fleeting opinion; on the other hand, the temptation to pay to the letters of the sacred book a worship as idolatrous and as profoundly opposed to its spirit as once had been the veneration paid to the sacred trees or the sacred stones of the consecrated groves or hills. But we have said that the book which was thus reverenced was not coextensive even with the Hebrew Scriptures as they are now received. It contained no single song of David, no single proverb of Solomon, no single prophecy of Isaiah or Jeremiah. It was 'the Law.' When The Law. Manasseh, in his passion for his Samaritan wife, fled from the fury of Nehemiah to the height of Gerizim, he carried with him, either actually or in remembrance, not all the floating records which the fierce Governor of Jerusalem in his calmer moods was gathering here and there like the Reliques which Percy or Scott collected from the holes and corners of English minstrelsy, or Livy from the halls of Roman nobles. It was the five books of Moses only, with that of Joshua appended, which the fugitive priest had heard from Ezra, or Ezra's companions, and which alone at the moment of his departure commanded the attention of the community from which he parted.' We trace the exact point which the popular veneration had reached by the point at which it was broken off in the Samaritan secession. It is not without importance to notice the ascendency of this one particular aspect of the ancient Jewish literature. over every other, and to observe that the religion of this age In like manner the retention of the ancient Hebrew characters by the Samaritans confirms the Talmudic tradition that the introduction of the Chaldaic characters dates from the time of Ezra. The Hebrew characters still continued to be used on coins, like Latin, as the official language of Europe after it had been discontinued in literature. The use of the Chaldæan characters for the was summed up, not in a creed or a hymn, but in the Law -whether on its brighter or its darker side. On its brighter side we see it as it is represented in the 119th Psalm,' belonging, in all probability, to this epoch. In every possible form the change is rung on the synonyms for this great idea. Every verse expresses it :-Law, Testimony, Commandments, Statutes. The Psalmist never lets us forget for a moment what is the object of his devotion. It is the Biblical expression of the unchanging Law of Right, through which, as it has been said by one of later times, Even the stars are kept from wrong, And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong. It is the vindication of the grandeur of that side of human goodness which both the religious and the cynical world have often condemned as commonplace morality, but which the author of this Jewish Ode to Duty regards as the highest flight both of piety and of philosophy. The 119th Psalm,' says a writer of our time, that meditation which 'with sweet monotony strikes ever the golden string deep 'buried in the human heart, a string implying by its 'strange susceptibilities the reality of a music not of this 'world, yet harmonising all worlds in one! There is no 'poetry, there is little rhythm, there is no intellectual 'insight, there is no comprehensive philosophy, in the gentle ' life that yearns and pleads through those undying words. But 'there is not one verse which does not tell of a man to whom 'the Infinite Power was a living Presence and a constant 'inspiration.' Such is the form under which the Law presented itself to a religious mind in that age of the Jewish Church, and which well agrees both with the passionate devotion of Ezra to its service, and the attachment to it, with a mingling of tears and laughter, which made it the main 1 See Ewald, v. 173. 2 2 Mystery of Matter, by the Rev. J. Allanson Picton, p. 280. lever of his revival of his people. It is strange to reflect that this grand idea had become so perverted and narrowed as time rolled on, that in the close of the Jewish Commonwealth the Law,' instead of being regarded by the highest spirit of the age as the main support of goodness, was at least at times regarded by him as its worst and deadliest enemy. But the aspect of the Law as presented by the Psalmist is more the persuasive and more enduring. He saw, and the course of ages has made us see even more clearly, that all other things come to an end, but that the commandment of God is bounded by no narrow compass.2 And this leads us to the attitude in which Ezra himself The Scribes. stood towards the Pentateuch. He was a Jewish priest; he was a Persian judge. But the name by which he is emphatically called, throwing all else into the shade, is the Scribe.' We have already indicated the earlier beginnings of the office. But in Ezra it received an importance3 altogether unprecedented. In him the title came to mean 'the man of the 'Book.' Those long readings and expositions of the Law called into existence two classes of men: the one inferior, the Interpreters or Targumists, or (which is another form of the same word), Dragomans; the other the Scribes, who took their places beside the Elders and the Priests, at times as the most powerful institution of the community. The Interpreters or Dragomans resulted from the necessity of rendering the archaic Hebrew into the popular Aramaic. They were regarded for the most part as mere hirelings-empty, bombastic characters, without the slightest authority, ragged, half-clothed mendicants, who could be silenced in a moment by their superiors in the assembly,* compelled to speak orally lest their words should by chance be mistaken for those of the 2 Ps. cxix. 96 (Perowne). Derenbourg, 25. 'Rom. iii. 20, 28; iv. 15; vii. 5; viii. 2, 3; Gal. ii. 16; iii. 2, 10; iv. 5, 9, 10; v. 18; 1 Cor. xv. 56. See, however, Rom. vii. 12; 1 Tim. i. 8. • Deutsch's Remains, pp. 325, 326. Scripture. The Scribes or Lawyers,' that is, the learned in the Pentateuch, were far different. Here, again, as in the case of the Law,' we find ourselves confronted with an element which contains at once the noblest and the basest aspects of the Jewish, and we must add, of the Christian religion. It is evident that in the Scribes rather than in any of the other functionaries of the Jewish Church is the nearest original of the clergy of later times. In the ancient Prophet, going to and fro, sometimes naked, sometimes wrapt in his hairy cloak, chanting his wild melodies, or dramatising his own message, always strange and exceptional— in the ancient Priest, deriving his sanctity from his clothes, with his strong arms imbrued, like a butcher's, in the blood of a cow or a sheep, no one would recognise the religious1 ministers of any civilized country for the last eighteen centuries. But in the Scribe, poring over the sacred volume, or reading and enforcing it from his lofty platform, or explaining it to the small knots of those that had under'standing,' and gathered round him for instruction, there is an unmistakeable likeness to the religious teachers of all the various forms which have arisen out of the Judaism of Ezia and Nehemiah. The Rabbi in the schools of Safed and Tiberias, expounding or preaching, from whatever tribe he may have sprung-the Cadi founding his verdicts on the Koran-the Imam delivering his Friday Sermon from the Midbar or instructing his little circle of hearers on the floor of the mosques-the Christian clergy through all their different branches-Doctors, Pastors, Evangelists, Catechists, Readers, Revivalists, studying, preaching, converting, persuading all these in these their most spiritual functions, have their root not in Aaron's altar, nor even in Samuel's choral school, but in Ezra's pulpit. The finer elements of this widely-ramifying institution See Lecture XXXVI. thus inaugurated appear at its outset. It was the perma nent triumph of the moral over the purely mechanical functions of worship. The Prophets had effected this to a certain extent; but their appearance was so fitful-their gifts so irregular-that they were always, so to speak, outside the system, rather than a part of it-Preaching Friars, Nonconformists, or, at the most, Occasional Conformists on the grandest scale. But from the time of Ezra the Scribes never ceased. The intention of their office, as first realised in him and his companions, was the earnest endeavour to reproduce, to study, to translate, to represent in the language of his own time, the oracles of sacred antiquity; to ascertain the meaning of dark words, to give life to dead forms, to enforce forgotten duties; to stimulate the apathy of the present by invoking the loftier spirit of the past. Such was the ideal of the Minister of Religion' henceforth; and when the Highest Teacher described it in His own words He found none better than to take the office of Ezra, and say: Every Scribe which is instructed' unto the Kingdom of 'Heaven is like unto an householder which bringeth forth out ' of his treasure things new and old.' 6 6 And when in the sixteenth century of the Christian Church the intellectual and spiritual element of Religion was once again brought to the front, with the appeal to its original documents-the English Martyr at the stake could find no fitter words to express the permanent triumph of his cause than those which in the Apocryphal Book of Esdras are spoken in reference to the ideal Scribe, the ideal Reformer of Israel: 'I shall light a candle of understanding in thine heart, 'which shall not be put out.' 2 But to this great office there was and is a darker side. There was, indeed, nothing of itself Priestly in the functions Matt. xiii. 52. 22 Esdras xiv. 25. Compare Froude's History of England, vi. 387. |