are struck by the identity of that people with their descendants in the ghettos of modern Rome,
Frankfurt, and New York. Then they excited as much as they do now the mingled contempt and
wonder of the world; they were as remarkable then for contrasts of intellectual beauty and striking
ugliness, wretched poverty and princely wealth; they liked onions and garlic, and dealt in old
clothes, broken glass, and sulphur matches, but knew how to push themselves from poverty and
filth into wealth and influence; they were rigid monotheists and scrupulous legalists who would
strain out a gnat and swallow a camel; then as now they were temperate, sober, industrious, well
regulated and affectionate in their domestic relations and careful for the religious education of their
children. The majority were then, as they are now, carnal descendants of Jacob, the Supplanter, a
small minority spiritual children of Abraham, the friend of God and father of the faithful. Out of
this gifted race have come, at the time of Jesus and often since, the bitterest foes and the warmest
friends of Christianity.
Among that peculiar people Jesus spent his earthly life, a Jew of the Jews, yet in the highest
sense the Son of Man, the second Adam, the representative Head and Regenerator of the whole
race. For thirty years of reserve and preparation he hid his divine glory and restrained his own
desire to do good, quietly waiting till the voice of prophecy after centuries of silence announced,
in the wilderness of Judaea and on the banks of the Jordan, the coming of the kingdom of God, and
startled the conscience of the people with the call to repent. Then for three years he mingled freely
with his countrymen. Occasionally he met and healed Gentiles also, who were numerous in Galilee;
he praised their faith the like of which he had not found in Israel, and prophesied that many shall
come from the east and the west and shall sit down with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom
of heaven, while the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness.^174 He conversed
with a woman of Samaria, to the surprise of his disciples, on the sublimest theme, and rebuked the
national prejudice of the Jews by holding up a good Samaritan as a model for imitation.^175 It was
on the occasion of a visit from some "Greeks," shortly before the crucifixion, that he uttered the
remarkable prophecy of the universal attraction of his cross.^176 But these were exceptions. His
mission, before the resurrection, was to the lost sheep of Israel.^177
He associated with all ranks of Jewish society, attracting the good and repelling the bad,
rebuking vice and relieving misery, but most of his time he spent among the middle classes who
constituted the bone and sinew of the nation, the farmers and workingmen of Galilee, who are
described to us as an industrious, brave and courageous race, taking the lead in seditious political
movements, and holding out to the last moment in the defence of Jerusalem.^178 At the same time
they were looked upon by the stricter Jews of Judaea as semi-heathens and semi-barbarians; hence(^174) Matt. 8:5-13; 15:21-28; Luke 7:1-9.
(^175) John 4:5-42; Luke 10:30-37.
(^176) John 12:20-32
(^177) Matt. 10:5, 6; 15:14.
(^178) Josephus, Bell. Jud. III. c. 3, § 2: "These two Galilees, of so great largeness, and encompassed with so many nations of
foreigners, have been always able to make a strong resistance on all occasions of war; for the Galileans are inured to war from
their infancy, and have been always very numerous; nor hath the country ever been destitute of men of courage, or wanted a
numerous set of them: for their soil is universally rich and fruitful, and full of the plantations of trees of all sorts, insomuch that
it invites the most slothful to take pains in its cultivation by its fruitfulness: accordingly it is all cultivated by its inhabitants, and
no part of it lies idle. Moreover, the cities lie here very thick, and the very many villages there are so full of people, by richness
of their soil, that the very least of them contained above fifteen thousand inhabitants (?)."
A.D. 1-100.