Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/97

Rh so firmly together and so relentlessly ruptures all older associations, is the creed, or what is known in Christian theology as the symbol, the same term that, as we have already seen, was used by the Greeks to denote the token or pledge of hereditary hospitality and friendship between families, which furnished a basis for the formation of treaties of amity and commerce between tribes.

Strictly tribal religions never proselytize. Instead of seeking to share with alien tribes the favor and protection of their gods, they wish to monopolize whatever power and patronage may be derived from this source as a means of rendering themselves superior to their enemies. This was the case with the ancient Hebrews, who never thought of sending missionaries into other lands to make converts to Jehovah, but would have condemned such a procedure as treasonable. It is true that Jesus, in his denunciation of the Pharisees, declared that they "compass sea and land to make one proselyte"; but this reproof referred to their zeal as a political party in winning adherents among their own countrymen, in order to supplant the more liberal-minded and less rigidly ritualistic Sadducees in the Sanhedrin.

Jesus himself evidently never intended to break away from Judaism and to become the founder of a new religion. According to his own statement, he was "not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel." His mission was not to destroy, but to fulfill; not to abrogate, but to accomplish the law. He sought to give a spiritual interpretation to ancient precepts and injunctions; to revivify and rehabilitate the moral sentiment, hitherto dwarfed and deformed under the heavy burden of a perfunctory ceremonialism; and to enforce the commandments of God free from all incrustations of the traditions of men.

Curiously, and yet naturally enough, it was out of the very strictest sect of the Pharisees, so severely rebuked on account of their proselytic spirit, that the great proselyte Paul came—the man whose breadth of view and energy of purpose changed a local reformatory movement, which seemed to have been practically suppressed by the crucifixion, into a world-wide religion, by emancipating it from the fetters of Mosaic formalism, taking it out of the narrow ghetto of tribalism, and imparting to it a universal character. In this bold effort to turn apparent disaster into permanent victory, by breaking through the barriers of Judaism and preaching the gospel to the Gentiles, he met with the most determined opposition from the near kin and personal friends of Jesus, as well as from the principal disciples in Jerusalem.

To this process of development—by which Christianity, whose "field is the world," rose out of Judaism, the special cult of a