The Uniting Bond of Israel. 15 their possession of wealth that gives them the advantage, the genius that could create the wealth, and so manipulate it as to maintain pre-eminence, is evidently a power of а high degree. To instruct the world in the worship of Mammon, after having taught it the knowledge of God, is no common achievement. A power like this, without political independence at its back, implies an inner uniting bond of no common kind; and when we ask what that bond is, we are driven back to the earlier history of the people for an answer. The possession of wealth by the race is of comparatively modern origin, brought about by their exclusion from the ordinary trades and professions, which were practised in the times when they suffered persecution at the hands of Christians. But the bond that unites them is of much older date: they had become a historic people, and had indeed achieved the best part of their history, before their corporate life had assumed this special phase. Persecution had its chief motive in their distinctiveness, and largely tended to perpetuate it. " The bond which united this people and enabled them? to achieve their distinction in the world was a religious one; and the specific contribution of ancient Israel to the world's good was the knowledge of their religion. The foundation upon which, at all periods, Israel's sense of its national unity rested, was religious in its character."1 "The history of Israel is essentially a history of religious ideas." The great Eastern empires, by a crushing despotism, welded peoples into kingdoms of colossal size, and prepared a field upon which more civilising influences could have play when the fit time arrived. The people of Israel attained no such empire, and left no such remains of 1 Wellhausen, Hist. of Israel, p. 433. 2 Stade, Geschichte des Volkes Israel, vol. i. p. 12. greatness as these empires exhibit. Their territory even at the largest was but small; they remained but a short time in these limited dominions; and their country, when they left it, became a No-man's-land, whose inhabitants at the present day own a foreign master, and have no attachment to it beyond an instinctive clinging to the soil that supports them. Rome gave the world a system of law which remained an active influence throughout Europe after the great Roman empire was shattered. Greece died in giving birth to immortal art, poetry, and science. Ancient Israel, on the contrary, never cultivated art nor distinguished itself in philosophy; and, so far from seeking to influence the great world, kept jealously aloof from its movements. What Israel has given to the world is a literature of a very peculiar kind, intensely national in the first place, instinct with an eloquence and a poetry of its own kind; but above all, and herein specifically different from all other national literatures, permeated from beginning to end with religion. From a very ancient time writers in this nation have set themselves to give the story, and a connected story, of their own rise and growth, to codify the laws, to put on record the words and deeds of teachers and leaders; and whether or not a part, great or small, of such ancient literature has been lost, one feature characterises what we possess, it is of a religious cast, and national only because it is religious. A nation is historical only when it makes history, and a nation records its history only when it becomes conscious that it has a history to record; and therefore the earliest of these records which have this national and religious tone, prove that at the time of their composition Israel had a consciousness of its own significant position in the world, and a belief that its history was worthy of being recorded. Israel's Religion not extinct. 17 "The self-consciousness of the religion of Israel," says Dr A. B. Davidson,1 "is a phenomenon almost more singular than the religion itself." Of course it is to be admitted that the existence of such writings, when once they did exist, had much to do with the making and moulding of the succeeding history; but the fact of their existing is first of all a proof that the nation was conscious that it had some great part to play. Yet the religion which was the bond uniting Israel and giving that people their peculiar position in the world, is not a dry system enshrined in ancient documents to furnish study for the archaeologist. Other nations of the ancient world had their religious systems, expounded by philosophers, guarded by priests, supported by the state, adorned with the ritual which the highest art could elaborate. These religions, however, faded from the view of the world with the decadence of the peoples who professed them, and are now painfully restored from forgotten writings and crumbling monuments; and even when recovered seem at best but like distant echoes of the religion of Israel. This, like the people themselves, has never ceased to be in evidence before the world, endued with endless vitality, and is operating at the present day in a wider field than its first professors ever dreamed of. We know how the religious systems of Greece and Rome crumbled to powder before the preaching of Jewish missionaries, men of little learning and of no social position; and how all that was best in the art and political life of the most civilised nations of antiquity has been made subservient to the spread of a religion which came from despised Judæa. For not only does the world owe to Israel the religion 1 Expositor, third series, vol. vi. p. 165. B of the Old Testament, which for the time was clearly distinguishable from the religions of contemporaneous nations, but to the religion of Israel we must trace back by direct descent the two greatest religions of succeeding times, Christianity and Mohammedanism. These two, with Buddhism, exhibit the highest attainments of the human race in the matter of religion; to them, as distinguished from merely local and national religions, has been given the name of Universal or World religions, because there is something in their character, as proved by their reception and spread, that fits them for peoples of various climes and of various race. Buddhism, no doubt, so far as numbers go, bulks more largely on the map of the world than Islam, yet as a factor in the great world's history it has not had so distinguished a career; it has been more a religion of thought than of action. And then, in its adaptation to the wants of man of every grade of civilisation, of every tribe and tongue, in the spirituality of its teaching and in its living power, Christianity, as the history of the world shows, occupies a place peculiarly its own. It is a matter of history, which very few question, that both these religions are traceable directly to the religion of Israel. There may be differences in the modes in which the influence is traced, and as to the precise amount of the dependence; but there can be no question that both Jesus and His apostles represented the faith of Abraham as the foundation of Christianity, and that Mohammed appealed to the same spiritual ancestor, declaring that Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian, but a Muslim.3 Thus two 2 1 Kuenen, National Religions and Universal Religions, p. 56. The Koran, Sura ii 60. Missionary Religions. 19 religions, which have been intimately bound up with the political and social movements of the world, which have subjugated to themselves nations in the foremost rank of intelligence, which have proved themselves adapted to peoples of the most diverse birth and training, and which are at the present moment rivalling one another in the missionary zeal with which they are propagated, are directly founded upon the religion of old Israel, which never was anything more than the religion of a small and isolated people. Mohammed gave forth the Koran as "a warning to all creatures," and even in his lifetime sent a peremptory summons, prophet of Arabia as he was, to both the King of Persia and the Emperor of Constantinople, as well as to other minor potentates, to accept the religion of Islam. And the command of Jesus, in fulfilment of which His followers travelled in all directions and suffered every hardship, was: "Go ye into all the world, and make disciples of all nations." But though claiming direct descent from Israel's religion, they have this very point in sharp contrast to it, that they both very soon became universal religions, whereas it remained, and still remains, a religion of one people. We have instances of the religion of Israel coming under the view of other nations, as in the story of Jonah; and there were, no doubt, all along, foreign converts to the Hebrew faith. But never did the religion of Israel set about a propaganda; it was only in late times, when the faiths of the pagan world were dying away, that in sickness of heart the religiously minded of the Gentiles became proselytes to Judaism, and found it a stepping-stone to Christianity. Yet though the faith of Israel remained restricted to one race, not only did it by direct genealogy bring forth the two great missionary 1 The Koran, Sura xxxviii. 87, |