UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. PREFACE. THESE LECTURES, begun at Oxford, and interrupted by the pressure of inevitable engagements in a more laborious sphere, have been resumed during the leisure of an enforced seclusion-under the impulse of an encouragement which overbore all obstacles-in the hope of finding relief from an anxiety which forbade all external occupations. The first volume was dedicated, thirteen years ago, to a dear and most sacred memory, fresh at the time and fresh for ever. This last is bound up with another like memory, if possible, still nearer, still more dear, and no less enduring. It had been my hope to have comprised in this volume the last stage of the Jewish history from the Captivity to the final destruction of Jerusalem, so as to complete the cycle contemplated in the original plan. Such an arrangement alone would accord with the logical sequence of the narrative and with the due proportions of the subject. To conclude that history without embracing the crowning scenes and characters of its close would be as unjust to the Jewish race itself as it would be derogatory to the consummation which gives to this preparatory period, not, indeed, its only, but unquestionably its chief, attraction. But it appeared to me that the argument allowed, if it did not invite, a division. I have, therefore, broken up the twenty Lectures which, according to the arrangement of the former volumes, would be due to this period, and have confined the present series to the interval from the Exile to the Christian era, leaving, at least for the present, the momentous epoch which involves at once the close of the Jewish Commonwealth and the birth of Christendom. The name of Lectures could properly be applied only to the substance of these pages in the rudimentary form in which they were first conceived, but it has been preserved as most nearly corresponding to the framework in which the whole work has been cast. Their unequal length has been the natural result of the disproportionate amount of materials in the different parts.1 I. A few remarks may be permitted in explanation of the method which here, as in the previous volumes, I have endeavoured to follow. 1. As before, so now, but perhaps even to a larger extent, the vast amount of previous historical investigation precludes the necessity, and forbids the desire, of again discussing questions or relating facts, which have already been amply treated. The elaborate Jewish researches of Jost, Herzfeld, Grätz, and Salvador, the dry criticism of Kuenen, the brief nd lucid narrative of Dean Milman, exempt any later author from the duty of undertaking afresh a labour which they have accomplished once for all, not to be repeated. But on two works relating to this period, very different from each other, a few words may be added. No English scholar, certainly no English Churchman, can rightly pass through the interval between the Old and New Testament without a tribute to the merit, rare for its age, of Dean Prideaux's Connection of Sacred and Profane 'History.' It has, no doubt, been in large part superseded by later research and criticism; its style is heavy, I have once more to express my obligations to my friend Mr. Grove for his revision of the press. |