I LECTURE II. THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. N the present lecture, I propose to resume the subject of the last. Without further preface, I remark: 7. That it has always seemed to me an incomprehensible anomaly that Jews should by any natural process have originated such a book as the New Testament, and such a religion as it contains. If they originated it (as they certainly did), it would seem to be in diametrical contradiction to all the principles and tendencies of their nature, as well as of human nature in general. The point has been partly anticipated in discussing the difficulty of accounting for such a "Messiah" as Jewish evangelists have painted; but the reasoning equally applies to all the writers of the New Testament, and to the origin of Christianity in general. There is hardly a feature of the religion which the Jew might not naturally be supposed the last man in the world to tolerate. The entire system of institutions under which his character had been formed made him recoil from it, and especially from its cosmopolitan character. That the Jewish nation was the chosen of Heaven; that to them "were committed the oracles of God," and that they had a monopoly of them—these were first principles to the Jew; and everything in his education, habits, prepossessions, made him clutch them passionately to his heart. The Gospel abruptly broke in upon these, and, as with volcanic force, fractured and upturned these solid strata of his belief. It went avowedly on the principle that all the Jew's privileges were transient, and subordinate to higher ends than his glory or welfare; that they were abrogated by the Gospel; that under it there was to be "neither Jew nor Greek;" that Christ came to throw down the "middle wall of partition" between them. One of the first lessons taught to Peter when he entered on his apostolic mission (and, like every Jew, he was astonished at it), was that God had abolished this distinction, and that he was henceforth to regard the Gentiles as on a level with himself. That all this should be most repugnant to the ordinary Jew, was natural, and the inevitable effect of the abuse of those privileges on which he had plumed himself for ages. He was of the highest caste, and the Jewish Brahmin looked down on the Gentile Pariah with all the contempt with which the Pharisee regarded the publican. We are not left to conjecture as to the degree of revulsion which his mind experienced; we see how it manifested itself, and may thence exactly measure the improbability of any such religion as that of the Gospel having naturally originated with him. It was his grand quarrel with Christ and His apostles that they pro |