STANLEY'S JEWISH CHURCH AND EASTERN SERMONS.* IN Hans Andersen's charming
story, " The Snow Queen," there is a quaint passage of which we have been sometimes reminded while reading good Bishop Colenso's latest arithmetical essays.
* Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church. Part L Abraham to Samuel. By Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, D.D. Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Oxford, and Canon of Christ Church. London: John Murray. 1863.
Sermons Preached before His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, during his Tour in the Fast in the Spring of 1862, with Notices of some of the Localities Visited- By Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, D.D. Published by command. London : John Murray. 1863.
Th; little hero of the tale, finding himself helplessly dragged o r very rough places by the sledge of the Snow Queen, got adly frightened, "and tried to repeat the Lord's Prayer, but he
oold only think of the multiplication table." On the other hand, we rise from the perusal of Dr. Stanley's delightful lectures with the wish that he had given the arithmetical element a little more prominence. To take a solitary, but significant instance, while the Bishop of Natal emphatically expresses a not quite ex- ceptional distrust of the historical accuracy of the statement that Moses led not fewer than 600,000 armed men out of Egypt, Dr. Stanley contents himself with these quiet observations :—" It is difficult to conceive the migration of a whole nation under such circumstances. This difficulty, amongst others, has in- duced the well-known French commentator (Laborde) to reduce the number from 600,000 to 600 (!) armed men. The groat German scholar (Ewald) defends the correctness of the original numbers. . . . . We may leave the question to the critical analysis of the text, and of the probabilities of the case, and confine our- selves to what remains equally true under either hypothesis." No doubt, "under either hypothesis," the great moral and theological elements involved in the emancipation of a race from slavery would equally retain their place in the Hebrew history ; but surely the difference between 600 and 600,000 is too enormous to leave the narrative of any of the outward events connected with the Exodus, the life in the desert, or the settlement in Canaan, unaffected. For if you start with the assumption that there were but 600 men capable of bearing arms, the whole story of preternatural help, of fear in the presence of enemies, and of the comparatively disorganized popular conditions during the times of the Judges, acquires a certain self-consistency ; but when you adopt the other supposition, the historical difficulties become many, if not insuperable. We do not, however, attach the least suspicion to Canon Stanley's method of dealing with this question, and similar questions. If he does not, as a rule, attempt the solution of diffi- culties, he never pretends to be ignorant of their existence. He would say with Butler, "I don't know the whole of the case." He believes, apparently, that somewhere between the corrosive criticism of the more pronounced Germans,,and the intolerant dogmatism of Hengstenberg, there lies an ample tract of what may be called free soil from which very rich spoils are to be gathered. And within this more or less definite tract we cannot but think that he is, on the whole, the most success- ful of later inquirers, whether English or Continental. In thus writing we do not mean to disparage the worth of Bishop Colenso's investigations. As Dr. Stanley himself admits, in a brave and manly note, at the end of his lectures, " the cause of religion has everything to gain, and nothing to lose, from an honest inquiry," like that of the Bishop of Natal,—words which seem to indicate that he does not sympathize with the verdict which a certain " literary criticism" has somewhat oracularly pronounced against Dr. Colenso's volumes, as adverse in spirit to the religious life of England. The love of wisdom is just as much an intellectual factor, as the wisdom of love is a moral element, in all truly spiritual life ; and if to ourselves Dr. Stanley's lectures are specially attractive from the predominance in them of the latter quality, we do not the less admire the integrity and courage of the Colonial Bishop—we do not the less protest against the pitiful censures which have-been launched against him from high places. It would be a fatal day for the Church of England should she ever authoritatively proclaim that there is no room within her borders for such men as Dr. Colenso.
But still, we believe that Dr. Stanley's synthetic and con- structive method will, in the end, and even more directly, reach those results which are sought for by the critic who pursues only the analytic way. Analysis announces that tradition has raised
old fact to a fabulous power. That is very likely, replies the synthetic expositor ; but beneath the accidents, and without feeling called on to discuss or dispose of them, I find those verities, moral and historical, which at once illuminate the past,
are largely applicable to the present, and hopefully predictive of the future.
The following sentence contains a frank and comprehensive enunciation of the conception which Dr. Stanley's various learn- ing and fine apprehensive tact, have enabled him to form of the genesis of the Jewish historical books as we now possess them :- "In the marvelously tesselated workmanship which the historical books of the Old Testament present,—in the careful interweaving of ancient document into a later narrative—in the editing and re-editing of paQsages where the introduction of a more modem name or word be- trays the touch of the more recent historian, we trace a research which Tr well have occupied many a vacant hoar in the prophetic schools of Bethel or Jerusalem, and at the same time a freedom of adaptation, of alteration, of inquiry, which places the authors or editors of these original writings on a level far above that of mere chroniclers or copyists. Such a union of research and freedom gives us, on the one hand, a view of the office of an inspired or prophetic historian quite different from that which would degrade him into the lifeless and passive instrument of a power which effaced his individual energy and reflection ; and, on the other hand, presents us with something like the model at which an historical student might well aspire, even in our more modern age, and if from the handiwork and composition of these writings we reach to their substance, we find traces of the same spirit, which will appear more closely as we speak of the prophetical office in its two larger aspects. By comparing the treatment of the history of' Israel or Judah, in the four prophetical books of Samuel and of Kings, with the treatment of the same subject in the books of Chronicles, we are at once enabled to form some notion of the true characteristics of the prophetic office as distinguished from that of the mere chronicler or Levite." (p. 445.) Quite in accordance with this felicitous characterization of the chief existing materials of Jewish history, Professor Stanley thus writes in the introduction to the lectures :- " It has been at various times supposed that the books of Moses, Joshua, and Samuel, were all written in their present form by those whose names they bear. This notion, however, was in former ages disputed both by Jewish and Christian theologians, and is now rejected by almost all scholars. It has no foundation in the several books them- selves, and is contradicted by the strong internal evidence of their con- tents." (p. 30.) In certain quarters where the living Word of God is re- garded as synonymous with dead letters, and where " the foundations of our faith," which are surely hid with Christ in God, are conceived of as resting on the contingencies of legends, errors of transcribers, yea, even on " the second stomach of a hare," sayings like the above will meet with a ready anathema as the mere utterances of unbelief; but but all truly thoughtful men among us, especially all thoughtful young men, will receive them gladly. Amid the imbecile mani- festoes of the Episcopal bench, it is at least some com- fort to know that there is one examining chaplain who will not demand of candidates for holy orders a reasonless submission to the shibboleths of an effete criticism, but who, on the contrary, will rather require that with free and filial hearts they shall endeavour to trace the footsteps of the Divine Providence in the great sanctuary of history.
Equally acceptable with Dr. Stanley's estimate of the quality of the historic materials of the Hebrew history will be the in- dication of his convictions on the subject of inspiration, and his more express deliverances on the nature of the prophetic office. For example, in the twentieth lecture, instead of employing the mechanical or magical formula "Plenary Inspiration " as applied to certain books, our author digs down to the moral element, when he writes of the visitations of the Divine Spirit, and says :—" It is well known that the only full sense of the word inspiration is that in which alone it is used by the Church of England, and the ancient Church generally, in the far wider sense of the universal mind of the whole Church, and all good in the human heart and intellect." But while Dr. Stanley thus recognizes the comprehensiveness of inspira- tion, he is not precluded from holding that in a quite special sense the pervading spirit " spake by the prophets." The prophets might be, as the more eminent of the Nazarites were originally named, " seers," beholders of visions, and oc-
casionally, too, they were foreseers. They saw " within the green the mouldered tree." They saw that a burden of in- evitable doom was ready to crush every stronghold of iniquity. At times they uttered predictions, which failed not in being ful- filled to the letter—but predictions to which Dr. Stanley is careful to supply his readers with striking parallels from Gentile sources. Moreover, whilst among other peoples the golden age was a dream or regret of the past, the Hebrew prophets led forward the hopes of their brethren to a golden age in the future. There was on their lofty foreheads the light of the coming sun. But in strict speech the prophet was not the " foreteller," but the forth-teller," the grand credentials of his special commission being that he flashed back their inmost thoughts upon the startled consciousness of his hearers. Mere fortune-tellers, mere prog- nosticators of what was going to happen in Palestine, or else- where, on some future day, would have been left to dream their dreams in peace, nay, might have been petted and lodged in
kings' palaces ; but the courageous proclaimers of the righteous Will that was working in men's hearts and resisting their evil,.
must needs share a very different treatment at the hands of' un- righteous priest or king. Dr. Stanley finds in Jewish Church his- tory three tolerably distinct periods. To the consideration of the first of these, extending from the call of Abraham to the death of Samuel, the present volume is devoted. The second period.embrac- ing the tangled story of "The Kings;" and the third, dating from the Babylonish Captivity, and ending with the grand culmination of Jewish story in the birth of Christ, will occupy respectively a second and third volume. Whether or not Dr. Stanley is to be classed among our more profound thinkers—if some would rank him rather among the eminent " teachers " who luminously expound the known than among the " prophets," who widen the horizon of our consciousness and add to the permanent thought of the race—we are confident that all competent critics will be unanimous in their finding as to the untiring industry, the varied learning, the mastery of English, the rare geographical faculty, the narrative talent, the wakeful thoughtfulness, the earnestness, the happy sense of historical analogy, the human-heartedness, which characterize the lectures before us. The lecture on Abraham is to us the most impressive. The author rises with his subject, if it be not more correct to say he is overshadowed by the grandeur of the bearing and faith of the " Friend of God," the " father of the faithful." Touching at every turn more familiar human elements, Dr. Stanley discourses on the epoch of "The Judges" with fresh elastic power, and to the merely English reader the rendering of the character of Samson, with his grim humour, uncontrollable even in his last utterance, when he prays to be avenged for the loss of but one of his eyes, will con- vey something like a new sensation. To ourselves the least interesting portion of the lectures is that which treats of the life in the desert. We do not here allude to the adroit handling of the passage of the Red Sea, or to the protest against the multiplication of miracles for the Jewish commissariat, but to the impossibility, as it appears to us, of reconciling the anar- chic tribal life in the times of the Judges with the hypothesis of such organization in the desert as seems implied by Dr. Stanley.
The perplexity which the poetic version of the sun's arrest by Joshua has occasioned when petrified into Western prose is very -satisfactorily disposed of, while the two lectures on Samuel and the nature of the prophetic teaching form an exquisite corona to the volume. There is even great dramatic power shown in the unity of Samuel's life, and the concluding sentence on the great future to which alike Jewish and Christian prophecy carries us forward is one of noble eloquence.
The Eastern Sermons form a fitting pendant to the lectures,— preached, as they were, in Egypt, in Syria, in Palestine, and also at sea on the track of the great Jew who, as Professor Stanley forcibly says of him, "approached Damascus a furious persecutor, entered it a humble penitent, and left it a zealous Apostle." The sermons are brief, but broad, always free from dogmatism, and replete with manliness, godliness in its best sense, and genuine catholicity. To the sermons are appended some pleasant notices of places visited by the party of the Prince of Wales. The account of the jealously guarded Hebron is of real interest.
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