to moral vigour and to national life.

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reverse can forfeit? Is not the same law familiar to us in this place, as it affects the well-being of a great educational institution? Here in Oxford we feel that we cannot rest upon the varied efforts and the accumulated credit even of ten centuries. We too have hopes embarked in the years or in the centuries before us; we have duties towards them. We differ, it may be, even radically, among ourselves as to the direction in which to look for our academical future. The hopes of some of us are the fears of others. This project would fain banish from our system whatever proclaims that God had really spoken, and that it is man's duty and happiness gladly and submissively to welcome His message; while that scheme would endeavour, if possible, to fashion each one of our intellectual workmen more and more strictly after the type of a believing and fervent Christian. The practical difference is indeed profound; but we are entirely. agreed as to the general necessity for looking forward. On both sides it is understood that an institution which is not struggling upwards towards a higher future, must resign itself to the conviction that it is already in its decadence, and must expect to die.

Nor is it otherwise with that conglomeration of men which we call a nation, the product of race, or the product of circumstances, the product in any case of a Providential Will, Which welds into a common whole, for the purposes of united action and of reciprocal influence, a larger or smaller number of human beings. A nation must have a future before it; a future which can rebuke its despondency and can direct its enthusiasm ; a future for which it will prepare itself; a future which it will aspire to create or to control. Unless it would barter away the vigorous nerve of true patriotism for the feeble pedantry of a soulless archæology, a nation cannot fall back altogether upon the centuries which have flattered its ambition, or which have developed its material well-being. Something it must propose to itself as an object to be compassed in the coming time; something which is as yet beyond it. It will enlarge its frontier; or it will develope its commercial resources; or it will extend its schemes of colonization; or it will erect its overgrown colonies into independent and friendly states; or it will bind the severed sections of a divided race into one gigantic nationality that shall awe, if it do not subdue, the nations around. Or perchance its attention will be concentrated on the improvement of its social life, and on the details of its internal legislation. It will extend the range of civil privileges; it will broaden the basis of

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A Future necessary to the Chosen People. government; it will provide additional encouragements to and safeguards for public morality; it will steadily aim at bettering the condition of the classes who are forced, beyond others, to work and to suffer. Thankful it may well be to the Author of all goodness for the enjoyment of past blessings; but the spirit of a true thankfulness is ever and very nearly allied to the energy of hope. Self-complacent a nation cannot be, unless it would perish. Woe indeed to the country which dares to assume that it has reached its zenith, and that it can achieve or attempt no more!

Now Israel as a nation was not withdrawn from the operation of this law, which makes the anticipation of a better future of such vital importance to the common life of a people. Israel indeed had been cradled in an atmosphere of physical and political miracle. Her great lawgiver could point to the event which gave her national existence as to an event unique in human historya. No subsequent vicissitudes would obliterate the memory of the story which Israel treasured in her inmost memory, the story of the stern Egyptian bondage followed by the triumphant Exodus. How retrospective throughout is the sacred literature of Israel! It is not enough that the great deliverance should be accurately chronicled; it must be expanded, applied, insisted on in each of its many bearings. and aspects by the lawgiver who directed and who described it; it must be echoed on from age to age, in the stern expostulations of Prophets and in the plaintive or jubilant songs of Psalmists. Certainly the greater portion of the Old Testament is history. Israel was guided by the contents of her sacred books to live in much grateful reflection upon the past. Certainly, it was often her sin and her condemnation that she practically lost sight of all that had been done for her. Yet if ever it were permissible to forget the future, Israel, it should seem, might have forgotten it. She might have closed her eyes against the dangers which threatened her from beyond the Lebanon, from beyond the Eastern and the Southern desert, from beyond the Western sea, from within her own borders, from the streets and the palaces of her capital. She might have abandoned herself in an ecstasy of perpetuated triumph to the voices of her poets and to the rolls of her historians. But there was One Who had loved Israel as a child, and had called His infant people

a Deut. iv. 34.

Its character, not secular but religious.

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out of Egypt, and had endowed it with His Name and His Law, and had so fenced its life around by protective institutions, that, as the ages passed, neither strange manners nor hostile thought should avail to corrupt what He had so bountifully given to it. Was He forgetful to provide for and to direct that instinct of expectation, without which as a nation it could not live? Had He indeed not thus provided, Israel might have struggled with vain energy after ideals such as were those of the nations around her. She might have spent herself, like the Tyrian or Sidonian merchant, for a large commerce; she might have watched eagerly, and fiercely, like the Cilician pirate or like the wild sons of the desert, for the spoils of adjacent civilizations; she might have essayed to combine, after the Greek pattern, a discreet measure of sensuality with a great activity of the speculative intellect; she might have fared as did the Babylonian, or the Persian, or the Roman; at least, she might have attempted the establishment of a world-wide tyranny around the throne of a Hebrew Belshazzar or of a Hebrew Nero. Nor is her history altogether free from the disturbing influence of such ideals as were these; we do not forget the brigandage of the days of the Judges, or the imperial state and prowess of Solomon, or the commercial enterprise of Jehoshaphat, or the union of much intellectual activity with low moral effort which marked more than one of the Rabbinical schools. But the life and energy of the nation was not really embarked, at least in its best days, in the pursuit of these objects; their attractive influence was intermittent, transient, accidental. The expectation of Israel was steadily directed towards a future, the lustre of which would in some real sense more than eclipse her glorious past. That future was not sketched by the vain imaginings of popular aspirations; it was unveiled to the mind of the people by a long series of authoritative announcements. These announcements did not merely point to the introduction of a new state of things; they centred very remarkably upon a coming Person. God Himself vouchsafed to satisfy the instinct of hope which sustained the national life of His own chosen people; and Israel lived for the expected Messiah.

But Israel, besides being a civil polity, was a theocracy; she was not merely a nation, she was a Church. In Israel religion was not, as with the peoples of pagan antiquity, a mere attribute or function of the national life. Religion was

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Israelitic belief concerning GoD and sin,

the very soul and substance of the life of Israel; Israel was a Church encased, embodied in a political constitution. Hence it was that the most truly national aspirations in Israel were her religious aspirations. Even the modern naturalist critics cannot fail to observe, as they read the Hebrew Scriptures, that the mind of Israel was governed by two dominant convictions, the like of which were unknown to any other ancient people. God was the first thought in the mind of Israel. The existence, the presence of One Supreme, Living, Personal Being, Who alone exists necessarily, and of Himself; Who sustains the life of all besides Himself; before Whom, all that is not Himself is but a shadow and vanity; from Whose sanctity there streams forth upon the conscience of man that moral law which is the light of human life; and in Whose mercy all men, especially the afflicted, the suffering, the poor, may, if they will, find a gracious and long-suffering Patron,—this was the substance of the first great conviction of the people of Israel. Dependent on that conviction was another. The eye of Israel was not merely opened towards the heavens; it was alive to the facts of the moral human world. Israel was conscious of the presence and power of sin. The 'healthy sensuality,' as Strauss has admiringly termed it b, which pervaded the whole fabric of life among the Greeks, had closed up the eye of that gifted race to a perception which was so familiar to the Hebrews. We may trace indeed throughout the best Greek poetry a vein of deep suppressed melancholy; but the secret of this subtle, of this inextinguishable sadness was unknown

b See Luthardt, Apologetische Vorträge, vorl. vii. note 6. The expression occurs in Schubart's Leben, ii. 461. Luthardt quotes a very characteristic passage from Goethe (vol. xxx. Winckelmann, Antikes Heidnisches, pp. 10-13) to the same effect. If the modern, at almost every reflection, casts himself into the Infinite, to return at last, if he can, to a limited point; the ancients feel themselves at once, and without further wanderings, at ease only within the limits of this beautiful world. Here were they placed, to this were they called, here their activity has found scope, and their passions objects and nourishment.' The 'heathen mind,' he says, produced 'such a condition of human existence, a condition intended by nature,' that 'both in the moment of highest enjoyment and in that of deepest sacrifice, nay, of absolute ruin, we recognise the indestructibly healthy tone of their thought.' Similarly in Strauss' Leben Märklin's, 1851, p. 127, Märklin says, 'I would with all my heart be a heathen, for here I find truth, nature, greatness.'

• See the beautiful passage quoted from Lasaulx, Abhandlung über den Sinn der Edipus-sage, p. 10, by Luthardt, ubi supra, note 7. Cf. also Döllinger, Heid. und Jud. bk. v. pt. 1, § 2; Abp. Trench, Huls. Lectures, ed. 3, p. 305, also Comp. Il. xvii. 446; Od. xi. 489, xviii. 130; Eurip. Hippol. 190, Med. 1224, Fragm. No. 454, 808.

points to a religious Deliverer.

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to the accomplished artists who gave to it an involuntary expression, and who lavished their choicest resources upon the oft-repeated effort to veil it beneath the bright and graceful drapery of a versatile light-heartedness peculiarly their own. But the Jew knew that sin was the secret of human sorrow. He could not forget sin if he would; for before his eyes, the importunate existence and the destructive force of sin were inexorably pictured in the ritual. He witnessed daily sacrifices for sin; he witnessed the sacrifice of sacrifices which was offered on the Day of Atonement, and by which the nation of religion,' impersonated in its High Priest, solemnly laid its sins upon the sacrificial victim, and bore the blood of atonement into the Presence-chamber of God. Then the moral law sounded in his ears; he knew that he had not obeyed it. If the Jew could not be sure that the blood of bulls and goats really effected his reconciliation with God; if his own prophets told him that moral obedience was more precious in God's sight than sacrificial oblations; if the ritual, interpreted as it was by the Decalogue, created yearnings within him which it could not satisfy, and deepened a sense of pollution which of itself it could not relieve; yet at least the Jew could not ignore sin, or think lightly of it, or essay to gild it over with the levities of raillery. He could not screen from his sight its native blackness, and justify it to himself by a philosophical theory which should represent it as inevitable, or as being something else than what it is. The ritual forced sin in upon his daily thoughts; the ritual inflicted it upon his imagination as being a terrible and present fact ; and so it entered into and coloured his whole conception alike of national and of individual life. Thus was it that this sense of sin moulded all true Jewish hopes, all earnest Jewish anticipations of the national future. A future which promised political victory or deliverance, but which offered no relief to the sense of sin, would have failed to meet the better aspirations, and to cheer the real heart of a people which, amid whatever unfaithfulness to its measure of light, yet had a true knowledge of God, and was keenly alive to the fact and to the effects of moral evil. And He Who, by His earlier revelations, had Himself made the moral needs of Israel so deep, and had bidden the hopes of Israel rise so high, vouchsafed to meet the one, and to offer a plenary satisfaction to the other, in the doctrine of an expected Messiah.

It is then a shallow misapprehension which represents the Messianic belief as a sort of outlying prejudice or superstition,