Paul, St. James, and St. John,
preached to the world.
Even the pagan poets, when they devised a myth, half believed in it
for a fact. What really lent some truth--moral truth only--to their
imaginations was indeed the beauty of nature, the comedy of life, or
the groans of mankind, crushed between the upper and the nether
millstones; but being scientifically ignorant they allowed their
pictorial wisdom to pass for a revealed science, for a physics of the
unseen. If even among the pagans the poetic expression of human
experience could be mistaken in this way for knowledge of occult
existences, how much more must this have been the case among a more
ignorant and a more intense nation like the Jews? Indeed, _events_ are
what the Jews have always remembered and hoped for; if their religion
was not a guide to events, an assured means towards a positive and
experimental salvation, it was nothing. Their theology was meagre in
the description of the Lord's nature, but rich in the description of
his ways. Indeed, their belief in the existence and power of the Lord,
if we take it pragmatically and not imaginatively, was simply the
belief in certain moral harmonies in destiny, in the sufficiency of
conduct of a certain sort to secure success and good fortune, both
national and personal.
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