he world. The Jew believed not
merely in an omnipotent God, but in a God who constantly used his power
quite independently of the action of men. We, on the contrary, believe
that the universe is so constituted that human action bears a fixed
relation to the course of events. What men do or do not bears a
definite relation to the events which will follow, and we no longer
look for God to help those who are unwilling to help themselves. One
of the means which we possess of helping ourselves is force, physical
force. We have the power to use it for good or for evil. It is as
culpable {35} not to use force when occasion requires as it is to use
it when occasion does not.

This is tolerably plain to us, but it was not tolerably plain to the
Jew of the first century. The war has brought out the human
limitations of the ethics of Jesus by the intellectual horizon of his
own time as clearly as the application of literary criticism to the Old
Testament brought out the defects of his knowledge of the authorship of
the Jewish scriptures. Just as it was wrong and futile to pretend that
when he said "David said" and quoted a psalm, he did not mean to
ascribe it to David, it is futile to argue that when he said "resist
not evil" and "love your enemies" he sanctioned the patriotic pursuit
of war.

[1] The best example of this method of "restatement" is probably
Plutarch's _De Iside et Osiride_, which discusses the Egyptian myth and
the various explanations given of it in accommodation to philosophic
truth. Heathenism did not long survive this kind of help; nor is it
surprising that it did not.

[2] See _Prolegomena to Acts_, i. 199-216.

[3] Ritschlianism is perhaps an exception: it did at least attempt a
synthesis with science approached through Kantian philosophy. But was
it successful?

[4] No one has seen this more clearly, or expressed it more vividly,
than the late George Tyrrell, especially in his _A Much Abused Letter_
and _Christianity at the Cross-roads_.

[5] Josephus, _Antiq._ xviii. 1. 1 and 6. See also _Prolegomena to
Acts_, i. 421 ff.

[6] This literature is now available as a whole in R. H. Charles,
_Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha_.

[7] The suggestion has even been made that some of the polemic in the
gospels, which is--as the text stands--directed against the Pharisees
and Rabbis, was historically intended for the Sadducees. It was too
important to be lost, and, as those who were originally a