LECTURE I.

THE JEWS.

WE are now to treat of the external evidence of religion. In the internal evidence we were looking, as it were, into the very face of Religion, striving to catch the spirit that gleams from her eye, that resounds in her voice, that challenges love and reverence in all the outlines and gestures of her august form. In the external evidence, on the other hand, we look to the history of her introduction into the world; we scan the title-deeds of her claim to her great estate; we examine with especial attention the wondrous seals of miracle and prophecy which attest these mighty instruments; we strive to weigh adequately, though not strictly defining, the divine inspiration and the real authority of the Scriptures and the Church; we show how the history of the Catholic Church warrants the advance of her claims over those of the Jewish Church; we mark the majestic unfolding and consistency of her doctrine in successive ages and amid various controversies; we point to the outward attestations of the great external facts on which she rests, and, finally, to the supernatural fruits which this divine tree has borne for the healing of the nations.

The subject to which we naturally turn first in this. great series is the history of the Hebrew or Jewish people. We have already noted' how even a superficial 'In the Introductory Lecture to the First Course.

explanation of any one fact-like the existence, for example, of the first printed Hebrew Bible-involves in truth the whole evidence of religion in all its branches, internal and external. We might affirm in a similar way that the services in any Jewish synagogue, of which examples are found in every part of the world, imply, if fairly weighed, the whole history of the Jewish race, and even the entire development of revealed religion. We might perhaps say the same of any one typical Jew. As to a skilful geologist, a Lyell or a Hugh Miller, a little piece of the earth's crust, say out of the old red sandstone, involves, by clear and necessary consequence, the whole past geological history of the globe: so the very features of the Jew, his hair, his eyes, his language, his religious books and devotions, will recall to a thoughtful observer, in inevitable succession, a series of events at once the most marvellous and the most certain in the history of the world-the plain of Chaldæa, Abraham going forth toward the Jordan and the land of the Amorite, Isaac and Jacob in Canaan and in Egypt, the great lawgiver in the desert and at Sinai, the valiant Joshua, the mighty Samson, the peerless David, the gifted Solomon, the line of prophets, the triumphs, the conquests, the rebellions, the sins, the captivity, the humiliations, the patriotic struggles, the false Messiahs and the True, the final overthrow of Jerusalem, the dispersion, the long agony that followed and still continues of a real though unaccepted martyrdom; a testimony, that is, to most weighty truths which they do not love, and to Scriptures whose letter they inflexibly guard, but whose clear meaning they detest. Such are the events extending now over four thousand years, and vitally connected with every other great event in the world's history, to which every Jew by his very existence bears indisputable witness-of which, indeed, his very existence may be said to be the product. The points we now emphasize, therefore, are that the Jew is a human being, as richly endowed as any member of the race with natural gifts, whose very exist

ence, nevertheless, such as he is, is an anomaly, an enigma, inexplicable by any natural laws, historical or physiological, that hold good in the case of all other human beings. He is found in every country, in every age, among the heathen of every kind, idolaters, philosophers, Buddhists, Muhammedans, even Christians; but everywhere refusing to eat with them, to pray with them, to intermarry, but always, nevertheless, keen in trade and able in government. The Jew is always distrusted, sometimes despised, sometimes hated, but invulnerable alike to contemptuous indifference and to active persecution, exhibiting the strange paradox of the most earthly qualities-vulgar greed of money and of the luxuries which money commands, combined with invincible resistance to the weaknesses that have subdued every other variety of the human race. It is not a theory nor any part of a philosophical hypothesis, but a plain matter of fact, attested by history, illustrated by thousands of living examples, that the Jew is what he is; that he continues amid mankind and resists disintegration solely in consequence of his religion. That he is out of sympathy with its spirit, and blind to some of the plainest truths contained in its Scriptures, does not shake his evidence to it, nor make him any the less certainly its child and product.

An outline of Jewish history for two thousand years, from the call of Abraham to the destruction of Jerusalem, with its leading and important events in their succession and dependence, is made known and certified to us by a fourfold combination of evidence, such as can hardly be produced for even a brief period of the most important section of any other human historyEgypt or Babylon, Greece or Rome, modern France or England, and such as is wholly wanting for any equally lengthened period. And the marvel of this first two thousand years has now been capped by the equal marvel, though different in kind, of a subsequent history, now nearly equal in time.

The fourfold evidence of this history is: (1) The testi

mony of written documents whose historical character is certified by such impartial witnesses as Neander, Ewald, and Grote. (2) The confirmations given by profane literature to Sacred Scripture: e. g., the attestations to the conquest of Canaan by Joshua, found in Moses of Chorene, Procopius, Suidas, and Phoenician fragments; the agreement between the Scripture account of Sidon and the Phoenicians and the descriptions in Homer, Menander, Strabo, and Justin; the account in Scripture of David's Syrian war with that in the native historian, Nicolas of Damascus; and many other striking particulars in Berosus, Herodotus, Abydenus, and Ptolemy's Canon. These last writers have been brought into harmony with Scripture, where they had been thought to differ, by the aid of the next species of evidence to be mentioned. (3) The combined testimony from physical geography, monuments and inscriptions that have been dug out of the earth. What is known of the Sinaitic mountains, for instance, agrees with the narrative of the wanderings in the desert, and there is "a detailed harmony between the life of Joshua and the various scenes of his battles." And so inscriptions recently found have put beyond question Scripture statements about an Asiatic Cush, and about Belshazzar and the last days of Babylon, which had been thought inconsistent with profane historians. (4) The threefold evidence from the sacred writings, from secular literature, and from visible monuments, natural and artificial, is finally welded together and vivified by the presence everywhere and miraculous preservation of the very people who are the subjects and the inheritors of the mighty tradition, in whose speech and looks and treasured books, nay, in whose very faults and errors, as well as virtues, the varied past lives again in indestructible vitality.

Livy, in the preface to his celebrated history, treats