Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/323

 *ported, or we must admit that he never for a moment pretended to be co-equal, co-eternal, or con-substantial with God.

Throughout his public life he spoke of himself as one who was sent by God for a certain purpose. What was that purpose? Was it, as the Gentile Christians so readily assumed, to abolish the laws and customs of the Jews, and to substitute others in their stead? Did he, for example, propose to supplant circumcision by baptism? the Sabbath by the Sunday? the synagogue by the church? the ceremonial observances of the law of Moses by observances of another kind? If so, let the evidence be produced. For unless we find among his recorded instructions some specific injunction to his disciples that they were no longer to be Jews, but Christians, we cannot assume that he intended any such revolution. Now, not only can no such injunction be produced, but the whole course of his life negatives the supposition that any was given. For while teaching much on many subjects, he never at any time alludes to the Mosaic dispensation as a temporary arrangement, destined to yield to a higher law. Yet it would surely have been strange if he had left his disciples to guess at his intentions on this all-important subject. Moreover, it came directly in his way when he censured the Pharisees. He frequently accuses them of overlaying the law with a multitude of unnecessary and troublesome rules; but while objecting to these, he never for a moment hints that the very law itself was now to become a thing of the past. Quite the reverse. The Pharisees were very scrupulous about paying tithes and disregarded weightier matters; these, he says, they ought to have done, and not to have left the other undone. If those tithes were no longer to be paid (at least not for the same objects), why does he not say so? Again, he charges them with transgressing the commandment of God by their tradition; where it is the accretions round the law, and not the law itself, which he attacks. In one case he even directly imposes an observance of the legal requirements on a man over whom he has influence (Mk. i. 44). Moreover, he himself evidently continued to perform the obligations of his Jewish religion until the very end of his life, for one of his last acts was to eat the passover with his disciples. The only institution which he apparently desires to alter at all is the