It is necessary to distinguish between the third of those privileges, the judgment by the breastplate of light and truth, which was an extraordinary gift of God, bestowed at particular times, and analogous in this to inspiration, and the fourth, the supreme jurisdiction and judgment of the High Priest, which belonged to him as an ordinary part of his office, and may be likened to a perpetual divine assistance inherent in it.[18]
2. Such was the high priesthood in its institution, and its operation through the whole of Jewish history down to the final destruction
of the Temple corresponds to its institution.
The children of Israel were made a nation for a specific purpose, that is, in order that the race of Abraham, by Isaac his chosen son, should maintain upon earth, in the midst of an ever-growing defection, the worship of the one True God, and should likewise em-body and represent no less that which was bound up in this worship, the promise of redemption given at the beginning of the world. The reason of its existence, therefore, was to be the bearer of the Messianic idea. To this all its ordinances and sacrifices pointed,
and in the execution of all this purpose the High Priest was the chief organ. The Pontificate was the stem of the nation, of which
the civil unity was made from the beginning dependent on the spiritual. On Aaron, by God's command, [Pg 76] Moses devolved one "part of his glory;" and when Eleazar had succeeded his father in the office of High Priest, and Moses was about to die, he devolved, by the same divine command, another part of his glory upon Joshua, appointing him to lead the children of Israel into their promised inheritance. To invest him with this solemn charge, the civil leadership of the nation, he brought him before Eleazar the priest, that, according to his instruction, Joshua and the whole congregation "should go out and go in." This relative position of Eleazar and Joshua is continued in the respective religious and civil rulers during several hundred years down to the kingship of Saul.
When the Israelites chose themselves a king after the pattern of the nations round them, the word of God to Samuel respecting their act is, "They have not rejected thee, but me, that I should not reign over them" (1 Kings viii. 7). Nevertheless God sanctions the erection of a kingdom, leaving unaltered the position of the High Priest. During the time of the kings the high priesthood continues the centre of Jewish worship; and when the civil unity is broken by the revolt of the ten tribes, they revolt likewise against the worship which had its seat in Jerusalem and was gathered up in the High Priest. The long-persistent iniquity of the people is punished by the captivity, and when a portion of the nation comes back to take root afresh in its own land, it is in the high priesthood more than ever that its unity is restored and maintained. Thus, through the three periods of Israelitic history, under the judges, [Pg 77] under
the kings, and after the return from captivity, the High Priest remains the permanent centre of Jewish life, the organ of spiritual, and
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therein of civil unity. Our Lord recognises this spiritual ruler as at the head of the Great Council, "sitting in the chair of Moses." At His birth Herod inquires of this authority where Christ should be born, and receives the undoubting answer, "In Bethlehem of Juda." Of Him Caiaphas, being then High Priest, uttered the famous prophecy denoting the great act of His mediatorial sacrifice; and the same Caiaphas, sitting as supreme judge of the nation, adjures Him by the living God to declare if He be the Christ; and our Lord answers the adjuration by the explicit declaration of His divine Sonship, and His authority to be Judge of the living and the dead.
The judges pass, the kings pass, the nation goes into captivity; it comes back chastened, and faithful at length to its belief in the divine unity and the promises attached to it; and through all this, up to the time of accomplishment, the High Priest sits in the chair of Moses, and offers expiation on the day of atonement, and the priests emanate from his person, and prophecy speaks from his mouth. He is the ordinary judge of the whole people, the guardian and interpreter of the divine law, whose decision is final and supreme.
3. That people lost its civil independence, which was merged in the great Roman empire, but its spiritual independence, centred in its High Priest, was preserved to it. At no period of its history was this independence more remarkably maintained. Philo, himself a Jew [Pg 78] settled in Egypt, says, "Innumerable pilgrims from innumerable cities flock together by sea and land, from East and West, from North and South, on every festival to this Temple (of Jerusalem) as to a common harbour and refuge, seeking peace there in the midst of a life of business or trouble."[19] "The Holy City," he says in another place, "is my country, a metropolis not of the single country of Judea, but of many others, on account of the colonies from time to time thence sent forth." But not only was this city such a metropolis to all Jews in every part of the world, and the High Priest the centre of the worship which drew them from all parts of the world, but his spiritual authority extended over them in the several cities which they inhabited as well as when they came up to Jerusalem. This was the power borne witness to by St. Paul, when "yet breathing out threatening and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, he went to the High Priest and asked of him letters to Damascus to the synagogues, that if he found any men and women of this way, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem." This was the power which counterworked and persecuted St.
Paul himself wherever he went, through which "five times he received of the Jews forty stripes save one, and was thrice beaten with
rods" (2 Cor. xi. 24). This was the power which, wherever the Apostles went, preaching the Gospel under the cover of a religion which enjoyed legal sanction, and so disobeyed no [Pg 79] Roman law, encountered them, and, after endless particular persecutions, succeeded at last with Nero in getting them put beyond the pale of the protection which their character of Jews might afford them, and placed under the ban of the empire as preachers of a new and unsanctioned religion. They were but summing up a long course of previous persecution in this act, which was the master-stroke of Jewish antagonism, by which they fulfilled to the uttermost the divine prediction: "Therefore, behold I send to you prophets, and wise men, and scribes; and some of them you will put to death and crucify, and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues, and persecute them from city to city" (Matt. xxiii. 40). And it was followed at once by the destruction of the city, the Temple, and the priesthood, as the prophecy ran, "Behold your house shall
be left to you desolate." The position of the High Priest in this last period of Israelitic history, the forty years which elapsed from the day of Pentecost to the destruction of the city and Temple, represents him most vividly as the guardian, judge, and mouthpiece of a religion which, though national, had colonies in all parts of the world, and in which not only the central seat of the worship and the country of Judea, but the colonies also, in whatever part of the world they might be situated, acknowledged his spiritual jurisdiction. This privilege was given by Julius Caesar, as to the Roman empire, and continued by Augustus. It is of much moment to understand the history of the first forty years of the Christian Church.
[Pg 80] 4. So completely had the high priesthood created by Moses, and the whole system of worship, sacrifices, rites, and ceremonies which it presided over and guarded, fulfilled the purpose for which it was created. It presented in all its parts a type and a prophecy of Christ and His kingdom--a type and a prophecy which through fifteen hundred years of action and suffering had wrought itself out in the heart of a people who, now deprived of their civil, but enjoying a spiritual, independence, lay scattered through the whole world, ready to receive the spiritual kingdom. Through all Gentiledom the sacerdotal authority had become, by its corruption of the high truths of religion, the serf or minion of the Civil Power, but to the Jews the worship of their God was in its own nature supreme, and did not admit of interference even from that power which they acknowledged to rule absolutely in temporal dominion. The same scribes and pharisees and people who cried out before the Roman governor, "We have no king but Caesar," were ready
a few years afterwards to sacrifice their lives rather than admit into Jerusalem a statue of the Emperor Caligula, which seemed to
them an impugnment of their religious law. And the Jewish people during the years of our Lord's teaching and ministry were looking for their Messias, and when they should acknowledge