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not governed by a Divine law, to the end of time. Its mission only ceases and combines with other missions when these other missions find a Divine principle in their legislation which will entitle them to call it the of Law of God. The Jews will then cease to be special or isolated, cease to be Jews, and the Gentiles cease to be Gentiles. But, until that great crisis arrives, the special people must "dwell alone, and cannot be reckoned amongst the nations." They are the rock, and they cannot be scattered; and yet they are scattered, for they are the sand. But all truth is bi-polar, having an obverse and reverse meaning, and the highest wisdom is always taught by means of apparent contradictions. They are scattered in person, but compact in spirit; scattered, but not lost. Not even the Ten Lost Tribes are lost, for they are mixed with the Gentiles, and by this mixture the Gentiles and all the world become Israel. By what other means than this very simple and beautiful expedient could the universal unity be genealogically accomplished, and all mankind comprehended in the sole name of Israel?

Two tribes alone were restored after the great captivity; but after the Restoration a singular change is apparent in the nation. A new era commences, entirely different from the former. That which preceded the captivity was the era of the prophets, the era of Divine Revelation. This which succeeds the captivity is the era of the Rabbis, the era of human interpretation, the Divinity and the

humanity in chronological order! There is no appearance of schools of criticism, philosophy, or theology before the captivity; no sects and parties, such as Pharisees and Sadducees, Essenes, &c. ; not even Rabbis or Doctors of the Law. But, immediately after the captivity, all these various symptoms of the Logos, or logical principle, which is the true characteristic of humanity, make their appearance. The nation had evidently contracted, and appropriated, in its captivity, a portion of the Gentile spirit of private judgment; that is, humanity, the Logos. It had learned the languages of the Chaldeans and the Greeks, and adopted many of their ideas and their modes of reasoning, and applied them to the interpretation of the sacred writings. And having thus closed the canon of Scripture, by advancing from childhood to puberty, we find ever after this a succession of schools, and sects, and Rabbis, and Doctors, superadding to the original Divinity of the Word their own humanity, to give a definite form to its meaning. For it is the character of Divinity to be indefinite-even as God is without form-and revelation, in perfect harmony with its incorporeal source, takes the indefinite character, and seeks its form, or its ultimate and satisfactory meaning, in the human understanding, as a spirit its body in the material world. This era of the humanity of the Jewish mission lasted till the great political and final dispersion, and the two great principles which thus characterise the

whole twofold mission, were personified at last, or summed up in the character of that mysterious personage whose most appropriate description is the Divine Humanity, the embodiment of the two natures, the human and the Divine. In this respect he typifies the entire mission of the people amongst whom he appeared; and it is a remarkable feature of that New Testament to which he gave birth, that it is rather a logical comment on than a continuation of the Old Testament. It is the humanity combining with the Divinity, and giving it a more intelligible form and character. But not being final, there is merely the bare semblance of interpretation, the true meaning being reserved for the end.

Meanwhile the logical mission of the Greeks runs parallel with that of the Jews, and dovetails chronologically with it. But there is this difference between the two: that whereas the logic of the Jews is confined to the interpretation of an absolute and a limited law, the logic of the Greeks is free to range over the boundless expanse of the unlimited law, the law of the Revelation of God in Nature. It is therefore more logical, more human, than that of the Jews. It is the logical, as the Jewish is the Divine or absolute, mission of the Drama; for even the human type of liberty of judgment, which is revealed in Jewish history after the captivity, is more absolute than any other school of logic, not even excepting that of the Turks, which now occu

pies its place. The absolute, which distinguishes divinity from humanity, characterises the Jewish character throughout, whether as the recipient of an absolute law, or its reverent, its timid and restricted interpreter; whilst the Greek, on the contrary, is unfettered, unrestricted, unappalled, and, like the wild Arab on the plain of the Syrian desert, or the horse, which is the hieroglyph of human intelligence, despising confinement in walls and towns, and civilised imprisonment in private estates, he makes the hemisphere of earth and heaven his home, and owns no walls but those which touch the horizon.

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ACT SECOND.-The Greck Missions.

SCENE FIRST.

THE ISLES OF GREECE AND THE GREEKS.

A NEW people, the representatives of a new idea, now come forth, to develop in their history the recondite principles of the Divine Drama. The first people represented absolute, unprogressive law; this new people are identified with the principle of progressive and productive liberty. The Jews were curbed and restrained, and limited in their sphere of intellectual activity, by the imperative dictates of a precept supposed to be eternal, and therefore inviolable. The Greeks were authorised, by the total absence of such a check upon voluntary action, to elaborate a scheme of civilisation for themselves, by the self-determining agency of their own understandings. It would be wrong, however, to suppose, that, because there was no apparent aid from the Absolute One, there was none in reality. The idea of a Divine Drama will not admit of this exceptional supposition. The mission of the Greeks is as genuine, as real, and as indispensable for the final realisation of the Divine idea, as the mission of the Hebrews. But it is a logical mission, in which the mind apparently works

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