THE ARGUMENT FROM RELIGIOUS DEGRADATION.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE " SPEOTATOE.1
Sin,—Must we really believe, with the Bishop of Natal, that "the great system of Levitical law "—whose literature is so redolent of the air of the wilderness, and whose regulations are so apt to the condition and needs of a nascent nation—" instead of being the work of the legislator to whom the Pentateuch attributes it, is really due to the pious zeal of the priests" of the Restoration, in order to solve the perplexing problem "how the nation which produced the Prophets before the Captivity could produce in the age of Christ only Scribes and Pharisees"?
It seems to some of us that if a critic, not from another hemi- sphere, but from another sphere, were to apply the same method, he would make short work of our early Christian history. Are Scribes and Pharisees so rare in Christendom, which once was young and glowing, that we need wonder at the course which Judaism ran according to the accepted narrative of Scripture? God gave to the chosen people in their fresh youth a commandment unto life, a commandment which seems to me charged with all the vital elements of the Gospel, and in the course of ages it became a law of carnal ordinances in their hands. So God gave to the world in the infancy of Christendom a law of liberty, and what in the course of ages have we made of it. What shall we say of the recent debate in Convocation, which, in spite of the eloquent and intensely earnest appeal of the Dean of Westminster, has resolved to keep bound on the neck of the Christian flck a yoke which neither they nor their fathers were able to bear? One learns, too, from the debates that the Scribes of Convocation have a hundred subtle modes of easing their own shoulders, which the untheological mind is either too honest to adopt or too simple to comprehend. But the yoke is bound tightly still. Is there anything in the Judaism of the days of Christ more out of tune with the vital spirit of the Mosaic legislation than is this policy of a great Church with all that is most Christian in Christianity ? All lovers of Christian truth in England owe a deep debt of gratitude to the Dean, whether conscious of it or not, the measure of which those will best appreciate who understand what it is for a member of an ecclesiastical assembly to plead for a measure which the great mass of his brethren in their blindness are ready to denounce as disloyalty to the Gospel of Christ.
Again, consider the question of education. A great body of Christian people, most zealous for religious education, are driven to insist that the public teacher of young children shall absolutely close his lips on the most sacred subjects, and keep all Christian truth out of his teaching, lest, so jealous are we, we should draw proselytes to a church rather than disciples to Christ. To me, a Nonconformist, I frankly confess the necessity is a miserable one; one on account of which the Christianity of the land ought to sit in sackcloth and ashes ; but I can see no real help for it while, like these Jews of Christ's days, we keep at white heat our sectarian passion and strife. Need we be so puzzled by the lapse of vital to ceremonial Judaism, when we see how Christianity has lapsed before our eyes into theological formularies and ecclesiastical zeal ?
Not that I would for a moment repeat the sneer at theology which one sees so constantly on the lips of the "advanced schooL" What we want more than anything, it seems to me, is theology. The whole course of our intellectual development demands theology as its crown. But it must be a theology which starts from God, and not from man's transgression ; which holds redemption to be the complete, the inevitable manifestation of the Fatherly love of God, not an expedient to readjust a harmony which had unhappily been destroyed. The world is waiting for such a theology, and the world will have it ; but till we get it, let us not hold up our hands with pious horror at the Judaism of the days of Christ. St. Paul came out of Gamaliel's school.
But perhaps we are all under a delusion. Perhaps these ancient Christian histories, which seem so fresh and so full of vigorous, joyous vitality, are really of quite recent invention, and are due to the pious zeal of the scholastic ages ; which would "explain the otherwise perplexing problem," how our ecclesiastical Chris- tianity is so cruelly hard, dry, and stern.—I am, Sir, &c., Kent Villa, Brixton Bill, May 6. J. BALDWIN BROWN.
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