66 Judaism left to itself. The Pharisee broke out at once in the national character, and when uncorrected by higher teaching, human nature is as ready to fall into the same mistake now as then. There are Evangelical Pharisees as well as legal-Pharisees as much in spite of Paul's doctrine, though ever quoting his words, as Esdras was a Pharisee in spite of the visions of the Evangelical Prophet Isaiah. The narrow religionist always takes the same view of God's dealings with man. Others are broken off that he may be grafted in. Others are passed by, that he may be included. "Well," says the Apostle, as if contemptuously, not vouchsafing an answer, see that you too are not broken off in your turn.' To this habit of mind Deism comes almost as an antidote, if it can be said that one evil can neutralise another. "Send me to hell with my forefathers," said the fierce Frisian chief, Radbrod, as he drew his foot out of the font, after questioning Bishop Wolfran what had become of those who had died unbaptized. Deism thus glories in the uncovenanted mercies, when those within the pale have no mercy for those outside. The education of the world is thus a counter-theory to the doctrine of reprobation, and where the one is never heard of, there the other will find little acceptance. It is worthy of notice that these so-called "broad" views spring up chiefly among those who have cultivated narrow views only. Thus the Church of Geneva soon fell from the doctrine of its master, Calvin, to the doctrine of its martyr heretic, Servetus ; the antagonism of the human mind to one form of error fosters the growth of another, as the sunbaked slime left by the receding waters of the Nile was supposed to breed crocodiles and the other pests of the river. But enough about the genesis of this theory. We have now to deal with it as it appears in the pages of Dr. Temple's Essay. The frontispiece to the folio edition of Hobbes' "Leviathan" will explain this theory very well to the general reader, who cannot go into details. A monstrous man, made up of little men, like the image of wicker-work in which the Druids burnt their victims, bestrides the world; that monster is humanity, being a whole which exists before the parts; or, if this piece of idealism is unintelligible to the English reader, we will say society is the unit, and not the man. The race is the ens individuum, not the individual, as we use the word popularly. There is much deep truth in this, disfigured though it is by vagaries of German Platonism. Our English theology is so nominalist ever since the days of Locke, that the Angustinian and, we may add, Pauline account of original sin is either frittered away with a Pelagian gloss, or interpreted as the hardest of dogmas, that God considered us to be accountable for Adam's sin, and as responsible for his guilt as well as our own. The spiritual unity of the human race would at once solve the difficulty. If men are not a mass of homogeneous units dropped into the world one after another, like rain-drops from a cloud, but rather derivations one from another, as the branches from one stem, then the transmission of evil presents little difficulty-the wonder would lie the other way, to conceive it possible for Adam's sin not to pass down to his latest posterity. So it is generally found in the words of Sir William Hamilton, that "no difficulty emerges in theology which has not previously emerged in philosophy," and so most of our so-called Scripture difficulties only arise from the false position from which we approach the subject. We have no objection, then, to Dr. Temple's account of the ideal unity of the human race; but when it comes to details, it is impossible to carry it through. Is history the growth of humanity as a whole? or is not humanity divided into several zones or circles, each of which has a growth of its own, and life independent of the rest? The latter we think is the only fair account of the matter. Dr. Temple divides hu manity into three periods of growth-the state of childhood, the state of transition, when the youth is taught partly by precept, and partly by example, the full state of manhood, when he carries the law within him. But the fact is, that while some have reached the third period, large masses of men are not even in the first. Some are steeped in savage ignorance, while humanity elsewhere has progressed to the state of holding by the law within. This looks very unlike the education of the world. What would England say if it heard that at Rugby there were five hundred boys, some of whom never saw their head master, nor had even heard of him; who roved about the country, birdnesting and robbing orchards, and getting imprisoned from time to time by the parish constable for being drunk and disorderly in the streets? Would it be any excuse to offer, that the head master diligently taught the head class, many of whom were ripe for the Universities, and ready to carry, off the great prizes of life? So much more disgraceful, they would say, that a head master, so attentive in his Grecians, should leave his little grammar schoolboys "like young barbarians at their play." Rugby, they would say, may be an excellent place for cramming prizemen, but it is a bad school for the mass of boys. So this education theory breaks down when pressed too far. We are not here required to go into the question why God should allow the heathen thus to run wild for so long a time; but at least it disposes of the analogy between the world and a school. We should be forced to say it with reverence, that if God's chief relation to man is that of a schoolmaster, and if the world is only a school, He certainly neglects the great mass of His pupils in the interest of a favoured few. We must take another view of the matter. Not that the world is being educated by God in its Pagan state, but that it is left to itself for a time, so as to bring it at last to a sense of its destitution, and to drive it back to God. The parable of the Prodigal Son is the account given by Infinite Wisdom of God's present dealings with the heathen. It does not suggest Dr. Temple's theory of three representative races, the Greek, the Roman, the Asiatic, leading on to God, side by side with the Jew; but it implies that all alike are very far from God, perishing with spiritual hunger, as much in polished Athens as in rude Scythia. If Dr. Temple had called his essay the preparation of the world for the Gospel, we should have agreed with him; but when he calls it the education, he misleads us by a metaphor, for education implies all that apparatus which George Herbert so well described : : "Lord, with what care thou hast begirt us round— Parents first season us, then schoolmasters To rules of reason, holy monitors." We miss the contrast between the children of the covenant and those outside it, if we put Gentile culture on the level with Jewish. As for the Gentiles, they were for the time being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenant of promise, having no hope, without God in the world. It is proper to speak of the Jew only as under education, though even in his case it was only the education of a young child left in charge of an upper servant-the law was our pedagogue to lead us to Christ (Gal. iii. 24). But in the case of the Gentile even this measure of superintendence was wanting. For reasons which God will hereafter make plain, He left all nations to take their own course, and seemed to withdraw Himself from the care of His erring children. He has abundantly proved since that He was caring for us all the while, watching like Moses' sister hidden among the reeds of the Nile. But till the fulness of the time was come, God consistently carried out a different course of preparation for the elder and the younger brother. The elder He kept at home with Himself. Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine." The younger he allowed to take his own course, to go off to a far country, and to join himself to a citizen, who sent him into the fields to feed swine. It is part of the mystery of redemption that the first shall be last, and the last first-that the Gentile, least cared for before Christ came, should be the first brought home; and the Jew, the favoured son, should be angry, and not come in for awhile, till the fulness of the Gentiles shall be gathered in. So it is, and all we can say is, "Even so, Father." But we should spoil the significance of this exquisite story of love, if we put the Jew and the Gentile on a parity of privilege for the time being—if, in our haste to vindicate God's goodness to all, we began the story of His covenant dealings with the Gentiles before Scripture begins it. This is the mistake of cultivated divines, who are impatient to see the purpose of all that long night of Paganism, and who cannot allow that Greek art and Roman law, as well as Oriental philosophy, were swinehusks, as far as salvation is concerned, as much as Hindoo suttees or New Zealand cannibal feasts. Were it only the pious wish that all art, and law, and philosophy, were not entire labour lost, and the time spent in acquiring these things time wasted, all would respect the wish the wish, too, might, with no impropriety, be father to the thought, that it was so. Pope Gregory the Great is said to have so taken to heart the case of the Emperor Trajan, as to have prayed that he might be excepted from the doom which he believed awaited all those who died out of Christ. Dante, too, allows his love for Virgil, his guide, and some one or two other pagans, to prevail over his orthodoxy, and to admit them by special favour into the place of blessedness. We are indulgent to the academic divine, who in preaching before a learned audience, as Dr. Temple preached, we understand the substance of this essay in the |