^ Walter Pater, Mwrius (he Epicurean.
196 THE NEW AND THE OLD
undo the heavy burdens of all that suffer wrong. The more appalling the world-wide scene of change, decay and ruin, the more certainly a power of life is working upward through it all.
^ The great empires of the East passed away, but not before they had transmitted to the people of God the treasures of their civilization. Greece fell; Eome fell: but in other forms they survive still. Let us only think what we owe in our own intel- lectual life, and in the expression of our religious faith, to Greece ; think what we owe in our civil and ecclesiastical organization to Eome ; and perhaps we shall be inclined to confess with a new conviction that " the dead rule the living," and recognize, humbled at once and stirred by the grandeur of om' obligation, that God has placed the future in our hands.^
(2) It is seen in the history of the Church. — Whilst it is God's law in creation and God's law in the history of man that old things pass away because they become new, this is true in the highest sense of the great work of human redemption. Look at the history of that redemption. When man fell, what was the Divine method ? Did God blot out the rebellious race, and create another race upon the earth ? No ; out of the ruin of human nature a new and more glorious fabric was revealed ; Christ the Son of God, the second Adam, was promised, and came in the likeness of sinful flesh. The bitter waters of the natural fountain were changed into sweet. A ruin was made the material of the new and better structure. The old became new. Mankind, which fell in the first Adam, was built up in the second Adam, Jesus Christ, God manifest in the flesh. And as God revealed Himself, first to patriarchs and then to Moses, the law-giver of the Old Covenant, and then to prophets who were interpreters of His will, there were elements of the earlier dispensation which were perpetuated in the next. The patriarchal nearness to God, the vision of the Almighty, did not cease when God went before His people in a pillar of cloud and in a pillar of flame. The Tabernacle was perpetuated in the Temple, the rites and cere- monies of the law were not abrogated but spiritualized by the prophets. And when St. Paul would find the great proof of his doctrine of justification by faith, he goes back to the ancient dispensation. Abraham is its great example; the prophet Habakkuk waiting upon God, when the Chaldaean armies were
' B. F. Westcott, Christian Aspects of Life, 89.
2 COR. V. i^ 197
approaching, gives him the words which are the key-note of his gospel. But the old had become new. For Jesus Christ had come in the flesh, revealed as the great object of faith ; and the true life of faith was life in union with Christ. And our Lord Himself teaches the same lesson. " Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets : I came not to destroy, but to fulfil." The Jewish priesthood perished, the Jewish sacrifices were abolished, the Jewish Temple was levelled with the ground, but their Divine meaning was fulfilled in Christ, and abides in Him and in His people to the present hour.
^ The Latin church left its work of witnessing and ministering for Christ, and made itself a judge and a divider among men. Its doctrines were all poisoned by one colossal blasphemy. It required what God has never asked even for Himself — to be believed without regard to reason, and obeyed without regard to conscience. So the yoke of Christian Pharisaism had to be broken, that men might be free to serve God in spirit and truth. The unspiritual unity of Western Europe had to be shattered in pieces, that nations might escape the tyranny of an alien and sectarian church. Above all, the idea of an infallible church holding plenary powers from an absent king had to be rooted out before men could begin to see the gradual development which is God's word to successive generations. But an infallible church is also incorrigible : therefore He cut her in sunder, and appointed her portion with the hypocrites. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the after-swell of the storm ; and only the nine- teenth was free to take up the work which the Reformation made possible even in countries where it was rejected. That work is hardly more than begun ; but we can already see its character. Our losses are no doubt immense. The old social order is gone, the old conception of miracle and inspiration is overthrown, and a growing tangle of practical questions represents the growing complexity of life and thought. But is there no gain in our wider knowledge of truth ? in a more strenuous and earnest life ? in a quickened hatred of social wrong? in a higher tone of that national conscience which under any form of government speaks the final word ? Is it nothing to know Christ as He never was known before ? to see the realms of grace and nature joined in their incarnate Lord ? to be made free from the horror of past ages, the inscrutable despot far off in heaven, who sought some other glory than the highest welfare of His creatures ? No \ heavier burden has been lifted from men since the Gospel swept away the whole slavery of gods and saints and demons, and left