MAURICE ON THE PROPHETS AND KINGS OD THE OLD TESTAMENT. *
lw the Prophets and Kings of the Old Testament Professor Mau- rice has a theme peculiarly suited to his genius. Though a con-
', Proplaeas and, Kings of the Old Testament : a Series of Sermons preached in the Chapel of Lincoln's Inn. By Frederick Denison Maurice, Chaplain of Lin- coln's Inn, and Professor of Divinity in King's College, London. Published by Macmillan and Co., Cambridge. tinuation, in some sense, of his previous course of Sermons an the Old Testament, and taking up the Jewish story where they left it, at the accession of the first Xing, the present aeries no longer fol-
lows the order of the Sunday lessons, but substitntes a chronological order, as better suited to show the progressive development of a people henceforward enjoying a regular government, in possession of a settled territory, and with its consciousness of a national unity distinctly brought out and realized in national institutions. That stage in the training of the Jewish nation was now reached which fitted it to be a beacon and an example to political communities in all time, and to show forth in living instances the action of those principles which are at work now as well as then, and whose per- petual operation gives to history a true unity and a never-fading interest. It is in enforcing the piles of political action, in illus- trating the dangers and temptations that beset the path of a nation, and in eliciting the lessons that its varying fortunes and final destiny point, that Mr. Maurice eminently shines. He has the
true civic spirit, which enables a man to feel the reality of politi- cal interests, and to estimate the importance of political Institu- tions. Ile looks upon these as methods by which the Almighty has ordained man to rise above his selfish and animal propensities, rather than as a mere machinery for the protection of his person and property and the furtherance of his bodily comforts. Man as an individual is only intelligible to the Preacher of Lincoln's Inn when regarded as a member of a family, of a state, of a race, and appears to him only then in his natural condition when fully conscious of and endeavouring to realize the duties and the privileges that arise out of these relations. And again, he is so profoundly a religious man, a believer in the actual presence and government of an Almighty Creator and Preserver, that he cannot comprehend these relations except as representative of the like re- lations between man and his Maker, and as only then truly realized and true blessings when felt to have this Divine sanction, and to be cooperative towards a final union of all created beings in the one God and Father of all. History, to such a man, is the gradual. unfolding of this Divine purpose towards mankind ; and its records are records of this prevailing purpose and of the obstinate struggles of the alienated and fallen human will against the un- changing good will of God. What constitutes the peculiar claim of the Bible to be called a revelation is, not that it contains iii. counts of wonderful and unusual interpositions of the Divine Governor, or of miraculous powers vouchsafed to favoured men, but that it more 'than all other books discloses the supreme law of the universe, the rule of God's government of men, the fixed and unalterable purpose He entertains and pursues, of bringing men back, in spite of themselves, into a condition of reconciliation with Him, and of consequent purity and happiness. Miraculous events are there recorded, but they in almost all cases evidently point to something beyond the mere marvels, to a law lying under all phmtioniena, which men were in danger of forgetting in their exclusive attention to the phmnomena, and which the miracle an- nounces by effecting its purpose without the intervention of the ordinary mediate agents. In brief, the law enforced by the Bible miracles is the agency of a living personal God, who ordinarily uses, indeed, a lengthened chain, the sequence of whose links follows a constant order, but who, when it is necessary to impress his existence on his creatures, can dispense with all in- termediate stages between the First Cause—his will, and the last effect in the impression on the senses of man. Thus, the Bible, so far from revealing a series of facts that are extraordinary, insu- lated, and exceptional, reveals just those facts which are expres- sive of the deepest and most unchanging laws in the universe— those facts which it most concerns men to know and acknowledge— those facts without the knowledge of which all history whatever becomes confused, unintelligible, and meaningless. Jewish poli- tical history is no more than the rest of the Bible an exception to a general rule : on the contrary, it brings out the general rule with a vivid distinctness to which no other history approaches; just because the Jewish nation had been trained to believe in the actual presence and government of the Lord and Maker of all things, to regard this fact as the only clue and interpretation to the tangled mass of outward occurrences which happened about them, and in Which they were engaged as actors and sufferers. This was the inspiration of prophets—to believe this, to seek for its confirmation in the experiences of private and of public life, and to ant and speak in the profoundest conviction of its reality. This, if not all, is the main point, the point in which this inspiration is a com- mon heritage of earnest God-fearing men in all ages, in all coun- tries, under all conditions of society : whether any mode of corn, munication between the Spirit of God and the soul of man was vouchsafed in those days of a peculiar character, matters little, so long as we recognize the fact of such communication as alike common to all who earnestly seek it, and listen in thankful obe- dience to the promptings of the Spirit of Truth, whether it come in the whirlwind and the visible tempest or in the still small voices of reason and conscience.
Viewed from this standing-point, Jewish history ceases to be a storehouse for the weapons of polemical theology, or an arid anti- quarian speculation, in which the details have well nigh faded out of sight, and need the skill of the comparative anatomist of nations to restore their probable structure. It becomes a picture of the battle-field of great principles, such as are now working for life and death in the cities and empires of modern Europe. It presents the duties of monarchs, of priests, of peoples, in the most solemn and impressive light capable of being thrown upon them, and re- flects this light upon the same and kindred relations in the states
of the Modern world. No statesman, no politician, no student of history, can fail to derive ifistruction from a mode of treating his- tory, in which the essential is mainly dwelt upon, in which right and wrong and their issues are the theme of the preacher, rather than cleverness, or splendour, or material greatness and the "shows of things." In some respects so strikingly different, yet in this main feature Mr. Maurice's lectures on Jewish History resemble Carlyle's History of the French Revolution, only that for the "eternal laws" and inexorable destiny of the lay preacher, the Christian professor of history substitutes with no shamefaced periphrasis the action of a personal God, whose absolute will strug- gles with the reluctant wills of men, and out of the struggle gra- dually emerges harmony, submission, and the kingdom of heaven. But, different as the men are, we can well imagine that Carlyle may lead to Maurice, and that Maurice must to the generality of minds be a necessary complement to Carlyle. Maurice is almost the only preacher of this day for whom the truths that Carlyle teaches would not give his disciples a distaste ; and on the other hand, a recognition of these truths is an essential part of Chris- tianity as Maurice teaches it, of the Bible as Maurice interprets it.
If we were to name among these Sermons one likely to excite especial admiration, it would be the one on the severance of the kingdom under Rehoboam. The wide scope of the preacher can scarcely be better illustrated than from the closing passage en this turning-point of Jewish history. "All Christians have felt—as I said the Jewish prophets felt—that the principle of separations and schisms in different lands and ages must be con- tained in this schism of the tribes. Romanist writers have of course been busy with their applications. What can be More natural than to consider Rome the parallel of Jerusalem, to identify the Elector of Saxony or Henry VIII. with Jeroboam, and to make the prohibition of intercourse with the Papal See and the establishment of a national worship the same sin as the Betting up of calves in Dan, that the people might be withdrawn from the general fellowship of Christendom ? However arbitrary such analogies may seem to us, they have a force on many minds; a force derived from a strong persuasion that in some way or other there must be a relation between differ- ent periods, and that the Bible is intended to discover that relation. I shall not hope to convince any person that this is not a legitimate mode of treat- ing the subject, whom I cannot also convince that when our lord said to the woman of Samaria, 'Believe me the hour cometh when neither in this mountain nor yet in Jerusalem ye shall worship the Father,' Ile announced a law of His Universal Church which excludes one visible centre of it as much as another, and that to imagine such a centre is in fact to restore that merely national economy into which Romanists accuse us of relapsing.
"And I could not venture to protest against this up of the portion of Scripture history we have been considering, unless I were ready to accept it —subject to that change which our Lord Himself has proclaimed to us—as a real interpretation of modern facts, both when it seems to make in our favour and when it condemns us. The great schism of the Latin and Greek Churches strikes the student of ecclesiastical records as a most startling con- tradiction in the history of a body which was to include all nations and races. Yet it was surely from the Lord. Idolatrous habits and feelings had been spreading in both divisions of the church. The sense of union in an in- visible Head, though not lost, was fearfully weakened. A seeming union must have been preserved by the loss of all witness for real union; the divi- aion remains a standing witness against the possibility of a visible head ever holding the Catholic body together.
"The schism of rival Popes in the Western church during the fifteenth century was as great a scandal to Christendom as can be conceived. Yet it was surely from the Lord. It led men to perceive that there was corruption in the head and in the members of the ecclesiastical polity ; it led to those disputes respecting the relative powers of Pori and Councils which showed that neither could heal the wounds of the Church or preserve its unity. It led to that movement in the sixteenth century which we all, I trust, believe to have been from the Lord, and which was really .a declaration of faith in a living God, against a system of idolatry, that was rapidly passing into a sys- tem of organized unbelief. In each of these cases there were chances of re- conciliation, such as,:were offered to Itehoboam when the people besought him to lessen their burdens. In each case there were grave counsellors advising reconciliation, and noisy fanatics preaching uncompromising resistance. In each ease the infatuation of princes and rulers, ecclesiastical and civil, was carrying out a divine and eternal principle even when they were defying it. They could not restore unity by declamations, by concessions, or by persecu- non. Facts spoke louder than the prophet spoke to Itehoboam, 'It cannot be. The thing is from the Lord.' "In the last period to which I have alluded, there were, in England as much as in any country, those who looked upon the new and reformed state of things merely as a means of establishing their own power ; who regarded the Church as an instrument of keeping up that power ; who valued a wor- ship in their own language, not because it brought their countrymen neare to God, but because it was a badge of separation from foreigners ; who pro- tested against the idolatry of Papal nations, and were really making royalty, or the privileges of the upper classes, or money, as much objects of their Idolatry as the calves in Dan or Bethel were to the ten tribes. And there- fore we must not shrink from the acknowledgment, that the different sects which rose up in this hind, seemingly to rend the body of Christ more com- pletely asunder than it had been rent already, were from the Lord. There Were idolatries in the ruling body which made such divisions inevitable. The first impulses of those who began them were like those of Jeroboam, pure and honourable. They became spokesmen of hearts which were suflbr- ing under a burden ; they encountered Rehoboams in the State and proud men in the Church, who said, 'Let us change rods into scorpions ' ; coni- proraises failed, persecutions failed ; the thing was from the Lord. And the lesson was repeated again in those separating bodies. Politic men rose up, who sought to make the division permanent and hopeless. The separate priest, and altar, and sacrifice must be introduced, that there Might be no recollection of the bond which united diem to those from whom they were Severed. Hence the one sacrifice for mankind became lost in the notion of some special salvation for themselves. New forms of intellectual if not sen- sual idolatry appeared; the victims of them groaned under the narrowness and bondage which they had been taught to call liberty. Are not many of them even now ready to turn for refuge from their sectarian faith and free- dom, sometimes to the vaguest forms of unbelief, sometimes to the most per- fect and universal despotism over conscience and will? "Oh, brethren, how intolerable would be these facts and recollections, vthich show every party in Church and State to have been the cause of Shameful scandals, which forbid us to cast stones at others because we are in the same sin, if we might not recur again Emd again to the words. which I have quoted so often. Out if the thing is of the Lord, there must be an end of all those strifes by which He has ordained that our idolatries against Him and cruelties to our brethren should punish themselves. There must be a day when all things in heaven and earth which consist only by Christ shall be gathered manifestly together in Him, when it shall be known and con- fessed that there is one king, one priest, one sacrifice ; that we have been at war with each other, because we have not done homage to that one king, drawn nigh to God through that one priest, omitted to present that one per- fect sacrifice. And those who are willing before God's altar to own that their self-seeking and self-will have been rending asunder their families, the nation, the Church, the world, may hope that God's Spirit will work in them henceforth to do all such acts as shall not retard but hasten forward the blessed consummation for which they look. They may ask to be taught the mystery of daily self-sacrifice—how to give up their own tastes, opinions, wishes. They may ask that they may never be tempted to give up one atom of God's truth, or to daily for one moment with the falsehoods of themselves or of their brethren ; because truth is the one ground of universal peace and fellowship, because falsehood and division are ever increasing and repro- ducing each other."
Mr. Maurice does not in these Sermons directly controvert either the methods or the results of the critical school; but he frequently does so in effect, by exhibiting events in a rational and harmonious connexion, in which that school has seen nothing but absurdity and contradiction. Moreover, the general spirit of this book is antagonistic to theirs, in its reverence for the recorded facts, its anxiety to explain them, rather than to explain them away, and its consistent views of revelation as a whole. The marked candour of the preacher, in acknowledging difficulties through which he cannot see his way, increases the effect of his general conviction of the peculiar character of the Bible record, and of its inestimable value to us. Had all Christians written of their sacred book in the same temper, and with the same truthful earnest spirit, much of the extravagance of modern criticism would have been pre- vented. It has been bigotry and nonsense on the one side which has called into activity incredulity and special-pleading on the other.
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