Thus, if the patriarchal origin of property, law, and government is borne witness to by the most ancient institutions, customs, and feelings of men, which witness likewise extends to the unity of the race, so likewise the original independence of the priestly order as to all its sacred functions and the sense of its divine origin, which runs through so many nations, bear joint witness to the unity of the race and to the truth of the Mosaic record. They convey a manifest contradiction to the theory that man sprung originally from a number of different races, and likewise to the theory that he grew up originally in a state of savagery.The force of the testimony consists in this: first, a priesthood appears everywhere; secondly, it is connected with the rite of sacrifice; thirdly, it usually comprises an order of men devoted to the purpose of divine worship, or at least having special functions which by no means belong to the civil ruler as such, so that if he performs them, it is as priest and not as king; fourthly, this order has a special authority from the Divine Being or Beings whom it represents, not subject to the civil rule; fifthly, injury to the priest's person or contravention to his order in divine things is esteemed as an injury done to the God whom he represents.
The peculiarity of a priesthood must therefore be added to the peculiarity of the rite of sacrifice upon which his office rests, and both together form an order of ideas so marked and distinctive as to establish the [Pg 66] unity of the race in the several portions of which they appear; and at the same time it establishes, as the common inheritance of that race, an overwhelming sense of human life being founded, preserved, and exalted by a communion between heaven and earth: it is, in short, a sense of man lying in the hand of God.
We have hitherto followed the dispersion of Babel in its Gentile development down to that ultimate issue in which a long and unbroken civilisation is combined with an extreme moral corruption; now let us revert to the divine plan which was followed to repair this evil.
At a certain point of time, when forgetfulness of the divine unity was becoming general, God chose one man out of whom to form a nation, whose function should be the preservation of a belief in this unity. Abraham, the friend of God and the forefather of Christ, was called out of his own country that he might preserve the religion of Noah, and that "in him all the kindreds of the earth might be blessed" (Gen. xii. 3). In the second generation his family was carried down into Egypt, and became, in the security of that kingdom, a people, but it likewise fell into bondage. From this it was redeemed in a series of wonderful events under the guidance of Moses, was led by him into the desert, and there formed into a nation by the discipline of a religious, which was also a civil code. In the law given on Mount Sinai we see once more the constitution of the society established in Noah. The whole moral order of the world contained in the ten commandments is made to rest upon the sovereignty of God: "I am the Lord; [Pg 67] thou shalt have no strange gods." From this precept, which fills the first table, proceed the precepts which, in the second, maintain the order of society: "Honour thy father and thy mother; thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not steal," and the rest. Such, says Bossuet, is the general order of all legislation. The ten words of God form the core of a complete religious and civil code, in which the two Powers exist in an ideal no less than a practical union. The individual and the national worship is the same, and the society springs out of it, the root being,
"I am the Lord;" but the persuasiveness of redemption is added to the power of creation: "I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage." Abraham, the father of the people, had exercised the patriarchal priesthood and the patriarchal sacrifice in his family; but just as God had not chosen Abraham because he was the first-born, so Moses, taking the patriarchal priesthood, with a special sanction, set it not in the first-born of the tribes, but in another tribe, and in a family of this tribe. He took, further, the rite of sacrifice, which had existed from the beginning, only developing its meaning in a series of ordinances, which, as St. Paul tells us, all pointed to Christ: "Almost all things according to the law are cleansed with blood, and without shedding of blood is no remission" (Heb. ix. 22). But while there is here a complete union in faith, in practice, and in worship, for every true Israelite and for the whole people, while there is one source of authority to the three, the bearers of the dig-
nities which represent this triple life of man [Pg 68] are separated. Moses instituted, in the person of Aaron, a high priesthood which
from that time stands through the whole history of his people at the head of their worship, superior in all that concerns it to the civil authority, which is bound to consult it and obey it, not only in the things of God, but in the chief civil acts which regard the nation. The outcome of this work is the creation of a people whose function is to bear on the worship of the one true God and faith in the Redeemer to come, a royal, prophetic, and priestly nation, the special domain of the promised Messias.
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I have no need here to follow this people through the trials, revolts, chastisements, and humiliations of 1500 years. It is sufficient to observe the result at the coming of Christ. The nation at length, as the fruit it would seem of captivity and suffering, has accepted with one mind and heart the doctrine and worship of one God; the Jewish priesthood, uncorrupted in its essence by any of the abominations of polytheism, offers the daily morning and evening sacrifice, which typified the Lamb of God, in the spirit of Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Moses. The power of the State had indeed just passed to a Roman lord, but it left the rites and practices and doctrines of the Jewish faith untouched in the hands of the High Priest and the Great Council, which sat in this respect in the chair of Moses,--a great and manifest distinction, perhaps, from the condition in this respect of the whole Gentile world. In Rome, at least, the worship "of the Immortal Gods," though blended with the whole growth of the [Pg 69] State, and seated triumphantly in the Capitol, was simply subservient to the Civil Power: in Judea, a small and despised province of Rome, the religion was the life of the people, which had been made a people that it might be God's domain, and, with all its divisions, was filled from the highest to the lowest with an universal expectation of the promised Christ, who was to be Prophet, Priest, and King.
In the relation between the two Powers, Gentilism required a total reconstruction, in order that the priesthood, existing in it from the beginning, might be completely purified, derived afresh from God, and receive from Him an independence which it had lost from
the moment that it lost its fidelity to the One Creator,--and such a gift would be a token of divine power. Judaism, on the contrary, made, after the programme of God, an image in the nation of what the Christian people was to be in the world, required only to acknowledge in the Christ the purpose for which it was appointed, that the law might go forth from Sion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
CHAPTER II.
RELATION BETWEEN THE CIVIL AND THE SPIRITUAL POWERS AFTER CHRIST.
1.--The Spiritual Power in its Source and Nature.
[Pg 70] Taking as our basis the historical outline of the relation between the Civil and Spiritual Powers which has preceded, let us
attempt to have present to our minds the state of this relation at the death of Christ.
The great world-empire had then been ruled in most peaceful security for half a generation by Tiberius. Under him lay a vast variety of nations, professing as strange a variety of gods and of worship paid to them, but all, with one exception, accepting a religious supremacy in him as Pontifex Maximus of the Roman religion. The Princeps of the civil power, the Imperator of the civil force, was also Chief Priest of religion, and by that union held in his hands those two Powers, an attack upon either of which constituted, as Tertullian testifies, the double guilt of majesty violated and sacrilege incurred. Within these limits, and with this condition, it was free to the several nations to practise their ancestral rites as well as to believe in their ancestral gods, at least within their ancient territorial bounds. [Pg 71] There can be no doubt that these nations generally clung to their several rites and beliefs, not only from the force of nurture and habit, but also as remnants of their former independence
