were in the habit of making marauding expeditions from the desert, "leaving no sustenance for Israel, neither sheep, nor ox, nor ass." Only in the mountain strongholds, in dens and caves among the hills, could the people preserve their lives and the produce of their fields. Gideon, who makes his appearance in history "threshing wheat by the wine-press to hide it from the Midianites," by his valor and military genius rids the country from these invaders for a period of forty years, driving them back into the Syrian desert. The deep interest which God took in these battles is well understood by the Christian world.

When Jephthah, the natural son of Gilead, was driven from home by his brothers, he became a successful brigand,"a profession not destitute of honor in the East, if practised in moderation and against national enemies." He was chosen captain of the Israelitish forces in their opposition to the Ammonites. He distinguished himself for diplomacy and generalship, and was one of the greatest of the Judges, because most successful in resisting the enemies of the tribes of Israel. The compact which he made with God to sacrifice the first innocent person who might come out of his house to meet him, on condition that the Lord would help him to slay the Ammonites, has become historical because the evil fate fell upon his daughter. What can be clearer to the Christian mind than the joy of the Lord upon the fulfilment of Jephthah's vow, unless it is the satisfaction which the Deity experienced at the human sacrifice offered on Calvary, when, according to our illustrious scheme of salvation, the sins of humanity were atoned for by the blood of Christ?

The respective pictures of Deborah uttering her judicial oracles from her tent under a palm-tree in Mt. Ephraim, and the natural statesman and patriot Samuel yielding at last to the wish of the people to exchange the tribe-life, or Theocratic Rule (?), for a more united and stable form of government by nominating a king, open and close the Heroic period, known as the time of the Judges. Then we have the reign of Saul, with its comparative success over the

Philistines and the other enemies of Israel; the conspiracy of David, the genius of his rule, and the splendid failure of Solomon, who impoverished the nation by his extravagances. Then comes the period of the two kingdoms (about two hundred and fifty years), during which nineteen dynasties reigned in Israel, "few of whom succeeded to the throne excepting by the murder of their predecessors." During this period there is a succession of bloody civil wars, in which Jehovah is made to take an active interest. The "will of God" is represented by a line of Prophets, inaugurated by Samuel, who seem to have derived their policy from the traditions of the tribal life or the theocratic régime established by Moses. They seem to have been utterly unable to keep the people from the grosser forms of nature and image-worship; and the God of Israel as defined by these prophets is systematically neglected. There is no doubt that the moral influence of Moses and Samuel gives to the teachings of the prophets a certain dignity and purity, but it is also clear that the religions of surrounding nations which the prophets characterized as heathen are not fairly judged in the Hebrew scriptures; for when we approach these religions through other sources we find that they contain a great deal that is good, and that on the whole they compare very favorably with the faith of the Hebrews.

All accounts agree that the Canaanites were far more civilized than the invading Hebrews; and we risk but little in supposing that the gods they worshipped were as humane and just as the God of Israel.

To follow the history of this remarkable people through their four great captivities, their brief independence, and their final absorption into the Roman Empire, would throw but little additional light upon the origin of our religious beliefs. When Alexander the Great, however, carried one hundred thousand of the inhabitants of Jerusalem captive to Alexandria, an epoch of Hebrew culture began which accounts almost entirely for the form Christianity has taken. Many of the early Christian writers were these learned Israelites of

Alexandria. To their speculative genius the elaborate creed of the Gnostics is due, and it is to their religious thought and feeling that we owe the fervent spirit of Judaism which breathes throughout our civilization.

One of the best reasons for supposing that the Christian civilization will be ranked as barbarous by the historians of future races is the character of our sacred books. How it is possible for us to believe that “the Jews were the people of God," in the sense in which we use the word, or that the Jewish conception of God was ever an exalted one, is as great a mystery as that we should regard the Hebrew scriptures with superstitious reverence, or as in any sense divine.

For an understanding of these anomalies of religious belief we must look to the study of the origins of Christianity.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE RELIGION OF CHRIST.

The Origin of the Faith-The Doctrines of Jesus-A Glance at the Present State of Christianity in America.

THERE is a painting by Munkacsy called Christ Before Pilate, which gives at a glance a more truthful conception of the origin of Christianity than we might be enabled to form by years of careful study. All the minute researches of the great German theologians and religious historians of the present century, which have done so much to distinguish for us the historical from the ideal Christ, the critical studies of Renan, the scholarly and eminently devout treatment of the subject which such men as Channing, Parker, Frothingham, Clarke, and Emerson have advanced,—all this great and good effort to dispel the fictions and still retain for the world the inspiration of Christianity has been voiced in this striking picture. Confronting the Roman Judge, calm, thoughtful, and determined, with blanched and even haggard face, a coarse, uncouth dress, surrounded by clamorous adversaries. representing the different classes of the Jews of Palestine, this man of Galilee awaits his fate. There is nothing ideal about the picture. It carries us back to the event itself, and, banishing for the instant the accumulations of superstition through which we are accustomed to view it, gives us a glimpse, startling but true, of what actually took place.

The art of the world has done its best to portray Jesus. The resources of the human face have been exhausted to find expressions of benignity, moral power, and sweetness, and all the nobler attributes of manhood, in trying to do justice to

the portraits, real and ideal, of this great man. This artist simply tried to tell the truth, and has surpassed them all.

Jesus as a man is immeasurably grander than as a God. As a God, faith in him is so unnatural that it cannot be reconciled with the better views of history, of science, and of life; but as a man he is one of the most commanding personages of our race.

When we criticise the writings which describe the life of Jesus, our object is not to decide whether Christ was God, but whether Jesus thought that he was God, and what conception of Deity was possible to him. His education, his social and moral surroundings, the ideals of the civilization to which he belonged, were all factors in the conception which he formed of God. His moral worth can only be estimated by considering the time and circumstances of his life. Moral character consists in an individual's relations to actual surroundings. These surroundings are factors in his life, and largely determine its quality. Many of the principles of social reform promulgated by the hero of the Gospels would have been entirely out of place in such mature civilizations as those of China, India, or Egypt, in the time of Jesus; and they have since been demonstrated to be utterly impracticable in any civilization. But the ideals of personal purity which Jesus advocated were based on a clearer and better view of life. They had been taught in other nations ages before the time of Jesus, and have invariably been found practical and beneficent. There is every evidence which a sincere inquiry can demand that the conception which Jesus formed of God was cast in the mould of Israelitish thought and feeling, and was an inevitable consequence of the circumstances and history of his race. God to him was a person, not a principle. His mind had been little exercised in those methodical classifications which the thoughtful in Egypt, Greece, and other nations had carried to such perfection, and which constitute the germ of modern science. Jesus was not only entirely unconscious of the vast achievements of Greek culture, but he was ignorant of the only truly liberal Jewish culture of his own