Charles A. H. Tuthill

“ The ten commandments, in their simplest form, are generally admitted to be relics of the Mosaic age. To account for the first and most important of these we have, in particular, to call in the authority of Moses. “I am Jahveh thy god; thou shalt have none other gods beside me,” is the foundation stone of the development of monotheism. It implies the existence of polytheism, but it decrees that polytheism shall be abolished. If the people, or any class of the people, continuously obeyed it, they had in time to become pure monotheists. ”

“ The popular religion, resting on ignorance, is always a mere superstition; the other religion, kept clear by partial knowledge from offensive crudities, is the recognized form. But during the worst period of the Middle Ages there was no such distinction; all religion was popular; even the highest classes were hopelessly lost in superstition. The gloom of this superstition, the shadow of the wretchedness of the age, left a lasting mark on Christianity. The terror of life was transferred to death; death was associated with the most repulsive images, and closely connected with hell. ”

“ Philosophy, when it arises in the midst of polytheism, at first allows the orthodox gods to be the subordinate instruments of this power, but it soon develops a tendency to sweep them utterly away. Then, having shaken itself free of popular religion, it builds up a new religion of its own, in which it asserts the existence of one supreme intelligence, the creator and governor of the world. ”

“ Far away from the local idolatries of Judæa, the exiles accepted the pure religion of the prophets. The most imaginative and the most spiritual of the greater prophets, Ezekiel and the second Isaiah, sprang from their ranks. And thus at last the prophetic became the popular religion, and Jahveh as God reigned over Israel. When the exiles returned to Judæa, they carried with them a pure and moral monotheism. The remainder of the people readily adopted their principles. Judaism from this time was the sole religion of the Jews, the expression of their national patriotism. ”

“ Knowing the universal God, the Israelites might become a nation of priests by leading all men to a knowledge of him their maker, and so have a glory and authority far greater than any that could be given by political power.
It would not be fair to say that the prophets, in the formation of this ideal, were influenced only by patriotism. Spiritually they were too great not to feel the need of a reconciliation between the world and its God. In the mind of the noblest of them, Israel was the servant of the Gentiles, a messenger of God bringing glad tidings of peace to men. ”

“ If thus from the beginning morality was impressed on Jahveh’s worshippers by a sacrificial system which declared every sin to be an offence against him that must be expiated at a personal cost, we can understand how any class continuously adhering to him should in time have developed a morality in which sin was hated for its own sake, and goodness made the essence of religion. ”

“ Christianity, in fact, was tending to become a purely Pagan polytheistic religion, with a human being as its most important god, when it was saved by the influence on it at this critical period of a fortunate development in Jewish hands of Pagan philosophy.
Philosophy, from the moment of its first existence, has always by an irresistible pressure been driven towards monotheism. The consciousness in the thinker of his own unity, and the inevitable conditions of thought, alike force him to imagine one power as the cause of all the phenomena of life. ”

“ The sons of them that afflicted thee shall come bending unto thee, and they shall call thee the city of Jahveh, the Zion of the Holy One of Israel. I will make thee an eternal excellency, a joy of many generations. Violence shall no more be heard in thy land, desolation nor destruction within thy borders ”

“ But, as a matter of fact, the priestly absolution of Catholicism is a much more immoral doctrine. In practice, as might be expected, the belief in justification by faith alone does less mischief than the belief that sins can be got rid of by a visit to the nearest church. Of course, in addition to this, the higher theology of Protestantism favours morality, just as the higher theology of Judaism did. So far as it is purer and more rational than Catholicism, it naturally is more moral, and allies itself less easily with ignorance and animalism. ”

“ The essence of popularity is sympathy; the popular man must be in sympathy with the people he meets, and must be ruled by the same ideas, whether they happen to be right or wrong. Christ’s popularity, his influence over his simple Jewish followers, is a fair proof that he was subject to their religious illusions, that no difference of deep insight separated him from them. People always are irritated by hearing what they do not understand. Had Christ been in the habit of speaking over the heads of his disciples, not many would have remained with him ”

“ Old religious ideas seeking a new basis will produce new upheavals of religious imagination, and a period of intense superstition will ensue. Whatever might result from such a period, in itself it could be nothing but evil, a time of darkness and disquiet, of relaxed morality and charlatan prophets. Fortunately the fall of Christianity is not likely to be so rapid in the future; the great mass of mankind may cling to it long after it has parted from the world’s intellectual life. ”

“ But the history of the world during this central period of Judaism is the history of the great empires of western Asia. The small people of Israel could offer no effective resistance to their power, and so, under pressure from them, the magnificent national religion of Israel was compelled to become the expression of patriotism, and to aim at the conversion of the world. So far, then, as Christianity was a movement towards the establishment of the Jewish religion as the religion of the world—and at first it was nothing else—it was inevitable. ”

“ As soon as this conception of his Messiahship was developed in his thoughts, he would at once adopt in its fulness the spiritual Messianic ideal. Rejected by the vast majority of the Jews—rejected, moreover, because he was not the national Messiah, he would be irresistibly impelled to proclaim himself the spiritual Messiah, in whose eyes no distinctions of race separated men from God. Failing with the Jews, there was the more need that he should turn to the Gentiles; defeated by Jewish nationalism, Jewish nationalism must have become hateful to him. ”

“ Such intense spiritual pride, of course, tended to diminish their purely political pride. Their race, so greatly distinguished in religion, could afford to dispense with material glory. While, viewed thus from a patriotic standpoint, the belief that the God of the world was Israel’s Jahveh was a source of national pride, it also suggested a means of gratifying national vanity. The homage of subject peoples constituted the chief attraction of material empire. Here, however, was a chance of receiving the homage, not merely of a few nations around them, but of all mankind. ”

“ We might predict with almost absolute certainty that fifty years hence hardly a single believer in dogmatic Christianity will be found among the leading men of European literature and science. Christianity is dying at the top.
There is a certain resemblance between this state of things and the condition of the Roman world at the time Christianity was beginning to conquer it. Pagan religions then were dying at the top. Philosophers despised them and wits laughed at them; the thought of the age was as completely agnostic as the thought of our own day is tending to become. ”

“ There is the same mixture of credulity and scepticism now that there was in the first century of the Christian era. We, too, have a philosophical class intensely sceptical, but we also have a class of people who are eager votaries of new religions and excessively credulous. The credulity of the many is the consequence of the scepticism of the few, and is the mark of religious change. It now characterizes those whose faith in Christianity is shaken, but in whom religious ideas are as strong as ever. ”

“ Humility, stress on faith, simplicity of thought and worship, and the closest connection with morality clearly marked the religion of the early Church. This was evidently the case because the first Christians were Jews. When, then, the Pagans came in, having wrapped up in their religious ideas pride, trust in good works, mysticism, a love of sensuous worship, and a loose regard for morality, and when before long they alone made up the Church, Christianity could not remain unchanged. Christianity became Pagan because Pagans became Christians. ”

“ The belief in the second advent of Christ in another way must have helped to maintain the purity of the early Christians. Living in the constant expectation of his immediate coming, worldly pleasures seemed too transient and unsure to be worthy of attention. Their belief too, was invested with a vivid sense of reality. They expected to see their lord in all his heavenly majesty, not under strange and unknown conditions only to be experienced by passing through the gate of death, but in the midst of the familiar associations of earth. ”

“ All Greek philosophy, except where it drifted into pantheism or pure materialism, was more or less influenced by this tendency. In Platonism especially it is clearly marked. The ideal world of Plato fills the place of the second or relative God, and acts as a mediator between God the absolute and the material world. God, according to Plato, is not the creator of matter, which, so far as it is recognized in his system, is given an eternal existence. The action of God is confined to the ideal world, of which material phenomena are a distorted reflection. ”

“ And so the Holy Spirit was included in the divine Government, and the dogma of the Trinity was complete.
The full doctrine of the Trinity, philosophically expressed, is this. God the Father is God the absolute, incomprehensible and unapproachable by created things. God the Son is part of God the relative, the creator and saviour of the world. God the Holy Spirit is the rest of God the relative, the sustainer and guide of the world. Thus it is evident that the third person of the Trinity philosophically has no existence ”

“ Men, as a proof of their devotion, give to their gods some of their possessions. The immediate object may be either to win the divine favour or to avert the divine wrath. When a religion is harsh and severe, the latter is likely to be the more frequent sacrificial motive. Accordingly, when the Israelites sacrificed to Jahveh, it was probably for the most part to remove Jahveh’s anger, to obtain forgiveness for their sins against him. Now exactly in proportion to the closeness of the connection between Jahvism and morality would be the tendency of these sins to be real sins. ”

“ With justice Josephus could assert that Greek philosophers only followed the example of his countrymen, and taught doctrines which the Jewish sacred law had made practical realities.1 For Judaism was not an esoteric creed which only the more cultured Jews fully understood; the lowest of the people grasped its principles, abhorred the idea of polytheism, detested even the smallest advance towards idolatry, and regarded every sin as a violation of divine decrees. Such a religion, pure and strongly held, was fit to be the parent of a noble religious system. ”

“ The doctrine of an incarnation of a divine being in a human form had already entered into Asiatic religion, and, in a more familiar shape, was a common feature of western Paganism. Christ, as the Word made flesh, could be raised to the level of God without destroying monotheism; the Jewish God, as the absolute and unknown, could be reduced to the position of a constitutional sovereign; by a mystery the impulses of the Church could be satisfied, and yet the purity of Christianity be preserved. ”

“ Even the fiercely national Jeremiah, who hated the Gentiles so bitterly that, though he believed them to be Jahveh’s instruments for the chastisement of Israel, he prayed that they might be punished for their assaults on the sacred city, had a vision of their coming to Jahveh.42 And, indeed, there was an inevitable pressure on the prophets which forced them in this direction. In proportion as the spiritual greatness of their religion was understood by them, they were driven to adopt the spiritual Messianic ideal. ”

“ That God became man is the central assertion of Catholicism, on which it bases its higher estimation of human dignity. This can plainly be seen in the work last referred to, where the Incarnation is regarded as the condition of theistic religion.109 But it is still more evident in the tendency of Catholic theology to exalt the divinity at the expense of the humanity of Christ, for manifestly the doctrine of the Incarnation is expanded and made more important in proportion as the difference between it and the original Jewish belief in the simple humanity of Christ is increased. ”

“ Life seems unbearable to many people unless it is assumed to be true. It is a prominent feature of all our new religious growths. The Psychical Research Society seeks to confirm it by the evidence of ghost-stories. Many generations will have to pass away before mankind in general can renounce it, and till then, if only to supply it with an apparent basis, dogmatic religion must survive.
If the decline of Christianity continues with the rapidity of the last half-century, a perilous crisis lies before the population of the civilized world. ”

“ Life is full of inevitable illusions, and only a few are in a position to detect their illusive character. In regard to these illusions, the belief of the great majority of mankind must be determined by authority; they can only choose between alternative authorities. And their choice cannot rest on strong grounds of personal conviction. The class of people just mentioned, for instance, who have lost faith in Christianity, for the most part could give but poor reasons for their refusal to accept its dogmas. ”

“ If from the age of Moses the religion of Jahveh was thus inseparably connected with morality, all the best of the people would rally round it. Unless Israel at any time was wholly without a remnant that loved righteousness and hated iniquity, Jahvism must always have had its earnest supporters. The same cause, of course, would tend to make it unpopular with the mass of the people.21 But for this, it would be difficult to understand why the Israelites, down to the captivity, were so persistent in their devotion to strange gods. ”

“ When away from Jerusalem, the Jew worshipped in the simplest and purest manner. And, most of all, morality was closely bound up with Judaism. Josephus justly boasted that his religion made virtue an indispensable part of itself.83 The Jews as a whole were certainly far more moral than the Pagans as a whole.
The opposite of all these qualities characterised Pagan religions. Pagans felt no religious humility, for there was no great difference between their gods and themselves. Pride, a sense of human dignity, distinguished them as men. ”