the ear, a blow on the back, spitting on the person, taking away an under garment, uncovering a woman's head, and the like. The value of a hand, or foot, or an eye, was computed by the depreciation it would have made in the value of a slave. A blow on the ear was variously set at the fine of a shilling or a pound: a blow on the one cheek at two hundred zuzees; on both cheeks, at double. To tear out hair, to spit on the person, to take away one's coat, or to uncover a woman's head, was compensated by a payment of four hundred zuzees.P

This rude and often mercenary softening of the harshness of the old Law fell wholly below the requirements of the New Kingdom. Its members must suffer wrong patiently, that the conscience of the wrong-doer-become its own accuser-might be won to repentance by the lesson of unresisting meekness. Christ's own Divine charity and forgiveness were to be repeated by His followers. Sin was to be conquered by being made to feel the power of goodness. The present was, at best, only a discipline for the future, and the patient endurance of wrong, with Christ-like love and gentleness, was part of the preparation for the pure joys of the Messianic kingdom. "Ye have heard," said He, "that it was said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. But I say unto you, that ye resist not the evil man; but whosoever smites thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And to him who desires to contend with thee and take thy coat, leave him thy cloak also. And whosoever shall press thee one mile, go with him two. To him that asks thee, give, and from him that desires to borrow of thee, turn not away." The spirit of such injunctions is evident. Hasty retaliation; readiness to stand on one's rights in all cases; deliberate revenge rather than pity, are unworthy a member of the New Kingdom. It is for him to teach by bearing, yielding, and giving, and not by words only. The virtues he commends he is to illustrate. But it is far from the teaching of Christ that law is to cease, or that the evildoer is to have everything at his mercy. Only, as far as possible, the principle of His kingdom is to be the purest, deepest, self-sacrificing love.

1 Robertson's Works, vol. iii. p. 239 (State of Europe in Middle Ages). Bastian, Rechtsverhältnisse, etc., p. 210. Hor. Heb., vol. ii. p. 130. Sepp, vol. iv. p. 224.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT (CONCLUDED).

JESUS had led His audience step by step to higher and higher conceptions, and now, by an easy transition, raised them to the highest of all.1

The character of any religion depends on its idea of God. The Jews had no loftier thought of Him than as a national deity, the Father of Israel and of its proselytes, but not the God of the world at large. They looked on Him also as a jealous God, and the Pharisee urged himself to a painful zeal in his fulfilment of the Law, by the thought that the sins of the father were visited on the third and fourth generation. If he agonized to carry out a thousand minute prescriptions, if the Essene secluded himself in hurtful loneliness, if the Sadducee toiled to discharge all that was required in the service of the Temple, and in the presentation of offerings, if the people mourned in the apprehension that God had forsaken them, it was because all alike looked up to a Being who, as they believed, required what they could scarcely render. They should have drawn other conceptions from their ancient Scriptures, but they did not. They had always learned much that was true and sublime from the Law and the Prophets -the Majesty of God and the dependence of the creaturethe dignity of man as the Divine image, and the kingly relation of Jehovah to Israel, His son, His first-born, His bride, His spouse. They had never lost the conviction that their nation could not perish, because the honour of God was pledged to defend it, and they even looked forward, with a frenzied earnestness, to a future when He would send His Messiah, and raise them above all the nations. As Jews, many doubtless drew comfort from the Divine words, that, like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him. But their theology had sunk to a mere mer

1 Chrysostom; quoted in Meyer, Matthäus, p. 157.

cenary relation of performance and reward. The idea of a strict return of good for good, or evil for evil, extended to the next world as well as this, and, at the best, God was only the Father of Israel, not of mankind. Still, above all, the Master, looking for service from man as the servantthe fond thought of His fatherhood, even in its limited national sense, grew more and more common as Christ's day drew near. The Jew was being educated for the Divine announcement of the whole truth.

The heathen world, also, had long been unconsciously preparing for its proclamation. Greek philosophy had spoken of the Father of gods and men. Man was the Divine image and of Divine origin-the friend, the fellow-citizen, the emanation, the son, of God.1 A generation later, in an insincere age, when fine words were used as mere rhetorical flourishes, springing from no conviction or earnestness, Seneca 2 was able to speak almost like a Christian. "The gods," said he, are full of pity and friendliness-do everything for our good, and for our benefit have created all kinds of blessings with exhaustless bounty, and prepared everything for us beforehand. What they have they make over to us: that is how they use things; and they are unwearied, day and night, dispensing their benefits as the protectors of the human race. We are loved by them as children of their bosom, and, like loving parents, they smile at the faults of their children, and cease not to bestow kindness on kindness to us; give us before we ask, and continue to do so, although we do not thank them, and even though we cry out defiantly, 'I shall take nothing from them; let them keep what they have for themselves!' The sun rises over the unjust, and the seas spread out even for sea robbers. The gods are easily appeased, never unforgiving; how unfortunate were we if they were not so!"3 Thus also "The way of man, in which the godlike walks, goes upwards to the gods, who reach out the hand to us without pride or jealousy, to help us to rise. We need no temple, nor even to lift up our hands to heaven: God is near thee; the Holy Spirit, the Watcher over good or evil, who ever, unweariedly, leads us to God."4 Words like these sound Christian, though we know that they were only artificial rhetoric, composed to turn aside the charge of

1 Authorities in Keim, vol. ii. p. 58.

Renan, L'Antechrist, p. 125. 3 Seneca d. Ir., ii. 27; d. Benef., vi. 23; ii. 29; iv. 5. Epis., lxxiii. 95. 4 Senec. Epis., lxiii.

THE BROTHERHOOD OF MANKIND.

71

worshipping stocks and stones. Faith in the divinity often gives way, in Seneca, to haughty pride in humanity, and that pride, in turn, sinks before the dark future. The fancy played over the dark abyss with empty words of comfort, respecting the father-like gods and god-like man, but even prosperity could hardly amuse itself with them, and the hour of trial repeated them with hollow laughter and selfmurder. Yet they were there to use for the highest good, had men chosen. The religious education of the world had gradually, through long ages, become ready for the teachings of Jesus."

When the Sermon on the Mount was delivered every sign of the wrath of God with the nation lay on it like a burden, and perplexed the masters in Israel. Yet it was then that Jesus revealed God as the Father of men, who had loved them from the beginning of the world; appealing for proof even to the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. For the first time, men heard that their whole race were sons of the great heavenly Father; that the world lay in the sunshine of His eternal love, and that all alike were invited to seek His face." It was the first proclamation of a universal religion, and, as such, an event unique in the history of mankind. In the early ages of the world, war was perpetual. Even after men had long adopted city life and its civilization, a stranger and an enemy were synonymous. Thus, in the first ages of Rome, a stranger who had not put himself formally under the protection of some Roman, had no rights and no protection. What the Roman citizen took from him was as lawful gain as the shell which no one owned, picked up on the sea-shore.3 He was like a wild beast, to be hunted and preyed on at any one's will.4 To use Mommsen's figure, a tribe or people must be either the anvil or the hammer. Ulysses was only the type of the world at large in his day, when, in the early part of his wanderings, he landed in Thrace, and having found a city, instantly sacked it and killed all the inhabitants. Where there was no express treaty, plunder and murder were always to be dreaded. The only safety of individuals or communities was their own capacity of self-defence. As tribes and clans expanded to nations, the blood connection secured peace, more or less, in the area they occupied, and,

1 Keim, vol. ii. p. 59.

2 Matt. vi. 28.

3 Mommsen's Röm. Gesch., vol. i. p. 158.

4 Ibid., p. 161.

ultimately, the interests of commerce, or the impulse of selfpreservation, joined even states of different nationalities in peaceful alliances. Isolated nations, like the Jews, still kept up the intense aversion to all but their own race, but the progress of the world made this more and more exceptional.

Before the age of Christ, the conquests of Rome had broken down the dividing walls of nationality over the civilized earth, and had united all lands under a common government, which secured a widespread peace, hitherto unknown. Men of races living far apart found themselves free to compete for the highest honours of public life or of letters, and Rome accepted men of genius, and even emperors, from the obscure populations of the provinces.

But though conquest had forced the nations into an outward unity, there was no real fusion or brotherhood. Man, as man, had gained nothing. The barbarian and the slave were no less despised than before, and had secured no more rights. The Romans had been forced, for their own sakes, to raise the conquered to more or less political equality with themselves, but they did so from no sentiment of respect to them as fellow-men, and still bore themselves towards them with the same haughty superiority and ill-concealed aversion. It was the peace of political and even moral death. All mankind had become the slaves of the despot on the Tiber. Ancient virtues had passed away, and vice and corruption, unequalled perhaps in any age, lay like a deadly miasma over universal society. The union of the world was regretted, as superseding the times when Rome could indulge its tastes in war and plunder. It was a political comprehension, not a moral federation. The hostility of the past was impossible, but the world had only become a mob, not a brotherhood, of nations, and had sunk in morality as it had advanced in outward alliance.

With the Jews, the old hatred of all races but their own had grown with the calamities of the nation. It seemed to them a duty to hate the heathen and the Samaritan, but their cynicism extended, besides, to all in whom their jealousy for the honour of the Law saw cause for dislike. They hated the publicans; the Rabbi hated the priest, the Pharisee the Sadducee, and both loathed and hated the common people, who did not know the ten thousand injunc

See a fine chapter in Ecce Homo, pp. 127-141.