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GOD knew what He would do, but He would not do it yet. In the dispensation of the fullness of times, St. Paul tells the Ephesians (i.10), God was to re-establish all things in Christ.
What does "the fullness of times" mean? At least it means that the Redemption was to take place not at a moment arbitrarily chosen, as though God suddenly decided that the mess had gone on long enough and He had better do some-thing about it. There was a fullness of time, a due moment. Looking at it from our own angle, we feel it fitting that God did not heal the disease at once: a disease should run its course. There is a rhythm of sin, as of revolution. Mankind had started on the road of self-assertion: it must be allowed to work out all the bleak logic of self-assertion to discover for itself all the unwholesome places into which self-assertion could take it. To be redeemed instantly might have left a faint "perhaps" to trouble mankind's peace: the Devil had said that we should be as gods— perhaps, if we had been allowed to try it out thoroughly, we might have become as gods. Well, we were allowed to try it out thoroughly: and we did not become as gods. When mankind knew at last, and beyond a doubt, that the game was up, might not that have been " the fullness of times "? Certainly there is an element of that in it. St. Paul perhaps is only putting the same idea more positively when he speaks of mankind as growing up, coming to maturity. By sin, mankind threw away the maturity God had conferred upon it, started it off with, so to speak. It had gone after a childish dream and must now go through all the pains of growing back to the maturity it had lost. It would be an element in that attained maturity to know that the dream was childish, to be prepared to put away the things of a child.
Mankind did, in some way clear to the eye of God and half-clear to the eye of man, grow up. The fullness of time came. And in it, to quote St. Paul again (Gal.iv.4), God sent His Son, made of a woman, that we might receive the adoption of sons.
Observe that it took mankind a vast stretch of time to grow up.
How long?
We have no notion.
We have a close and detailed account of God's continuous dealings with one
race.
His chosen race the Jews, from somewhere about the year 2000bc when He called
Abraham.
Recorded history as a whole does not go so very much further back,
even for the handful of favoured races whose earlier history is to be read
at all.
Scripture, as we have seen, is not concerned to tell us how long ago man was
created.
Archaeology and Geology give us glimpses of civilizations behind civilizations,
and some certainty that the race was already very old when our history begins
to take hold of its doings.
What had happened to the human race between Adam's expulsion from Eden and
the beginning of a continuous historical record?
Above all, what had happened to man's relations with God?
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The one astonishing fact is that at the time history takes hold, we find religion everywhere. And although there is an enormous variety of creed and rite and spiritual and moral atmosphere, there is a solid core of common principle. There is a universal belief in a creator of heaven and earth and in especial of man, in the existence of a moral law, in some sort of survival after death; the practice of prayer and sacrifice; and an almost universal belief in an earlier state of earthly happiness which mankind had and lost. All these things are not found everywhere with equal clearness: any one of them will be in one place strongly held and dominating the whole religious outlook, in another hardly realized, living or half-living in the background of the mind. But it is all there, and at any stage of clarity or shadowiness its universality is remarkable. We cannot know all the twists and turns of the road religion took from Adam onwards; but there is sufficient resemblance between what it was in him and what we find it to be in these remote descendants of his, to enable us to get some notion of the main forces at work.
What did the human race bring out of Paradise for the start of the vast adventure of regaining in the hardest possible way the maturity it had rejected? Two things principally: The first was religious knowledge: what God had revealed to Adam and Eve. They would teach it to their children, and they to theirs: it would become a tradition, a memory, a half-memory. The second was their human nature— made of nothing by God and held in existence by His continuing presence in them; a mind and a will wounded, but functioning; a body clamorous and hard to control, and no continuing will to control it. Had the human race been left to its own devices, the interplay of these two factors— the memory of truth revealed and the nature of man— would have governed the state of religion at any given time and place. But the human race was not left to its own devices and two other factors must be realized as in continuous action: Satan did not lose his interest in man after his first spectacular victory; and God never ceased in His care for the world He loved.
One can imagine what would happen to the tradition, the handing on from generation to generation of the religious truths that Adam knew. As the generations lengthened and the families of man spread to cover the earth, there was an inevitable dilution and distortion of the original message. We have seen what happened to the deposit of faith given by Christ to the Apostles, how it has been split into fragments and most of it lost, save where the infallible Church preserves it; the deposit of faith given by God to Adam, with no infallible Church to guard it, would not have fared better. The memory as a memory could only fade: the weakness of the human mind and human will would be too heavily against it. But human nature, if on this side it would make against the preservation of religious truth by memory, would on another side make for its rebuilding. The mind of man was de-ranged by sin but not destroyed. Quite apart from what might survive of the tradition or if nothing at all survived, the mind of man could establish the foundations of a religious interpretation of the universe; and the will of man, with all its tendency toward self as apart from God, could not rid itself of an impulse to move toward God, too. How could it, since God is more intimately present to it than it is to itself? Only a final rejection of God could annihilate finally the impulse to move toward him, and in this life men do not finally reject Him.
Just what elements in the universe and in himself led man to construct the religious interpretation of things which came to the aid of the religious memory that was fading, or supplied for it if it was faded altogether, we cannot know with any certainty. With the scraps of evidence that archaeology and anthropology provide, with inferences from the mental processes of savage peoples still existent, with a colouring from the personality of the theorist, admirable theories are constructed. Any of them may be true, possibly all of them represent an element in a complex process.
The human mind can, as we have seen, by its own powers and without the aid of revelation, establish the existence of God. There are the five proofs set down by St. Thomas, for instance. But did early man set about it like that? We do not know. We know that he did pretty universally believe in a God (or Gods) responsible for creating heaven and earth, in a moral law that expressed the divine will, in prayer and sacrifice as a way to approach the divinity. We do not know how he arrived at this: there are any number of ways leading to it. But after all how could he have failed to arrive at it, since all ways lead to it?
He saw the universe being and happening, so to speak. Things are done: he would assume (quite rightly as it happens) that some-one does them. There is an order, of day and night and seasons and such: he would assume, rightly again, that someone arranged it so. If anyone had suggested to him that no one arranged it, that it merely happened, he would perhaps not have known the philosophical answer to that untruth; but it is an untruth, it would not have occurred to him spontaneously, and no one seems to have suggested it to him: or if anyone did he gave the perfectly good answer "Don't be silly". Atheism arrived later, and was not widely popular then.
Toward the Someone who made things and did things, he naturally felt dependence (for he knew his own helplessness in the grip of the universe), and he naturally felt awe in the presence of one so immeasurably more powerful. Prayer would be natural (and it may in exceptional souls have reached a very high point of union with God); so, at a further remove, would sacrifice— prayer and sacrifice being at the lowest likely to win the divine favour, and at the highest capable of expressing the profoundest reality about man himself. The reality of man must always be kept in mind. Man would not thus early have arrived at the freakish notion of leaving his body out of account in religion, therefore there would always be some sort of ritual; and the natural tendency to find outward expression for the soul's deepest states would lead to the idea of sacrament and symbol— such as the notion of the ritual use of water for spiritual cleansing.
All this is at once right, and pretty well inevitable. What other attitudes man would adopt, or what embroidery he would put upon these, would depend on what further attributes— beyond personality and omnipotence— he considered that the Divinity would have. Upon this there is no limit. According to the elements in the universe which have most impressed their mind or their imagination or their fear or their fancy, men have in one time and place or another credited their gods with the strangest attributes and acted toward them accordingly. But the root of all this has been the assumption that God can be known from what He has made, an assumption in itself reasonable, but likely to mislead men who argued back from the thing made to the maker without allowing for the difference between infinite and finite. It would be impossible to pursue all the ways in which men have argued back from creation to Creator and the strange religious beliefs and practices that have resulted; but there are two which seem to be especially widespread and of special importance— two elements in man himself upon which he has built a notion of God.
The one is the human experience of sex— universal, life-giving, the closest union of two human beings, at once non-rational and ecstatic, lifting men for the moment out of themselves. It was inevitable that they should attribute some sort of sex-experience to the Divinity, and natural enough that they should (as so many did) introduce sexual union into their religious rituals as a symbolic means of union with the creative power.
The other is the human experience of conscience— worked out for us magnificently by Newman. The root of it is the awareness of something within us that says "You shall" or "You shall not": the sense of a law written in our nature, asserting an obligation not imposed on us by ourselves to do right and avoid wrong. It might or might not have led men to believe in a Supreme Being: but once they did believe in such a Being, it was inevitable that they should connect that inner voice with Him, should see the law it utters as His, should see Him as a source of morality, and so even of holiness: as One whom they would worship, with whom they would seek some sort of mystical oneness.
All this, man following his own nature could do: and all this, whether by some such process as we have sketched or by some quite other, man did do. Yet precisely as, by the reality in it, human nature tends to build religion, so by the wounds in it it tends to deform what it has built.
Thus the human intellect would tend to see that there must be some sort of Supreme Being: but only a human intellect at full strength would by its own unsupported powers hold on to one God and that God spiritual, just as a human will at less than full strength would find one God too overwhelming, and a purely spiritual God too remote. Polytheism and idolatry came crowding in everywhere; pantheism was an escape in a different direction. Moral corruption naturally corrupted religion, too. Sexual rites could only grow monstrous: man's fallen nature gets too much excitement out of sex to be trusted with sexual ritual. Nor did man's fallen nature always keep blood rituals in control: animal sacrifice suggested human sacrifice, and human sacrifice could grow to hecatombs. And if this means aberration by excess there was the possibility of aberration by defect, religion falling to a mere ritual relation without love or holiness or sense of moral obligation, but only gods to be placated and a routine of placation.
Scripture makes it clear that the Devil played a great part in it. The prophet Baruch (iv.7) tells the Jews that their captivity in Babylon is a punishment from God for having worshipped false gods. For you have provoked Him who made you, the eternal God, offering sacrifice to devils and not to God. So St. Paul, advising Christians not to eat meat that is known to have been offered in sacrifice to idols, makes clear that this is not because what is offered in sacrifice to idols is anything, or that the idol itself is anything, but that the things which the heathens sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils and not to God. And I would not that you should be made partakers with devils.
In the very worst of religions, you can see what good thing they are travestying: some-where below the travesty there is a basis of reality. The Devil indeed prefers to work with reality gone astray: there is more to it than to total fictions. The religions of heathendom gave him wonderful scope. Just how much he made of it, we see in a grim passage of Wisdom (xiv.21-27):
Men, serving either their affection or their kings, gave the incommunicable name to stones and wood. And it was not enough for them to err about the knowledge of God: but whereas they lived in a great war of ignorance, they call so many and so great evils peace. For either they sacrifice their own children, or use hidden sacrifices, or keep watches full of madness. So that now they neither keep life nor marriage undefiled: but one killeth another by envy or grieveth him by adultery. And all things are mingled together, blood, murder, theft and dissimulation, corruption and unfaithfulness, tumults and perjury, disquieting of the good; forgetfulness of God, defiling of souls, changing of nature, disorder in marriage, and the irregularity of adultery and uncleanness. For the worship of abominable idols is the cause, and the beginning and end, of all evils.
It was a carnival for the Devil. Yet religion did not perish. Nor is the history of religion a history of corruptions growing ever worse. There is degeneration, but there is revival, too. Between Adam and Our Lord we see now one section, now another of the pagan world, but we see no one section steadily, and a vast part of the world we scarcely see at all. So that it is impossible to figure a rhythm of degeneration and revival: but on the whole the movement of Paganism strikes us as not downward certainly, upward if anything. So history seems to show: so we should expect. For every Pagan was made by God in His own image and God loved them all. They had all fallen in Adam, but the Redemption was for them all. His providence did not ignore them in the immeasurable ages between. Wherever we look in time or place we see men calling upon God; it would be strange if God did not answer.
Just how God's providence worked we do not know. St. John tells us in the first chapter of his Gospel that the Word who is God enlightens every soul born into the world, so that besides the supernatural illumination of the soul in grace which, as we have seen, is appropriated to the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, there is an illumination of every human soul appropriated to the Second. St. Irenaeus, who knew Paganism—he lived in the midst of it in Asia and in Italy and in Gaul—writes in the Second Century: One and the same Divine Father and His eternal Word are from the beginning and in every age close to the human race and approach man by many ordinances and many operations of assisting grace.
The formula for this period as for all periods is man's desire for God (not,
alas, man's sole desire, nor always his strongest, and in some men no longer
there at all) and God's love for man.
Given that, we might expect to find what in fact we do find.
With all the fantastic perversions wrought by man's weakness of mind and will,
there are true values, that is to say resemblances to the Christian revelation,
to be found in every part of Paganism.
Some elements in the true approach of God to man and of man to God are to be
found in all religions;
there is hardly one that is not to be found in some.
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But in God's plan for the re-establishment of the whole race, a special part was to be acted by one race, the Jews, and because of this God brought them into a special relation with Himself. The story is told in the forty-six books of the Old Testament, from which I have already quoted so much. They are the sacred books of the Jews, and form a body of religious writing without parallel in the world. They cover the whole period from the creation of Adam to just before the coming of Christ; but they treat mainly of God's choosing of the Jews and what followed from it. The Church that Christ founded teaches that they were written by men under the inspiration of God— inspiration consisting in this, that God so illuminated the minds and energized in the wills of the writers, that what they wrote was what God wanted them to write. Thus these books have God for their principal author. That is why the arguments as to when and by whom the various books were written do not affect our acceptance of the doctrine they contain: our acceptance rests not on the human author but on God who inspired him.
The special relation of one people with God begins at a time and a place— the time roughly 2000 b.c., the place Haran in the land of Chanaan. There had come Abram, with his father and his brothers, from the Chaldaean town of Ur. And God said to Abram (Gen.):
I will make of thee a great nation and I will bless thee and magnify thy name: and thou shalt be blessed. I will bless them that bless thee and curse them that curse thee: and in thee shall all the kindred of the earth be blessed.
In the years that followed, God renewed the promises many times: but it was twenty-five years later that the great covenant was made which constituted the Jews God's people (Gen.xvii.): God said to him: I am. And My covenant is with thee: and thou shalt be a father of many nations. And I will establish My covenant between Me and thee and between thy seed after thee in their generations, by a perpetual covenant: to be a God to thee and to thy seed after thee.
God changed Abram's name to Abraham, which means "father of nations", and gave the command of circumcision "as a sign of the covenant".
God then had singled out a particular family, which was to grow into a nation: not for their own sake but for the sake of all mankind: they were chosen not simply for a favour, but for a function, something God was to do through them for the whole race. This God makes clear again (Gen.x.18): In thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.
The promises were repeated to Abraham's second son Isaac (he had already had a son Ishmael by a bondwoman) and to Isaac's second son Jacob (for the elder, Esau, had forsworn his birthright). In all this we see the hint of Redemption—all mankind is to be blessed through the seed of Abraham. And soon comes the hint of a Redeemer, and even of the mode of the Redemption— Jacob, dying, prophesies one who is to come from his fourth son Juda: The sceptre shall not be taken away from Juda, nor a ruler from his thigh, till he come that is to be sent: and he shall be the expectation of nations. Tying his foal to the vineyard and his ass, O my son, to the vine. He shall wash his robe in wine, and his garment in the blood of the grape. (Gen.xlix.10-11.)
By now the children of Jacob, to whom God had given the new name of Israel, were in Egypt, and there they were to be for four hundred years. The last part of that time they were fiercely oppressed, until God brought them out of Egypt under the leader Moses, whom he had appointed to them. The last act of their time in Egypt was spectacular. The angel of God visited the houses of the Egyptians, slaying the first-born: but he passed over the houses of the children of Israel, who had marked their door-posts with the blood of a lamb sacrificed by God's ordinance. And God ordered that this passing over (pasch is the Hebrew word) should be celebrated each year by the sacrifice of a lamb.
So the Israelites went from Egypt, crossed the Red Sea and came into the Arabian Desert: and there, upon Mt. Sinai, the Covenant was renewed and the Law was given. God gave the Jews through Moses the Ten Commandments and a great mass of moral, ritual and legal precepts covering every detail of their lives. Sacrifices were offered and Moses "taking the book of the cove-nant", read it in the hearing of all the people: and they said: All things that the Lord hath spoken, we will do. We will be obedient. And he took the blood and sprinkled it upon the people, and he said: This is the blood of the covenant which the Lord has made with you concerning all these words. (Exodus xxiv.8.)
Let us repeat that the Jews were chosen because of something God meant to accomplish through them for the whole world. The essence of their function lay in this— that from them was to come the Redeemer, who should redeem all mankind. Meanwhile, they were to bear witness to truths which were in danger of perishing, which indeed seemed to have perished utterly: the truth that there is but one God, the truth that God will send a Redeemer of mankind.
Strangely enough, the Jews showed no great natural aptitude for, or any very tenacious hold upon, either truth. Monotheism, for instance, made no more appeal to them than to all that ocean of polytheistic people which surrounded them. All their instincts ran to strange gods and to idols: the thing seems to have been a craving as strong as a man might feel for alcohol. They were forever going after the gods of the heathen, and God forever restoring them to right ways. God's pedagogy was of two sorts: He allowed their enemies to work their will upon them as a reminder that they were in the hand of the one God and could achieve nothing without Him: He sent them the Prophets to bear glowing and glorious witness to the same truth. If they found monotheism difficult, they found not much easier the true doctrine as to the nature of the Messias, the Anointed One, who was to come, and of the Kingdom He was to found. Here again the Prophets were their instructors, and as the centuries pass the picture of the Messias and His Kingdom grows in detail and in clarity.
Yet we should be mistaken if we exaggerated the clarity. There is a vast mass of prophecy, and a magnificence over all of it. But much of it is obscure even to us who have seen its fulfilment; certain elements which now seem most wonderfully fulfilled appear buried in their context, not emphasized as prophetical or especially likely to catch the ear or the eye. The Prophets did not provide a blackboard diagram and then proceed to lecture on it. Indeed our modern use of the word prophet may give us a wrong notion of their office. Prophesy does not mean to foretell, but to speak out. They were not there primarily to foretell the future, but to utter the eternal and judge the present by it. The Jews not unnaturally found morality harder even than monotheism: the Law had imposed upon them a morality stricter than any known among men, and they fell from it. The Prophets thundered against this as against strange gods. For here, too, they must judge the present by the eternal.
But precisely because that was their function they did speak much of Him who was to come. Consider how the picture builds up. We have already seen that One who was to be the expectation of nations should come from Juda. From the Psalms (e.g., Ps.cxxxi.11) we gather the further detail that He was to be a descendant of David the King, and this is confirmed by the statement of Isaias (xi.1) that he is to be a rod out of the root of Jesse, for Jesse was David's father: In that day the root of Jesse, who standeth for an ensign of the people, him the Gentiles shall beseech and his sepulchre shall be glorious.
There is no explicit statement that this is the Messias: but St. Paul takes it for granted (Rom.xv.12), and in any event no Jew doubted that the Messias was to be sprung from David.
In the seventh chapter of Isaias we read: Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son: and his name shall be called Emmanuel.
From St. Matthew (i.23) we know that this is a prophecy of the virgin birth of Christ; yet in the context, one might well think that the prophecy referred to an event immediately expected and actually described in the next chapter of Isaias, the eighth, as having happened. In the light of our new knowledge, we can re-read the eighth chapter and see that though there is some sort of fulfilment there and then, yet some mightier thing is involved: the language used is of a grandeur too great for the actual episode.
The fifth chapter of Micheas tells us that the Messias is to be born in Bethlehem: And thou, Bethlehem Ephrata, art a little one among the thousands of Juda: out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be the ruler of Israel: and his going forth is from the beginning, from the days of eternity. ... And this man shall be our peace.
There are other details which we see fulfilled, but which could hardly have meant so much to their first hearers: thus Zacharias (ix.9) writes: Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Sion, shout for joy, O daughter of Jerusalem: Behold thy King will come to thee, the just and saviour. He is poor and riding upon an ass, upon a colt, the foal of an ass.
Such details as we have been considering— that the Messias was to be of the tribe of Juda, of the family of David, born of a virgin and in Bethlehem— are not the primary things about Him. Two things that matter far more are Himself and what He was to do. Upon both, the prophecies are fuller and clearer.
As to what He was: there is a central stream of teaching which shows Him a man triumphant, and two parallel streams, one showing Him as more than a man, the other showing Him as less than triumphant. It would seem that the Jews concentrated on the central stream, and made little of either of the others. Yet these others are of such vast importance that missing them one hardly sees Him at all.
That He was to be more than man, not simply the greatest of men, is indicated again and again. We have already seen the phrase of Micheas—his going forth is from the beginning, from the days of eternity.
But it is not only by pre-existence that the Messias seems to be more than man. The hints are everywhere: as for instance the suggestion that He is God's son in some special way (It is hard to see how they could be more than hints: the truth about the divinity of the Messias could not well be conveyed to a nation that did not know the doctrine of the Trinity.)
The reverse of the medal is the even clearer stream of prophecy that the Messias is to be poor and suffering. The greatest passages are in Psalm xxi. and in chapter liii. of Isaias. The Psalm and the chapter should be read most carefully. Here note a few verses from the chapter, summing all up: Despised and the most abject of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with infirmity. ... He shall be led as a sheep to the slaughter and shall be dumb as a lamb before his shearer. And the Lord was pleased to bruise him in infirmity. If he shall lay down his life for sin he shall see a long-lived seed.
To say that the Jews ignored a good deal of all this is not to accuse them of any startling malignity. The assertion of the Messias's pre-existence, for example, was difficult to reconcile with the certainty that he was to be a descendant of David: one gets the impression that the Jews, faced with two elements difficult to reconcile, simply took the intellectual line of least resistance, concentrated upon the clearer one and left the other in its mysteriousness. Similarly it is hard to see how anything short of what did in fact happen to Christ Our Lord could have shown the fulfilment both of the splendour and the suffering: lacking that clue they concentrated on the more obvious.
But if their intellect followed the line of least resistance in the picture they formed of the Messias in Himself, their will seems to have followed the line of greatest complacency in the picture they formed of the Kingdom He was to found. They saw it as a Kingdom of Israel in which the Gentiles, if they came into it at all, should be very much in a subordinate place; and they saw it as an earthly and not as a spiritual Kingdom. The Prophets, carefully read, supply correctives for both errors.
Thus they assert that the Messias is coming for a light to the Gentiles and that the Gentiles are to share in the joy of his Kingdom. When Psalm Ixxi. says: In him shall all the tribes of the earth be blessed: all nations shall magnify him, it simply re-asserts what God said to Abram in the first of the promises. Isaias is filled with the same teaching: and he indicates the possibility that there may be Jews excluded from the Kingdom and Gentiles admitted. So St. Paul (Rom.x.20) explains the contrast (Isaias Ixv.) between what God says of the Gentiles: Those who never looked for me have found me: I have made myself known to those who never asked for word of me, and what He says of the Jews: I stretch out my hand all day to a people that refuses obedience and cries out against me.
But if we find from the Prophets that the Gentiles were to have a place, and a place of joy, in the Kingdom, it was left for St. Paul to utter in plain words the intimate secret of the total equality of Jew and Gentile in the Kingdom, the mystery of Christ which was never made known to any human being in past ages ... that through the gospel preaching the Gentiles are to win the same inheritance, to be made part of the same body, to share the same divine promise in Christ Jesus. (Eph.iii.5-6).
Thus all who belong to Christ are of the seed of Abraham and the promises of the Kingdom are to us. But what sort of Kingdom? The Jews, as we have seen, seemed to expect an earthly Kingdom. The Prophets do not precisely and explicitly contradict them, but they give a mass of teaching which should have made the notion of a merely earthly Kingdom untenable and not even desirable. Thus Ezechiel (xxxvi.24-26): And I will pour upon you clean water, and you shall be cleansed from all your filthiness and I will cleanse you from all idols. And I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh and will give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in the midst of you. And Zacharias (ix.): And He shall speak peace to the Gentiles: and His power shall be from sea to sea, and from rivers even to the end of the earth. ... And the Lord their God will save them in that day, as the flock of his people: for holy stones shall be lifted up over His lands. For what is the good thing of Him and what is His beautiful thing, but the corn of the elect and wine springing forth virgins.
Indeed it is plain enough, for us who read the Prophets now, that there was to be a spiritualization at every point: even at the point of priesthood and sacrifice where Israel had most scrupulously observed the Law. For the Jewish priests and the Jewish sacrifices were but figures of, and preparations for, something that was mysteriously to transcend them. The Messias was to be (Ps.cix.) a priest forever according to the order of Melchisedech —a strange phrase, for Melchisedech, who had offered a sacrifice of bread and wine (Gen.xiv.), was not a Jew. As for the priesthood, so for the sacrifices: From the rising of the sun even to the going down, my name is great among the Gentiles, and in every place there is sacrifice, and there is offered to my name a clean oblation: for my name is great among the Gentiles, saith the Lord of Hosts. (Mal. i.11.)
Everything in Israel was preparatory, looked forward to some-thing which should
complete it.
The Law given by God to Moses was not a consummation.
It was a preparation: a hard and heavy preparation:
not maturity, but a superb training for maturity.
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Maturity came. Look again at what St. Paul told the Galatians (iv.3-5): So we also, when we were children, were serving under the elements of the world. But when the fullness of the time was come. God sent his Son, made of a woman, made under the Law: that He might redeem them who were under the Law: that we might receive the adoption of sons.
I have said that the moment of maturity was clear to the eye of God, half-clear to our eye. We seem to see, though it would be absurd to pretend in such a matter that we could be certain, that the Law had done for the Jews all that it had in it to do. Trained by the Law and hammered by their enemies, they had come to a splendid point of development— poor enough in the light of the possibilities Christ was to reveal, but magnificent in comparison with what was to be found elsewhere. Their century-old temptation to polytheism and idolatry, they had conquered: from their return out of captivity in Babylon, five hundred years before, it seems not to have troubled them. Under the Romans, who had ruled them now for sixty years, they had stood gloriously against the introduction of idols. They held unbreakably to belief in the one true God, and observed most scrupulously His ritual law; and if the moral law was harder to observe, they maintained its rights as law, and repented for their sins against it. It is easy enough to see defects here— as in the disproportionate observance of the outward act and failure to grasp that the inward state of the will was decisive. But the Jewish religion at the time of Christ's birth was a thing of grandeur: and showed by the holiness it produced in the best of the Jews how fit it was for the completion that Christ was to bring it and the use He made of it. The Law, says St. Paul (Gal.iii.24), was a pedagogue— the word here does not mean a teacher, but the slave who took the children to school: and the school that the Law brought them to was Christ. To Christ the Law did in all reality bring the Jews.
But the preparation was not only of the Jews, nor the fullness of time only a matter of their coming to maturity. For the Gentiles, too, the time was at the full. The history of the human race is one story from end to end, not a collection of unrelated short stories. The history of the race, says St. Augustine, is the story of one man. It was the race that fell in Adam, it was the race that was to be redeemed: in between the race had to be made ready. One cannot pretend to see the Gentile world as God saw it. Yet even in what we can see, there is at least a suggestion of a pedagogic action of God upon the Gentiles, parallel (though at a lower level) to His pedagogic action upon the Jews. If the Jews were made ready in one way, the Gentiles were made ready in another. God had not given them the Mosaic Law, but His natural law was written in their hearts. And His providence was over them. He had not sent them Prophets like those He had sent Israel, but they had had powerful religious teachers and great religious revivals, countless movements upwards to balance— and as it would seem more than balance— the countless movements downwards: and God was not for nothing in all this. Indeed it is hard to see how, otherwise, religion, under the combined influence of man's weakness and the Devil's destructive skill, should have survived at all—whereas in fact the general religious standard of the heathen world was almost certainly higher at the coming of Christ than it had been two thousand years earlier when God made His covenant with Abraham.
But that continuing providence of God over the Gentiles which a study of the Gentile world certainly suggests, we know as a fact from Scripture. St. John, we have seen, in the first chapter of his Gospel speaks of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity as the True Light Who enlightens every soul born into the world.
St. Paul states unequivocally (Rom.i .) that Acknowledge of God is clear to their minds; God Himself has made it clear to them; from the foundation of the world men have caught sight of His invisible nature, His eternal power and His divineness, as they are known through His creatures.
Nor is it merely a matter of the intellect's power to draw inferences from the external universe: As for the Gentiles, though they have no Law to guide them, there are times when they carry out the precepts of the Law unbidden, finding in their own natures a rule to guide them, in default of any other rule; and this shows that the obligations of the law are written in their hearts; their conscience utters its own testimony, and when they dispute with one another, they find themselves condemning this, approving that. (Rom.ii.14-15.)
So that the Gentiles had a law uttering the will of God to them, but not supplemented as it was for the Jews by the Law given to Moses, Similarly the Gentiles had religious teachers, not Prophets inspired by God, but men working toward truth all the same and by and large serving truth— at least to the point of bettering the proportion of truth to error. Around five hundred years before Christ, the Jews as we have seen returned from the Babylonian captivity cleansed once for all of attachment to strange gods. About the same time there was a religious movement— or series of movements— throughout the Pagan world. Zoroaster in Persia got closer to monotheism perhaps than any religious founder ever got outside the main stream of God's revelation to man; in different ways Gautama Buddha in India, Confucius and Lao Tse in China founded systems based upon great truths from which, though they were mingled with error or hindered by insufficiency, men's souls surely gained far more than they lost. A couple of hundred years later, the Greek philosophers— Socrates, Plato, Aristotle— did a marvellous intellectual work upon the nature of things, which moved St. Justin Martyr to give them the title which St. Paul a century earlier had given the Law—Pedagogues to bring men to Christ.
Of the later religious movements— Stoicism, Neo-Pythagoreanism and such— we may say what we have said of the great sixth century movements: that, allowance made for their errors, they meant some sort of upward movement. Compared with Christianity they are laden with imperfections: but compared with what actually lay around them, one can see how they had their part in the preparation. There were many other elements at work. The Roman Law spread a greater measure of better discipline over a wider area of the world than any secular law before it. The Jews were widely dispersed inside and outside the Roman Empire, and some of the truth of Judaism had seeped into the surrounding paganisms.
All these things are true, yet a glance at the state of the Pagan world might lead us to feel that they bear too tiny a proportion to a whole ocean of iniquity. Look at St. Paul's powerful description in the first chapter of his Epistle to the Romans (a description blacker if anything than the passage already quoted from the centuries-earlier book of Wisdom):
They, who claimed to be so wise, turned fools, and exchanged the glory of the imperishable God for representations of perishable man, of bird and beast and reptile. That is why God abandoned their lustful hearts to filthy practices of dishonouring their own bodies among themselves. They had exchanged God's truth for a lie, reverencing and worshipping the creature in preference to the Creator ... and in return God abandoned them to passions which brought dishonour to themselves. Their women exchanged natural for unnatural intercourse, and the men, on their side, giving up natural intercourse with women, were burnt up with desire for each other, men practising vileness with their fellow-men. Thus they have received a fitting retribution for their false belief. And as they scorned to keep God in view, so God has abandoned them to a frame of mind worthy of all scorn, that prompts them to disgraceful acts. They are versed in every kind of injustice, knavery, impurity, avarice, and ill-will; spiteful, murderous, contentious, deceitful, depraved, back-biters, slanderers. God's enemies; insolent, haughty, vainglorious; inventive in wickedness, disobedient to their parents; without prudence, without honour, without love, without loyalty, without piety.
In what sense can we speak of a fullness of time for such people?
How can we feel that they too have in any way been made ready?
Clearly we cannot know: yet certain possibilities leap to the eye.
In the best of the Gentiles clearly, and in the average less clearly, there
had grown up a contempt for the puerilities of the myths and a dissatisfaction
with the Mysteries;
philosophy which had promised so fair four centuries earlier had come to a
sort of barrenness and clearly could do no more for them;
the pleasures of the flesh were horribly exacting, but yielded less and less
of joy.
Despair lay over everything and despair is a kind of maturity too, or at least
a last stage on one road to maturity.
It is not altogether fanciful to think that Jew and Gentile, having different
roles to play in the design of the Messias who was to come, were made ready
by God in different ways.
Israel was to receive the message from the Christ and bear it to the Pagan
world;
the Pagan world was to receive it from Israel.
Israel was made ready to receive the new impulse because the Law had done so
much for it;
the Law had brought Israel as far as it could,
but it had brought it there trained in mind and will and filled with hope—
ready for what was to come.
If Israel's preparation was by way of vitality and hope.
Paganism's was by way of devitalization and despair.
The Jew had learned the glory of God, the Pagan the worthlessness of all else.
The spiritual energy of Israel needed this new relation with God: they had
to do something with their energy.
The spiritual destitution of Paganism needed this new inpouring of life:
they had to get energy from somewhere.
For Jew and for Gentile, it was the fullness of time.
Christ came that all things might be re-established in Him.
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