Even if they are regarded in no other light than as literary treasures, the position, both of the oldest books among the Sacred Scriptures, and, next to them, of the Homeric poems, is so remarkable, as not only to invite, but to command the attention of every inquirer into the early condition of mankind. Each of them opens to us a scene, of which we have no other literary knowledge. Each of them is, either wholly or in a great degree, isolated; and cut off from the domain of history, as it is commonly understood. Each of them was preserved with the most jealous care by the nation to which they severally belonged. By far the oldest of known compositions, and with conclusive proof upon the face of them that their respective origins were perfectly distinct and independent, they, notwithstanding, seem to be in no point contradictory, while in many they are highly confirmatory of each other’s genuineness and antiquity. Still, as historical representations, and in a purely human aspect, they are greatly different. The Holy Scriptures are like a thin stream, beginning from the very fountain-head of our race, and gradually, but continuously finding their way through an extended solitude, into times otherwise known, and into the general current of the fortunes of mankind. The Homeric poems are like a broad lake outstretched in the distance, which provides us with a mirror of one particular age and people, alike full and marvellous, but which is entirely dissociated by an interval of many generations from any other records, except such as are of the most partial and fragmentary kind. In respect of the influence which they have respectively exercised upon mankind, it might appear almost profane to compare them. In this point of view, the Scriptures stand so far apart from every other production, on account of their great offices in relation to the coming of the Redeemer, and to the spiritual training of mankind, that there can be nothing either like or second to them.
But undoubtedly, after however wide an interval, the Homeric poems thus far at least stand in a certain relation to the Scriptures, that no other work of man can be compared to them. Their immediate influence has been great; but that influence which they have mediately exercised through their share in shaping the mind and nationality of Greece, and again, through Greece upon the world, cannot readily be reduced to measure: Les vraies origines de l’esprit humain sont là; tous les nobles de l’intelligence y retrouvent la patrie de leurs pères[1013]. Insomuch that, passing over the vast interval between those purposes which concern salvation, and every other purpose connected with man, this remains to be admitted, that there is a relative parallelism between the oldest Holy Scriptures and the works of Homer. For each of them stands at the head of the class of powers to which they respectively belong; and the minor seems to present to our view, as well as the major one, the indications of a distinct Providential aim that was to be attained through its means.
The relation, however, of the Homeric poems to the earlier portion of the Sacred Scriptures, appears to me to be capable of being represented in a more determinate form than it assumes when they are merely compared as being respectively the oldest known compositions, and as each confirming the testimony of the other by numerous coincidences of manners.
For the Eastern world, it is, I suppose, generally acknowledged that we ought to regard Mahometanism as having had, no less than Judaism, a place, though doubtless a very different place, in the determinate counsels of God. So in the West, we must view the extraordinary developments, which human nature received, both individually and in its social forms, among the Greeks and Romans, as having been intended to fulfil high Providential purposes. They supplied materials for the intellectual and social portions of that European civilization, which derives its spiritual substance from the Christian Faith. And they wrought out solutions apparently conclusive for the questions which absolutely required an answer, as to the capacity or incapacity of man, when without the aid of especial divine light and guidance, to work out his own happiness and peace. That Divine Word, which tells us that the Redeemer came in the fulness of time, indirectly points to the great transactions which filled the space of ages since the Fall, when time was not yet full; and the greatest of all those great transactions surely were the parts played by Greece and Rome, as the representatives of humanity at large in its most vigorous developments. They too, as well as the discipline of the Jewish people, doubtless belonged to the Divine plan. All these varied manifestations may differ much in their character and rank, but yet, like the body, soul, and spirit of a man, they are to be referred to one origin, and they are integrants to one another.
Just in the same manner with the parallel currents of historical events, it would appear that the early Scriptures and the Homeric poems combine to make up for us a sufficiently complete form of the primitive records of our race. The Scriptures of the Old Testament give us the history of the line, in which the promise of the Messiah was handed down. But the intellectual and social developments of man are there represented in the simplest and the slightest, nay, even in the narrowest forms. With the exception of Solomon, who, in spite of his wisdom, was enticed away from God by lust, and of the two illustrious specimens of uncorrupted piety in the midst of dangerous power, Joseph and Daniel, I know not whether we can, on the authority of Holy Scripture, point to any character of the Mosaic or Judaic history as great in any other sense, than as the organs of that Almighty One, with whom nothing human is either great or small. It is plain that if we bring the leading characters of that history into contrast with the Achilles or the Ulysses of Homer, and with his other marked personages, these latter undoubtedly give us a representation and development of human nature, and of man in his social relations, that Scripture from its very nature could not supply. Each has its own function to perform, so that there is no room for competition between them, and it is better to avoid comparison altogether; and to decline to consider the legislation of Moses as a work to be compared either with the heroic institutions, or with systems like those of Lycurgus or of Solon. We then obtain a clear view of it as a scheme evidently constructed not alone with human but with superhuman wisdom, if only we measure it in reference to its very peculiar end. That end was not to give political lessons to mankind, which are more aptly supplied elsewhere. It was to fence in, with the ruder materials of the ceremonial and municipal law, a home, within which the succession of true piety and enlightened faith might be preserved; a garden wherein the Lord God might, so to speak, still walk as He had walked of old, and take His delight with the sons of men. But this high calling had reference only to chosen persons, a few among the few. Over and above this interior work, there was a national vocation also. The aim of that vocation seems to have been to isolate the people, so as to stop the influences from without that might tend in the direction of change; and so far to crystallize, as it were, its institutions within, that they might preserve in untainted purity the tradition and the expectation of Him that was to come.
When the Almighty placed his seal upon Abraham by the covenant of circumcision, and when He developed that covenant in the Mosaic institutions, in setting the Jewish people apart for a purpose the most profound of all His wise designs, He removed it, for the time of its career, out of the family of nations.
Should we, like some writers of the present day, cite the Pentateuch before the tribunal of the mere literary critic, we may strain our generosity at the cost of justice, and still only be able to accord to it a secondary place. The mistake surely is to bring it there at all, or to view its author otherwise than as the vehicle of a Divine purpose, which uses all instruments, great, insignificant, or middling, according to the end in view, but of which all the instruments are perfect, by reason not of what is intrinsic to themselves, but, simply and solely, of their exact adaptation to that end[1014].
If, however, we ought to decline to try the Judaic code by its merely political merits, much more ought we to apply the same principle to the sublimity of the Prophecies, and to the deep spiritual experiences of the Psalms. In the first, we have a voice speaking from God, with the marks that it is of God so visibly imprinted upon it, that the mind utterly refuses to place the prophetical books in the scale against any production of human genius. And all that is peculiar in our conception of Isaiah, or of Jeremiah, does not tend so much to make them eminent among men, as to separate them from men. Homer, on the other hand, is emphatically and above all things human: he sings by the spontaneous and the unconscious indwelling energies of nature; whereas these are as the trumpet of unearthly sounds, and cannot, more than Balaam could, depart from that which is breathed into them, to utter either less or more.
But most of all does the Book of Psalms refuse the challenge of philosophical or poetical competition. In that Book, for well nigh three thousand years, the piety of saints has found its most refined and choicest food; to such a degree indeed, that the rank and quality of the religious frame may in general be tested, at least negatively, by the height of its relish for them. There is the whole music of the human heart, when touched by the hand of the Maker, in all its tones that whisper or that swell, for every hope and fear, for every joy and pang, for every form of strength and languor, of disquietude and rest. There are developed all the innermost relations of the human soul to God, built upon the platform of a covenant of love and sonship that had its foundations in the Messiah, while in this particular and privileged Book it was permitted to anticipate His coming.
We can no more then compare Isaiah and the Psalms with Homer, than we can compare David’s heroism with Diomed’s, or the prowess of the Israelites when they drove Philistia before them with the valour of the Greeks at Marathon or Platæa, at Issus or Arbela. We shall most nearly do justice to each by observing carefully the boundary lines of their respective provinces.
It appears to be to a certain extent agreed that Rome has given us the most extraordinary example among all those put upon record by history, of political organization; and has bequeathed to mankind the firmest and most durable tissue of law, the bond of social man. Greece, on the other hand, has had for its share the development of the individual; and each has shown in its own kind the rarest specimen that has been known to the world, apart from Divine revelation. The seeds of both these, and of all that they involved, would appear to be contained in the Homeric poems[1015]. The condition of arts, manners, character, and institutions, which they represent, is alike in itself entire, and without any full parallel elsewhere. It is for the bodily and mental faculties of man, that which the patriarchal and early Hebrew histories are for his spiritual life.
Of the personal and inward relations of man with God, of the kingdom of grace in the world, Homer can tell us nothing: but of the kingdom of Providence much, and of the opening powers and capabilities of human nature, apart from divine revelation, everything. The moral law, written on the tables of stone, was in one sense a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ, because it demonstrated our inability to tread the way of righteousness and pardon without the Redeemer. And perhaps that ceremonial law, which indulged some things to the hardness of heart that prevailed among the Jews, was by its permissions, as some have construed a very remarkable passage in Ezekiel[1016], a schoolmaster in another sense; because it witnessed to the fact that they had greatly fallen below the high capacities of their nature. And again, in yet a third sense, we may say with reverence that these primeval records are likewise another schoolmaster, teaching us, although with another voice, the very same lesson: because they show us the total inability of our race, even when at its maximum of power, to solve for ourselves the problems of our destiny; to extract for ourselves the sting from care, from sorrow, and above all, from death; or even to retain without waste the vital heat of the knowledge of God, when we have become separate from the source that imparts it.
It seems impossible not to be struck, at this point, with the contrast between the times preceding the Advent, and those which have followed it. Since the Advent, Christianity has marched for fifteen hundred years at the head of human civilization; and has driven, harnessed to its chariot as the horses of a triumphal car, the chief intellectual and material forces of the world. Its learning has been the learning of the world, its art the art of the world, its genius the genius of the world, its greatness, glory, grandeur, and majesty have been almost, though not absolutely, all that in these respects the world has had to boast of. That which is to come, I do not presume to portend: but of the past we may speak with confidence. He who hereafter, in even the remotest age, with the colourless impartiality of mere intelligence, may seek to know what durable results mankind has for the last fifteen hundred years achieved, what capital of the mind it has accumulated and transmitted, will find his investigations perforce concentrated upon, and almost confined to that part, that minor part, of mankind which has been Christian.
Before the Advent, it was quite otherwise. The treasure of Divine Revelation was then hidden in a napkin: it was given to a people who were almost forbidden to impart it; at least of whom it was simply required, that they should preserve it without variation. They had no world-wide vocation committed to them; they lay ensconced in a country which was narrow and obscure; obscure, not only with reference to the surpassing splendour of Greece and Rome, but in comparison with Assyria, or Persia, or Egypt. They have not supplied the Christian ages with laws and institutions, arts and sciences, with the chief models of greatness in genius or in character. The Providence of God committed this work to others; and to Homer seems to have been intrusted the first, which was perhaps, all things considered, also the most remarkable stage of it[1017].
Without bearing fully in mind this contrast between the providential function of the Jews and that of other nations, we can hardly embrace as we ought the importance of the part assigned, before the Advent of our Lord, to nations and persons who lived beyond the immediate and narrow pale of Divine Revelation. The relation of the old dispensation to those who were not Jews, was essentially different from that of Christendom to those who are not Christians. Only the fall of man and his recovery are the universal facts with which Revelation is concerned; all others are limited and partial. The interval between the occurrence of the first, and the provision for the second, was occupied by a variety of preparations in severalty for the revelation of the kingdom of God. Until the Incarnation, the world’s history was without a centre. When the Incarnation came, it showed itself to be the centre of all that had preceded, as well as of all that was to follow: and since the withdrawal of the visible Messiah, the history of man has been grouped around His Word, and around the Church in which the effect and virtue of His Incarnation are still by His unseen power prolonged.
The picture thus offered to our view is a very remarkable one. We see the glories of the world, and that greatest marvel of God’s earthly creation, the mind of man, become like little children, and yield themselves to be led by the hand of the Good Shepherd: but it seems as though the ancient promise of His coming, while just strong enough to live in this wayward sphere, was not strong enough to make the conquest of it; as if nothing but His own actual manifestation in the strength of lowliness and of sorrow, and crowned by the extremity of contempt and shame, was sufficient to restore for the world at large that symbol of the universal duty of individual obedience and conformity, which is afforded by the establishment of the authority of the spiritual King over all the functions of our nature, and all the spheres, however manifold and remote they may seem to be, in which they find their exercise. Nor is this lesson the less striking because this, like other parts of the divine dispensations, has been marred by the perversity of man, ever striving to escape from that inward control wherein lies the true hope and safety of his race.
But, even after the Advent, it was not at once that the Sovereign of the new kingdom put in His claim for all the wealth that it contained. As, in the day of His humiliation, He rode into Jerusalem, foreshadowing his royal dominion to come, so Saint Paul was forthwith consecrated to God as a kind of first fruits of the learning and intellect of man. Yet for many generations after Christ, it was still the Supreme will to lay in human weakness the foundations of divine strength. Not the Apostles only, but the martyrs, and not the martyrs only, but the first fathers and doctors of the Church, were men of whom none could suspect that they drew the weapons of their warfare from the armouries of human cultivation: nor of them could it be said, that by virtue of their human endowments they had achieved the triumphs of the cross; as it might perhaps have been said, had they brought to their work the immense popular powers of St. Chrysostom, or the masculine energy of St. Athanasius, or the varied and comprehensive genius of St. Augustine.
Nor, again, if we are right in the belief that we are not to look for the early development of humanity in the pages of Jewish and patriarchal history, but rather to believe that it was given to another people, and the office of recording it to the father, not only of poetry, but of letters, does it seem difficult to read in this arrangement the purpose of the Most High, and herewith the wisdom of that purpose. Had the Scriptures been preserved, had the Messiah been Incarnate, among a people who were in political sagacity, in martial energy, in soaring and diving intellect, in vivid imagination, in the graces of art and civilized life, the flower of their time, then the divine origin of Christianity would have stood far less clear and disembarrassed than it now does. The eagle that mounted upon high, bearing on his wings the Everlasting Gospel, would have made his first spring from a great eminence, erected by the wit and skill of man; and the elevation of that eminence, measured upward from the plain of common humanity, would have been so much to be deducted from the triumph of the Redeemer.
Thus the destructive theories of those, who teach us to regard Christianity as no more than a new stage, added to stages that had been previously achieved in the march of human advancement, would have been clothed in a plausibility which they must now for ever want. ‘God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; and base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are[1018].’ An unhonoured undistinguished race, simply elected to be the receivers of the Divine Word, and having remained its always stiffnecked and almost reluctant guardians, may best have suited the aim of Almighty Wisdom; because the medium, through which the most precious gifts were conveyed, was pale and colourless, instead of being one flushed with the splendours of Empire, Intellect, and Fame.