall he became a priest, and the bloody sacrifice to God of
His own creatures, a mode of propitiating God which man could never have invented or imagined of himself, is a token of the ritual enjoined upon him, and of the faith which it symbolised and perpetuated.
Such, then, was the condition of the children of Adam, the first human society, in those "many days" which passed before Cain
rose up against Abel: the state of a family living in full knowledge of their own creation, being, and end, in vast security, for who
was there to hurt them? worshipping God the Creator by a rite which He had ordained in token of a great promise, at their head the Father, the Teacher, and the Priest, with the triple dignity which emanates from the divine sovereignty, and makes a perfect government.
The two powers which were to rule the world rested as yet undivided upon Adam after his fall.
It is evident that nothing could be further from a state of savagery or barbarism, from a state of defective knowledge of God and man, and his end, than such a condition as this, which suggests itself necessarily to any one who considers attentively the sacred narrative.
But as Adam in paradise was left to the exercise of his free-will, and fell out of the most guarded state of innocence by its misuse,
so the first-born of Adam broke out of this secure condition of patriarchal life through [Pg 17] the same misuse, and begun by fratricide the City of the Devil. We are told that God remonstrated with him when he fell under the influence of envy and jealousy, but in vain. He rose against his brother and slew him; he received in consequence the curse of God; "went out from his face, and dwelt
a fugitive on the earth at the east side of Eden." There it is said that he built the first city, on which St. Augustine comments: "It is
written of Cain that he built a city; but Abel, as a stranger and pilgrim, built none."
The fratricide of Cain leads to a split in the human family. The line of Cain seems to depart from Adam and live in independence of him. It becomes remarkable for its progress in mechanical arts, and for the first example of bigamy. The end of it is all we need here note. In process of time, "as men multiplied on the earth," two societies seem to divide the race of Adam--one entitled that of "the sons of God," the other that of "the daughters of men." But the ruin of the whole race is brought about by the blending of the better with the worse: the bad prevail, the two Cities become mixed together in inextricable confusion. God left to man throughout his free-will, but when the result of this was that "the wickedness of men was great upon the earth, and that all the thoughts of their heart was bent upon evil at all times," that is, when the City of the Devil had prevailed over the City of God in that patriarchal race which He had so wonderfully taught and guarded, He interfered to destroy those whose rebellion was hopeless of amendment, and to make out of one who [Pg 18] had remained faithful to Him a new beginning of the race.
The race had been cut down to the root because in the midst of knowledge and grace it had deserted God; and Noah, as he stepped forth from the ark, began with a solemn act of reparation. He "built an altar to the Lord and offered holocausts upon it of all cattle and fowls that were clean." God accepted the sacrifice, inasmuch as it was in and through this act that He bestowed the earth upon Noah and his sons, and gave him everything that lived and moved on it for food. He consecrated afresh the life of man by ordaining that whoever took human life away, that is, by an act of violence, not of justice, should himself be punished with the loss of his own life; and He grounded this great ordinance upon the fact that man was made after the image of God. At the same time God repeated to Noah and his sons the primal blessing which had multiplied the race, and was to fill the earth with it, and made a covenant with him and with his seed for ever, a covenant to be afterwards developed, but never to be abrogated. It is to be noted that the sacred narrative dwells rather upon the sacrifice made by Noah immediately upon issuing from the ark than upon the original sacrifice offered by Adam. Of the first institution of sacrifice it makes only incidental mention, referring with great significance to those skins
of beasts, of which God provided a covering for the nakedness of Adam and Eve. It is as if the rite of sacrifice, instituted as a
prophecy of the future expiation of sin, might fitly [Pg 19] supply from the skins of its victims a covering for that nakedness which
sin alone had revealed and made shameful. The mention of this fact ensues immediately upon the record of the fall, before Adam is cast out of paradise. And again, by the mention of the sacrifice of Abel, and of its acceptance, it is shown that the rite already existed in the children of the first man. But now the sacrifice of Noah, and the covenant made in it, as being of so vast an import to every succeeding generation, is described at length as the starting-point of the whole renewed, that is, the actual race of man. In this sacrifice it is emphatically declared that "the Lord smelled a sweet savour," since it stood at the beginning of man's new life, coming after the waters of the deluge as the image and precursor of the Sacrifice on Calvary, which was to purify the earth, and which those waters typified.
17
As, then, we considered lately the position of man as to his knowledge of God and of himself in the "many days" which ensued after the fall before the death of Abel, so let us glance at his condition in these same respects at the starting-point of this new life of man. First of all, out of the wreck of the old world Noah had carried the two institutions, one of which makes the human family in its natural increase, while the other constitutes its spiritual life--marriage and sacrifice. In marriage we have the root of society; in sacrifice the root of religion. These had not perished, neither had they changed in character. They were the never-displaced foundation of the race, an heirloom of paradise never lost; marriage, as established in the primeval [Pg 20] sanctity before man fell, sacrifice as superadded to man's original worship of adoration, thanksgiving, and prayer immediately upon his fall, in token of his future recovery. God, in selecting Noah to repair the race, made him, in so far like to Adam, the head of the two orders, King and Priest, and from that double headship the actual government of the world through all the lines of his posterity descends.
Thirdly, we find in Noah's family the divine authority of government expressly established; for in the protection thrown over human life the power to take it away in case of grievous crime is also given. Authority to take life away belongs of right to the giver of life alone. He here bestows the vicarious exercise of it upon that family which was likewise the first State, and the fountain-head of ac-tual human society. "At the hand of every man, and of his brother, will I require the life of man: whosoever shall shed man's blood, his blood shall be shed, for man was made to the image of God. But increase you, and multiply, and go upon the earth, and fill it."
We have then the charter here of human society;[8] the delegation to it of supreme power by the Head of all power, to be vicariously
exercised [Pg 21] henceforward over the whole race as it went out, conquered, and replenished the earth; the sacredness of man's life
declared, in virtue of that divine image according to which he alone of all creatures upon the earth was made, yet power over that life for the punishment of crime committed to man himself in the government established by God. An absolute dominion over all beasts was given at the same time to man; first for himself, in virtue of his distinction from the beast, in virtue of the divine image resting upon him, a delegation of divine power was set up in the midst of him, the supreme exercise of which is the power of life
and death. Civil government therefore was no less created by God than marriage, and sacrifice, with the religious offices belonging to
it. Like them it was ratified afresh in the race at this its second starting-point.
But, fourthly, it was as Father and Head of the race that the first act of Noah leaving the ark was to offer sacrifice; he offered it for himself and for all his children. With him, as offering in a public act the homage of his race, the great covenant of which we have been speaking was made. Besides the divine things bound together in the institution of sacrifice--the accord of four acts, adoration, thanksgiving, prayer, and expiation, which express man's knowledge of his condition of God's sovereignty, and of his own last end, as well as the dedication of his will to God--great temporal promises, such as the dominion over all other creatures, and the filling the earth with his race, promises which belong to man as one family and one race, were made to Noah in [Pg 22] this solemn covenant ratified in sacrifice. The common hopes of the whole community for the present life and the future also were jointly represented in it. It is, in fact, the alliance of the civil government with religion, of which we see here the solemn ratification. Noah the Father, the King, and the Priest, sacrifices for all, where all have a common hope, a common belief, a common knowledge, a life not only as individual men, but as a family, as a race, as a society.
Thus in marriage, in sacrifice, in the vicarial exercise of divine power by civil government, and in the alliance of that government with the worship of God, we have the four central pillars on which the glorious dome of a sacred civilisation in the human family, when it should be conterminous with the whole earth, was intended to rest. These four things date from the beginning of the race; they precede heathenism, and they last through it. Greatly as man in the exercise of his free-will may rage against them, grievously as he may impair their harmony, and even distort by his sin the vast good which that harmony ensures and guards into partial evil, yet he will not avail to destroy the fabric of human society resting upon them before the Restorer comes.
Noah having lived 600 years before the flood, and having been the preacher of justice for 120 years to a world which would not listen to him, has his life prolonged for 350 years after the flood. During this time he is to be viewed as the great Teacher of his family, like Adam when he came out of Paradise. What the Fall was in the mouth of Adam the Deluge was in the [Pg 23] mouth of Noah, a great example of punishment inflicted on man for the disregard of God as his end. It is hard to see how God could have more completely guarded those two beginnings of human society from the corruption of error and the taint of unfaithfulness than by the mode in which He caused them to arise, in that He formed them both through the teaching of a family by the mouth of a Parent, and the government of a race by the headship of its Author. For the larger society sprung actually out of brethren as the brethren themselves out of one parent. "They have," to use Bossuet's striking recapitulation, "one God, one object, one end, a com-mon origin, the same blood, a common interest, a mutual need of each other, as well for the business of life as for its enjoyments." And one common language, it may be added, serves as the outward expression, the witness, and the bond of a society so admirably compacted, based, as it would seem, on so immovable a foundation.
Let us sum up in three words the history so far as it has yet been recorded. The foundation of all is man coming forth by creation out of the hand of God. He comes forth as one family in Adam. Falling from his high estate by his Father's sin, he receives
a religion guarded and expressed by a specific rite of worship, which records his fall, and prophesies his restoration. After this the
family springs from parents united in a holy bond, which, as it carries on the natural race, is likewise the image of a future exaltation.
18
As he increases and multiplies the divine authority is vicariously [Pg 24] exercised in the government of the race as a society. That government is strictly allied with his religion. It is most remarkable that the last end of man dominates the whole history; that is, all the temporal goods of man from the beginning depend on his fidelity to God. Disregard of this works the Fall; the same disregard works the Deluge. It remains to show how that compact and complete society instituted under Noah depended, as to the maintenance in unimpaired co-operation of the great goods we have just enumerated, upon the free-will of man to preserve his fidelity to God; that is, to show how in the constant order of human things there is an inherent subordination of the temporal to the spiritual good, as for the individual so for the race.
2.--The Divine and Human Society in the Dispersion.
The divine narrative of the beginning of human society ends with an event of which the consequences remain to the present day, and from which all the actual nations of the earth take their rise. The blessing and command given to Noah and his family were, "Increase and multiply and fill the earth." It would seem that the family of man continued in that highly privileged and guarded state which has just been described during five generations, comprehending perhaps the life of Noah and Shem. Of all this time it is said, "The earth was of one tongue and the same speech." The division of the earth among the families of a race by [Pg 25] virtue of a natural growth, which was itself the effect of the divine blessing and command, did not carry with it as a condition of that growth the withdrawal of so great a privilege as the unity of language. God had formed the human family out of one; had built it up by marriage; cemented it by a religious rite of highest meaning; crowned it with His own delegated authority of government, and sanctified that government by its alliance with religion. Unity of language is as it were the expression of all these blessings. The posses-
sion of language by the first man, the outer vocalised word, corresponding to the inner spiritual word of reason, was a token of the
complete intellectual nature inhabiting a corporeal frame--a fact expressed by the doctrine that the soul is the form of the body--
which constituted his first endowment. And in a proportionate manner the possession of one language as the exponent of mind
and heart by his race, was the most effective outward bond of inward unity which could tie the race together, whatever its numerical and local extension might be. It is to be noted that though the cause of the deluge was that "the earth was corrupted before God, and was filled with iniquity" (Gen. vii. 11), yet God had not withdrawn from man the unity of language, perhaps because the revolt of man had not hitherto reached to a corruption of his thought of the Divine Nature itself. But now ensued an act of human pride and rebellion which led God Himself to undo the bond of society, consisting in unity of language, in order to prevent a greater evil. The sin is darkly recorded, as if some peculiar abomination [Pg 26] lay hid underneath the words; the punishment, on the contrary,
is made conspicuous. "And the earth was of one tongue and the same speech. And when they removed from the east, they found a plain in the land of Sennaar and dwelt in it. And each one said to his neighbour, Come, let us make brick and bake them with fire. And they had brick instead of stones, and slime instead of mortar. And they said, Come and let us make a city and a tower, the top whereof may reach to heaven: and let us make our name famous before we be scattered abroad into all lands. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children of Adam were building. And He said, Behold it is one people, and all have one tongue; and they have begun to do this, neither will they leave off from their designs till they accomplish them indeed. Come
ye, therefore, let us go down and there confound their tongue, that they may not understand one another's speech. And so the Lord scattered them from that place into all lands, and they ceased to build the city. And therefore the name thereof was called Babel, confusion, because there the language of the whole earth was confounded; and from thence the Lord scattered them abroad upon the face of all countries."
It may be inferred that the city and the tower thus begun point at a society the bond of which was not to be the worship of the one true God. As a matter of fact, thenceforth and to all time the name of Babel has passed into the languages of men as signifying the City of Confusion, the seat of false worship, the headship of the [Pg 27] line of men who are the seed of the serpent, and of that antagonism which the primal prophecy announced as the issue of the fall.
But the severity of the punishment and its nature seem further to indicate that we are here in presence of the beginning of the third great sin of the human race, in which, as in the former, the free-will of man, his inalienable prerogative and the instrument of his trial, runs athwart the purpose of God. The first was the sin of Adam's disobedience resulting in the Fall; the second the universal iniquity of the race punished by the Deluge; the third is the corruption of the idea of God by setting up many gods instead of one,
a desertion of God as the source of man's inward unity, which is punished by the loss of unity of language in man, the voice of the inward unity, as it is also the chief stay and bond of his outward unity. The multiplication of the race and its propagation in all lands was part of the original divine intention. When the bond of living together in one place and under one government was withdrawn, there remained unity of worship and unity of language to continue and to support the unity of the race. Man was breaking his fealty to God not only by practical impiety, as in the time before the flood, but by denial of the Divine Nature itself as the One Infinite Creator and Father; God replied by withdrawing from rebellious vassals that unity of language which was the mark and bond of
their living together as children of one Parent. With the record of this event Moses closes his history of the human race as one family, which he had up to [Pg 28] this point maintained. He had hitherto strongly marked its unity in its creation, in its fall through Adam, in its first growth after the fall, and in the common punishment which descended upon it in the flood, and again in its second growth and expansion from Noah. Language is the instrument of man's thought, and the possession of one common language the
19
most striking token of his unity; and here, after recording the withdrawal of that token by a miraculous act of God in punishment of a great sin, Moses parts from all mention of the race as one. He proceeds at once to give the genealogy of Shem's family as the ancestor of Abraham, and then passes to the call of Abraham as the foundation of the promised people. He never reverts to the nations as a whole, whom he has conducted to the point of their dispersion and there leaves.
Through this great sin the division of the earth by the human family started not in blessing, but in punishment. "The Lord scattered them abroad upon the face of all countries." He who had made the unity of Noah's family, Himself untied it, and we may conceive that He did so because of that greatest of all crimes, the division of the Divine Nature by man in his conception of it, his setting up many gods instead of one.
Let us see how this sin impaired, and more and more broke down, that privileged civilisation brought by Noah from before the
flood, and set up by him in his family.
If God be conceived as more than one, He ceases by that very conception to be self-existing from eternity, immense, infinite, and incomprehensible, he ceases also [Pg 29] to have power, wisdom, and goodness in an infinite plenitude; and, further, He ceases to be the one Creator, Ruler, and Rewarder of men.
Thus the conception of more gods than one carries with it an infinite degradation of the Godhead itself, as received in the mind and
