Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/536

520 historical credit, must feel how improbable it is that our Lord should have carried His ministry into a really Greek or Gentile district on the only one occasion when He thought fit to run counter to the public sentiment, and to give to His action the character of a serious interference with the rights of property. How could He have ventured thus to associate Himself with the destruction of a great herd of swine, if the country was Gentile, and if those swine belonged to persons not bound by the prohibition of the Mosaic law? Might they not, and would they not, have resorted to the use of force against this unarmed as well as unauthorized intruder? But what happens is that the swineherds fly; according to all the three Evangelists, they fly; to the city, according to St. Matthew and St. Mark, which was the seat of authority; and they tell what had happened. Why, then, if this was a land of Gentile rule, and if the swineherds were Gentiles, why was not our Saviour—since His agency was recognized—either assailed by popular violence, or called regularly to account by the law of the land; by that "Hellenic Gadarene law," with the supposed existence of which Mr. Huxley pastures his imagination? Instead of this, without the slightest idea of an accusation against our Lord, the population, streaming forth, simply consult for their own temporal interests, and beseech Him to depart out of their coasts.

The supply of swine testifies indeed to the existence of a demand. It may probably testify also to the existence of a Gentile class or element in the country. The question, indeed, which relates to the use of pork as an article of diet has by no means that uniformity of color, outside the Mosaic law, which Prof. Huxley assigns to it. But it would be tedious by entering upon it to lengthen a paper already too long, for we may safely allow that among the Syrian Gentiles this diet may have been known, and may not have entailed any legal penalty.

Mr. Huxley concludes the argumentative portion of his article by insisting that the "party of Galilæans" were foreigners in the Decapolis, and could have no title, as private individuals, even to vindicate the law. I will not argue the point, which is wholly immaterial to my purpose; and it may not be easy to draw with exactness the line up to which the private person may go of his own motion in supporting established law. I confine myself to the following propositions:

1. Both from antecedent likelihoods, and from history, there is the strongest reason to believe that the Mosaic law was the public law of Gadaris.