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involved in his own calling and mission that led him to develope this line of thought.) It was the necessary correction of a view of divine governance which, though it seemed to be the logical outcome of the Mosaic dispensation, had now done its work. Ezekiel, dealing as a divinely appointed watchman or pastor of souls with the despondency and apathy of the exiles, found it necessary to proclaim a truth that formed a new starting-point in the evolution of religion1.

The psalmists occasionally betray their consciousness of two opposite aspects of human life. Lord, what is man, that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man, that thou visitest him? Thou madest him lower than the angels, to crown him with glory and worship. Thou madest him to have dominion of the works of thy hands, and thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet. Of these two views, however, the more ideal one everywhere prevails, and indeed gives its characteristic tone and colour to the Psalter. Consequently, although we find in the Psalms the same chilling and cheerless conception of death which the discipline of the Law had fostered, yet alongside of it we find a conviction, ever growing in clearness and strength, of the subsistence of an indestructible bond between the living God and the creatures whom He has visited and redeemed. idea has been justly called 'a sentiment rather than an article of faith'; yet it seems to be powerful enough to resist successfully the impression made by the exterior phenomena of death. Thus we have such passages as Ps. xlix. 15, God will redeem my soul from the power of the grave, for he shall receive me, the verb used being the same which occurs in the narrative of Enoch's translation (Gen. v. 24), He was not, for God took-received-him. With this passage we may compare the outburst of faith in Ps. xvii. 15, As for me, I will behold thy face in righteousness; 1 Cp. Ezek. xxxiii. 7, 10; xxxvii. 11.

2 Ps. viii. 4, 5.

The

I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness. And to these might be added the sublime verses which close the seventy-third Psalm: Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel, and afterward receive me to glory. Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee. My flesh and my heart faileth, but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever. The devout Jew was in fact able to feel secure even with the prospect of dissolution before him, in the firm conviction of his relationship to a perfectly holy and loving being. He rested in the thoughts of peace which his religion supplied, not inventing, as the heathen did, a definite picture of the future state, but trusting calmly to omnipotent goodness as the one constant and fixed reality amid the decay and change of visible nature1. He was not blind to the positive lessons presented by the daily spectacle of human mortality. He doubtless learned to connect the mystery of death with the fact of sin and of God's wrath, as the ninetieth Psalm testifies; and this consciousness of a close relation subsisting between death and sin would certainly be deepened by the ceremonial defilement which under the Law was involved in any contact with death. Nevertheless, the true Israelite could hold fast to his trust in God; he could submit to be gathered to his fathers in peace, secure in the thought of that personal relation to God which he had proved by the experience of life to be a solace and a stay. For the very call to communion with God of which he was conscious would be to him a pledge of uninterrupted life.

The character of God-His covenant-faithfulness, His creative compassion for the souls which He had made-could assure the righteous man of protection. Death would be a supreme and trustful self-surrender. Into the hands of God he would com

1 Cp. Mozley, Essays, ii. 173.

2 See Job xix. 25 foll.; Ps. xcii. 13 foll.; Prov. xi. 7; xiv. 32; xxiii. 18; xxiv. 14; Isa. lvii. 2.

mend his spirit in confidence that a being whom God had so highly favoured would not utterly perish. The hope of the devout Israelite might, in short, be expressed in the words of Augustine: Junge cor tuum immortalitati Dei, et cum illo aeternus eris1. Without therefore laying too much stress on isolated passages, or reading into them a belief which was not yet developed, there is ground for the statement that at least the foundation was laid in the Mosaic system for à doctrine of immortality, since the Law presupposed and inculcated the truth of man's dignity and worth as a being called to communion with God and capable of rendering moral obedience to His will.

2. The second main foundation on which the doctrine of a future life could be based is to be found in the gradually awakened sense of the anomalies and difficulties of God's moral government, and the apparent uncertainties of divine retribution.

The Mosaic doctrine of retribution is well represented in such a passage as Lev. xxvi, which embodies the general doctrine of the Law that ultimately man's earthly lot will correspond with his desert. It is one of the incidental limitations of Mosaism that it represents the present world as the only scene of God's distributive justice. It almost invariably connects material prosperity with righteous conduct and disaster with wickedness. Certainly there are traces in the Old Testament of something much higher than mere eudaemonism. Earthly blessings are promised to the righteous, but it is taught that they are to be prized mainly as tokens or pledges of divine favour. The psalmists and prophets rise to the thought that in the presence of God is fullness of joy, that He is the hope of the soul, its treasure and its portion in the land of the living, its unfailing source of gladness, even although the fig tree shall not blossom neither shall fruit

1 Enarr. in Ps. xci. 8. Cp. Cheyne, Aids to the Devout Study of Criticism, p. 159: 'Living as he does by prayer, and with a sense of the invisible things which grows every day in strength and purity, he cannot imagine that his intimacy with God will come to an abrupt end.'

be in the vines1. And in general it seems to be true that the Old Testament idea of 'life 2' as the sum of blessing points to something higher than material prosperity, just as the narrative of Joseph sold by his brethren, wrongfully accused and thrown into bondage in Egypt, might suggest the possibility of suffering befalling the innocent. But these are only dim anticipations of a deeper conception of retribution. The simpler Mosaic doctrine was one with which Jewish faith was evidently loath to part. It seems to underlie the treatment of history in the books of Samuel and Kings. In the books of Chronicles the belief appears in an almost unqualified form-the writer's apparent aim being to construct a theodicy rather than a history, based on the principle that the temporal happiness or misery of the nation was entirely determined by its attitude to the moral and ceremonial injunctions of the levitical Law. But it is clear that while this theory might be suitable to the phenomena of a simple and comparatively stable condition of society, it was liable to break down under the strain and stress of troublous times; it would not correspond with men's experience of the actual and visible facts of a highly-developed and corrupt civilization. In such a state of things the invariable association of righteousness with earthly prosperity was not found to hold good. The afflictions of the godly were matters of daily experience. A Josiah was slain in battle; 'a Jeremiah was crushed beneath a thousand woes, and sorrow-stricken psalmists prayed in vain to be delivered from the injustice and oppression of the great. . . . In a word, evil appeared to come purely from a law of nature, absolutely irrespective of moral order 4.'

Now these unwelcome facts of human experience

See Ps. xvi. 5 foll.; cxlii. 5; Habak. iii. 17, 18. Cp. W. S. Bruce, The Ethics of the O. T. pp. 21, 22.

2 " Deut. xxx. 15 foll.; Prov. viii. 35; xii. 28, &c. Cp. Oehler, $89.

Cp. Montefiore, Hibbert Lectures, p. 448.

Schultz, ii. 209.

were met sometimes with a persistent denial, sometimes with sorrowful expostulation and strenuous assertions of innocence: for we must remember that the Law had not only trained men to the belief that suffering is the result of sin; it had also produced the sense of guilt, and its opposite the consciousness of innocence. This latter spirit was characteristic of post-exilic Judaism. It breathes in many of the Psalms; and a main element in Job's truthfulness and rectitude of character is his steadfast refusal to condemn himself1. The same temper finds utterance in the cries of expostulation with God on the apparent injustice of His dealings, which we meet with in Scripture-in the protests and appeals of such typical passages as Psalm 1xxiii; Jeremiah, chap. xii; or Habakkuk, chap. i. The fact is that an adequate doctrine of future retribution was as yet lacking. The righteous sufferer of the Old Testament was left to hope against hope that what he had ever believed to be a law of divine governance would yet somehow be triumphantly vindicated. The same sense of injured rectitude also contributes to the impatience and thirst for vengeance which startles us in the imprecatory passages of the Old Testament. Both alike-the expostulations and the curses uttered by godly Israelites-bear witness to the perception of a serious moral difficulty, the attempted explanation of which was to lead to more profound views of the future state, as one in which the anomalies of the present would be corrected.

So far as the Psalms deal with this problem, a solution seems to be implicitly contained in the idea previously noticed, that namely of such a 'saving and indissoluble union with God' as might adequately compensate the righteous man for his undeserved suffering and for the prosperity of the wicked. the Wisdom literature, however, we seem to be able to trace a continuous and progressive effort to solve the problem. Thus the book of Proverbs, reflecting the

1 1 Job xxvii. 5.

In

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