That the spirit of man should entertain hopes and anticipations, beyond what it actually knows and can verify, is quite natural. Human life could not have the scope, and depth, and progress it has, were this otherwise. It is natural, too, to make these hopes and anticipations give in their turn support to the simple and humble experience which was their original ground. Israel, therefore, who originally followed righteousness because he felt that it tended to life, might and did naturally come at last to follow it because it would enable him to stand before the Son of Man at his coming, and to share in the triumph of the saints of the Most High.

But this latter belief has not the same character as the belief which it is thus set to confirm. It is a kind of fairy-tale, which a man tells himself, which no one, we grant, can prove impossible to turn out true, but which no one, also, can prove certain to turn out true. It is exactly what is expressed by the German word 'Aberglaube,' extra-belief, belief beyond what is certain and verifiable. Our word 'superstition' had by its derivation this same meaning, but it has come to be used in a merely bad sense, and to mean a childish and craven religiosity. With the German word it is not so; therefore Goethe can say with propriety and truth: Aberglaube is the poetry of life, der Aberglaube ist die Poesie des Lebens.' It is so. Extra-belief, that which we hope, augur, imagine, is the poetry of life, and has the rights of poetry. But it

is not science; and yet it tends always to imagine itself science, to substitute itself for science, to make itself the ground of the very science out of which it has grown. The Messianic ideas, which were the poetry of life to Israel in the age when Jesus Christ came, did this; and it is the more important to mark that they did it, because similar ideas have so signally done the same thing with popular Christianity.—Literature and Dogma.

WHAT JESUS christ efFECTED,

SIGNS there are, without doubt, of others, before Jesus Christ, trying to identify the Messiah of popular Jewish hope,--the triumphant Root of David, the mystic Son of Man, with an ideal of meekness, inwardness, patience, and self-denial. And well might reformers try to effect this identification, for the true line of Israel's progress lay through it! But not he who tries makes an epoch, but he who effects; and the identification which was needed Jesus Christ effected. Henceforth the true Israelite was, undoubtedly, he who allied himself with this identification; who perceived its incomparable fruitfulness, its continuance of the real tradition of Israel, its correspondence with the ruling idea of the Hebrew spirit, Through righteousness to happiness! or, in Bible words: To him that ordereth his conversation right shall be shown the salvation of God! That the Jewish nation at large, and its rulers, refused to accept the identification, shows

What Jesus Christ Effected.

265

only that want of power to penetrate through wraps and appearances to the essence of things, which the majority of mankind always display. The national and social character of their theocracy was everything to the Jews, and they could see no blessings in a revolution which annulled it.-Literature and Dogma.

'EPIEIKEIA' AGAIN.

Now,

JESUS Christ's new and different way of putting things was the secret of his succeeding where the prophets failed. And this new way he had of putting things is what is indicated by the expression epieikeia,—an expression best rendered, as I have elsewhere said, by these two words: 'sweet reasonableness.' For that which is epieikes is that which has an air of truth and likelihood; and that which has an air of truth and likelihood is prepossessing. never were there utterances concerning conduct and righteousness, Israel's master-concern, and the mastertopic of the New Testament as well as of the Old, -which so carried with them an air of consummate truth and likelihood as Jesus Christ's did; and never, therefore, were any utterances so irresistibly prepossessing. He put things in such a way that his hearer was led to take each rule or fact of conduct by its inward side, its effect on the heart and character; then the reason of the thing, the meaning of what had been mere matter of blind rule, flashed upon him. The hearer could distinguish between

what was only ceremony, and what was conduct; and the hardest rule of conduct came to appear to him infinitely reasonable and natural, and therefore infinitely prepossessing. A return upon themselves, and a consequent intuition of the truth and reason of the matter of conduct in question, gave men for right action the clearness, spirit, energy, happiness, they had lost.-Literature and Dogma.

MORAL THERAPEUTICS.

In one respect alone have the miracles of Jesus Christ a more real ground than the mass of miracles of which we have the relation. Medical science has never gauged,―never, perhaps, enough set itself to gauge,—the intimate connexion between moral fault and disease. To what extent, or in how many cases, what is called illness is due to moral springs having been used amiss,—whether by being over-used or by not being used sufficiently,—we hardly at all know, and we too little inquire. Certainly it is due to this very much more than we commonly think; and the more it is due to this, the more do moral therapeutics rise in possibility and importance. The bringer of light and happiness, the calmer and pacifier, or invigorator and stimulator, is one of the chiefest of doctors. Such a doctor was Jesus; such an operator, by an effica

Consult the Charmides of Plato (chap. v. for a remarkable account of the theory of such a treatment, attributed by Socrates to Zamolxis, the god-king of the Thracians.

Moral Therapeutics.

267

cious and real, though little observed and little employed agency, upon what we, in the language of popular superstition, call the unclean spirits, but which are to be designated more literally and more correctly as the uncleared, unpurified spirits, which came raging and madding before him. This his own language shows, if we know how to read it. 'What does it matter whether I say, Thy sins are forgiven thee! or whether I say, Arise and walk!' And again Thou art made whole; sin no more, lest a worse thing befall thee.' His reporters, we must remember, are men who saw thaumaturgy in all that Jesus did, and who saw in all sickness and disaster visitations from God, and they bend his language accordingly. But indications enough remain to show the line of the Master, his perception of the large part of moral cause in many kinds. of disease, and his method of addressing to this part his

cure.

It would never have done, indeed, to have men pronouncing right and left that this and that was a judgment, and how, and for what, and on whom. And so, when the disciples, seeing an afflicted person, asked whether this man had done sin or his parents, Jesus checked them and said: 'Neither the one nor the other, but that the works of God might be made manifest in him.' Not the less clear is the belief of Jesus himself in the moral root of much physical disease, and in moral therapeutics; and it is important to note well the instances of miracles where