rophets prophesied, and of whose kingdom they had such brilliant
visions, whilst its subjects are despised, hated, and down-trodden, and
its princes are the scum and off-scouring of all things unto this day?
We say that the Jews were expecting a splendid temporal kingdom, a
visible reign of the Messiah in righteousness over a regenerate and
exulting world. We say it with a touch of scorn. We may spare our scorn;
Christendom is always dreaming of it too. It would be a wonderful thing
if the Jews had not nourished some such expectations. All men have not
faith. How many Christians understand Christianity better than the Jews
understood the Judaism of their times? What is the Papacy but an
endeavour to realize this splendid and prosperous reign of Christ, of
which Judaism dreamed? A rule of righteousness, peace, and goodwill,
under the sceptre of Christ's immediate delegate and regent, is the
vision which has haunted in all ages some of the ablest minds in
Christendom; and the desire to realize this has been near the heart of
some of the most desperate struggles which rent the civilized world
throughout the middle age. We cannot wonder at their sad thoughts. We
think the same when things much less visibly ordained of God are
shattered and swept away as wrecks. The answer of the writer of this
epistle to the question which was wrung out of the death agony of that
nation and church was substantially this: God does not establish things,
He plants seeds which grow. The principle of life in the seed is the
principle of identity through the successive stages of the development
of the organism. The body of man is one, though it changes form very
visibly at successive eras, and though every particle of matter
composing it is in constant flux, passing away from without, restored by
the constructive force of the living principle within. Rise, he says, to
a loftier and more comprehensive view of the Divine dispensations. See
how the living principle of God's relation to you, to man, as Father and
Redeemer, runs through all the dispensations, moulds the outward form of
the Church according to the exigencies of the times, and is ever
bringing forth new forms as the ages need. See how the germ which was
planted before the law grew into the legal dispensation, and how when
the leafage and fruitage of that dispensation grew old and withered, as
_things_ must grow old and perish, the living principle within took new
and diviner form, suffere