etc., are really offered to the one and only God. According to another, it refers to the already widely scattered Jews of the dis- persion, who, in the many lands of their exile, are offering to J” i are pure though beyond the holy land.
Sacrifices, which
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with the ideas in which he had been educated, and their stereotyped expression in the ritual, he models his very style on that of earlier prophets. He is the preserver of the past rather than a creator for the future. By his whole mental atti- tude he represented what was necessary for the period in which his activity falls. He belongs to an age which had to retain rather than to create, to impress on men, through institutions and ritual, ideas which had been conceived in the sore travail of preceding controversies. Ideals in this world of men need to be expressed in institutions as well as in words, if they are to influence not only a select few but a whole generation, and, above all, if they are to be transmitted to the following genera- tions. And, since men are influenced by uncon- scious habits as well as by conscious convictions, great religious truths must create forms which touch the whole life of a community. Probably, at that period of the national history, when Judah had been reduced to a community of humble men, and when so many of its purely secular hopes had disappeared, the utmost it could accomplish was to maintain the ground already won, to cling to the ideas already learned, and to continue institu- tions which were fitted to be the home of souls in the after generations, the birthplace for larger ideals in more fruitful years. To undervalue the law is easy ; to appraise it is a much harder task. Yet the law kept a kingless people together through several centuries. The truths it embodied made Judea almost unique in resisting the dis- integrating influence of the Hellenic spirit. The ideals which it represented produced men who were capable of accepting the higher ideals of Jesus Christ, and of becoming the founders of His Chureh. At the period when his countrymen ran grave risk of losing their hold on this ritual and all it contained for them and their descendants, Malachi lent his whole influence to maintain its power. To him, however, it continued to be valu- able because of the expression it gave to spiritual realities and the support it afforded the moral life. And if the Judaism of the silent centuries grew often formal in its reverence for the law as law and for the ritual as ritual, this was due as much to their forgetfulness as to their memory of the message they had received from the Fro het. The exhortation which falls near the end of the book, “to remember the law of Moses,’ became dangerous so soon as the minds of men grew unspiritual ; but what truth is not dangerous?
This attitude to the law explains in part the high value which Malachi sets on the priesthood. It is no longer the prophets but the priests who are the messengers of J “ (27). It is they who must first be purified by J”s visitation, in order that they may then direct the people (3%). Their office and work are set in an ideal and beautiful light. But the prophetic period is so far behind this teacher, and its fresh creative life so dead, that, when he thinks of the possibility of a new revelation of J”, the medium of that revelation is no longer a man whose lips God should touch with pure fire. It is that one of the popes of the past who did not die, and whom J” should restore to His people’s necessity (455), But this expecta- tion has a deeper root than the higher estimate of ritual and so of priesthood can explain. It is allied to the hope which the prophet cherished for the future, in which he diverged most widely from the early prophets. When Judah became a de- pendent satrapy, and its royal house fell into insignificance, the Messianic figure of the Davidic king naturally and inevitably disappeared. But the ‘suffering servant’ has also p out of sight; the priestly figure has equally gone. Judah has lost confidence in her destiny and her mission
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It is not out of the people itself that any deliverer or new spring of life is expected, even by its prophets. Malachi believes that a deliverer shall come, that Judah still has a mission, that J" has not forsaken His people. But he expects that the messenger of the covenant, who can hardly be dis- tinguished from J" Himself, shall appear in the tem- ple to renew all things. The Messiah is not thought of as having his roots in the soil, he has lost all essential relation to the people whom he comes to deliver, heis less a gift than an emanation from J".
This altered hope witnesses to an altered con- ception of God and of His relation to men. That hard deism, into which Hebrew theology was always liable to degenerate, is showing it- self afresh, and now in the minds of the prophets. Persian thought, with its dualism and its idea of the impurity of matter, fostered the tendency. The popular conception of the connexion between guilt and physical calamity ministered to it in a com- munity which was always in distress. J" was con- ceived as so far separated from men that any revelation from Him was increasingly thought of as ab extra, and not through the inner life of man. He must send His angels or Elijah, if the people’s life is to be guided by Him. Such a conception was certain to have further results. So long as prophecy lived with its witness to the God, who is not only beyond all men’s thought but who is present with and in their highest thought, so Jong as prophecy founded the appeal of religion on the moral and spiritual instincts of men, by which they were related to their God, there was little danger from sacerdotalism. The ritual existed, but it was construed as the outward expression and satisfaction of those instincts. But when the people, impotent, conscious of guilt, came to think of J" as so far removed from them that any message from Him must be an importation from without, and must be guaranteed, when old and long present by tradition, when new by miracle, they were sure to fall into a material idea of divine grace.