The reader will have noticed the indifference already betrayed by our reviewer, as by worldly men in general, for the mysteries of Christianity as compared with its morals. It would be too gross to deny the practical fruits which the faith of Christ has manifested in the face of the narrow selfishness of the synagogue and the bolder impurity of heathenism. Two methods of neutralizing the weight of such a testimony are usually adopted by the enemies of the gospel: one the divorce of Christian morals from the revealed dogmas; the other, the insinuation that as good morality was taught by Jews—that the New Testament and the Talmud are therefore well-nigh identical in what affects life and godliness. Indeed in one place at least (cited before) the writer's zeal carries him so far as to speak of “the striking parallels of dogma and parable, of allegory and proverb, exhibited by the gospel and the Talmudical writings.... There are many more vital points of contrast between the New Testament and the Talmud than divines yet seem fully to realize.” We have seen how unfounded are his instances in proof of this intrepid assertion, and that the use of “redemption,” “baptism,” “grace,” “faith,” “salvation,” &c., if more thoroughly looked into, point to a conclusion precisely the reverse of this superficial estimate. It would rather go to prove that, while the inspired writers of the New Testament were led in God's wisdom to employ the Hellenistic dialect and phraseology, already familiar to Jews in their widely used Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures, they employed some terms, common to them and the compilers of the Talmud, in senses as contrasted as the scope of the Talmud is with that of the New Testament. They differ as time and the earth that now is differ from eternity—as far as man does from the God of grace and holiness.
Christianity essentially consists in the revelation of a divine person, who was man withal as truly as He was God, and who, suffering on the cross, wrought the mighty work of redemption. This alone conciliates perfect light with perfect love, a sin-hating and a sinner-pitying God who deigns out of His own pure grace to save guilty man by faith, and yet so as not only to justify, but to glorify his own character in the very righteousness which justifies the believer. This (though not this only) is revealed in the New Testament. It is not the law merely but the truth; and the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven is the power both of enjoying and of testifying this admirable display of our God and Father in Christ the Lord. The Old Testament prepared the way for this new thing which was to fill up the interval between God's rejection of the earthly people Israel till they repent and own the Messiah whom they rejected, and then the old hopes of the chosen nation (sown in a generation to come born of God) shall revive, and Israel shall come forward, under Messiah and the new covenant, and inherit the land long promised to their fathers, and thus shall they be a blessing to all families of the earth, instead of a curse, as their unbelief has proved far and wide to Gentiles for eighteen centuries at least.
It must be evident, therefore, that it is folly as well as wickedness, to sever the ethics of Christianity from its fundamental mysteries. To attempt it is to seek to cut off the head from its body. It is nothing but mutilation and death. It is false that the distinctive Christian truths “are matters wholly apart.” The morals of a Christian cannot be found, save with the faith and confession of the Lord Jesus. For though the δικαίωμα or righteous import of the law is only fulfilled in him who is not under the law and who walks after the Spirit, not after the flesh, it is not true that the fullness of Christian morality is contained even in that. Love is the fulfilling of the law; but nowhere is it said or meant that love, as revealed in Christ and made good in the Christian, does not now go far beyond. “If,” says the great apostle of circumcision, “when ye do well, and suffer for it, ye take it patiently, this is acceptable [not merely righteousness, but grace] with God, for even hereunto were ye called [“ ye” Christians, not Jews]; because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow his steps; who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth; who when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not, but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously,” &c. Christ is life as well as truth, and these things are inseparable in fact, though in thought they may he distinguished. He was the manifestation of what God is toward sinners as well as His own children in an evil world. The law, and beyond this no Jew can go, is but the claim of what man should be. Christ, not the law, is the image of God, and the exemplar of the Christian who is called to imitate God and walk in love as Christ did, who loved and gave Himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savor. The law can but condemn and kill the guilty. In Christianity God commends His love toward us in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. From faith in this, and more than this, in His infinite death and resurrection, flows the morality of the gospel. What has Hillel or any other comparable? They cannot rise above self and man. The ethics of the Christian have their source in union with a Christ who died and rose, and is now on the throne of God—in God Himself thus manifesting Himself in Him. Are they then “totally apart from” the mysteries of the Christian faith? Are they, in form or substance, in breadth or depth, identical with the sayings of any Rabbi that ever breathed?
The reviewer protests against the notion that the Jewish sabbath savors of grim austerity. It was (says he) a feast day, honored by fine garments, by the best cheer, by wine, lights, spices, and other joys of pre-eminently bodily import. Does this illustrate the parallel between the morals of the Gospel and of the Talmud? Entirely is it granted that the Puritans are no more to be trusted as expositors of law and gospel than they of the broad-church school, who take advantage of the New-Testament doctrine as to the sabbath, in order to deny the divinely sanctioned character of the Lord's day, mistaking their own license for Christian liberty. In truth the essential distinctness of the two days illustrate well the difference between (not merely the corrupted Judaism of the Talmud, but) the Mosaic institution in its best estate, and Christianity. “The sabbath was made for man,” especially for Israel when that people was called and formed. It was the last day of the week, when man having toiled six days ended with the seventh as a solemn and beneficent sign, the present benefits of which the Israelite shared not only with the stranger but with the dumb brutes that served him. But the Christian begins with his first day—his, did I say? It is rather the Lord's day, but given to them that know and love Him, the day of new creation and of grace on which His Savior and Lord rose from the grave to which man, and pre-eminently the Jew had consigned Him before and throughout that fatal sabbath, which was “an high day,” in their guilty infatuation. Thus Christians enter on each week of their pilgrimage here below with songs of resurrection, that the first day may shed its heavenly light on each day that succeeds, and govern the conscience and cheer the heart of those who through much tribulation must enter into the kingdom of God. And fully am I persuaded that the last or seventh day will be for Israel a day of joys and of import far higher than those bodily delights with which they now essay to cheer themselves in their protracted exile from the “pleasant land.” I say not that God will not vouchsafe them, then and there, joys of an earthly and natural kind; for God means to vindicate Himself from the old libel of His enemy, and will yet bless this earth delivered from every vestige of the curse, with that exception indeed which but proves the rule and keeps up the witness that its deliverance will be of His mere mercy, after all had been lost by sin and Satan.
And when that bright day dawns on this world, will not the Jew be there? Assuredly he will; and in the highest seats here below, when God will delight to pour out His blessing bountifully on every creature of His hand then living, but holding fast His order, that Israel shall be the head and the Gentiles the tail. Not His people only, but all nations shall then bless Him with one accord and add their cordial Amen. Above in the heavenly places will the world then behold the Church of God that is now (since redemption and the descent of the Holy Ghost) being called out to the confession of the Crucified, the sharer of glory with Christ on high, Head of the Church, King of Israel, and Son of man, whom all people, nations, and languages shall serve as long as the earth endures. For God has made known to us the mystery of His will according to His good pleasure which He has purposed in Himself for the dispensation of the fullness of times; namely, to head up all things in the Christ, those in the heavens and those on the earth—in Him in whom we have also obtained an inheritance. But as we then shall be glorified above, joint-heirs with Him as His bride, so Israel shall be the inner circle of blessing, His inheritance here below, and the nations that are spared, blessed according to His goodness and sovereign will each in its due place. Alas! poor Israel is toiling for rest as yet, but the true sabbath will surely come at the end. The Christian has entered intelligently on his blessing by faith; at least it is his deep shame if it be not so. Christianity supposes that for us the Deliverer is come and has finished the work by which our sins are blotted out on the confession of His name; but that He has gone on high, having made atonement. There the Christian follows Christ in faith; for the Holy Spirit meanwhile has come down to be the witness of accomplished redemption and the earnest of the glory we shall have with Christ where He is. But Israel must wait without until He, the great High Priest, comes forth; and then shall they, astonished and afflicted but delivered, learn that He is none other than the Nazarene. “They shall look upon Me whom they have pierced; and they shall mourn for him as one mourneth for his only son.” (Zech. 12) They shall find in Jesus thus seen their sacrifice as well as their Savior, their Priest, Prophet, King, yea Jehovah the God of Israel.
Thus truly read, the Sabbath and the Lord's day are strikingly distinctive, and each of them a sign and pledge of blessing respectively for Israel and man, and for the Christian. On his portion the Christian enters at once by faith, possessing all things, yet having nothing in appearance of what he knows to be his in and with Christ, till He comes again. It is for him the first day of the week, and in this light he is called to walk now. But the Jew awaits the last day for his blessing when Jesus shall appear to his salvation; though not without tears of bitter sorrow, joy will come in that cloudless morning. Eternal praise to Him who has already done such things for us though known now only to faith, for they are unseen! Eternal praise to Him who, in the day when we shall appear with Him in glory, will make Israel glad in His salvation, and swallow up the face of the covering that covers all people and the vail that is spread over all nations!
From such hopes in both Testaments it is a descent to take up the account of Hillel and Akiba striving unsuccessfully to arrange the oral traditions of the Rabbis, or of the equivocal success of Jehnda “the saint,” who is said to have reduced them, though still unwritten, to one code about A. D. 200.
But it is in vain to justify the reign of tradition which superseded the Mosaic law by the fact that Magna Charta is not the general appeal in English law courts of the day. (p. 443.) Rather does it evince the unbelief that everywhere lies under, and often on, the surface of this paper. The law given by Moses was the law of Jehovah: has Magna Charta to boast of such an origin or character? Alas! so far gone is the Jew that the Christian has to remind him of his own singular and exceeding privileges. “For what nation is so great, who hath God so nigh unto them, as the Lord our God is in all things, that we call on him for? And what nation is there so great that hath statutes and judgments so righteous as all this law which I set before you this day?” The writer excludes God from the case and evidently sees a progress from barbarism to civilization in the appeal of modern Jews to the Mischnah, rather than the Pentateuch.
There is nothing to surprise in the absence of hell from the Mischnah. Even the Old Testament treats of the eternal scene in good or evil but dimly. Light and incorruption were brought to light by the gospel as the apostle expressly tells us in 2 Tim. 1, and as is evident in fact. God acted on the souls of the fathers by promises. His dealings with the children of Israel were in view of present government in the world, though passages in Job, the Psalms, and the Prophets went farther, till Christ came telling all things, and the Holy Spirit was sent to guide the apostles into all the truth. Now it is not temporal judgments which are executed or spoken of, but wrath is revealed from heaven, no less than God's righteousness in the gospel. If it be merely a question of dealing with wrongs, death closes all questions.
On the other hand, to make the highest virtue lie in study of the law, if thereby be meant the oral tradition that overlaid it, is the proof of the degradation to which the holy nation was reduced. For such an exaggerated value attached to Rabbinic micrology one must look to the scholastic disputes of the dark ages, or the place assigned to Chinese literature in later times, to find a counterpart.
Further on, I may show how far there is room for boasting of the “humane, almost refined, penal legislation of the Talmud.” Once they had God in their midst judicially enthroned, and the Lex Talionis was no dead letter of the law. Him they had lost; and if Sadducees would retain the letter when the spirit was there no more, the Pharisees, who were covetous, were content to make bodily injuries redeemable by money. Both were insensible to their dismal loss, and I can see no ground for congratulating one party more than another. (pp. 444-6.) But the serious thing to note is the constant undisguised preference of man to God, as is plain in the following extract: “Practically, capital punishment was abrogated even before the Romans had taken it out of the hands of the Sanhedrim. Here again the humanizing influence of the traditions' had been at work, commuting the severe Mosaic Code.” (p. 448.) A similar process goes on now among men who have no respect for God's word nor sense of the responsibility of those who bear the sword in civil government. (Gen. 9, Rom. 13) In their eyes it would seem that the blood of a murderer has more price than that of his victim; and God's vindication in the matter is the last thing in their thoughts. The Christian, I need scarce add, who knows his calling on high, is outside such questions; but it is a serious one for those it concerns.
(Continued from page 38)
(To be continued.)