Comparative Literature/Book 4/Chapter 3

by Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett

CHAPTER III.

THE SOCIAL SPIRIT IN WORLD-LITERATURE.

§ 71. The story of a literature's decline and fall, as exemplified by Alexandrian and Roman cosmopolitanism, is curiously like and unlike that of Israel's decadence. Hebrews, like Athenians, before the destruction of their political independence had lost much of their old communal sympathies. Perhaps no better exemplification of the principle that the movement of progressive societies is from communal to individual life can be found all the world over than the contrast between the inherited guilt of the Decalogue and the strenuous assertion of personal responsibility by Ezekiel. "Behold," says the nâbî, "all souls are to me thus—as a soul the father and as a soul the son; thus are they to me; the sinning soul, it shall die. … The sinning soul, it shall die; son shall not bear the father's sin, nor father bear the son's sin; the righteousness of the righteous shall be on himself, and the iniquity of the iniquitous shall be on himself."^[1] Between the period at which the Hebrew castes of priests had collected the customs of the allied tribes and the age of Ezekiel we may thus infer that a great social change had taken place. Clan life among the priestly and landowning aristocracy of Israel, as afterwards in the town life of Athens and Rome, had been broken up and the spirit of self-interest and personal responsibility had been developed. No doubt the Hebrew village communities still remained as the social organisation of the ʾam-hââretz, or "common folk of the land." But, just as the village communities in India became subordinated to the Bráhmans, so the Hebrew clansmen seem to have sunk perhaps even into serfdom under the rule of their priests and nobles.

But, though communal ideas might have lost something of prestige by thus becoming the peculiar property of impoverished if not degraded freemen, they remained the great ideals of Hebrew thought; and side by side with Ezekiel's priestly and aristocratic individualism we have clear signs of this old Hebrew social spirit. If in his utterances personal responsibility is, as we have seen, stated with startling distinctness such as no earlier nâbî approximates, in none also can we find the same social conception of national unity under the figure of an ideal clan communion. As in days of Spartan decline the idea of a fresh distribution of lands became a kind of echo from old Doric communal life, so does the mind of Ezekiel recur to the primitive allotments and village communes of early Hebrew life. Even in this return, however, there is a mark of the cosmopolitan spirit which the associations of Babylon were stirring in the Hebrew soul; the "stranger" is also to have his lot among the clansmen of the chosen people. "So you shall divide this land into lots for you, for the tribes of Yisrâêl; and it shall be that you shall allot it by portion to yourselves and to the resident strangers (gêrim) among you, who have begotten children among you, and they shall be for you as native among the sons of Yisrâêl. … And it shall be that in the tribe where the stranger resides you shall assign his portion."^[2] Thus are the cosmopolitan and personal spirits found in company among the Hebrews, as among the Greeks and Romans, and the twofold process of social expansion and individual emancipation from clan restraints again meets us.

It is this union of the individual with the social spirit which makes Ezekiel perhaps the most interesting figure in Hebrew literature. In him we have a link between the oldest forms of Hebrew life and that spirit of Greek philosophy which the conquests of Alexander and his successors were to introduce into Israel. In him we have a thinker and poet and priest who explains at once the narrowness and the breadth of which the Hebrew mind has proved itself capable. From him, as in two streams, we may watch the learned individualism which was to terminate in Sadducean materialism and the puerilities of the Talmud, and the life-giving spirit of social sympathy which was to expand into the morality of Christ, taking their rise as from a common source. But, unlike some of his Greek contemporaries, Ezekiel does not appear to be conscious of the grave ethical problems raised by individualism. Pindar has learned the value of an individual future life of reward or punishment as the great sanction of personal morality. But the shadow-world of Ezekiel is little more than the Odyssean Hades. For Ezekiel Sheôl is indeed a place far wider, far more grandly vague than the subterranean home of the clan; the shadow-world has expanded into the gathering-place of whole nations, and the idea of Sheôl has become world-wide. In Ezekiel's "land of the underparts," which he contrasts with "the land of life," are fallen nations with their graves all round"—Ashur and his company, Elam and her multitude, Edom, her kings and princes; and at the sight of the fallen mighty, "who have descended to Hades with their weapons of war and laid their swords under their heads," Pharaoh and all his host are comforted.^[3] Throughout this remarkable picture there is no glimpse of personal punishment or reward in a future state; it is the picture of a shadow-world in which the dead in nations lie disfigured shades of their mangled bodies, a pale subterranean battle-field in which national or group distinctions are alone noticed. When Vergil in Hades sees Deiphobus with mangled body and gashed face, the idea is as materialistic as Ezekiel's; but Vergil's Hades is peopled with individuals, and contains the Pindaric ideas of personal reward and punishment; it is far removed from the clan age and clan associations. Dante's descriptions of the City of Dis, where are the tombs of the heretics burning with intense fire, has been compared with Ezekiel's picture; but the sepulchres of Dante are not the gathering-places of nations, they are abodes of torture for individuals such as Farinata degli Uberti; indeed, Dante's Hades exactly reflects the strongly individualised life of the Italian republics, Florence in particular. In Ezekiel the absence of this personal future of reward or punishment is all the more remarkable because of his open repudiation of the old clan morality. He is, therefore, in the position of a man who has discarded the traditional morality without finding any sanction to put in its place; the wicked may now prosper and the righteous perish without even the clan justice of inherited evil or good.

§ 72. How this ethical position of Ezekiel was likely to lead to pessimism the Book of Qôheleth (or Ecclesiastes, as we call it) only too sadly indicates. Individualism in the age of Simonides and Bacchylides, while belief in personal immortality was still an esoteric doctrine, had spoken thus:—

 

"For mortal man not to be born is best
Nor e'er to see the bright beams of the day;
Since, as life rolls away,
No man that breathes was ever alway blest."

 

The mournful voice of the Semitic "Preacher" speaks in this key, too, because over him, too, there broods an age full of individualised feelings, but without that eternal conception of human personality which in a manner places the individual on a par with the corporate life of groups or even humanity itself. Like the sun in his daily round, or the wind in his circuits, or the rivers returning to the place from whence they came, moves the life of man; and there is no new thing under the sun, for the "Preacher," like the Alexandrian savants, possesses, or thinks he possesses, universal knowledge. Before this dull round, this fatal law of human cycles, all differences between individuals disappear; an impersonal Fate destroys the distinctions between good and evil bound up so indissolubly with personal morality, and even reduces man, individual and social, to the level of the brute. "For the fate (miqreh, lit. 'what meets') of the sons of man and the fate of the beast are one, as the death of the one so the death of the other; for one spirit is to all, and the advantage of man over the beast is nothing, for all are vanity; all go to one place, all are of the dust and to the dust all return. Who knows whether the spirit of the sons of man goes upwards, but the spirit of the beast descends downwards to the earth? … All are alike; one fate for the righteous and the wicked, for the good and the pure and the unclean, for him who sacrifices and him who sacrifices not; like good, like sinner. … This is the evil in everything done beneath the sun that all have one fate."^[4] In this life, divorced from all moral restraints, is a pessimism which surpasses that of Greek or Roman. The sprightly Greek had reserved his melancholy for old age, with its lost vitality and outlook on the grave.

 

"But when at length the season of youth has vanished behind us,
Then to have perished at once truly were better than life,"

 

says Simonides; and even the gloomy Tacitus, when, at the opening of his Histories, he declared that "never by more ruinous disasters of the Roman people had it been proved that the gods care nothing for our safety but only for taking vengeance on us," admitted the existence of avenging deities, and shrank from the moral nihilism which Qôheleth avows. No wonder the Oriental pessimist finds the life of man altogether insufferable, and envies the blessings of the unborn: "So I praised the dead who long since died more than the living who are yet alive, but better than either of these I praised him who has never been, who has never seen the evil deeds which are done beneath the sun."^[5]

Qôheleth thus takes us some way on one of the two streams which part from Ezekiel downwards—the stream of Hebrew melancholy which the unhappy times of Antiochus did so much to increase. The study of early Hebrew literature, fostered by the hope of national independence and the gradual alteration of popular speech into Aramaic, had produced a literate class which soon lost the idea of literary creation in a minute verbal study aimed at nothing higher than the interpretation of the Tôrah, or Law. In Ezekiel the Hebrew idea of literature had reached its widest circumference; it was then no longer circumscribed by the narrow limits of the priestly hymnal, or the legal books, or chronicles of the priestly caste; and the rythmical address of the nâbî, primarily intended to be heard rather than to be read, had in Ezekiel's hands, as in those of Jeremiah, become an instrument for the pen as much as for the voice. A critical age,^[6] bookish and surfeited with study, was, however, to reduce Hebrew ideas of literature into narrower bounds. No doubt the era of Hebrew captivity may be credited with an outburst of Hebrew genius; for new ideas were then breaking in upon the old exclusiveness of the Hebrew mind. But the Hebrews seem to have soon learned that if they intended to maintain any national sentiments in spite of their political weakness, they must forego cosmopolitan ideas and restrain themselves within national traditions. Thus the literary class, which now tended to take the place of an aristocracy, was checked in its sympathies. Little remained for the patriotic Hebrew but to anticipate the Arab's deification of his Qurʾân by setting up the Torah for verbal worship; and the alphabetical psalms and arrangement of Lamentations^[7] show how the creative imagination of the nâbîs was giving way to literary tricks reminding us of the Alexandrian Syrinx. The name by which Ezra is known, "the scribe" (hassôphêr), and the intermixture of Aramaic with Hebrew in his language, indicate the age of verbal criticism and the redaction of the canon—the Alexandrian period of Hebrew literature.

Still the exiles at Babylon learned to spiritualise Hebrew sentiments and to expand their range beyond the circle of Hebrew associations—learned, in fact, the two great lessons of personal responsibility and universal sympathy taught in India about this time by the famous Gautama Buddha (543 B.C.). In the Book of Daniel, with its international tone and mystic forecast of the world's history, that book which, for its perception of successive epochs in human development, has been called the first attempt at a philosophy of history, "the first forerunner of Herder, Lessing, and Hegel," we have this expanded Hebræism displaying itself in literature as late as 168–164 B.C. Other influences, however, triumphed, and the "murmurs and scents of the infinite sea," which the night-wind of Babylonian conquest had for a moment swept into the narrow channels of Hebrew literature, died away on the stagnant shallows of a verbal criticism more deadly than those of Alexandria herself.

§ 73. But Alexandria and Greek intellect were to be much more closely connected with the Hebrew spirit than by way of parallel decadence; and in this living connection we find united those two streams of Hebrew feeling we have observed in Ezekiel—the social, typified by his national picture of clan life, and the personal, marked by his repudiation of communal morality. While exiles and returned captives were spiritualising the ritual of Israel; while the worship of the synagogue was growing up and prayer taking the place of sacrifice; while, later on, the scribes were by their traditions "making a hedge about the Law" and gliding into an exclusiveness recalling old Hebrew life, the conquests of Alexander had brought Greek language and thought among the Semites. Malachi, last of the nâbîs, describes the state of social life in Israel before this new influence reached the Hebrews. Priestly traditions have "caused many to stumble at the Law;" and the declaration of a coming judgment on "false swearers, and those who defraud the hireling in wages, the widow, and the fatherless,"^[8] reminds us of that social injustice against which Isaiah and Amos had formerly preached. The social spirit of the old Hebrew village communities was being again shocked by action from individual self-interest without a thought of common sympathy. "Have we not all one Father? Hath not God created us? Why do we deal treacherously every man against his brother, profaning the covenant of our fathers?"^[9] But if the old political idea of a Hebrew League or Covenant (Berîth) thus meets us as an ideal of social sympathy, the dominant idea of Malachi, that God is "robbed in tithes and offerings," proves that the materialising spirit of Levitical rites rather than moral self-culture was at work.

Perhaps the earliest direct evidences of Greek influence in Hebrew literature are to be found in the Greek names of the musical instruments mentioned in the Book of Daniel.^[10] Classical Hebrew was now dying out, as this very book, by its intermixture of Hebrew and Aramaic, clearly shows. But, though the social teaching of the nâbîs might thus seem to be perishing among narrow-minded descendants who were losing the very power of understanding their language, Greek influences were destined to produce an expansion of the old Hebrew social spirit, and a deepening of the weak Hebrew sense of personality beyond anything which even an Ezekiel might have anticipated. The cosmopolitan spirit aroused in Ezekiel by the world-wide associations of Babylon had been checked by the necessity of stopping, even at the cost of a relapse into narrow Hebræism, that merger of Hebrew in Aramaic language and thought which was insidiously progressing. Side by side with the scribes learned in the Torah had arisen an inferior class of interpreters, whose business was the rendering of the archaic Hebrew into the popular Aramaic. Moreover, something worse than Aramaised language was resulting from Hebrew contact with their Semite kinsmen; conceptions more or less opposed to monotheism were creeping in under cover of reverence for angels. It has been observed that the Book of Malachi indicates the craving for "messengers," or intermediate spirits, between that Yâhveh whose very name had become "incommunicable" and his people. Psalms written after the return^[11] place the "angels" or "messengers" of Yâhveh at the head of the creation. In Ezekiel and Zechariah the innermost circle of angels is "dimly arranged in the mystic number of seven." In the Book of Daniel for the first time we have two names of angels, Michael and Gabriel. In the Book of Tobit a third, Raphael, is added; Uriel follows next; and then, "with doubtful splendour," as Dean Stanley says, Phaniel, Raguel, and the rest. Such were the dangers to which Aramaising influences were exposing Hebrew language and thought.

But no such dangers were, at first at least, perceptible on the side of Hellenism. Greek language and thought might well seem too widely separated from Hebrew to allow any popularisation of Hellenic influences. From the Greeks, accordingly, philosophic borrowing might be made without any apparent danger of undermining Hebrew unity; and while there was less fear in this respect to be entertained of a people so different from themselves, the condition of Hebrew thought supplied special reasons for the preference. We have seen how the development of individual freedom, unaccompanied by ideas of personal immortality, had in Qôheleth terminated in one of the most despairful pictures of human origin and destiny which the literature of any age has ever produced. The vague Aramaic spirit-world of angels was, however, preparing the way for Platonic teaching; and when Hellenised Hebrews, acquainted with the ethics of Socrates and Plato, began to compare their own Ezekiel or Qôheleth with such philosophic inquirers, they must have observed that the thinkers who, against the individualism of the sophistic age, had endeavoured to teach the doctrines of conscience and personal immortality, had been engaged in solving, or attempting to solve, the very problems which had perplexed the master-minds Israel. If the literature of Greece came upon the Romans as an anticipation of all they could hope æsthetically to effect, a treasury of models in verse and prose which they could not do more than imitate with some success, upon the Hebrews, whose idea of literature had always been didactic and whose language was too inflexible for æsthetic purposes, it came as a great philosophic awakening, an evidence that other peoples in the world beside the sons of Israel had met the same great moral questions, and had far surpassed all Hebrew efforts towards their solution. To men whose highest spiritual guides had often appealed to social justice between man and his neighbour (as had the Hebrew nâbîs), with what force Platonic discussions on "What is Justice?" must have come home! To men whose spiritual guides had been sorely perplexed by the ethics of inherited guilt (as had Ezekiel), how profoundly interesting must the Greek ideas of personal conscience have proved! Above all, how deeply must such an essay as Plato's Phædo have affected men who, like Qôheleth, had experienced the emptiness of an individual life, with no outlook save on a stream of humanity ever flowing in the same circle, and ever returning to the earth from whence it rose!

§ 74. If we contrast the Book of Wisdom with that of Qôheleth, we shall have an insight into these Greek influences. The Socratic identification of knowledge with virtue, of wisdom with justice, was sure to commend itself to the Hebrew mind, so long accustomed to mingle ideas of intellectual and moral excellence. Accordingly, the author of the Wisdom of Solomon makes Sophia or Wisdom the spirit of intellectual and moral power. Sophia will not enter "into a soul of evil arts" (εἰς κακότεχνον ψυχὴν), nor dwell "in a body subjected to sin" (ἐν σώματι κατάχρεῳ ἁμαρτίας). She is a "humane spirit" (φιλάνθρωπον πυεῦμα), and stands altogether apart from and superior to that spirit (ruach) common to man and beast of which Qôheleth spoke. While we have here the humanising ideas of the Greek, ideas which found it equally hard to absorb the life of man into the general life of animals or of the physical world, Sophia is a direct rebuke to the pessimism of Qôheleth. God did not make Death, nor is He pleased with the destruction of the living. For He created all things for existence (εἰς τὸ εἷνατ), and the races of the world are worthy to be preserved (σωτήριοι); the poison of destruction is not in them, nor is the kingdom of Death (ᾅδον βασίλειον) upon earth. For justice is immortal; but impure men by deed and thought have summoned Death to themselves, thinking him a friend have been consumed, and have made a compact with him because they are worthy to take part with him. For, reasoning wrongly with themselves they said, 'Short and painful is our life; there is no healing in the end of man, and never was there known a man who escaped from Hades. For we came into life by a chance (αὐτοσχεδίως), and hereafter we shall be as though we had never been, because the breath in our nostrils is smoke, and reason (ὁ λόγος) is a spark in the motion of our heart, which being extinguished, our body shall return to ashes and our spirit dissolve like empty air. In time our name shall be forgotten and no one remember our deeds; our life shall pass away like tracks of cloud, and be scattered like a mist dispelled by rays of the sun and overcome by his heat. … Come, then, let us enjoy the good things that exist, and use the possession of them, like youth, with energy. Let us satiate ourselves with costly wine and perfumes, and let not the flower of Spring pass us by. Let us crown ourselves with rosebuds ere they be withered; let none of us lose his share of jollity; everywhere let us leave behind tokens of enjoyment, because this is our portion and this our lot. Let us force down the poor just man; let us not spare the widow nor reverence an old man's grey hairs. Be Might (ή ἴσχυς) the law of right, for weakness is proved useless.' This was their calculation; and they went wrong; for their own wickedness blinded them. They knew not God's mysteries, nor expected wages of righteousness, nor discerned a reward of blameless souls. For God created man for immortality (ἐπ᾽ ἀφθαρσίᾳ), and made him an image of His Eternal Self.^[12] But by Satan's envy Death entered into the universe (κόσμος), and they who are on his side find it."^[13]

If the web of this remarkable passage is Hebrew, the woof is Greek. The Hebrew pessimism of Qôheleth meets the Greek horror of old age; the old Hebrew conceptions of social justice and respect for old age are found in the company of action from self-interest, supported by the iron rule of Force, and that contempt of old age which students of Alexandrian literature have frequently observed. But, above all, the Greek realisation of personality and the Platonic sanction for personal morality in a future state meet and correct the despairing nihilism of Qôheleth. In this juncture consists the abiding interest of Alexandrian Judæism; the personal ideas of the Greek are now united with the social ideas of the Hebrew. For neither the old clan morality, nor the ideal brotherhood of social life which had started within the narrow circle of the clan, could disappear even among educated Hebrews writing in the flush of Hellenic inspiration. Side by side with the Greek conceptions of individual punishment or reward in a future state, we have survivals from the old mundane morality of punishment or reward within the present life. "The ends of the unjust race," says even the Platonic author of the Sophia, "are hard; the children of the wicked shall vanish; for, though they be long-lived, they shall be counted for nothing, and, at the end, their old age shall be dishonoured."

§ 75. If communal sentiments thus survived in the Hellenised culture of the educated Hebrew, how much deeper must the sentiments of early Hebrew social life have been cherished in the hearts of the Hebrew poor? From the pages of Ezra and Nehemiah we may gather that the body of the returned exiles retained the old clan organisation; and, however this system may have been broken down by the individualising spirit among scribes and priests, there can be little doubt that the Hebrew village community not only lasted far on into Roman times, but (as the Russian Mir to the contemporary communism of Russian reformers) supplied a constant model of social reform and an ideal of Hebrew brotherhood which only needed the touch of the Greek spirit to become cosmopolitan. Such an effort at social reform may be seen in the Essenes, a sect which, retiring from the outward ceremonial of the temple, practised community of property. Josephus, in a peculiarly interesting chapter of his Wars of the Jews,^[14] gives us an account of this remarkable sect, which shows that it united the character of social reformers with the deepest personal morality. Basing their social reforms on a return to clan communism—"those who come to them," says Josephus, "must let what they have be common to the whole order, insomuch that among them all there is no appearance of poverty or excess of riches, but every one's possessions are intermingled with every other's, and so there is, as it were, one patrimony among all the brethren"—the Essenes in their conception of the soul and their self-discipline were culturists in the highest sense of the word. "Their doctrine," Josephus observes, "is that bodies are corruptible, and that the matter they are made of is not permanent; but that the souls are immortal and continue for ever, and that they come out of the most subtle air, and are united to their bodies as in prisons, but that when they are set free from the bonds of the flesh they then, as released from a long bondage, rejoice and mount upward." The resemblance of these ideas to certain opinions of the Greeks is carefully noted by Josephus; and the famous passage of the Phædo, which contains the same simile of an imprisoned soul, will come to the mind of any Greek scholar.

But the true interest of the Essenes lies not so much in their adoption of Greek conceptions of personality as in their combining this individual culture with socialism of an advanced type. If in Ezekiel we have individualism struggling to get free from clan ethics, if in Qôheleth we have it freed from such ethics but bound up with pessimism, if in the Sophia of Solomon we have it ennobled by Greek conceptions of immortality, in the Essenes we have this eternal conception of individuality joining with the old social spirit of the Hebrews no longer confined within the limits of nationality. Spiritualised socialism and spiritualised individualism thus meet in the Essenes; and in Christianity they meet in a world-creed. But, it may be asked, was their meeting of any significance to literature? Are we justified in regarding that union of Hebrew and Greek thought which ultimately issued in Christianity as lying within the domain of comparative literature? And, if this question be answered in the affirmative, are we justified in regarding the social as the dominant aspect of Christian world-literature?

In answer to the first of these questions—whether the union of Hebrew and Greek thought issuing in Christianity lies within the domain of comparative literature—it will be conceded that the cosmopolitan tendencies of the Alexandrian Greeks and those of Post-Babylonian Hebrews are sufficiently similar and dissimilar to form an interesting study in literature treated comparatively. Athens and Jerusalem, taking their origin alike in those miniature social groups which we have preferred to call by the general name of clan, passed out upon two ideal worlds of spiritual influence—the world of individual self-culture and the world of social brotherhood. Unlike the vigorous human life of Athens—the life of the Ekklesia, the law-courts, the theatre—the city of Jerusalem owed its dignity to a religious centralism which recalls the Delphic Amphiktiony or the Koreish and Mecca. Here there was little scope for the development of the purely individual spirit compared with the varied field of Athenian activities. Surrounded by agricultural communities based on the clan organisation, and with its own hierarchy formed on the same model, Jerusalem could never become a congenial home for individualism; whatever steps it made within the circle of the priesthood and landowning nobility (chôrim), individualism must have always presented an invidious aspect to Hebrew associations. Hence, when we find in Christianity the meeting-place of two such divine spirits, each the master-spirit of its own sphere, are we not warranted in maintaining that no more profoundly interesting problem is to be found in the whole range of human thought than the progress of that Hebrew and Greek cosmopolitanism through which the social and individual spirits sought reconciliation? No doubt it may be replied that this is matter of ethical rather than literary interest; that the function of literature is to collect and build with the most beautiful ideas irrespective of their moral significance. But it is one thing to resolve literature into didactic prose or verse, and another to maintain that the "best ideas" which literature seeks to discover and express must be valued after standards which involve either an ideal of individual self-culture or an ideal of social happiness; must, in other words, represent either the Greek or the Hebrew spirit, or possibly endeavour to combine both. Any literature which really mirrors human life, any literature which is something greater and nobler than a graceful imitation of classical models, must ultimately derive its inspiration from individual or social being, or (the most life-giving of all sources) from that conflict between these aspects of human existence which has raged so fiercely in certain epochs of man's development.

Yet another question remains to be answered—are we justified in regarding the social as the dominant aspect of Christian world-literature, are we justified in treating the teaching of Christ and his disciples as the most splendid example of the social spirit in world-literature? No doubt the Christian idea of personal immortality is widely removed from the clan ethics of inherited guilt, and would seem at first sight to be conceived in a purely Greek spirit of individualism. But the kernel of Greek individualism—action from self-interest—is not to be found in the Christian literature. Far from this, the fundamental doctrines of Christianity—inheritance of sin by every member of the human race, and the vicarious punishment of Christ—are the ethics of early Hebrew life universalised; and ideas of social brotherhood, besides being practically expressed in early Christian communism, meet us everywhere in extant accounts of the great social Reformer. It is true that Christianity, as a grand social reformation, is far from having yet produced the fruits which it seems destined to bear. It is true that in the conditions of the Roman empire—its cruel slavery of man, its intense selfishness, its accepted materialism—the sufferings of the early Christians and the hopelessness of social reform turned away Christian thought from the realisation of the human ideal society to an ideal beyond the range of space and time. But none the less evident are the marks of the old Hebrew social idealism on the Christian, none the less clear is it that the ideal community of Ezekiel is spiritualised and universalised in the Christian brotherhood, and that, however the conditions of the Roman empire, or the temporal power Christianity afterwards acquired, or the industrial development of modern Europe, have thrown the social spirit of Christianity into the background, the creed whose individual side was expressed by Dante was above all things the mighty utterance of man's social spirit.

Footnotes

1. Ezek. xviii. 4, 5, 20
2. Ezek. xlvii. 21–23.
3. See Ezek. xxxii.
4. Eccles. iii. 19–21; ix. 2, 3.
5. Eccles. iv. 2, 3.
6. Dean Stanley (Hist. Jewish Church, vol. iii. p. 16) observes that while the public life of the people disappeared with the fall of Jerusalem, while "the prophets could no longer stand in the temple courts or on the cliffs of Carmel to warn by word of mouth or parabolic gesture, there is one common feature which runs through all the writings of this period, and which served as a compensation for the loss of the living faces and living words of the ancient seers. Now began the practice of committing to writing, of compiling, of epistolary correspondence;" as Ewald says, "never before had literature possessed so profound a significance for Israel." Thus Jeremiah throws his prophecies into the form of a letter to the exiles, a literary form which has been compared with the Epistles of the New Testament; and the arrangement of Ezekiel's prophecies in chronological order is another sign of critical times.
7. The twenty-two verses of the first, second, and fourth chapters begin with each letter of the alphabet in succession, while the sixty-six verses of the third chapter are likewise arranged, only repeating the same letter at the beginning of three verses successively.
8. Mal. iii. 5.
9. Mal. ii. 10.
10. ch. iii.
11. Cf. Ps. cxlviii.
12. εἴκονα τῆς ἰδίας ἰδίοτητος, lit. "an image of the Idea of His Personality"—a thoroughly Platonic phrase.
13. Wisdom of Solomon, i. 13–ii. 24.
14. Bk. ii. ch. viii.