4.

Public Life of Jesus from the First to the Second Passover.

 

On the dispersion of the strangers from the metropolis, at the close of the Passover, Jesus, with his more immediate followers, passed a short time in Judaea, where such multitudes crowded to the baptism administered by his disciples, that the adherents of John began to find the concourse to their master somewhat diminished. The Baptist had removed his station to the other side of the Jordan, and fixed himself by a stream, which afforded a plentiful supply of water, near the town of Salim, in Peraea. The partisans of John, not it might seem without jealousy, began to dispute concerning the relative importance of the baptism of their master, and that of him whom they were disposed to consider his rival. But these unworthy feelings were strongly repressed by John. In terms still more emphatic he reasserted his own secondary station: he was but the paranymph, the humble attendant on the bridegroom, Christ the bridegroom himself: his doctrine was that of earth, that of Christ was from heaven; in short, he openly announces Jesus as the Son of the Almighty Father, and as the author of everlasting life.

The career of John was drawing to a close. His new station in Peraea was within the dominions of Herod Antipas. On the division of the Jewish kingdom at the death of Herod the Great, Galilee and Peraea had formed the tetrarchate of Antipas. This Herod was engaged in a dangerous war with Aretas, king of Arabia Petraea, whose daughter he had married. But having formed an incestuous connexion with the wife of his brother, Herod Philip, his Arabian queen indignantly fled to her father, who took up arms to revenge her wrongs against her guilty husband. How far Herod could depend in this contest on the loyalty of his subjects, was extremely doubtful. It is possible he might entertain hopes that the repudiation of a foreign alliance, ever hateful to the Jews, and the union with a branch of the Asmonean line (for Herodias was the grand-daughter of Herod the Great and of Mariamne), might counterbalance in the popular estimation the injustice and criminality of his marriage with his brother’s wife. The influence of John (according to Josephus) was almost unlimited. The subjects, and even the soldiery of the tetrarch had crowded with devout submission around the Prophet. On his decision might depend the wavering loyalty of the whole province. But John denounced with open indignation the royal incest, and declared the marriage with a brother’s wife to be a flagrant violation of the Law. Herod, before long, ordered him to be seized and imprisoned in the strong fortress of Machaerus, on the remote border of his Transjordanic territory.

Jesus, in the meantime, apprehensive of the awakening jealousy of the Pharisees, whom his increasing success inflamed to more avowed animosity, left the borders of Judaea, and proceeded on his return to Galilee. The nearer road lay through the province of Samaria. The mutual hatred between the Jews and Samaritans, ever since the secession of Sanballat, had kept the two races not merely distinct, but opposed to each other with the most fanatical hostility. This animosity, instead of being allayed by time, had but grown the more inveterate, and had recently been embittered by acts, according to Josephus, of wanton and unprovoked outrage on the part of the Samaritans. During the administration of Coponius, certain of this hateful race, early in the morning on one of the days of the Passover, had stolen into the Temple at Jerusalem, and defiled the porticoes and courts by strewing them with dead men’s bones—an abomination the most offensive to the Jewish principles of cleanliness and sanctity. Still later, they had frequently taken advantage of the position in which their district lay, directly between Judaea and Galilee, to interrupt the concourse of the religious Galileans to the capital. Jealous that such multitudes should pass their sacred mountain, Gerizim, to worship in the Temple at Jerusalem, they often waylaid the incautious pilgrim, and thus the nearest road to Jerusalem had become extremely insecure. Our History will show how calmly Jesus ever pursued his course through these conflicting elements of society, gently endeavoured to allay the implacable schism and set the example of that mild and tolerant spirit, so beautifully embodied in his precepts. He passed on in quiet security through the dangerous district; and it is remarkable that here, safe from the suspicious vigilance of the Pharisaic party, among these proscribed aliens from the hopes of Israel, He more distinctly and publicly than He had hitherto done, avowed his title as the Messiah, and developed that leading characteristic of his religion, the abolition of all local and national deities, and the promulgation of one comprehensive faith, in which the great Eternal Spirit was to be worshipped by all mankind in spirit and in truth.

There was a well near the gates of Sichem, a name which by the Jews had been long perverted into the opprobrious term Sichar. This spot, according to immemorial tradition, the Patriarch Jacob had purchased, and here were laid the bones of Joseph, his elder son, carried from Egypt, to whose descendant, Ephraim, this district had been assigned. Sichem lay in a valley between the two famous mountains Ebal and Gerizim, on which the Law was read, and ratified by the acclamations of the assembled tribes; and on the latter height stood the rival temple of the Samaritans, which had so long afflicted the more zealous Jews by its daring opposition to the one chosen sanctuary on Mount Moriah. The well bore the name of the Patriarch; and while his disciples entered the town to purchase provisions, a traffic from which probably few, except the disciples of Christ, would not have abstained, except in extreme necessity, Jesus reposed by its margin. It was the sultry hour of noon, about twelve o’clock, when a woman, as is the general usage in the East, where the females commonly resort to the wells or tanks to obtain water for all domestic uses, approached the well. Jesus, whom she knew not to be her countryman, either from his dress, or perhaps his dialect or pronunciation, in which the inhabitants of the Ephraimitish district of Samaria differed both from the Jews and Galileans, to her astonishment, asked her for water to quench his thirst. For in general the lip of a Jew, especially a Pharisaic Jew, would have shrunk in disgust from the purest element in a vessel defiled by the hand of a Samaritan. Drawing, as usual, his similitudes from the present circumstances, Jesus excites the wonder of the woman by speaking of living waters at his command, waters which were to nourish the soul for everlasting life: he increases her awe by allusions which show more than mortal knowledge of her own private history (she was living in concubinage, having been married to five husbands), and at length clearly announce that, the local worship, both on Gerizim and at Jerusalem, was to give place to a more sublime and comprehensive faith. The astonished woman confesses her belief that, on the coming of the Messiah, truths equally wonderful may be announced. Jesus, for the first time, distinctly and unequivocally declares himself to be the Messiah. On the return of the disciples from the town, their Jewish prejudices are immediately betrayed at beholding their master thus familiarly conversing with a woman of the hateful race : on the other hand, the intelligence of the woman runs rapidly through the town, and the Samaritans crowd forth in eager interest to behold and listen to the extraordinary teacher.

The nature and origin of the Samaritan belief in the Messiah is even a more obscure question than that of the Jews. That belief was evidently more clear and defined than the vague expectation which prevailed throughout the East; still it was probably, like that of the Jews, by no means distinct or definite. It is generally supposed that the Samaritans, admitting only the Law, must have rested their hope solely on some ambiguous or latent prediction in the books of Moses, who had foretold the coming of another and a mightier prophet than himself. But though the Samaritans may not have admitted the authority of the prophets as equal to that of the Law—though they had not installed them in the regular and canonised code of their sacred books, it does not follow that they were unacquainted with them, or that they did not listen with devout belief to the more general promises, which by no means limited the benefits of the Messiah’s coming to the local sanctuary of Jerusalem, or to the line of the Jewish kings. There appear some faint traces of a belief in the descent of the Messiah from the line of Joseph, of which, as belonging to the tribe of Ephraim, the Samaritans seem to have considered themselves the representatives. Nor is it improbable, from the subsequent rapid progress of the doctrines of Simon Magus, which were deeply impregnated with Orientalism, that the Samaritan notion of the Messiah had already a strong Magian or Babylonian tendency. On the other hand, if their expectations rested on less definite grounds, the Samaritans were unenslaved by many of those fatal prejudices of the Jews, which so completely secularised their notions of the Messiah, and were free from that rigid and exclusive pride which so jealously appropriated the divine promises. If the Samaritans could not pretend to an equal share in the splendid anticipations of the ancient prophets, they were safer from their misinterpretation. They had no visions of universal dominion; they looked not to Samaria or Sichem to become the metropolis of some mighty empire. They had some legend of the return of Moses to discover the sacred vessels concealed near Mount Gerizim, but they did not expect to see the banner raised, and the conqueror go forth to beat the nations to the earth and prostrate mankind before their reestablished theocracy. They might even be more inclined to recognise the Messiah in the person of a purely religious reformer, on account of the overbearing confidence with which the rival people announced their hour of triumph, when the Great King should erect his throne on Sion, and punish all the enemies of the chosen race, among whom the “foolish people,” as they were called, “who dwelt at Sichem,” would not be the last to incur the terrible vengeance. A Messiah who would disappoint the insulting hopes of the Jews would, for that very reason, be more acceptable to the Samaritans.

The Samaritan commonwealth was governed under the Roman supremacy by a council or sanhedrin. But this body had not assumed the pretensions of a divinely inspired hierarchy; nor had they a jealous and domineering sect, like that of the Pharisees in possession of the public instruction and watching every new teacher who did not wear the garb, or speak the Shibboleth of their faction as guilty of an invasion of their peculiar province. But, from whatever cause, the reception of Jesus among the Samaritans was strongly contrasted with that among the Jews. They listened with reverence, and entreated him to take up his permanent abode within their province; and many among them distinctly acknowledged him as the Messiah and Saviour of the world.

Still a residence, longer than was necessary in the infected air, as the Jews would suppose it of Samaria would have strengthened the growing hostility of the ruling powers, and of the prevailing sect among the Jews. After two days, therefore, Jesus proceeded on his journey, reentered Galilee, and publicly assumed in that province his office as the teacher of a new religion. The report of a second, a more public and more extraordinary miracle than that before performed in the town of Cana, tended to establish the fame of his actions in Jerusalem, which had been disseminated by those Galileans who had returned more quickly from the Passover, and had excited a general interest to behold the person of whom such wonderful rumours were spread abroad. The nature of the miracle, the healing a youth who lay sick at Capernaum, about twenty-five miles distant from Cana, where he then was; the station of the father, at whose entreaty he restored the son to health (he was probably on the household establishment of Herod), could not fail to raise the expectation to a higher pitch, and to prepare the inhabitants of Galilee to listen with eager deference to the new doctrines.

One place alone received the Son of Mary with cold and inhospitable unconcern, and rejected his claims with indignant violence—his native town of Nazareth. The history of this transaction is singularly true to human nature. Where Jesus was unknown, the awestruck imagination of the people, excited by the fame of his wonderful works, beheld him already arrayed in the sanctity of a prophetical, if not of a divine mission. Nothing intruded on their thoughts to disturb their reverence for the commanding gentleness of his demeanour, the authoritative persuasiveness of his language, the holiness of his conduct, the celebrity of his miracles: He appeared before them in the pure and unmingled dignity of his public character. But the inhabitants of Nazareth had to struggle with old impressions, and to exalt their former familiarity into a feeling of deference or veneration. In Nazareth he had been seen from his childhood; and though gentle, blameless, popular, nothing had occurred, up to the period of his manhood, to place him so much above the ordinary level of mankind. His father’s humble station and employment had, if we may so speak, still farther undignified the person of Jesus to the mind of his fellow-townsmen. In Nazareth Jesus was still “the carpenter’s son.” We think, likewise, that we discover in the language of the Nazarenes something of local jealousy against the more favoured town of Capernaum. If Jesus intended to assume a public and distinguished character, why had not his dwelling place the fame of his splendid works? Why was Capernaum honoured as the residence of the new prophet, rather than the city in which he had dwelt from his youth?

It was in the synagogue of Nazareth where Jesus had hitherto been a humble and devout listener, that he stood up in the character of a Teacher. According to the usage, the chazan or minister of the synagogue, whose office it was to deliver the volume of the Law or the Prophets appointed to be read to the person to whom that function had fallen, or who might have received permission from the rulers of the synagogue to address the congregation, gave it into the hands of Jesus. Jesus opened on the passage in the beginning of the 16th chapter of Isaiah by universal consent applied to the coming of the Messiah, and under its beautiful images describing with the most perfect truth the character of the new religion. It spoke of good tidings to the poor of consolation in every sorrow, of deliverance from every affliction:—“He hath anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken hearted; to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind; to set at liberty them that are bound.” It went on, as it were, to announce the instant fulfilment of the prediction, in the commencement of the “acceptable year of the Lord;” but before it came to the next clause, which harmonised ill with the benign character of the new faith, and spoke of “the day of vengeance,” He broke off and closed the book. He proceeded, probably at some length, to declare the immediate approach of these times of wisdom and peace.

The whole assembly was in a state of pleasing astonishment at the ease of his delivery, and the sweet copiousness of his language; they could scarcely believe that it was the youth whom they had so often seen, the son of a humble father, in their streets, and who had enjoyed no advantages of learned education. Some of them, probably either by their countenance, or tone, or gesture, expressed their incredulity, or even their contempt for Joseph’s son; for Jesus at once declared his intention of performing no miracle to satisfy the doubts of his unbelieving countrymen:—“No prophet is received with honour in his own country.” This avowed preference of other places before the dwelling of his youth; this refusal to grant to Nazareth any share in the fame of his extraordinary works, embittered perhaps by the suspicion that the general prejudice against their town might be strengthened, at least not discountenanced, as it might have been, by the residence of so distinguished a citizen within their walls—the reproof so obviously concealed in the words and conduct of Jesus, mingled no doubt with other fanatical motives, wrought the whole assembly to such a pitch of frenzy, that they expelled Jesus from the synagogue. Nazareth lies in a valley, from which a hill immediately rises; they hurried him up the slope, and were preparing to cast him down from the abrupt cliff on the other side, when they found that the intended victim of their wrath had disappeared.

Jesus retired to Capernaum, which from this time became, as it were, his headquarters. This place was admirably situated for his purpose, both from the facility of communication, as well by land as by the lake, with many considerable and flourishing towns, and of escape into a more secure region, in case of any threatened persecution. It lay towards the northern extremity of the lake or sea of Gennesaret. On the land side it was a centre from which the circuit of both Upper and Lower Galilee might begin. The countless barks of the fishermen employed upon the lake, many of whom became his earliest adherents, could transport him with the utmost ease to any of the cities on the western bank; while, if danger approached from Herod or the ruling powers of Galilee, he had but to cross to the opposite shore, the territory, at least at the commencement of his career, of Philip, the most just and popular of the sons of Herod, and which on his death reverted to the Roman government. Nor was it an unfavourable circumstance, that he had most likely secured the powerful protection of the officer attached to the court of Herod, whose son he had healed, and who probably resided at Capernaum.

The first act of the Saviour’s public career was the permanent attachment to his person, and the investing in the delegated authority of teachers of the new religion, four out of the twelve who afterwards became the Apostles. Andrew and Peter were, as before stated, originally of Bethsaida, at the north-eastern extremity of the lake, but the residence of Peter appears to have been at Capernaum. James and John were brothers, the sons of Zebedee. All these men had united themselves to Jesus immediately after his baptism; the latter, if not all the four, had probably attended upon him during the festival in Jerusalem, but had returned to their usual avocations. Jesus saw them on the shore of the lake,—two of them were actually employed in fishing, the others at a little distance were mending their nets. At the well-known voice of their master, confirmed by the sign of the miraculous draught of fishes, which impressed Peter with so much awe, that he thought himself unworthy of standing in the presence of so wonderful a Being, they left their ships and followed Him into the town; and though they appear to have resumed their humble occupations, on which, no doubt, their livelihood depended, it would seem that from this time they might be considered as the regular attendants of Jesus.

The reception of Jesus in the synagogue of Capernaum was very different from that which he encountered in Nazareth. He was heard on the regular day of teaching, the Sabbath, not only undisturbed, but with increasing reverence and awe. And, indeed, if the inhabitants of Nazareth were offended, and the Galileans in general astonished at the appearance of the humble Jesus in the character of a public teacher, the tone and language which he assumed was not likely to allay their wonder. The remarkable expression, “He speaks as one having authority, and not as the scribes,” seems to imply more than the extraordinary power and persuasiveness of his language.

The ordinary instructors of the people, whether under the name of scribes, lawyers, or Rabbis, rested their whole claim to the public attention on the established Sacred Writings. They were the conservators, and perhaps personally ordained interpreters of the Law, with its equally sacred traditionary comment; but they pretended to no authority, not originally derived from these sources. They did not stand forward as legislators, but as accredited expositors of the Law; not as men directly inspired from on high, but as men who, by profound study and intercourse with the older wise men, were best enabled to decide on the dark, or latent, or ambiguous sense of the inspired writings; or who had received, in regular descent, the more ancient Cabala, the accredited tradition. Although, therefore, they had completely enslaved the public mind, which reverenced the sayings of the masters or Rabbis equally with the original text of Moses and the Prophets; though it is quite clear that the spiritual Rabbinical dominion, which at a later period established so arbitrary a despotism over the understanding of the people, was already deeply rooted, still the basis of their supremacy rested on the popular reverence for the Sacred Writings. “It is written,” was the sanction of all the Rabbinical decrees, however those decrees might misinterpret the real meaning of the Law, or “add burdens to the neck of the people,” by no means intended by the wise and humane lawgiver.

Jesus came forth as a public teacher in a new and opposite character. His authority rested on no previous revelation, excepting as far as his divine commission had been foreshown in the Law and the Prophets. He prefaced his addresses with the unusual formulary, “I say unto you.” Perpetually displaying the most intimate familiarity with the Sacred Writings, instantly silencing or baffling his adversaries by adducing with the utmost readiness and address, texts of the Law and the Prophets according to the accredited interpretation, yet his ordinary language evidently assumed a higher tone. He was the direct, immediate representative of the wisdom of the Almighty Father; he appeared as equal, as superior to Moses; as the author of a new revelation, which, although it was not to destroy the Law, was in a certain sense to supersede it by the introduction of a new and original faith. Hence the implacable hostility manifested against Jesus, not merely by the fierce, the fanatical, the violent, or the licentious, by all who might take offence at the purity and gentleness of his precepts, but by the better and more educated among the people, the Scribes, the Lawyers, the Pharisees. Jesus at once assumed a superiority not merely over these teachers of the Law, this acknowledged religious aristocracy whose reputation, whose interests, and whose pride were deeply pledged to the maintenance of the existing system, but he set himself above those inspired teachers of whom the Rabbis were but the interpreters. Christ uttered commandments which had neither been registered on the tablets of stone, nor defined in the more minute enactments in the book of Leviticus. He superseded at once by his simple word all that they had painfully learned, and regularly taught as the eternal, irrepealable word of God, perfect, complete, enduring no addition. Hence their perpetual endeavours to commit Jesus with the multitude, as disparaging or infringing the ordinances of Moses; endeavours which were perpetually baffled on his part, by his cautious compliance with the more important observances, and, notwithstanding the general bearing of his teaching towards the development of a higher and independent doctrine, his uniform respect for the letter as well as the spirit of the Mosaic institutes. But as the strength of the Rabbinical hierarchy lay in the passionate jealousy of the people about the Law, they never abandoned the hope of convicting Jesus on this ground, notwithstanding his extraordinary works, as a false pretender to the character of the Messiah. At all events, they saw clearly that it was a struggle for the life and death of their authority. Jesus acknowledged as the Christ, the whole fabric of their power and influence fell at once. The traditions, the Law itself, the skill of the Scribe, the subtilty of the Lawyer, the profound study of the Rabbi, or the teacher in the synagogue and in the school, became obsolete; and the pride of superior wisdom, the long-enjoyed deference, the blind obedience with which the people had listened to their decrees, were gone by for ever. The whole hierarchy were to cede at once their rank and estimation to an humble and uninstructed peasant from Galilee, a region scorned by the better educated for its rudeness and ignorance, and from Nazareth, the most despised town in the despised province. Against such deep and rooted motives for animosity, which combined and knit together every feeling of pride, passion, habit, and interest, the simple and engaging demeanour of the Teacher, the beauty of the precepts, their general harmony with the spirit however they might expand the letter of the Law, the charities they breathed, the holiness they inculcated, the aptitude and imaginative felicity of the parables under which they were couched, the hopes they excited, the fears they allayed, the blessings and consolations they promised, all which makes the discourses of Jesus so confessedly superior to all human morality, made little impression on this class, who in some respects, as the most intellectual, might be considered as in the highest state of advancement, and therefore most likely to understand the real spirit of the new religion. The authority of Jesus could not co­exist with that of the Scribes and Pharisees; and this was the great principle of the fierce opposition and jealous hostility with which he was in general encountered by the best instructed teachers of the people.

In Capernaum, however, no resistance seems to have been made to his success: the synagogue was open to him on every Sabbath; and wonderful cures, that of a demoniac in the synagogue itself, that of Simon’s wife’s mother, and of many others within the same town, established and strengthened his growing influence. From Capernaum He set forth to make a regular progress through the whole populous province of Galilee, which was crowded, if we are to receive the account of Josephus, with flourishing towns and cities, beyond almost any other region of the world. According to the statement of this author, the number of towns, and the population of Galilee in a district of between fifty and sixty miles in length, and between sixty and seventy in breadth, was no less than 204 cities and villages, the least of which contained 15,000 souls. Reckoning nothing for smaller communities, and supposing each town and village to include the adjacent district, so as to allow of no scattered inhabitants in the country, the population of the province would amount to the incredible number of 3,060,000. Of these, probably, much the larger proportion were of Jewish descent, and spoke a harsher dialect of the Aramaic than that which prevailed in Judaea, though in many of the chief cities there was a considerable number of Syrian Greeks and of other foreign races. Each of these towns had one or more synagogues, in which the people met for the ordinary purposes of worship, while the more religious attended regularly at the festivals in Jerusalem. The province of Galilee with Peraea formed the tetrarchate of Herod Antipas, who, till his incestuous marriage, had treated the Baptist with respect, if not with deference, and does not appear at first to have interfered with the proceedings of Jesus. Though at one time decidedly hostile, he appears neither to have been very active in his opposition, nor to have entertained any deep or violent animosity against the person of Jesus even at the time of His final trial. No doubt Jerusalem and its adjacent province were the centre and stronghold of Jewish religious and political enthusiasm; the pulse beat stronger about the heart than at the extremities. Nor, whatever personal apprehensions Herod might have entertained of an aspirant to the name of the Messiah, whom he might suspect of temporal ambition, was he likely to be actuated by the same jealousy as the Jewish Sanhedrin, of a teacher who confined himself to religious instruction. Herod’s power rested on force, not on opinion; on the strength of his guards and the protection of Rome, not on the respect which belonged to the half-religious, half-political pre-eminence of the rulers in Jerusalem. That which made Jesus the more odious to the native government in Judaea, his disappointment of their hopes of a temporal Messiah, and his announcement of a revolution purely moral and religious, would allay the fears and secure the indifference of Herod. To him Christianity, however imperfectly understood, would appear less dangerous than fanatical Judaism. The Pharisees were in considerable numbers, and possessed much influence over the minds of the Galileans; but it was in Judaea that this overwhelming faction completely predominated, and swayed the public opinion with irresistible power. Hence the unobstructed success of Jesus in this remoter region of the Holy Land, and the seeming wisdom of selecting that part of the country where, for a time at least, he might hope to pursue unmolested his career of blessing. During this first progress he appears to have passed from town to town uninterrupted, if not cordially welcomed. Either astonishment, or prudent caution, which dreaded to offend his numerous followers; or the better feeling which had not yet given place to the fiercer passions; or a vague hope that Jesus might yet assume all that they thought wanting to the character of the Messiah, not only attracted around him the population of the towns through which he passed, but as he approached the borders, the inhabitants of Decapolis (the district beyond the Jordan), of Judaea, and even of Jerusalem, and the remoter parts of Peraea, thronged to profit both by his teaching, and by the wonderful cures which were wrought on all who were afflicted by the prevalent diseases of the country.

How singular the contrast (familiarity with its circumstances, or deep and early reverence, prevents us from appreciating it justly) between the peaceful progress of the Son of Man, on the one hand healing maladies, relieving afflictions, restoring their senses to the dumb or blind; on the other gently instilling into the minds of the people those pure, and humane, and gentle principles of moral goodness, to which the wisdom of ages has been able to add nothing; and every other event to which it can be compared, in the history of human kind! Compare the men who have at different periods wrought great and beneficial revolutions in the civil or the moral state of their kind; or those mythic personages, either deified men or humanised deities, which appear as the parents, or at some marked epoch in the revolutions. History of different nations, embodying the highest notions of human nature or divine perfection to which the age or the people have attained—compare all these, in the most dispassionate spirit, with the impersonation of the divine goodness in Jesus Christ. It seems a conception, notwithstanding the progress in moral truth which had been made among the more intellectual of the Jews, and the nobler reasoners among the Greeks, so completely beyond the age, so opposite to the prevalent expectations of the times, as to add no little strength to the belief of the Christian in the divine origin of his faith. Was the sublime notion of the Universal Father, the God of Love, and the exhibition of as much of the divine nature as is intelligible to the limited faculties of man, his goodness and beneficent power, in the “Son of Man,” first developed in the natural progress of the human mind among the peasants of Galilee? Or, as the Christian asserts with more faith, and surely not less reason, did the great Spirit, which created and animates the countless worlds, condescend to show this image and reflection of his own inconceivable nature, for the benefit of one race of created beings, to restore them to, and prepare them for, a higher and eternal state of existence?

The synagogues, it has been said, appear to have been open to Jesus during the whole of his progress through Galilee; but it was not within the narrow walls of these buildings that he confined his instructions. It was in the open air, in the field, or in the vineyard, on the slope of the hill, or by the side of the lake, where the deck of one of his followers vessels formed a kind of platform or tribune, that he delighted to address the wondering multitudes. His language teems with allusions to external nature, which, it has often been observed, seem to have been drawn from objects immediately around him. It would be superfluous to attempt to rival, and unjust to an author of remarkable good sense and felicity of expression, to alter the language in which this peculiarity of Christ’s teaching has already been described:—“In the spring our Saviour went into the fields and sat down on a mountain, and made that discourse which is recorded in St Matthew, and which is full of observations arising from the things which offered themselves to his sight. For when he exhorted his disciples to trust in God, he bade them behold the fowls of the air, which were then flying about them, and were fed by Divine Providence, though they did not sow nor reap, nor gather into barns. He bade them take notice of the lilies of the field which were then blown, and were so beautifully clothed by the same power, and yet ‘toiled not’ like the husbandmen who were then at work. Being in a place where they had a wide prospect of a cultivated land, he bade them observe how God caused the sun to shine, and the rain to descend upon the fields and gardens, even of the wicked and ungrateful. And he continued to convey his doctrine to them under rural images, speaking of good trees and corrupt trees—of wolves in sheep's clothing—of grapes not growing upon thorns, nor figs on thistles—of the folly of casting precious things to dogs and swine—of good measure pressed down, and shaken together, and running over. Speaking at the same time to the people, many of whom were fishermen and lived much upon fish, he says, What man of you will give his son a serpent, if he ask a fish? Therefore when he said in the same discourse to his disciples, Ye are the light of the world; a city that is set ana hill, and cannot be hid, it is probable that he pointed to a city within their view, situated upon the brow of a hill. And when he called them the salt of the earth, he alluded, perhaps, to the husbandmen, who were manuring the ground: and when he compared every person who observed his precepts, to a man who built a house upon a rock, which stood firm; and everyone who slighted his word, to a man who built a house upon the sand, which was thrown down by the winds and floods—when he used this comparison, it is not improbable that he had before his eyes houses standing upon high ground, and houses standing in the valley in a ruinous condition, which had been destroyed by inundations.

It was on his return to Capernaum, either at the close of the present or of a later progress through Galilee, that among the multitudes who had gathered around him from all quarters, he ascended an eminence, and delivered in a long continuous address the memorable Sermon on the Mount. It is not my design to enter at length on the trite, though in my opinion by no means exhausted, subject of Christian morality. I content myself with indicating some of those characteristic points which belong, as it were, to the historical development of the new religion, and cannot be distinctly comprehended unless in relation to the circumstances of the times :—I. The morality of Jesus was not in unison with the temper or the feelings of his age. II, It was universal morality, adapted for the whole human race, and for every period of civilisation. III. It was morality grounded on broad and simple principles, which had hitherto never been laid down as the basis of human action.

I. The great principle of the Mosaic theocracy was the strict apportionment of temporal happiness or calamity, at least to the nation, if not to the individual, according to his obedience or his rebellion against the divine laws. The natural consequence of this doctrine seemed to be, that prosperity was the invariable sign of the divine approval, adversity of disfavour. And this, in the time of our Lord, appears to have been carried to such an extreme, that every malady, every infirmity, was an evidence of sin in the individual, or a punishment inherited from his guilty forefathers. The only question which arose about the man born blind was, whether his affliction was the consequence of his own or his parents’ criminality: he bore in his calamity the hateful evidence that he was accursed of God. This principle was perpetually struggling with the belief in a future state, and an equitable adjustment of the apparent inequalities in the present life, to which the Jewish mind had gradually expanded; and with the natural humanity, inculcated by the spirit of the Mosaic Law,towards their own brethren. But if the miseries of this life were an evidence of the divine anger, the blessings were likewise of his favour. Hence the prosperous, the wealthy, those exempt from human suffering and calamity, were accustomed to draw even a more false and dangerous line of demarcation than in ordinary cases, between themselves and their humble and afflicted brethren. The natural haughtiness which belonged to such superiority, acquired, as it were, a divine sanction; nor was any vice in the Jewish character more strongly reproved by Jesus, or more hostile to his reception as the Messiah. For when the kingdom of Heaven should come—when the theocracy should be restored in more than its former splendour—who so secure in popular estimation of its inestimable blessings as those who were already marked and designated by the divine favour. Among the higher orders the expectation of a more than ordinary share in the promised blessings might practically be checked from imprudently betraying itself, by the natural timidity of those who have much to lose, and by their reluctance to hazard any political convulsion. Yet nothing could be more inexplicable, or more contrary to the universal sentiment, than that Jesus should disregard the concurrence of, and make no particular advances towards those who formed the spiritual as well as the temporal aristocracy of the nation—those whose possession of the highest station seemed, in a great degree, to prove their designation for such eminence by the Almighty. “Have any of the rulers believed in him?” was the contemptuous, and, as they conceived, conclusive argument against his claims, adduced by the Pharisees. Jesus not only did not condescend to favour, he ran directly counter to this prevailing notion. He announced that the kingdom of Heaven was peculiarly prepared for the humble and the afflicted; his disciples were chosen from the lowest order; and it was not obscurely intimated that his ranks would be chiefly filled by those who were undistinguished by worldly prosperity. Yet, on the other hand, there was nothing in his language to conciliate the passions of the populace, no address to the envious and discontented spirit of the needy to inflame them against their superiors. Popular as he was, in the highest sense of the term, nothing could be farther removed than the Prophet of Nazareth from the demagogue. The “kingdom of Heaven” was opened only to those who possessed and cultivated the virtues of their lowly station—meekness, humility, resignation, peacefulness, patience; and it was only because these virtues were most prevalent in the humbler classes, that the new faith was addressed to them. The more fierce and violent of the populace rushed into the ranks of the zealot, and enrolled themselves among the partisans of Judas the Galilean. They thronged around the robber chieftain, and secretly propagated that fiery spirit of insurrection which led, at length, to the fatal war. The meek and peaceful doctrines of Jesus found their way only into meek and peaceful hearts; the benevolent character of his miracles touched not those minds which had only imbibed the sterner, not the humaner, spirit of the Mosaic Law. Thus it was lowliness of character, rather than of station, which qualified the proselyte for the new faith—the absence, in short, of all those fierce passions which looked only to a conquering, wide-ruling Messiah: and it was in elevating these virtues to the highest rank, which to the many of all orders was treason against the hopes of Israel and the promises of God, that Jesus departed most widely from the general sentiment of his age and nation. He went still further; he annihilated the main principle of the theocracy—the administration of temporal rewards and punishments in proportion to obedience or rebellion—a notion which, though, as we have said, by no means justified by common experience, and weakened by the growing belief in another life, nevertheless still held its ground in the general opinion. Sorrow, as in one sense the distinguishing mark and portion of the new religion, became sacred; and the curse of God was, as it were, removed from the afflictions of mankind. His own disciples, He himself, were to undergo a fearful probation of suffering, which could only be secure of its reward in another life. The language of Jesus confirmed the truth of the anti-Sadducaic belief of the greater part of the nation, and assumed the certainty of another state of existence, concerning which, as yet, it spoke the current language; but which it was hereafter to expand into a more simple and universal creed, and mingle, if it may be so said, the sense of immortality with all the feelings and opinions of mankind.

II. Nor was it to the different classes of the Jews alone that the universal precepts of Christian morality expanded beyond the narrow and exclusive notions of the age and people. Jesus did not throw down the barrier which secluded the Jews from the rest of mankind, but he shook it to its base. Christian morality was not that of a sect, a race, or a nation, but of universal man: though necessarily delivered at times in Jewish language, couched under Jewish figures, and illustrated by local allusions, in its spirit it was diametrically opposite to Jewish. However it might make some provisions suited only to the peculiar state of the first disciples, yet in its essence it may be said to be comprehensive as the human race, immutable as the nature of man. It had no political, no local, no temporary precepts; it was, therefore, neither liable to be abrogated by any change in the condition of man, nor to fall into disuse, as belonging to a past and obsolete state of civilisation. It may dwell within its proper kingdom, the heart of man, in every change of political relation—in the monarchy, the oligarchy, the republic. It may domesticate itself in any climate, amid the burning sands of Africa, or the frozen regions of the North; for it has no local centre, no temple, no Caaba, no essential ceremonies impracticable under any conceivable state of human existence. In fact it is, strictly speaking, no Law; it is no system of positive enactments; it is the establishment of certain principles, the enforcement of certain dispositions, the cultivation of a certain temper of mind, which the conscience is to apply to the ever-varying exigencies of time and place. This appears to me to be the distinctive peculiarity of Christian morals, a characteristic in itself most remarkable, and singularly so when we find this free and comprehensive system emanating from that of which the mainspring was its exclusiveness.

III. The basis of this universality in Christian morals was the broad and original principles upon which it rested. If we were to glean from the later Jewish writings, from the beautiful aphorisms of other Oriental nations, which we cannot fairly trace to Christian sources, and from the Platonic and Stoic philosophy, their more striking precepts, we might find, perhaps, a counterpart to almost all the moral sayings of Jesus. But the same truth is of different importance as an unconnected aphorism, and as the groundwork of a complete system. No doubt the benevolence of the Creator had awakened grateful feelings, and kindled the most exquisite poetry of expression, in the hearts and from the lips of many before the coming of Christ; no doubt general humanity had been impressed upon mankind in the most vivid and earnest language. But the Gospel first placed these two great principles as the main pillars of the new moral structure : God the universal Father, mankind one brotherhood; God made known through the mediation of his Son, the image, and humanised type and exemplar of his goodness; mankind of one kindred, and therefore of equal rank in the sight of the Creator, and to be united in one spiritual commonwealth Such were the great principles of Christian morals, shadowed forth at first, rather than distinctly announced, in condescension to the prejudices of the Jews, who, if they had been found worthy of appreciating the essential spirit of the new religion—if they had received Jesus as the promised aviourmight have been collectively and nationally the religious parents and teachers of mankind.

Such was the singular position of Jesus with regard to his countrymen: the attempt to conciliate them to the new religion was to be fairly made; but the religion, however it might condescend to speak their language, could not forfeit or compromise even for such an end its primary and essential principles. Jesus therefore pursues his course, at one time paying the utmost deference to, at another unavoidably offending, the deep-rooted prejudices of the people. The inveterate and loathsome nature of the leprosy in Syria, the deep abhorrence with which the wretched victim of this disease was cast forth from all social fellowship, is well known to all who are even slightly acquainted with the Jewish Law and usages. One of these miserable beings appealed, and not in vain, to the mercy of Jesus. He was instantaneously cured; but Jesus, whether to authenticate the cure, and to secure the readmission of the outcast into the rights and privileges of society from which he was legally excluded, or more probably lest he should be accused of interfering with the rights or diminishing the dues of the priesthood, enjoined him to preserve the strictest secrecy concerning the cause of his cure; to submit to the regular examination of his case by the appointed authorities, and on no account to omit the customary offering. The second incident was remarkable for its publicity, as having taken place in a crowded house, in the midst of many of the Scribes, who were, at this period at least, not friendly to Jesus. The door of the house being inaccessible on account of the crowd, the sick man was borne in his couch along the flat terrace roofs of the adjacent buildings (for in the East the roofs are rarely pointed or shelving) and let down through an aperture, which was easily made, and of sufficient dimensions to admit the bed into the upper chamber, where Jesus was seated in the midst of his hearers. Jesus complied at once with their request to cure the afflicted man, but made use of a new and remarkable expression, “Thy sins are forgiven thee.” This phrase, while it coincided with the general notion that such diseases were the penalties of sin, nevertheless as assuming to the Lord an unprecedented power, that which seems to belong to the Deity alone, struck his hearers, more especially the better instructed, the Scribes, with astonishment. Their wonder, however, at the instantaneous cure, for the present, overpowered their indignation, yet no doubt the whole transaction tended to increase the jealousy with which Jesus began to be beheld.

The third incident jarred on a still more sensitive chord in the popular feeling. On no point were all orders among the Jews so unanimous as in their contempt and detestation of the publicans. Strictly speaking the persons named in the Evangelists were not publicans. These were men of property, not below the equestrian order, who farmed the public revenues. Those in question were the agents of these contractors, men, often freed slaves, or of low birth and station, and throughout the Roman world proverbial for their extortions, and in Judaea still more hateful, as among the manifest signs of subjugation to a foreign dominion. The Jew who exercised the function of a publican was, as it were, a traitor to the national independence. One of these, Matthew, otherwise called Levi, was summoned from his post as collector, perhaps at the port of Capernaum, to become one of the most intimate followers of Jesus; and the general astonishment was still farther increased by Jesus entering familiarly into the house, and even partaking of food with men thus proscribed by the universal feeling; and though not legally unclean, yet no doubt held in even greater abhorrence by the general sentiment of the people.

Thus ended the first year of the public life of Jesus. The fame of his wonderful works; the authority with which he delivered his doctrines; among the meeker and more peaceful spirits the beauty of the doctrines themselves; above all, the mystery which hung over his character and pretensions, had strongly excited the interest of the whole nation. From all quarters, from Galilee, Peraea, Judaea, and even the remoter Idumea, multitudes approached him with eager curiosity. On the other hand, his total secession from, or rather his avowed condemnation of, the great prevailing party, the Pharisees, while his doctrines seemed equally opposed to the less numerous yet rival Sadducaic faction; his popular demeanour, which had little in common with the ascetic mysticism of the Essenes; his independence of the ruling authorities; above all, notwithstanding his general deference for the Law, his manifest assumption of a power above the Law, had no doubt, if not actively arrayed against him, yet awakened to a secret and brooding animosity, the interests and the passions of the more powerful and influential throughout the country.

 

5

Second Year of the Public Life of Jesus.