The same line of argument applies to all the compliances of Christ with the Jewish prejudices (partly imported from the Euphrates) as to demonology, witchcraft, &c. By the way, in this last word, 'witchcraft,' and the too memorable histories connected with it, lies a perfect mine of bibliolatrous madness. As it illustrates the folly and the wickedness of the biliolaters, let us pause upon it.

The word witch, these bibliolaters take it for granted, must mean exactly what the original Hebrew means, or the Greek word chosen by the LXX.; so much, and neither more nor less. That is, from total ignorance of the machinery by which language moves, they fancy that every idea and word which exists, or has existed, for any nation, ancient or modern, must have a direct interchangeable equivalent in all other languages; and that, if the dictionaries do not show it, that must be because the dictionaries are bad. Will these worthy people have the goodness, then, to translate coquette into Hebrew, and post-office into Greek? The fact is, that all languages, and in the ratio of their development, offer ideas absolutely separate and exclusive to themselves. In the highly cultured languages of England, France, and Germany, are words, by thousands, which are strictly untranslatable. They may be approached, but cannot be reflected as from a mirror. To take an image from the language of eclipses, the correspondence between the disk of the original word and its translated representative is, in thousands of instances, not annular; the centres do not coincide; the words overlap; and this arises from the varying modes in which different nations combine ideas. The French word shall combine the elements, l, m, n, o—the nearest English word, perhaps, m, n, o, p. For instance, in all words applied to the nuances of manners, and generally to social differences, how prodigious is the wealth of the French language! How merely untranslatable for all Europe! I suppose, my bibliolater, you have not yet finished your Hebrew or Samaritan translation of coquette. Well, you shall be excused from that, if you will only translate it into English. You cannot: you are obliged to keep the French word; and yet you take for granted, without inquiry, that in the word 'witchcraft,' and in the word 'witch,' applied to the sorceress of Endor, our authorized English Bible of King James's day must be correct. And your wicked bibliolatrous ancestors proceeded on that idea throughout Christendom to murder harmless, friendless, and oftentimes crazy old women. Meantime the witch of Endor in no respect resembled our modern domestic witch.[Footnote: 'The domestic witch.'—It is the common notion that the superstition of the evil eye, so widely diffused in the Southern lands, and in some, not a slumbering, but a fiercely operative superstition, is unknown in England and other Northern latitudes. On the contrary, to my thinking, the regular old vulgar witch of England and Scotland was but an impersonatrix of the very same superstition. Virgil expresses this mode of sorcery to the letter, when his shepherd says—

'Nescio quis teneros oculus mihi fascinat agnos?'

Precisely in that way it was that the British witch operated. She, by her eye, blighted the natural powers of growth and fertility. By the way, I ought to mention, as a case parallel to that of the Bible's recognising witchcraft, and of enlightened nations continuing to punish it, that St. Paul himself, in an equal degree, recognises the evil eye; that is, he uses the idea, (though certainly not meaning to accredit such an idea,) as one that briefly and energetically conveyed his meaning to those whom he was addressing. 'Oh, foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you?' That is, literally, who has fascinated your senses by the evil eye? For the Greek is, tis umas ebaskanen? Now the word ebaskanen is a past tense of the verb baskaino, which was the technical term for the action of the evil eye. Without having written a treatise on the Æolic digamma, probably the reader is aware that F is V, and that, in many languages, B and V are interchangeable letters through thousands of words, as the Italian tavola, from the Latin tabula. Under that little process it was that the Greek baskaino transmigrated into the Latin fascino; so that St. Paul's word, in speaking to the Galatians, is the very game word as Virgil's, in speaking of the shepherd's flock as charmed by the evil eye.] There was as much difference as between a Roman Proconsul, surrounded with eagle-bearers, and a commercial Consul's clerk with a pen behind his ear. Apparently she was not so much a Medea as an Erichtho. (See the Pharsalia.) She was an Evocatrix, or female necromancer, evoking phantoms that stood in some unknown relation to dead men; and then by some artifice (it has been supposed) of ventriloquism,[Footnote: I am not referring to German infidels. Very pious commentators have connected her with the engastrimuthoi () or ventriloquists.] causing these phantoms to deliver oracular answers upon great political questions. Oh, that one had lived in the times of those New-England wretches that desolated whole districts and terrified vast provinces by their judicial murders of witches, under plea of a bibliolatrous warrant; until at last the fiery furnace, which they had heated for women and children, shot forth flames that, like those of Nebuchadnezzar's furnace, seizing upon his very agents, began to reach some of the murderous judges and denouncers!

Yet, after all, are there not express directions in Scripture to exterminate witches from the land? Certainly; but that does not argue any scriptural recognition of witchcraft as a possible offence. An imaginary crime may imply a criminal intention that is not imaginary; but also, which much more directly concerns the interests of a state, a criminal purpose, that rests upon a pure delusion, may work by means that are felonious for ends that are fatal. At this moment, we English and the Spaniards have laws, and severe ones, against witchcraft, viz., in the West Indies, and indispensable it is that we should. The Obeah man from Africa can do no mischief to one of us. The proud and enlightened white man despises his arts; and for him, therefore, these arts have no existence, for they work only through strong preconceptions of their reality, and through trembling faith in their efficacy. But by that very agency they are all-sufficient for the ruin of the poor credulous negro; he is mastered by original faith, and has perished thousands of times under the knowledge that Obi had been set for him. Justly, therefore, do our colonial courts punish the Obeah sorcerer, who (though an impostor) is not the less a murderer. Now the Hebrew witchcraft was probably even worse; equally resting on delusions, nevertheless, equally it worked for unlawful ends, and (which chiefly made it an object of divine wrath) it worked through idolatrous agencies. It must, therefore, have kept up that connection with idolatry which it was the unceasing effort of the Hebrew polity to exterminate from the land. Consequently, the Hebrew commonwealth might, as consistently as our own, denounce and punish witchcraft without liability to the inference that it therefore recognised the pretensions of witches as real, in the sense of working their bad ends by the means which they alleged. Their magic was causatively of no virtue at all, but, being believed in, through this belief it became the occasional means of exciting the imagination of its victims; after which the consequences were the same as if the magic had acted physically according to its pretences. [Footnote: Does that argument not cover 'the New England wretches' so unreservedly denounced in a preceding paragraph?—ED.]

II. Development, as applicable to Christianity, is a doctrine of the very days that are passing over our heads, and due to Mr. Newman, originally the ablest son of Puseyism, but now a powerful architect of religious philosophy on his own account. I should have described him more briefly as a 'master-builder,' had my ear been able to endure a sentence ending with two consecutive trochees, and each of those trochees ending with the same syllable er. Ah, reader! I would the gods had made thee rhythmical, that thou mightest comprehend the thousandth part of my labors in the evasion of cacophon. Phil. has a general dislike to the Puseyites, though he is too learned to be ignorant, (as are often the Low-Church, or Evangelical, party in England,) that, in many of their supposed innovations, the Puseyites were really only restoring what the torpor of the eighteenth century had suffered to go into disuse. They were reforming the Church in the sense sometimes belonging to the particle re, viz., retroforming it, moulding it back into compliance with its original form and model. It is true that this effort for quickening the Church, and for adorning her exterior service, moved under the impulse of too undisguised a sympathy with Papal Rome. But there is no great reason to mind that in our age and our country. Protestant zealotry may be safely relied on in this island as a match for Popish bigotry. There will be no love lost between them—be assured of that—and justice will be done to both, though neither should do it to her rival; for philosophy, which has so long sought only amusement in either, is in these latter days of growing profundity applying herself steadily to the profound truths which dimly are descried lurking in both. It is these which Mr. Newman is likely to illuminate, and not the faded forms of an obsolete ceremonial that cannot now be restored effectually, were it even important that they should. Strange it is, however, that he should open his career by offering to Rome, as a mode of homage, this doctrine of development, which is the direct inversion of her own. Rome founds herself upon the idea, that to her, by tradition and exclusive privilege, was communicated, once for all, the whole truth from the beginning. Mr. Newman lays his corner-stone in the very opposite idea of a gradual development given to Christianity by the motion of time, by experience, by expanding occasions, and by the progress of civilization. Is Newmanism likely to prosper? Let me tell a little anecdote. Twenty years ago, roaming one day (as I had so often the honor to do) with our immortal Wordsworth, 1 took the liberty of telling him, at a point of our walk, where nobody could possibly overhear me, unless it were old Father Helvellyn, that I feared his theological principles were not quite so sound as his friends would wish. They wanted repairing a little. But, what was worse, I did not see how they could be repaired in the particular case which prompted my remark, for in that place, to repair, or in any respect to alter, was to destroy. It was a passage in the 'Excursion,' where the Solitary had described the baptismal rite as washing away the taint of original sin, and, in fact, working the effect which is called technically regeneration. In the 'Excursion' this view was advanced, not as the poet's separate opinion, but as the avowed doctrine of the English Church, to which Church Wordsworth and myself yielded gladly a filial reverence. But was this the doctrine of the English Church? That I doubted—not that I pretended to any sufficient means of valuing the preponderant opinion between two opinions in the Church; a process far more difficult than is imagined by historians, always so ready to tell us fluently what 'the nation' or 'the people' thought upon a particular question, (whilst, in fact, a whole life might be often spent vainly in collecting the popular opinion); but, judging by my own casual experience, I fancied that a considerable majority in the Church gave an interpretation to this Sacrament differing by much from that in the 'Excursion.' Wordsworth was startled and disturbed at hearing it whispered even before Helvellyn, who is old enough to keep a secret, that his divinity might possibly limp a little. I, on my part, was not sure that it did, but I feared so; and, as there was no chance that I should be murdered for speaking freely, (though the place was lonely, and the evening getting dusky,) I stood to my disagreeable communication with the courage of a martyr. The question between us being one of mere fact, (not what ought to be the doctrine, but what was the doctrine of our Church at that time,) there was no opening for any discussion; and, on Wordsworth's suggestion, it was agreed to refer the point to his learned brother, Dr. Christopher Wordsworth, just then meditating a visit to his native lakes. That visit in a short time 'came off,' and then, without delay, our dispute 'came on' for judgment. I had no bets upon the issue—one can't bet with Wordsworth—and I don't know that I should have ventured to back myself in a case of that nature. However, I felt a slight anxiety on the subject, which was very soon and kindly removed by Dr. Wordsworth's deciding, 'sans phrase,' that I, the original mover of the strife, was wrong, wrong as wrong could be. To this decision I bowed at once, on a principle of courtesy. One ought always to presume a man right within his own profession even if privately one should think him wrong. But I could not think that of Dr. Wordsworth. He was a D.D.; he was head of Trinity College, which has my entire permission to hold its head up amongst twenty and more colleges, as the leading one in Cambridge, (provided it can obtain St. John's permission), 'and which,' says Phil., 'has done more than any other foundation in Europe for the enlightenment of the world, and for the overthrow of literary, philosophical, and religious superstitions,' I quarrel not with this bold assertion, remembering reverentially that Isaac Barrow, that Isaac Newton, that Richard Bentley belonged to Trinity, but I wish to understand it. The total pretensions of the College can be known only to its members; and therefore, Phil. should have explained himself more fully. He can do so, for Phil. is certainly a Trinity man. If the police are in search of him, they'll certainly hear of him at Trinity. Suddenly it strikes me as a dream, that Lord Bacon belonged to this College. Don't laugh at me, Phil., if I'm wrong, and still less (because then you'll laugh even more ferociously) if I happen to be right. Can one remember everything? Ah! the worlds of distracted facts that one ought to remember. Would to heaven that I remembered nothing at all, and had nothing to remember! This thing, however, I certainly do remember, that Milton was not of Trinity, nor Jeremy Taylor; so don't think to hoax me there, my parent! Dr. Wordsworth was, or had been, an examining chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury. If Lambeth could be at fault on such a question, then it's of no use going to Newcastle for coals. Delphi, we all know, and Jupiter Ammon had vanished. What other court of appeal was known to man? So I submitted as cheerfully as if the learned Doctor, instead of kicking me out of court, had been handing me in. Yet, for all that, as I returned musing past Rydal Water, I could not help muttering to myself—Ay, now, what rebellious thought was it that I muttered? You fancy, reader, that perhaps I said, 'But yet, Doctor, in spite of your wig, I am in the right.' No; you're quite wrong; I said nothing of the sort. What I did mutter was this—'The prevailing doctrine of the Church must be what Dr. Wordsworth says, viz., that baptism is regeneration—he cannot be mistaken as to that—and I have been misled by the unfair proportion of Evangelical people, bishops, and others, whom accident has thrown in my way at Barley Wood (Hannah More's). These, doubtless, form a minority in the Church; and yet, from the strength of their opinions, from their being a moving party, as also from their being a growing party, I prophesy this issue, that many years will not pass before this very question, now slumbering, will rouse a feud within the English Church. There is a quarrel brewing. Such feuds, long after they are ripe for explosion, sometimes slumber on, until accident kindles them into flame.' That accident was furnished by the tracts of the Puseyites, and since then, according to the word which I spoke on Rydal Water, there has been open war raging upon this very point.

At present, with even more certainty, I prophesy that mere necessity, a necessity arising out of continual collisions with sceptical philosophy, will, in a few years, carry all churches enjoying a learned priesthood into the disputes connected with this doctrine of development. Phil., meantime, is no friend to that Newmanian doctrine; and in sect.31, p.66, he thus describes it:—'According to these writers' (viz., the writers 'who advocate the theory of development'), 'the progressive and gradual development of religious truth, which appears to us' (us, meaning, I suppose, the Old-mannians,) 'to have been terminated by the final revelation of the Gospel, has been going on ever since the foundation of the Church, is going on still, and must continue to advance. This theory presumes that the Bible does not contain a full and final exposition of a complete system of religion; that the Church has developed from the Scriptures true doctrines not explicitly contained therein,' &c. &c.

But, without meaning to undertake a defence of Mr. Newman (whose book I am as yet too slenderly acquainted with), may I be allowed, at this point, to intercept a fallacious view of that doctrine, as though essentially it proclaimed some imperfection in Christianity. The imperfection is in us, the Christians, not in Christianity. The impression given by Phil. to the hasty reader is, that, according to Newmanism, the Scriptures make a good beginning to which we ourselves are continually adding—a solid foundation, on which we ourselves build the superstructure. Not so. In the course of a day or a year, the sun passes through a vast variety of positions, aspects, and corresponding powers, in relation to ourselves. Daily and annually he is developed to us—he runs a cycle of development. Yet, after all, this practical result does not argue any change or imperfection, growth or decay, in the sun. This great orb is stationary as regards his place, and unchanging as regards his power. It is the subjective change in ourselves that projects itself into this endless succession of phantom changes in the object. Not otherwise on the scheme of development; the Christian theory and system are perfect from the beginning. In itself, Christianity changes not, neither waxing nor waning; but the motions of time and the evolutions of experience continually uncover new parts of its stationary disk. The orb grows, so far as practically we are speaking of our own benefit; but absolutely, as regards itself, the orb, eternally the same, has simply more or fewer of its digits exposed. Christianity, perfect from the beginning, had a curtain over much of its disk, which Time and Social Progress are continually withdrawing. This I say not as any deliberate judgment on development, but merely as a suspending, or ad interim idea, by way of barring too summary an interdict against the doctrine at this premature stage. Phil., however, hardens his face against Newman and all his works. Him and them he defies; and would consign, perhaps secretly, to the care of a well-known (not new, but) old gentleman, if only he had any faith in that old gentleman's existence. On that point, he is a fixed infidel, and quotes with applause the answer of Robinson, the once celebrated Baptist clergyman, who being asked if he believed in the devil, replied, 'Oh, no; I, for my part, believe in God—don't you?'

Phil., therefore, as we have seen, in effect, condemns development. But, at p. 33, when as yet he is not thinking of Mr. Newman, he says,' If knowledge is progressive, the development of Christian doctrine must be progressive likewise.' I do not see the must; but I see the Newmanian cloven foot. As to the must, knowledge is certainly progressive; but the development of the multiplication table is not therefore progressive, nor of anything else that is finished from the beginning. My reason, however, for quoting the sentence is, because here we suddenly detect Phil. in laying down the doctrine which in Mr. Newman he had regarded as heterodox. Phil. is taken red-hand, as the English law expresses it, crimson with, the blood of his offence; assuming, in fact, an original imperfection quoad the scire, though not quoad the esse; as to the 'exposition of the system,' though not as to the 'system' of Christianity. Mr. Newman, after all, asserts (I believe) only one mode of development as applicable to Christianity. Phil. having broke the ice, may now be willing to allow of two developments; whilst I, that am always for going to extremes, should be disposed to assert three, viz:—

First. The Philological development. And this is a point on which I, Philo-Phil. (or, as for brevity you may call me, Phil-Phil.) shall, without wishing to do so, vex Phil. It's shocking that one should vex the author of one's existence, which Phil. certainly is in relation to me, when considered as Phil-Phil. Still it is past all denial, that, to a certain extent, the Scriptures must benefit, like any other book, by an increasing accuracy and compass of learning in the exegesis applied to them. But if all the world denied this, Phil., my parent, is the man that cannot; since he it is that relies upon philological knowledge as the one resource of Christian philosophy in all circumstances of difficulty for any of its interests, positive or negative. Philology, according to Phil, is the sheet-anchor of Christianity. Already it is the author of a Christianity more in harmony with philosophy; and, as regards the future, Phil., it is that charges Philology with the whole service of divinity. Wherever anything, being right, needs to be defended—wherever anything, being amiss, needs to be improved—oh! what a life he will lead this poor Philology! Philology, with Phil., is the great benefactress for the past, and the sole trustee for the future. Here, therefore, Phil., is caught in a fix, habemus confitentem. He denounces development when dealing with the Newmanites; he relies on it when vaunting the functions of Philology; and the only evasion for him would be to distinguish about the modes of development, were it not that, by insinuation, he has apparently denied all modes.

Secondly. There is the Philosophic development, from the reaction upon the Bible of advancing knowledge. This is a mode of development continually going on, and reversing the steps of past human follies. In every age, man has imported his own crazes into the Bible, fancied that he saw them there, and then drawn sanctions to his wickedness or absurdity from what were nothing else than fictions of his own. Thus did the Papists draw a plenary justification of intolerance, or even of atrocious persecution, from the evangelical 'Compel them to come in!' The right of unlimited coercion was read in those words. People, again, that were democratically given, or had a fancy for treason, heard a trumpet of insurrection in the words 'To your tents, oh Israel!' But far beyond these in multitude were those that drew from the Bible the most extravagant claims for kings and rulers. 'Rebellion was as the sin of witchcraft.' This was a jewel of a text; it killed two birds with one stone. Broomsticks were proved out of it most clearly, and also the atrocity of representative government. What a little text to contain so much! Look into Algernon Sidney, or into Locke's controversy with Sir Eobert Filmer's 'Patriarcha,'[Footnote: I mention the book as the antagonist, and not the man, because (according to my impression) Sir Robert was dead when Locke was answering him.] or into any books of those days on political principles, and it will be found that Scripture was so used as to form an absolute bar against human progress. All public benefits were, in the strictest sense of the word, precarious, as depending upon prayers and entreaties to those who had an interest in refusing them. All improvements were elcemosynary; for the initial step in all cases belonged to the Crown. 'The right divine of kings to govern wrong' was in those days what many a man would have died for—what many a man did die for; and all in pure simplicity of heart—faithful to the Bible, but to the Bible of misinterpretation. They obeyed (often to their own ruin) an order which they had misread. Their sincerity, the disinterestedness of their folly, is evident; and in that degree is evident the opening for Scripture development. Nobody could better obey Scripture as they had understood it. Change in the obedience, there could be none for the better; it demanded only that there should be a change in the interpretation, and that change would be what is meant by a development of Scripture. Two centuries of enormous progress in the relations between subjects and rulers have altered the whole reading. 'How readest thou?' was the question of Christ himself; that is, in what meaning dost thou read the particular Scripture that applies to this case? All the texts and all the cases remain at this hour just as they were for our ancestors; and our reverence for these texts is as absolute as theirs; but we, applying lights of experience which they had not, construe these texts by a different logic. There now is development applied to the Bible in one of its many strata—that stratum which connects itself most with civil polity. Again, what a development have we made of Christian truth; how differently do we now read our Bibles in relation to the poor tenants of dungeons that once were thought, even by Christian nations, to have no rights at all!—in relation to 'all prisoners and captives;' and in relation to slaves! The New Testament had said nothing directly upon the question of slavery; nay, by the misreader it was rather supposed indirectly to countenance that institution. But mark—it is Mohammedanism, having little faith in its own laws, that dares not confide in its children for developing anything, but must tie them up for every contingency by the letter of a rule. Christianity—how differently does she proceed! She throws herself broadly upon the pervading spirit which burns within her morals. 'Let them alone,' she says of nations; 'leave them to themselves. I have put a new law into their hearts; and if it is really there, and really cherished, that law will tell them—will develop for them—what it is that they ought to do in every case as it arises, when once its consequences are comprehended.' No need, therefore, for the New Testament explicitly to forbid slavery; silently and implicitly it is forbidden in many passages of the New Testament, and it is at war with the spirit of all. Besides, the religion which trusts to formal and literal rules breaks down the very moment that a new case arises not described in the rules. Such a case is virtually unprovided for, if it does not answer to a circumstantial textual description; whereas every case is provided for, as soon as its tendencies and its moral relations are made known, by a religion that speaks through a spiritual organ to a spiritual apprehension in man. Accordingly, we find that, whenever a new mode of intoxication is introduced, not depending upon grapes, the most devout Mussulmans hold themselves absolved from the restraints of the Koran. And so it would have been with Christians, if the New Testament had laid down literal prohibitions of slavery, or of the slave traffic. Thousands of variations would have been developed by time which no letter of Scripture could have been comprehensive enough to reach. Were the domestic servants of Greece, the (thetes), within the description? Were the serfs and the ascripti glebae of feudal Europe to be accounted slaves? Or those amongst our own brothers and sisters, that within so short a period were born subterraneously,[Footnote: See, for some very interesting sketches of this Pariah population, the work (title I forget) of Mr. Bald, a Scottish engineer, well known and esteemed in Edinburgh and Glasgow. He may be relied on. What he tells against Scotland is violently against his own will, for he is intensely national, of which I will give the reader one instance that may make him smile. Much of the rich, unctuous coal, from Northumberland and Durham, gives a deep ruddy light, verging to a blood-red, and certainly is rather sullen, on a winter evening, to the eye. On the other hand, the Scottish coal or most of it, being far poorer as to heat, throws out a very beautiful and animated scarlet blaze; upon which hint, Mr. Bald, when patriotically distressed at not being able to deny the double power of the eastern English coal, suddenly revivifies his Scottish heart that had been chilled, perhaps, by the Scottish coals in his fire-grate, upon recurring to this picturesque difference in the two blazes—'Ah!' he says gratefully, 'that Newcastle blaze is well enough for a "gloomy" Englishman, but it wouldn't do at all for cheerful Scotland.'] in Scottish mines, or in the English collieries of Cumberland, and were supposed to be ascripti metallo, sold by nature to the mine, and indorsed upon its machinery for the whole term of their lives; in whom, therefore, it was a treason to see the light of upper day—would they, would these poor Scotch and English Pariahs, have stood within any scriptural privilege if the New Testament had legislated by name and letter for this class of douloi (slaves)? No attorney would have found them entitled to plead the benefit of the Bible statute. Endless are the variations of the conditions that new combinations of society would bring forward; endless would be the virtual restorations of slavery that would take place under a Mahometan literality; endless would be the defeats that such restorations must sustain under a Christianity relying on no letter, but on the spirit of God's commandments, and that will understand no equivocations with the secret admonitions of the heart. Meantime, this sort of development, it may be objected, is not a light that Scripture throws out upon human life so much as a light that human life and its development throw back upon Scripture. True; but then how was it possible that life and the human intellect should be carried forward to such developments? Solely through the training which both had received under the discipline of Christian truth. Christianity utters some truth widely applicable to society. This truth is caught up by some influential organ of social life—is expanded prodigiously by human experience, and, when travelling back as an illustrated or improved text to the Bible, is found to be made up, in all its details, of many human developments. Does that argue anything disparaging to Christianity, as though she contributed little and man contributed much? On the contrary, man would have contributed nothing at all but for that nucleus by which Christianity started and moulded the principle. To give one instance—Public charity, when did it commence?—who first thought of it? Who first noticed hunger and cold as awful realities afflicting poor women and innocent children? Who first made a public provision to meet these evils?—Constantine it was, the first Christian that sat upon a throne. Had, then, rich Pagans before his time no charity—no pity?—no money available for hopeless poverty? Not much—very little, I conceive; about so much as Shakspeare insinuates that there is of milk in a male tiger. Think, for instance, of that black-hearted reprobate, Cicero, the moralist. This moral knave, who wrote such beautiful Ethics, and was so wicked—who spoke so charmingly and acted so horribly—mentions, with a petrifying coolness, that he knew of desolate old women in Rome who passed three days in succession without tasting food. Did not the wretch, when thinking of this, leap up, and tumble down stairs in his anxiety to rush abroad and call a public meeting for considering so dreadful a case? Not he; the man continued to strut about his library, in a huge toga as big as the Times newspaper, singing out, 'Oh! fortunatam natam me Consule Romam!' and he mentioned the fact at all only for the sake of Natural Philosophers or of the curious in old women. Charity, even in that sense, had little existence—nay, as a duty, it had no place or rubric in human conceptions before Christianity, Thence came the first rudiments of all public relief to starving men and women; but the idea, the principle, was all that the Bible furnished, needed to furnish, or could furnish. The practical arrangements, the endless details for carrying out this Christian idea—these were furnished by man; and why not? This case illustrates only one amongst innumerable modes of development applicable to the Bible; and this power of development, in general, proves also one other thing of the last importance to prove, viz. the power of Christianity to work in co-operation with time and social progress; to work variably according to the endless variations of time and place; and that is the exact shibboleth of a true and spiritual religion—for, on reviewing the history of false religions, and inquiring what it was that ruined them, rarely is it found that any of them perished by external violence. Even the dreadful fury of the early Mahometan Sultans in India, before the house of Timour, failed to crush the monstrous idolatries of the Hindoos. All false religions have perished by their own hollowness, under that searching trial applied by social life and its changes, which awaits every mode of religion. One after another they have sunk away, as by palsy, from new aspects of society and new necessities of man which they were not able to face. Commencing in one condition of society, in one set of feelings, and in one system of ideas, they sank uniformly under any great change in these elements, to which they had no natural power of accommodation. A false religion furnished a key to one subordinate lock; but a religion that is true will prove a master-key for all locks alike. This transcendental principle, by which Christianity transfers herself so readily from climate to climate,[Footnote: Sagacious Mahometans have been often scandalized and troubled by the secret misgiving that, after all, their Prophet must have been an ignorant fellow. It is clear that the case of a cold climate had never occurred to him; and even a hot one had been conceived most narrowly. Many of the Bedouin Arabs complain of ablutions not adapted to their waterless condition. These evidences of oversight would have been fatal to Islamism, had Islamism produced a high civilization.] from century to century, from the simplicity of shepherds to the utmost refinement of philosophers, carries with it a necessity, corresponding to such infinite flexibility of endless development.



ON THE SUPPOSED SCRIPTURAL EXPRESSION FOR ETERNITY.

[1852.]

Forty years ago (or, in all probability, a good deal more, for we have already completed thirty-seven years from Waterloo, and my remembrances upon this subject go back to a period lying much behind that great era), I used to be annoyed and irritated by the false interpretation given to the Greek word aion, and given necessarily, therefore, to the adjective aionios as its immediate derivative. It was not so much the falsehood of this interpretation, as the narrowness of that falsehood, which disturbed me. There was a glimmer of truth in it; and precisely that glimmer it was which led the way to a general and obstinate misconception of the meaning. The word is remarkably situated. It is a scriptural word, and it is also a Greek word; from which the inevitable inference is, that we must look for it only in the New Testament. Upon any question arising of deep, aboriginal, doctrinal truth, we have nothing to do with translations. Those are but secondary questions, archaeological and critical, upon which we have a right to consult the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures known by the name of the Septuagint.

Suffer me to pause at this point for the sake of premising an explanation needful to the unlearned reader. As the reading public and the thinking public is every year outgrowing more and more notoriously the mere learned public, it becomes every year more and more the right of the former public to give the law preferably to the latter public, upon all points which concern its own separate interests. In past generations, no pains were taken to make explanations that were not called for by the learned public. All other readers were ignored. They formed a mob, for whom no provision was made. And that many difficulties should be left entirely unexplained for them, was superciliously assumed to be no fault at all. And yet any sensible man, let him be as supercilious as he may, must on consideration allow that amongst the crowd of unlearned or half-learned readers, who have had neither time nor opportunities for what is called 'erudition' or learned studies, there must always lurk a proportion of men that, by constitution of mind, and by the bounty of nature, are much better fitted for thinking, originally more philosophic, and are more capaciously endowed, than those who are, by accident of position, more learned. Such a natural superiority certainly takes precedency of a merely artificial superiority; and, therefore, it entitles those who possess it to a special consideration. Let there be an audience gathered about any book of ten thousand one hundred readers: it might be fair in these days to assume that ten thousand would be in a partial sense illiterate, and the remaining one hundred what would be rigorously classed as 'learned.' Now, on such a distribution of the readers, it would be a matter of certainty that the most powerful intellects would lie amongst the illiterate ten thousand, counting, probably, to fifteen to one as against those in the learned minority. The inference, therefore, would be, that, in all equity, the interest of the unlearned section claimed a priority of attention, not merely as the more numerous section, but also as, by a high probability, the more philosophic. And in proportion as this unlearned section widens and expands, which every year it does, in that proportion the obligation and cogency of this equity strengthens. An attention to the unlearned part of an audience, which fifteen years ago might have rested upon pure courtesy, now rests upon a basis of absolute justice. I make this preliminary explanation, in order to take away the appearance of caprice from such occasional pauses as I may make for the purpose of clearing up obscurities or difficulties. Formerly, in a case of that nature, the learned reader would have told me that I was not entitled to delay him by elucidations that in his case must be supposed to be superfluous: and in such a remonstrance there would once have been some equity. The illiterate section of the readers might then be fairly assumed as present only by accident; as no abiding part of the audience; but, like the general public in the gallery of the House of Commons, as present only by sufferance; and officially in any records of the house whatever, utterly ignored as existences. At present, half way on our pilgrimage through the nineteenth century, I reply to such a learned remonstrant—that it gives me pain to annoy him by superfluous explanations, but that, unhappily, this infliction of tedium upon him is inseparable from what has now become a duty to others. This being said, I now go on to inform the illiterate reader, that the earliest translation of the Hebrew Scriptures ever made was into Greek. It was undertaken on the encouragement of a learned prince, Ptolemy Philadelphus, by an association of Jewish emigrants in Alexandria. It was, as the event has shown in very many instances, an advantage of a rank rising to providential, that such a cosmopolitan version of the Hebrew sacred writings should have been made at a moment when a rare concurrence of circumstances happened to make it possible; such as, for example, a king both learned in his tastes and liberal in his principles of religious toleration; a language, viz., the Greek, which had already become, what for many centuries it continued to be, a common language of communication for the learned of the whole (i.e., in effect of the civilized world, viz., Greece, the shores of the Euxine, the whole of Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Carthage, and all the dependencies of Carthage, finally, and above all, Rome, then beginning to loom upon the western horizon), together with all the dependencies of Rome, and, briefly, every state and city that adorned the imperial islands of the Mediterranean, or that glittered like gems in that vast belt of land, roundly speaking, one thousand miles in average breadth, and in circuit running up to five thousand miles. One thousand multiplied into five times one thousand, or, otherwise expressed, a thousand thousand five times repeated, or otherwise a million five times repeated, briefly a territory measuring five millions of square miles, or forty-five times the surface of our two British islands—such was the boundless domain which this extraordinary act of Ptolemy suddenly threw open to the literature and spiritual revelation of a little obscure race, nestling in a little angle of Asia, scarcely visible as a fraction of Syria, buried in the broad shadows thrown out on one side by the great and ancient settlements on the Nile, and on the other by the vast empire that for thousands of years occupied the Tigris and the Euphrates. In the twinkling of an eye, at a sudden summons, as it were from the sounding of a trumpet, or the oriental call by a clapping of hands, gates are thrown open, which have an effect corresponding in grandeur to the effect that would arise from the opening of a ship canal across the Isthmus of Darien, viz., the introduction to each other—face to face—of two separate infinities. Such a canal would suddenly lay open to each other the two great oceans of our planet, the Atlantic and the Pacific; whilst the act of translating into Greek and from Hebrew, that is, transferring out of a mysterious cipher as little accessible as Sanscrit, and which never would be more accessible through any worldly attractions of alliance with power and civic grandeur or commerce, out of this darkness into the golden light of a language the most beautiful, the most honored amongst men, and the most widely diffused through a thousand years to come, had the immeasurable effect of throwing into the great crucible of human speculation, even then beginning to ferment, to boil, to overthrow—that mightiest of all elements for exalting the chemistry of philosophy—grand and, for the first time, adequate conceptions of the Deity. For, although it is true that, until Elias should come—that is, until Christianity should have applied its final revelation to the completion of this great idea-we could not possess it in its total effulgence, it is, however, certain that an immense advance was made, a prodigious usurpation across the realms of chaos, by the grand illuminations of the Hebrew discoveries. Too terrifically austere we must presume the Hebrew idea to have been: too undeniably it had not withdrawn the veil entirely which still rested upon the Divine countenance; so much is involved in the subsequent revelations of Christianity. But still the advance made in reading aright the divine lineaments had been enormous. God was now a holy spirit that could not tolerate impurity. He was the fountain of justice, and no longer disfigured by any mode of sympathy with human caprice or infirmity. And, if a frown too awful still rested upon his face, making the approach to him too fearful for harmonizing with that perfect freedom and that childlike love which God seeks in his worshippers, it was yet made evident that no step for conciliating his favor did or could lie through any but moral graces.

Three centuries after this great epoch of the publication (for such it was) secured so providentially to the Hebrew theology, two learned Jews—viz., Josephus and Philo Judaeus—had occasion to seek a cosmopolitan utterance for that burden of truth (or what they regarded as truth) which oppressed the spirit within them. Once again they found a deliverance from the very same freezing imprisonment in an unknown language, through the very same magical key, viz., the all-pervading language of Greece, which carried their communications to the four winds of heaven, and carried them precisely amongst the class of men, viz.—the enlightened and educated class—which pre-eminently, if not exclusively, their wish was to reach. About one generation after Christ it was, when the utter prostration, and, politically speaking, the destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish nation, threw these two learned Jews upon this recourse to the Greek language as their final resource, in a condition otherwise of absolute hopelessness. Pretty nearly three centuries before Christ it was (two hundred and eighty-four years, according to the common reckoning), when the first act of communication took place between the sealed-up literature of Palestine and the Greek catholic interpretation. Altogether, we may say that three hundred and twenty years, or somewhere about ten generations of men, divided these two memorable acts of intercommunication. Such a space of time allows a large range of influence and of silent, unconscious operation to the vast and potent ideas that brooded over this awful Hebrew literature. Too little weight has been allowed to the probable contagiousness, and to the preternatural shock, of such a new and strange philosophy, acting upon the jaded and exhausted intellect of the Grecian race. We must remember, that precisely this particular range of time was that in which the Greek systems of philosophy, having thoroughly completed their evolution, had suffered something of a collapse; and, having exhausted their creative energies, began to gratify the cravings for novelty by re modellings of old forms. It is remarkable, indeed, that this very city of Alexandria founded and matured this new principle of remodelling applied to poetry not less than to philosophy and criticism. And, considering the activity of this great commercial city and port, which was meant to act, and did act, as a centre of communication between the East and the West, it is probable that a far greater effect was produced by the Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures, in the way of preparing the mind of nations for the apprehension of Christianity, than has ever been distinctly recognised. The silent destruction of books in those centuries has robbed us of all means for tracing innumerable revolutions, that nevertheless, by the evidence of results, must have existed. Taken, however, with or without this additional result, the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures in their most important portions must be ranked amongst what are called 'providential' events. Such a king—a king whose father had been a personal friend of Alexander, the mighty civilizing conqueror, and had shared in the liberalization connected with his vast revolutionary projects for extending a higher civilization over the globe, such a king, conversing with such a language, having advantages so absolutely unrivalled, and again this king and this language concurring with a treasure so supernatural of spiritual wisdom as the subject of their ministrations, and all three concurring with political events so auspicious—the founding of a new and mighty metropolis in Egypt, and the silent advance to supreme power amongst men of a new empire, martial beyond all precedent as regarded means, but not as regarded ends—working in all things towards the unity of civilization and the unity of law, so that any new impulse, as, for instance, impulse of a new religion, was destined to find new facilities for its own propagation, resembling electric conductors, under the unity of government and of law—concurrences like these, so many and so strange, justly impress upon this translation, the most memorable, because the most influential of all that have ever been accomplished, a character of grandeur that place it on the same level of interest as the building of the first or second temple at Jerusalem.

There is a Greek legend which openly ascribes to this translation all the characters of a miracle. But, as usually happens, this vulgarizing form of the miraculous is far less impressive than the plain history itself, unfolding its stages with the most unpretending historical fidelity. Even the Greek language, on which, as the natural language of the new Greek dynasty in Egypt, the duty of the translation devolved, enjoyed a double advantage: 1st, as being the only language then spoken upon earth that could diffuse a book over every part of the civilized earth; 2dly, as being a language of unparalleled power and compass for expressing and reproducing effectually all ideas, however alien and novel. Even the city, again, in which this translation was accomplished, had a double dowery of advantages towards such a labor, not only as enjoying a large literary society, and, in particular, a large Jewish society, together with unusual provision in the shape of libraries, on a scale probably at that time unprecedented, but also as having the most extensive machinery then known to human experience for publishing, that is, for transmitting to foreign capitals all books in the readiest and the cheapest fashion, by means of its prodigious shipping.

Having thus indicated to the unlearned reader the particular nature of that interest which invests this earliest translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, viz., that in fact this translation was the earliest publication to the human race of a revelation which had previously been locked up in a language destined, as surely as the Welsh language or the Gaelic, to eternal obscurity amongst men, I go on to mention that the learned Jews selected for this weighty labor happened to be in number seventy-two; but, as the Jews systematically reject fractions in such cases (whence it is that always, in order to express the period of six weeks, they say forty days, and not, as strictly they should, forty-two days), popularly, the translators were called 'the seventy,' for which the Latin word is septuaginta. And thus in after ages the translators were usually indicated as 'The LXX,' or, if the work and not the workmen should be noticed, it was cited as The Septuagint. In fact, this earliest of Scriptural versions, viz., into Greek, is by much the most famous; or, if any other approaches it in notoriety, it is the Latin translation by St. Jerome, which, in this one point, enjoys even a superior importance, that in the Church of Rome it is the authorized translation. Evidently, in every church, it must be a matter of primary importance to assign the particular version to which that church appeals, and by which, in any controversy arising, that church consents to be governed. Now, the Jerome version fulfils this function for the Romish Church; and accordingly, in the sense of being published (vulgata), or publicly authorized by that church, it is commonly called The Vulgate.

But, in a large polemic question, unless, like the Romish church, we uphold a secondary inspiration as having secured a special privileged translation from the possibility of error, we cannot refuse an appeal to the Hebrew text for the Old Testament, or to the Greek text for the New. The word aeonios (), as purely Grecian, could not connect itself with the Old Testament, unless it were through the Septuagint translation into Greek. Now, with that version, in any case of controversy, none of us, Protestants alike or Roman Catholics, have anything whatever to do. Controversially, we can be concerned only with the original language of the Scriptures, with its actual verbal expressions textually produced. To be liable, therefore, to such a textual citation, any Greek word must belong to the New Testament. Because, though the word might happen to occur in the Septuagint, yet, since that is merely a translation, for any of us who occupy a controversial place, that is, who are bound by the responsibilities, or who claim the strict privileges of controversy, the Septuagint has no virtual existence. We should not be at liberty to allege the Septuagint as any authority, if it happened to countenance our own views; and, consequently, we could not be called on to recognise the Septuagint in any case where it should happen to be against us. I make this preliminary caveat, as not caring whether the word aeonios does or does not occur in the Septuagint. Either way, the reader understands that I disown the authority of that version as in any degree affecting myself. The word which, forty years ago, moved my disgust by its servile misinterpretation, was a word proper to the New Testament; and any sense which it may have received from an Alexandrian Jew in the third century before Christ, is no more relevant to any criticism that I am now going to suggest, than is the classical use of the word aeon () familiar to the learned in Sophocles or Euripides.

The reason which gives to this word aeonian what I do not scruple to call a dreadful importance, is the same reason, and no other, which prompted the dishonesty concerned in the ordinary interpretation of this word. The word happened to connect itself—but that was no practical concern of mine; me it had not biassed in the one direction, nor should it have biassed any just critic in the counter, direction—happened, I say, to connect itself with the ancient dispute upon the duration of future punishments. What was meant by the aeonian punishments in the next world? Was the proper sense of the word eternal, or was it not? I, for my part, meddled not, nor upon any consideration could have been tempted to meddle, with a speculation repellent alike by the horror and by the hopeless mystery which invest it. Secrets of the prison-house, so afflicting to contemplate steadily, and so hopeless of solution, there could be no proper motive for investigating, unless the investigation promised a great deal more than it could ever accomplish; and my own feeling as to all such problems is, that they vulgarize what, left to itself, would take its natural station amongst the freezing horrors that Shakspeare dismisses with so potent an expression of awe, in a well-known scene of 'Measure for Measure.' I reiterate my protest against being in any way decoyed into the controversy. Perhaps I may have a strong opinion upon the subject. But, anticipating the coarse discussions into which the slightest entertainment of such a question would be every moment approaching, once for all, out of reverential regard for the dignity of human nature, I beg permission to decline the controversy altogether.

But does this declinature involve any countenance to a certain argument which I began by rejecting as abominable? Most certainly not. That argument runs thus—that the ordinary construction of the term aeonian, as equivalent to everlasting, could not possibly be given up when associated with penal misery, because in that case, and by the very same act, the idea of eternity must be abandoned as applicable to the counter-bliss of Paradise. Torment and blessedness, it was argued, punishment and beatification, stood upon the same level; the same word it was, the word aeonian, which qualified the duration of either; and, if eternity in the most rigorous acceptation fell away from the one idea, it must equally fall away from the other. Well; be it so. But that would not settle the question. It might be very painful to renounce a long-cherished anticipation; but the necessity of doing so could not be received as a sufficient reason for adhering to the old unconditional use of the word aeonian. The argument is—that we must retain the old sense of eternal, because else we lose upon one scale what we had gained upon the other. But what then? would be the reasonable man's retort. We are not to accept or to reject a new construction (if otherwise the more colorable) of the word aeonian, simply because the consequences might seem such as upon the whole to displease us. We may gain nothing; for by the new interpretation our loss may balance our gain; and we may prefer the old arrangement. But how monstrous is all this! We are not summoned as to a choice of two different arrangements that may suit different tastes, but to a grave question as to what is the sense and operation of the word aeonian. Let the limitation of the word disturb our previous estimate of Paradise, grant that it so disturbs that estimate, not the less all such consequences leave the dispute exactly where it was; and if a balance of reason can be found for limiting the extent of the word aeonian, it will not be the less true because it may happen to disturb a crotchet of our own.

Meantime, all this speculation, first and last, is pure nonsense. Aeonian does not mean eternal; neither does it mean of limited duration; nor would the unsettling of aeonian in its old use, as applied to punishment, to torment, to misery, &c., carry with it any necessary unsettling of the idea in its application to the beatitudes of Paradise. Pause, reader; and thou, my favored and privileged reader, that boastest thyself to be unlearned, pause doubly whilst I communicate my views as to this remarkable word.

What is an aeon? In the use and acceptation of the Apocalypse, it is evidently this, viz., the duration or cycle of existence which belongs to any object, not individually for itself, but universally in right of its genus. Kant, for instance, in a little paper which I once translated, proposed and debated the question as to the age of our planet the Earth. What did he mean? Was he to be understood as asking whether the Earth were half a million, two millions, or three millions of years old? Not at all. The probabilities certainly lean, one and all, to the assignment of an antiquity greater by many thousands of times than that which we have most idly supposed ourselves to extract from Scripture, which assuredly never meant to approach a question so profoundly irrelevant to the great purposes of Scripture as any geological speculation whatsoever. But this was not within the field of Kant's inquiry. What he wished to know was simply the exact stage in the whole course of her development which the Earth at present occupies. Is she still in her infancy, for example, or in a stage corresponding to middle age, or in a stage approaching to superannuation? The idea of Kant presupposed a certain average duration as belonging to a planet of our particular system; and supposing this known, or discoverable, and that a certain assignable development belonged to a planet so circumstanced as ours, then in what particular stage of that development may we, the tenants of this respectable little planet Tellus, reasonably be conceived to stand?

Man, again, has a certain aeonian life; possibly ranging somewhere about the period of seventy years assigned in the Psalms. That is, in a state as highly improved as human infirmity and the errors of the earth herself, together with the diseases incident to our atmosphere, &c., could be supposed to allow, possibly the human race might average seventy years for each individual. This period would in that case represent the 'aeon' of the individual Tellurian; but the 'aeon' of the Tellurian RACE would probably amount to many millions of our earthly years; and it would remain an unfathomable mystery, deriving no light at all from the septuagenarian 'aeon' of the individual; though between the two aeons I have no doubt that some secret link of connection does and must subsist, however undiscoverable by human sagacity.

The crow, the deer, the eagle, &c., are all supposed to be long-lived. Some people have fancied that in their normal state they tended to a period of two[Footnote: I have heard the same normal duration ascribed to the tortoise, and one case became imperfectly known to myself personally. Somewhere I may have mentioned the case in print. These, at any rate, are the facts of the case: A lady (by birth a Cowper, of the whig family, and cousin to the poet Cowper; and, equally with him, related to Dr. Madan, bishop of Peterborough), in the early part of this century, mentioned to me that, in the palace at Peterborough, she had for years known as a pet of the household a venerable tortoise, who bore some inscription on his shell indicating that, from 1638 to 1643, he had belonged to Archbishop Laud, who (if I am not mistaken) held the bishopric of Peterborough before he was translated to London, and finally to Canterbury.] centuries. I myself know nothing certain for or against this belief; but, supposing the case to be as it is represented, then this would be the _aeonian_ period of these animals, considered as individuals. Among trees, in like manner, the oak, the cedar, the yew, are notoriously of very slow growth, and their _aeonian_ period is unusually long as regards the individual. What may be the _aeon_ of the whole species is utterly unknown. Amongst birds, one species at least has become extinct in our own generation: its _aeon_ was accomplished. So of all the fossil species in zoology, which Palaeontology has revealed. Nothing, in short, throughout universal nature, can for a moment be conceived to have been resigned to accident for its normal _aeon_. All periods and dates of this order belong to the certainties of nature, but also, at the same time, to the mysteries of Providence. Throughout the Prophets, we are uniformly taught that nothing is more below the grandeur of Heaven than to assign earthly dates in fixing either the revolutions or the duration of great events such as prophecy would condescend to notice. A day has a prophetic meaning, but what sort of day? A mysterious expression for a time which has no resemblance to a natural day—sometimes comprehending long successions of centuries, and altering its meaning according to the object concerned. 'A time,' and 'times,' or 'half a time'—'aeon_,' or '_aeons_ of _aeons_'—and other variations of this prophetic language (so full of dreadful meaning, but also of doubt and perplexity), are all significant. The peculiar grandeur of such expressions lies partly in the dimness of the approximation to any attempt at settling their limits, and still more in this, that the conventional character, and consequent meanness of ordinary human dates, are abandoned in the celestial chronologies. Hours and days, or lunations and months, have no true or philosophic relation to the origin, or duration, or periods of return belonging to great events, or revolutionary agencies, or vast national crimes; but the normal period and duration of all acts whatever, the time of their emergence, of their agency, or their reagency, fall into harmony with the secret proportions of a heavenly scale, when they belong by mere necessity of their own internal constitution to the vital though hidden motions that are at work in their own life and manifestation. Under the old and ordinary view of the apocalyptic _aeon_, which supposed it always to mean the same period of time—mysterious, indeed, and uncertain, as regards _our_ knowledge, but fixed and rigorously certain in the secret counsels of God—it was presumed that this period, if it lost its character of infinity when applied to evil, to criminality, or to punishment, must lose it by a corresponding necessity equally when applied to happiness and the golden aspects of hope. But, on the contrary, every object whatsoever, every mode of existence, has its own separate and independent _aeon_. The most thoughtless person must be satisfied, on reflection, even apart from the express commentary upon this idea furnished by the Apocalypse, that every life and mode of being must have hidden within itself the secret _why_ of its duration. It is impossible to believe of _any_ duration whatever that it is determined capriciously. Always it rests upon some ground, ancient as light and darkness, though undiscoverable by man. This only is discoverable, as a general tendency, that the _aeon_, or generic period of evil, is constantly towards a fugitive duration. The _aeon_, it is alleged, must always express the same idea, whatever _that_ may be; if it is less than eternity for the evil cases, then it must be less for the good ones. Doubtless the idea of an _aeon_ is in one sense always uniform, always the same, viz., as a tenth or a twelfth is always the same. Arithmetic could not exist if any caprice or variation affected these ideas—a tenth is always hiore than an eleventh, always less than a ninth. But this uniformity of ratio and proportion does not hinder but that a tenth may now represent a guinea, and next moment represent a thousand guineas. The exact amount of the duration expressed by an _aeon_ depends altogether upon the particular subject which yields the _aeon_. It is, as I have said, a radix; and, like an algebraic square-root or cube-root, though governed by the most rigorous laws of limitation, it must vary in obedience to the nature of the particular subject whose radix it forms.

Reader, I take my leave. I have been too loitering. I know it, and will make such efforts in future to cultivate the sternest brevity as nervous distress will allow. Meantime, as the upshot of my speculation, accept these three propositions:—

A. That man (which is in effect every man hitherto,) who allows himself to infer the eternity of evil from the counter eternity of good, builds upon the mistake of assigning a stationary and mechanic value to the idea of an aeon; whereas the very purpose of Scripture in using this word was to evade such a value. The word is always varying, for the very purpose of keeping it faithful to a spiritual identity. The period or duration of every object would be an essentially variable quantity, were it not mysteriously commensurate to the inner nature of that object as laid open to the eyes of God. And thus it happens, that everything in this world, possibly without a solitary exception has its own separate aeon: how many entities, so many aeons.

B. But if it be an excess of blindness which can overlook the aeonian differences amongst even neutral entities, much deeper is that blindness which overlooks the separate tendencies of things evil and things good. Naturally, all evil is fugitive and allied to death.

C. I separately, speaking for myself only, profoundly believe that the Scriptures ascribe absolute and metaphysical eternity to one sole Being, viz., to God; and derivatively to all others according to the interest which they can plead in God's favor. Having anchorage in God, innumerable entities may possibly be admitted to a participation in divine aeon. But what interest in the favor of God can belong to falsehood, to malignity, to impurity? To invest them with aeonian privileges, is in effect, and by its results, to distrust and to insult the Deity. Evil would not be evil, if it had that power of self-subsistence which is imputed to it in supposing its aeonian life to be co-eternal with that which crowns and glorifies the good.



JUDAS ISCARIOT.

[1852.]

Everything connected with our ordinary conceptions of this man, of his real purposes, and of his ultimate fate, apparently is erroneous. That neither any motive of his, nor any ruling impulse, was tainted with the vulgar treachery imputed to him, appears probable from the strength of his remorse. And this view of his case comes recommended by so much of internal plausibility, that in Germany it has long since shaped itself into the following well-known hypothesis:—Judas Iscariot, it is alleged, participated in the common delusion of the apostles as to that earthly kingdom which, under the sanction and auspices of Christ, they supposed to be waiting and ripening for the Jewish people. So far there was nothing in Judas to warrant any special wonder or any special blame. If he erred, so did the other apostles. But in one point Judas went further than his brethren, viz., in speculating upon the reasons of Christ for delaying the inauguration of this kingdom. All things were apparently ripe for it; all things pointed to it; the expectation and languishing desires of many Hebrew saints; the warning from signs; the prophetic alarms and kindling signals raised aloft by heralds like the Baptist; the fermentation of revolutionary doctrines all over Judea; the passionate impatience of the Roman yoke; the continual openings of new convulsions and new opportunities at the great centre of Rome; the insurrectionary temper of Jewish society, as indicated by the continual rise of robber leaders, that drew off multitudes into the neighboring deserts; and, universally, the unsettled mind of the Jewish nation. These explosive materials had long been accumulated; they needed only a kindling spark. Heavenly citations to war had long been felt in the insults and aggressions of paganism; there wanted only a leader. And such a leader, if he would but consent to assume that office, stood ready in the founder of Christianity. The supreme qualifications for leadership, as revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, were evident to all parties in the Jewish community, and not merely to the religious body of his own immediate followers. These qualifications were published and expounded to the world in the facility with which everywhere he drew crowds about himself,[Footnote: As connected with these crowds, I have elsewhere noticed, many years ago, the secret reason which probably governed our Saviour in cultivating the character and functions of a hakim, or physician. Throughout the whole world of civilization at that era [ ], whatever might be otherwise the varieties of the government, there was amongst the ruling authorities a great jealousy of mobs and popular gatherings. To a grand revolutionary teacher, no obstacle so fatal as this initial prejudice could have offered itself. Already, in the first place, a new and mysterious body of truth, having vast and illimitable relations to human duties and prospects, presented a field of indefinite alarm. That this truth should in the second place publish itself, not through books and written discourses, but orally, by word of mouth, and by personal communication between vast mobs and the divine teacher—already that, as furnishing a handle of influence to a mob-leader, justified a preliminary alarm. But then, thirdly, as furnishing a plea for bringing crowds together, such a mode of teaching must have crowned the suspicious presumptions against itself. One peril there was at any rate to begin with—the peril of a mob: that was certain. And, secondly, there was the doctrine taught: which doctrine was mysterious and uncertain; and in that uncertainty lay another peril. So that, equally through what was fixed and what was doubtful, there arose that 'fear of change' which by authentic warrant 'perplexes monarchs.'] in the extraordinary depth of impression which attended his teaching, and in the fear as well as hatred which possessed the Jewish rulers against him. Indeed, had it not been for the predominance of the Roman element in the government of Judea, it is pretty certain that Christ would have been crushed in an earlier stage in his career.

Believing, therefore, as Judas did, that Christ contemplated the establishment of a temporal kingdom—the restoration, in fact, of David's throne; believing, also, that all the conditions towards the realization of such a scheme met and centred in the person of Christ, when viewed in relation to the circumstances of the times; what was it that, upon any solution intelligible to Judas, neutralized so grand a scene of promise? Simply and obviously, to a man with the views of Judas, it was the character of Christ himself, sublimely over-gifted for purposes of speculation, but, like Shakspeare's great creation of Prince Hamlet, not commensurately endowed for the business of action and the sudden emergencies of life. Indecision and doubt (such was the interpretation of Judas) crept over the faculties of the Divine Man as often as he was summoned away from his own natural Sabbath of heavenly contemplation to the gross necessities of action. It became important, therefore, according to the views adopted by Judas, that his master should be precipitated into action by a force from without, and thrown into the centre of some popular movement, such as, once beginning to revolve, could not afterwards be suspended or checked. It is by no means improbable that this may have been the theory of Judas. Nor is it at all necessary to seek for the justification of such a theory, considered as a matter of prudential policy, in Jewish fanaticism. The Jews of thai day were distracted by internal schisms. Else, and with any benefit from national unity, the headlong rapture of Jewish zeal, when combined in vindication of their insulted temple and temple-worship, would have been equal to the effort of dislodging the Roman legionary force for the moment from the military possession of Palestine. After which, although the restoration of the Roman supremacy could not ultimately have been evaded, it is not at all certain that a compromise might not have been welcome at Rome, such as had, in fact, existed under Herod the Great and his father.[Footnote: It was a tradition which circulated at Rome down to the days of the Flavian family, that the indulgence conceded to Judea by the imperial policy from Augustus downwards, arose out of the following little diplomatic secret:—On the rise of the Parthian power, ambassadors had been sent to Antipater, the father of Herod, offering the Parthian alliance and support. At the same moment there happened to be at Jerusalem a Roman agent, having a mission from the Roman Government with exactly the same objects. The question was most solemnly debated, for it was obvious, that ultimately this question touched the salvation of the kindgom, since to accept an alliance with either empire, would be to insure the bitter hostility of the other. With that knowledge fully before his mind, Antipater made his definitive election for Rome. The case transpired at Rome—the debate, and the issue of the debate—and eventually proved worth a throne to the Herodian family; for the honor of Rome seemed to be concerned in supporting the man who, in this sort of judgment of Paris, had solemnly awarded the prize of superiority to the remoter potentate.] The radical power, in fact, would have been lodged in Rome; but with such external concessions to Jewish nationality as might have consulted the real interests of both parties. Administered under Jewish names, the land might have yielded a larger revenue than, as a refractory nest of insurgents, it ever did yield to the Roman exchequer; and, on the other hand, a ferocious bigotry, which was really sublime in its indomitable obstinacy, might have been humored without prejudice to the grandeur of the imperial claims. Even little Palmyra in later times was indulged to a greater extent without serious injury in any quarter, had it not been for the feminine arrogance that misinterpreted and abused that indulgence.

The miscalculation, in fact, of Judas Iscariot—supposing him really to have entertained the views ascribed to him—did not hinge at all upon political oversights, but upon a total spiritual blindness; in which blindness, however, he went no farther than at the time did probably most of his brethren. Upon them, quite as little as upon him, had as yet dawned the true grandeur of the Christian scheme. In this only he outran his brethren—that, sharing in their blindness, he greatly exceeded them in presumption. All alike had imputed to their Master views utterly irreconcilable with the grandeur of his new and heavenly religion. It was no religion at all which they as yet supposed to be the object of Christ's teaching, but a simple preparation for a pitiably vulgar scheme of earthly aggrandizement. But, whilst the other apostles had simply failed to comprehend their master, Judas had presumptuously assumed that he comprehended the purposes of Christ more fully than Christ himself. His object was audacious in a high degree, but (according to the theory which I am explaining) for that very reason not treacherous at all. The more that he was liable to the reproach of audacity, the less can he be suspected of perfidy. He supposed himself executing the very innermost purposes of Christ, but with an energy which it was the characteristic infirmity of Christ to want. His hope was, that, when at length actually arrested by the Jewish authorities, Christ would no longer vacillate; he would be forced into giving the signal to the populace of Jerusalem, who would then have risen unanimously, for the double purpose of placing Christ at the head of an insurrectionary movement, and of throwing off the Roman yoke. As regards the worldly prospects of this scheme, it is by no means improbable that Iscariot was right. It seems, indeed, altogether impossible that he, who (as the treasurer of the apostolic fraternity) had in all likelihood the most of worldly wisdom, and was best acquainted with the temper of the times, could have made any gross blunder as to the wishes and secret designs of the populace in Jerusalem.[Footnote: Judas, not less than the other apostles, had doubtless been originally chosen, upon the apparent ground of superior simplicity and unworldliness, or else of superior zeal in testifying his obedience to the wishes of his Master. But the other eleven were probably exposed to no special temptation: Judas, as the purse-bearer, was. His official duty must have brought him every day into minute and circumstantial communication with an important order of men, viz., petty shop-keepers. In all countries alike, these men fulfil a great political function. Beyond all others, they are brought into the most extensive connection with the largest stratum by far in the composition of society. They receive, and with dreadful fidelity they give back, all jacobinical impulses. They know thoroughly in what channels, under any call arising for action, these impulses are at any time moving. They are always kept up au courant of the interior councils and ultimate objects of the most national, and, in one sense, the most powerful body in the whole community. Consciousness, which such men always have, of deep incorruptible fidelity to their mother-land, and to her interests, however ill understood, ennobles their politics, even when otherwise base. They are corrupters in a service that never can be utterly corrupt. They have therefore a power to win attention from virtuous men; and, being known to speak a representative language, they would easily, in a land so agitated and unreconciled, so wild, stormy, and ignorant as Judea, kindle in stirring minds the most worldly contagions as to principle and purpose: on the one hand, kept through these men in vital sympathy with the restless politics of the insurrectionist populace—on the other, hearing a sublime philosophy that rested for its key-note upon the advent of vast revolutions among men—what wonder that Judas should connect his daily experience by an imaginary synthesis?] This populace, however, not being backed by any strong section of the aristocracy, having no confidence again in any of the learned bodies connected with the great service of their national temple, and having no leaders, were apparently dejected, and without unity. The probability, meantime, is, that some popular demonstration would have been made on behalf of Christ, had he himself offered it any encouragement. But we, who know the incompatibility of any such encouragement with the primary purpose of Christ's mission upon earth, know of necessity that Judas, and the populace on which he relied, must equally and simultaneously have found themselves undeceived for ever. In an instant of time one grand decisive word and gesture of Christ must have put an end peremptorily to all hopes of that kind. In that brief instant, enough was made known to Judas for final despair. Whether he had ever drunk profoundly enough from the cup of spiritual religion to understand the full meaning of Christ's refusal; whether he still adhered to his worldly interpretation of Christ's mission, and simply translated the refusal into a confession that all was lost, whilst in very fact all was on the brink of absolute and triumphant consummation, it is impossible for us, without documents or hints, to conjecture. Enough is apparent to show that, in reference to any hopes that could be consolatory for him, all was indeed lost. The kingdom of this world had melted away in a moment like a cloud; and it mattered little to him that a spiritual kingdom survived, and that intellectually he might suddenly become aware of it, if in his heart there were no spiritual organ by which he could appropriate the new and stunning revelation. Equally he might be swallowed up by despair in the case of retaining his old worldly delusions, and finding the ground of his old anticipations suddenly giving way below his feet, or again in the opposite case of suddenly correcting his own false constructions of Christ's mission, and apprehending a far higher purpose; but which purpose, in the very moment of becoming intelligible, rose into a region far beyond his own frail fleshly sympathies. He might read more truly—far more truly; but what of that, if the new truth were nothing to him? The despondency of Judas might be of two different qualities, more or less selfish; indeed, I would go so far as to say, selfish or altogether unselfish. And it is with a view to this question, and under a persuasion of a wrong done to Judas by gross mistranslation disturbing the Greek text, that I entered at all upon this little memorandum. Else what I have hitherto been attempting to explain (excepting only the part relating to the hakim, which is entirely my own suggestion) belongs to German writers. The whole construction of Iscariot's conduct, as arising, not out of perfidy, but out of his sincere belief that some quickening impulse was called for by a morbid feature in Christ's temperament—all this I believe was originally due to the Germans; and it is an important correction, for it must always be important to recall within the fold of Christian forgiveness any one who has long been sequestered from human charity, and has tenanted a Pariah grave. In the greatest and most memorable of earthly tragedies, Judas is a prominent figure. So long as the earth revolves, he cannot be forgotten. If, therefore, there is a doubt affecting his case, he is entitled to the benefit of that doubt; and if he has suffered to any extent—if simply to the extent of losing a palliation, or the shadow of a palliation—by means of a false translation from the Greek, we ought not to revise or mitigate his sentence merely, but to dismiss him from the bar. The Germans make it a question—in what spirit Iscariot lived? My question is—how he died? If he were a traitor at last, in that case he was virtually a traitor always. If he perpetrated treason in the last hours of his connection, with Christ, and even a mercenary treason, then he must have been dallying with the purpose of treason during all the hours of his apostleship. If, in reality, when selling his master for money, he meant to betray him, and regarded the money as the commensurate motive for betraying him, then his case will assume a very different aspect from that impressed upon it by the German construction of the circumstances.

The life of Judas, and the death of Judas, taken apart, or taken jointly, each separately upon independent grounds, or both together upon common grounds, are open to doubts and perplexities. And possibly the double perplexities, if fully before us, might turn out to be self-neutralized. Taking them jointly, we might ask—Were they, this life and this death, to be regarded as a common movement on behalf of a deep and heart-fretting Hebrew patriotism, which was not the less sincere, because it ran headlong into the unamiable form of rancorous rationality and inhuman bigotry? Were they a wild degeneration from a principle originally noble? Or, on the contrary, this life and this death, were they alike the expression of a base mercenary selfishness, caught and baffled in the meshes of its own chicanery? The life, if it could be appreciated in its secret principles, might go far to illustrate the probable character of the death. The death, if its circumstances were recoverable, and could be liberated from the self-contradictory details in the received report, might do something to indicate retrospectively the character and tenor of that life. The life of Judas, under a German construction of it, as a spasmodic effort of vindictive patriotism and of rebellious ambition, noble by possibility, though erring and worldly-minded, when measured by a standard so exalted as that of Christianity, would infer (as its natural sequel) a death of fierce despair. Read under the ordinary construction as a life exposed to temptations that were petty, and frauds that were always mercenary, it could not reasonably be supposed to furnish any occasion for passions upon so great a scale as those which seem to have been concerned in the tragical end of Judas, whether the passions were those of remorse and penitential anguish, or of personal disappointment. Leaving, however, to the Germans, the task of conjecturally restering its faded lineaments to this mysterious record of a crime that never came before any human tribunal, my own purpose is narrower. I seek to recall and to recombine the elements, not of the Iscariot's life, nor of his particular offence, but simply of his death.

The reader is probably aware, that there has always been an obscurity, or even a perplexity, connected with the death of Iscariot. Two only out of the entire five documents, which record the rise and early history of Christianity, have circumstantially noticed this event. Mark, Luke, and John, leave it undescribed. St. Matthew and the Acts of the Apostles have bequeathed to us a picturesque account of it, which, to my own belief, has been thoroughly misunderstood; and, once being misunderstood, naturally enough has been interpreted as something fearfully preternatural. The crime, though great, of Iscariot has probably been much exaggerated. It was the crime of signal and earthly presumption, seeking not to thwart the purposes of Christ, or to betray them, but to promote them by means utterly at war with their central spirit. As far as can be judged, it was an attempt to forward the counsels of God by weapons borrowed from the armory of darkness. The crime being once misapprehended as a crime, without a name or a precedent, it was inevitable that the punishment, so far as it was expounded by the death of the criminal, should, in obedience to this first erroneous preconception, be translated into something preternatural. To a mode of guilt which seemed to have no parallel, it was reasonable enough that there should be apportioned a death which allowed of no medical explanation.[Footnote: In neutral points, having no relation to morals or religious philosophy, it is not concealed by the scriptural records themselves, that even inspired persons made grave mistakes. All the apostles, it is probable, or with the single exception of St. John, shared in the mistake about the second coming of Christ, as an event immediately to be looked for. With respect to diseases, again, it is evident that the apostles, in common with all Jews, were habitually disposed to read in them distinct manifestations of heavenly wrath. In blindness, for instance, or, again, in death from the fall of a tower, they read, as a matter of course, a plain expression of the divine displeasure pointed at an individual. That they should even pause so far as to make a doubt whether the individual or his parents were the object of this displeasure, arose only from the absolute coercion to so much reserve as this which was continually obtruding itself in the cases where innocent infants were the sufferers. This, in fact, was a prejudice inalienable from their Jewish training; and as it would unavoidably lead oftentimes to judgments not only false but also uncharitable, it received, on more occasions than one, a stern rebuke from Christ himself. In the same spirit, it is probable that the symptoms attending death were sometimes erroneously reported as preternatural, when, in fact, such as every hospital could match. The death of the first Herod was regarded by the early Christians universally as a judicial expression of God's wrath to the author of the massacre at Bethlehem, though in reality the symptoms were such as often occur in obstinate derangements of the nervous system. Indeed, as to many features, the malady of the French king, Charles IX., whose nervous system had been shattered by the horrors of the St. Bartholomew massacre, very nearly resembled it; with such differences as might be looked for between an old, ruined constitution, such as Herod's, and one so youthful as that of Charles. In the Acts of the Apostles, again, the grandson of Herod (Herod Agrippa) is evidently supposed to have died by a judicial and preternatural death, whereas apparently one part of his malady was the morbus pedicularis—cases of which I have myself circumstantially known in persons of all ranks; one, for instance, being that of a countess enormously rich, and the latest a female servant.]

This demur, moreover, of obscurity was not the only one raised against the death of Judas: there was a separate objection—that it was inconsistent with itself. He was represented, in the ordinary modern versions, as dying by a double death—viz., 1st, by a suicidal death: 'he went and hanged himself'—this is the brief account of his death given by St. Matthew; but, 2d, by a death not suicidal: in the Acts of the Apostles, we have a very different account of his death, not suggesting suicide at all, and otherwise describing it as mysteriously complex; that is, presenting us with various circumstances of the case, none of which, in the common vernacular versions (English and Continental), is at all intelligible. The elements in the case are three: that he 'fell down headlong;' that he 'burst asunder in the middle;' and that 'his bowels gushed out'—the first of these elements being unintelligible in the English expression of it, and the two others being purely and blankly impossible. These objections to the particular mode of that catastrophe which closed the career of Judas, had been felt pretty generally in the Christian church, and probably from the earliest times; and the more so on account of that deep obscurity which rested upon the nature of his offence. That a man, who had been solemnly elected into the small band of the apostles, should so far wander from his duty as to incur forfeiture of his great office—this was in itself sufficiently dreadful, and a shocking revival to the human imagination of that eldest amongst all traditions—a tradition descending to us from what date we know not, nor through what channel of original communication—the possibility that even into the heaven of heavens, and amongst the angelic hosts, rebellion against God, long before man and human frailty existed, should have crept by some way metaphysically inconceivable. What search could be sufficient, where even the eye of Christ had failed to detect any germ of evil? Still, though the crime of Judas had doubtless been profound,[Footnote: In measuring which, however, the reader must not allow himself to be too much biassed by the English phrase, 'son of perdition.' This, and the phrase which we translate 'damnation,' have been alike colored unavoidably by the particular intensity of the feeling associated with our English use of the words. Now, one great difficulty in translating is to find words that even as to mere logical elements correspond to the original text. Even that is often a trying problem. But to find also such words as shall graduate and adjust their depth of feeling to the scale of another language, and that language a dead language, is many times beyind all reach of human skill.] and evidently to me it had been the intention of the early church to throw a deep pall of mystery over its extent—charity, that unique charity which belongs to Christianity, as being the sole charity ever preached to men, which 'hopeth all things,' inclined through every age the hearts of musing readers to suspend their verdict where the Scriptures had themselves practised some reserve, and (were it only by the extreme perplexity of its final and revised expressions) had left an opening, if not almost an invitation, to doubt. The doubt was left by the primitive church where Scripture had left it. There was not any absolute necessity that this should ever be cleared up to man. But it was felt from the very first that some call was made upon the church to explain and to harmonize the apparently contradictory expressions used in what may be viewed as the official report of the one memorable domestic tragedy in the infant stage of the Christian history. Official I call it, as being in a manner countersigned by the whole confederate church, when proceeding to their first common act in filling up the vacancy consequent upon the transgression of Judas, whereas the account of St. Matthew pleaded no authority but his own. And domestic I call the tragedy, in prosecution of that beautiful image under which a father of our English church has called the twelve apostles, when celebrating the paschal feast, 'the family of Christ.'[Footnote: for the reader must not forget that the original meaning of the Latin word familia was the sum total of the famuli. Hence, whenever it is said in an ancient classic that such or such a man had a large family, or that he was kind to his family, or was loved by his family, always we are to understand not at all his wife and children, but the train and retinue of his domestic slaves. Now, the relation of the Apostles to their Master, and the awfulness of their dependency upon him, which represented a golden chain suspending the whole race of man to the heavens above, justified, in the first place, that form of expression which should indicate the humility and loyalty that is owned by servants to a lord; whilst, on the other hand, the tenderness involved in the relations expressed by the English word family, redressed what would else have been too austere in the idea, and recomposed the equilibrium between the two forces of reverential awe and of childlike love which are equally indispensable to the orbicular perfection of Christian duty.]