Another strain very different from Neo-Platonism contributed to the sum of
Christian emotion. This was Judaism, which recently had shown the fury of
its energy in defence of Jerusalem against the legions of Titus.
Christians imbibed its force of feeling from the books of the Old
Testament. The passion of those writings was not as the humanly directed
passions of the Greeks. Israel’s desire and aversion, her scorn and
hatred, her devotion and her love, hung on Jehovah. “Do I not hate them, O
Jehovah, that hate thee?” This cry of the Psalmist is echoed in Elijah’s
“Take the prophets of Baal; let not one of them escape.” Jewish wrath was
a righteous intolerance, which would neither endure idolatrous Gentiles
nor suffer idolaters in Israel. Moses is enraged by the sight of the
people dancing before the golden calf; and Isaiah’s scorn hisses over
those daughters of Israel who have turned from Jehovah’s ways of decorum:
“Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth
necks, and wanton eyes, mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with
their feet; therefore Jehovah will smite with a scab the crown of the head
of the daughters of Zion, and Jehovah will lay bare their secret parts.”
Did a like scorn and anger find harbourage in Him who likened the
Pharisees to whitened sepulchres, and with a scourge of small cords drove
the money-changers from His Father’s house? At all events a kindred hate
found an enduring home in the religion of Tertullian and Athanasius, and
in the great Church that persecuted the Montanists at Augustine’s
entreaty, and thereafter poured its fury upon Jew and Saracen and heretic
for a thousand years.
Jehovah was also a great heart of love, loving His people along the ways
of every sweet relationship understood by man. “When Israel was a child,
then I loved him, and out of Egypt called my son hither.” “Can a woman
forget her sucking child, so as not to yearn upon the son of her womb?
Yea, these may forget, yet will I not forget thee.” Again, Jehovah is the
husband, and Israel the sinning wife whom He will not put away.[411]
Israel’s responding love answers: “My soul waits on God--My heart and
flesh cry aloud to the living God--Like as the hart panteth for the
water-brooks”! Such passages throb obedience to Deuteronomy’s great
command, which Jesus said was the sum of the Law and the Prophets. No need
to say that the Christian’s love of God had its emotional antecedent in
Psalmist and Prophet. Jehovah’s purifying wrath of love also passed over
to the Christian words, “As many as I love, I reprove and chasten.” And
“the fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom,” found its climax
in the Christian terror of the Judgment Day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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