METHODIST REVIEW

JULY, 1907

ART. I.-THE NEW TESTAMENT METHOD OF LAW I. SAINT PAUL represents the law of Moses as "of the letter," as "written with ink," as "written and engraven in stones." He thus notes an obvious feature of this ancient legislation. It was chiefly a system of rules, and not of principles. It was preeminently outward, dealing more with particular actions than with spiritual qualities and motives. It was copious, minute, exact. It hedged in the whole life of the Hebrew with injunction and restriction. It had, for example, regulations for house, dress, food, ablution, sanitation; for marriage, dower, divorce, adoption, inheritance, burial; for trade, agriculture, loans, usury, landredemption, servitude, enfranchisement. It forbade many specified acts without affixing penalties, and to many crimes it denounced various and often severe punishments. And it had provisions, constitutional in their nature, for the distribution of jurisdiction both quasi-legislative and judicial.

In the field of religious ceremony the law became even more explicit and particular. One exclusive seat of national worship was to be selected. It were wearisome to recall the exact prescriptions given for the tabernacle and its furniture; for the qualification, consecration, duties and support of Levites and priests; for the sacrifices, expiatory and eucharistic, national and individual, which filled the year; for innumerable ritual observances; for gifts, tithes, fasts, and feasts; for holy days and for Sabbatic and

jubilee years. Suffice it to say that to a sharply defined civil and moral code was added a vast and complex ceremonial order.

But the Mosaic law, as it stands in the Pentateuch, was not destitute of spiritual elements. It obviously lacked some conceptions common to modern thought. There was in it no explicit recognition of God as an infinite and immanent Spirit, of the human soul as distinct from the body, of a future life of rewards and punishments. Though it enjoined some high qualities and many arduous duties, in only one passage (Deut. 30. 6) did it promise or even intimate any divine help in the inevitable struggle. But, on the other hand, the majesty and holiness of Jehovah, and his love shown in the deliverance from "the land of Egypt and the house of bondage," repeatedly enforce his claim to the unqualified obedience of Israel. A few times supreme love to Jehovah is enjoined; twice the Jew is commanded to love his neighbor as himself. And it is to be further noted that great truths concerning God and man and their mutual relations are implicit in all laws concerning justice, purity, and helpfulness, and in all the ritual, which allowed approach to the Holy One within the veil only with ablutions, propitiations, and priestly mediations. Probably the Hebrew of the Exodus but dimly perceived these mysteries. The hieroglyphs were not easily deciphered. It was reserved for the prophets of distant centuries to penetrate to the heart of the system, to surmise its predictive character, and to declare, in various forms, that righteousness is more than thousands of rams, or tens of thousands of rivers of oil. From form to reality, from shadow to substance, the training went slowly but surely on.

How far the "statutes and judgments" given by Moses were an inheritance from the patriarchal and tribal life of Israel, or how far the long sojourn in Egypt led to the adoption of some parts of its civil and ceremonial law, it is impossible to decide. To admit such contributions to the Mosaic law need not affect our estimate of its divine authority or of its wisdom. In his training of men toward a new era God does not discard existing facts and forces. He uses and ennobles them. And the new era for Israel had come.

Enslaved tribes were to enter on an inde

pendent national life. And together came from Jehovah, their Deliverer, a home, a government, a church, and a covenant. The new system was not ideally perfect: "the law made nothing perfect." If tried by the standards which thirty-five additional centuries of training have established, it is in many respects defective. Yet it fitted the age and the people to which it was given; in many particulars it was far in advance of other existing systems of law; and it held in it germs capable of an indefinite development. The acorn prophesied the oak, for which, however, many centuries must wait.

Meantime its stern morality and its insistence on Jehovah's right to rule was sure to awaken a sense of sin and a fear of judgment. "The law entered that the offense might abound." "It was added because of transgressions"; that is, to the end, and with the result, that men should know their distance from God, their incompetence for goodness, and their consequent need of redemption. It was thus a "ministry of condemnation," the "letter that killeth."

Even as Paul wrote these words, the system, decaying and waxing old, was ready to vanish away. The Holy City would soon fall; the priest and the sacrifice would cease, the chosen people would be dispersed among all nations. Another covenant had place. Henceforth men shall be taught to "serve in newness of spirit and not in the oldness of the letter."

II. In two vital qualities the new covenant transcended the old. 1. It was the clear revelation of the fact, vaguely apprehended before, of the intimate relation of the Divine Spirit to the human soul, of the illapse of God on man, of the incoming and abiding of a divine energy within all human faculties that they might be wrought into the image of God. It was the full disclosure of the life of God in the soul of man. The incarnation had visibly linked heaven and earth. Henceforth men shall know the Spirit of holiness, of truth, of peace, and of power as the Lord and Giver of life.

Ritual law gives place to inspiration. Not in dependence on observances of any kind are men to seek goodness and peace. That way lies defeat. lies defeat. Let them use the observances-but wisely,

as opportunities to open the soul Godward. For it is this opening of the soul and the answering inflow of the gracious Spirit that restores the broken and chaotic human nature to the likeness of God and establishes a blessed and perpetual fellowship between the heavenly Father and the earthly son.

2. It corresponds with this that, in the New Testament, the formal code and the precise regulation give place to emphasis on moral and spiritual qualities. Not particular ethical law, but a new nature determining all duty is its chief injunction. Witness the Beatitudes, and indeed, the whole Sermon on the Mount. The blessed ones are the poor in spirit, the mourner, the meek, they that hunger after righteousness, the pure in heart, the merciful. Anger is murder; the impure purpose is adultery. Even when particulars only are given they are often, if taken literally, so impracticable, so unreasonable, or so insignificant, that we are forced to interpret them only as indications of the spirit which the disciple is to cherish. Few will hold that we are to submit to all violence and robbery and invite the repetition of them, to give to everyone that asks, to pray only in the closet, to lay up no treasure on earth, to pass no judgment on others. Evidently the Great Teacher is seeking patient, loving, sincere, and just souls. The letter is comparatively nothing; the spirit is invaluable. The tables of stone are lost: the law is put into the mind and written on the heart.

This contrast calls for further illustration. Let us suppose that through the open soul and faith in Christ one has come to the renewal and the fellowship with God spoken of above. Inevitably he will ask: "What shall I render to the Lord for all his benefits? What would he have me do? What are his commands?" To such questions the common and right answer would be: "Go to your Bible-there learn God's will." But the answer, though correct, needs supplement and interpretation.

The disciple goes to the Old Testament. What does he find? A progressive revelation of God, the eternal and the perfect One; the history of a movement, unhasting, unresting, toward the redemption of men by the anointed King of Righteousness; the record of the piety of pre-Christian ages in vivid narrative,

in profound drama, in glowing prophecy, and in songs which thrill the heart and inspire the hymns of later centuries-all these he finds. But when he asks for explicit law for his daily life, he is perplexed at finding that what appear to be moral and permanent commands are so intimately intermingled with, and often modified by, civil and ceremonial law, evidently transitory in its nature, that at length he hesitates at receiving any precept of the Old Testament as permanently obligatory unless it is obviously founded on fundamental and immutable morality, or has been reënacted by Christ or his apostles. With profound respect for the chosen people to whom "were committed the oracles of God," he is forced to say: I am not a Jew; I am a Christian.

From the Old Testament the disciple turns to the New. In addition to its central glory, God in Christ reconciling the world to himself, he finds every great spiritual quality-reverence, faith, humility, love, patience, courage, hope-enjoined constantly, and with the highest conceivable sanctions. He finds all these qualities exemplified in the unparalleled life of the Man of Nazareth. He finds that, as occasions arose either with Christ or his apostles, some particular duties are enjoined. He finds here and there in the volume extended discussion of spiritual law as applied to questions emerging in the early church, such as Paul's treatment of the use of meats offered in idol sacrifices, of the use of spiritual gifts, and of marriage-admirable illustrations of the temper in which questions of conscience are to be considered.

But he also finds that his New Testament is not a full and explicit directory for his daily life. Even for his church life he lacks such direction. His New Testament establishes the Christian society, indicates in general the purpose, spirit, and powers of the organization, names some officers and their duties as they existed in the primitive days. But he inquires in vain for a definite, authoritative and permanent constitution for this body, for the number of orders in its ministry, and the exact function of each, for the law by which men are inducted into these orders, for the partition of rights and duties between ministers and laymen, for the method of judicial administration in the church, and, indeed, for the vast detail of church work. Even