THE "TRUE RELIGION" OF ST. JAMES.
[TO TEE EDITOR OP THE "SPECTATOR."]
.,I3,---May I suggest that the able advocate to whom was entrusted the " apology " for the Epistle of St. James in the Sp jet or of September 14th might have materially :trengthened his cause by appealing from our Authorised Version rendering to the original Greek of the two crucial words rendered therein,—" religious" (i. 26) and " religion " i. 27) respectively ? For the question, after all, is not what we mean by " religious " and "religion," but what St. James meant by " Apiosos" and " Opngzeicc"; and to determine that our one safe guide is surely to ascertain the sense which other writers of classical or New Testament Greek have attached to these same words. And a little examination will, I think, make it abundantly clear that the larger and more important half of what we now mean by " religion " is, so to say, left outside of St. James's words, and is not, in fact, indicated by them at all ; that his " Opnrmsfos," in fact, deals not with the inner spirit and essence, but with the external acts and observances of religion. 'When, e.g., Herodotus in three passages (II. 18, IL 37, II. 64) uses the identical ex- pressions, it is in each case in reference to the minute and burthensome ritual of ancient Egypt,—e.g., its abstinence from certain meats, the sanctity attached to their temples, the attire, tonsure, and ceremonial washings of their priests ; and, as he adds, "the ten thousand other observances (tplan(a;) which they practise besides." Again, the worship paid to angels (Colossians ii. 18) by Colossian fanatics, and their arbitrary prohibitions of purely external acts (" touch not," &c.), are described by St. Paul by the same, or an exten- sion of the same, term (idaoapegxs(,c, " will-worship " of A.V.) The presumption, then, to say the least, is exceedingly strong that St. James, too, uses the word in its received sense, of religion in its external aspect, as expressed in act or cere- mony. And that religion would present itself in that aspect both to the writer and the readers of the Epistle is the more probable, since both he and they had "made their exodus" from a religion which was in part even in its original design, and through Pharisaic perversions had become almost exclusively a religion of externals — and so a dimazi;es in this narrow sense, as St. Paul, indeed (Acts xxvi. 5), calls it—for a religion which had so narrowed down deserved no higher designation. But granting this narrower sense to be the true one here, what must be its bearing on our estimate of St. James's doctrine ? Surely, if rightly apprehended, it must exalt it mightily; for then his assertion amounts to this, that good works of benevolence and purity of life are but the ceremonial and external service of the religion of Jesus Christ; that, in the striking language of Coleridge in a passage worthy of all study, our religion "has light for its garment ; its very robe is righteousness " ; that "morality is the body of which faith in Christ is the soul." To what passage of Scripture can we look for a higher ideal of Christianity than this ? We may even dispense with the attempt, which I venture to think neither philologically nor doctrinally satisfactory, to include the whole of Christianity within the limits of this, its supposed definition ; and rest satisfied that in pure spirituality of view St. James has here approved himself "no whit behind the very chiefest of the
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