The New Religious Prospect. 323 be looked for elsewhere than in the materialistic aspirations of our popular religion. He lived in the eternal order, and the eternal order never dies ;-this, if we may try to formulate in one sentence the result of the sayings of Jesus about life and death, is the sense in which, according to him, we can rightly conceive of the righteous man as immortal, and aspire to be immortal ourselves. And this conception we shall find to stand us in good stead, when the popular materialistic version of our future life fails us. So that here again, too, the version which, unfamiliar and novel as it may now be to us, has the merit of standing fast and holding good while other versions break down, is at the same time the version of Jesus.-God and the Bible. REPROACH OF A SUBLIMATED CHRISTIANITY. PEOPLE talk scornfully of 'a sublimated Christianity,' as if the Christianity of Jesus Christ himself had been a materialistic fairy-tale like that of Messrs. Moody and Sankey. On the contrary, insensibly to lift us out of all this sort of materialism was Jesus Christ's perpetual endeavour. The parable of the king, who made a marriage for his son, ends with the episode of the guest who had not on a wedding garment, and was cast out.' as usual, the Tübingen critics detect tendence. And here, They see in the episode a deliberate invention of the Evangelists, 1 Matth., xxii, 1–14. a stroke of Jewish particularism, indemnifying itself for having had to relate, that salvation was preached in the highways. We have disagreed often with the Tübingen critics, and we shall venture finally to disagree with them here. We receive the episode as genuine ; but what did Jesus mean by it? Shall we not do well in thinking, that he, whose lucidity was so incomparable, and who indicated so much which was to be seized not by the present but by the future, here marked and meant to mark, although but incidentally and in passing, the profound, the utter insufficiency of popular religion? Through the turbid phase of popular religion the religion of Jesus had to pass. Good and bad it was to bear along with it; the gross and ignorant were to be swept in, by wholesale, from the highways; the wedding was to be furnished with guests. On this wise must Christianity needs develop itself, and the necessary law of its development was to be accepted. Vain to be too nice about the unpreparedness of the guests in general, about their inevitable misuse of the favours which they were admitted to enjoy! What could have been the end of such a fastidious scrutiny? To turn them all out into the highways again. But the king's design was, that the wedding should be furnished with guests. So the guests shall all stay and fall to;-popular Christianity is founded. But presently, almost as if by accident, a guest even more unprepared and gross than the common, a guest not having on a Reproach of a Sublimated Christianity. 325 wedding garment,' comes under the king's eye, and is ejected. Only one is noted for decisive ejection; but ah! how many of those guests are as really unapt to seize and to follow God's designs for them as he ! Many are called, few chosen. The conspicuous delinquent, however, is sentenced to be bound hand and foot, and to be taken away, and cast into outer darkness. In the severity of this sentence, Jesus marks how utterly those who are gathered to his feast may fail to know him. The misapprehending and materialising of his religion, the long and turbid stage of popular Christianity, was, indeed, inevitable. But, to give light and impulsion to future times, Jesus stamps this Christianity, even from the very moment of its birth, as, though inevitable, not worthy of its name; as ignorant and transient, and requiring all who would be truly children of the kingdom to rise beyond it.—God and the Bible. THE TRUE JERUSALEM. ISRAEL'S visible Jerusalem is in ruins; and how, then, shall men 'call Jerusalem the throne of the Eternal, and all the nations shall be gathered unto it'? But the true Israel was Israel the bringer-in and defender of the idea of conduct, Israel the lifter-up to the nations of the banner of righteousness. The true Jerusalem was the city of this ideal Israel. And this ideal Israel could not and cannot perish, so long as its idea, righteousness and its necessity, does not perish, but prevails. Now, that it does prevail, the whole course of the world proves, and the fall of the actual Israel is of itself witness. Thus, therefore, the ideal Israel for ever lives and prospers; and its city is the city whereto all nations and languages, after endless trials of everything else except conduct, after incessantly attempting to do without righteousness and failing, are slowly but surely gathered. To this Israel are the promises, and to this Israel they are fulfilled. 'The nation and kingdom that will not serve thee shall perish, yea, those nations shall be utterly wasted.' It is so; since all history is an accumulation of experiences that what men and nations fall by is want of conduct. To call it by this plain name is often not amiss, for the thing is never more great than when it is looked at in its simplicity and reality. Yet the true name to touch the soul is the name Israel gave : righteousness. And to Israel, as the representative of this imperishable and saving idea of righteousness, all the promises come true, and the language of none of them is pitched too high. The Eternal, Israel says truly, is on my side. 'Fear not, thou worm Jacob, and thou handful Israel! I will help thee, saith the Eternal. The Eternal hath chosen Zion; men shall call Jerusalem "the throne of the Eternal," and all the nations shall be gathered unto it. And he will destroy in this mountain the face of the The True Ferusalem. 327 covering cast over all people, and the veil that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death in victory.'Literature and Dogma. ISRAEL AND HIS REVELATION. THE whole history of the world to this day is in truth one continual establishing of the Old Testament revelation: O ye that love the Eternal, see that ye hate the thing that is evil! to him that ordereth his conversation right, shall be shown the salvation of God. And whether we consider this revelation in respect to human affairs at large, or in respect to individual happiness, in either case its importance is so immense, that the people to whom it was given, and whose record is in the Bible, deserve fully to be singled out as the Bible singles them. 'Behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the nations; but the Eternal shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee!' For, while other nations had the misleading idea that this or that, other than righteousness, is saving, and it is not; that this or that, other than conduct, brings happiness, and it does not; Israel had the true idea that righteousness is saving, that to conduct belongs happiness. Nor let it be said that other nations, too, had at least something of this idea. They had, but they were not possessed with it; and to feel it enough to make the world feel it, it was necessary to be possessed with it. It is not |