CHAPTER XIV.

RELATIONS OF JESUS WITH THE PAGANS AND THE SAMARITANS.

As a consequence of these principles, Jesus contemned all religion which was not of the heart. The foolish practices of the devotees, the exterior rigorism, which trusted to formality for salvation, had in him a mortal enemy. He cared little for fasting. He preferred forgiving an injury to sacrifice. The love of God, charity and reciprocal forgiveness, were his whole law. Nothing could be less priestly. The priest, by virtue of his office, ever advocates public sacrifice, of which he is the 131appointed minister; he discourages private prayer, which is a means of dispensing with his office. We should seek in vain in the Gospel for one religious rite recommended by Jesus. Baptism to him was only of secondary importance; and as to prayer, he prescribes nothing, except that it must come from the heart. As is always the case, many thought to substitute the good-will of feeble souls for genuine love of goodness, and imagined they could gain the kingdom of heaven by saying to him, “Rabbi, Rabbi,” but he rebuked them, and proclaimed that his religion consisted in doing good. He often quoted the passage in Isaiah, “This people honour me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.”

The Sabbath was the principal point upon which was raised the whole edifice of Pharisaic scruples and subtleties. This ancient and excellent institution had become a pretext for the miserable disputes of casuists, and a source of a thousand superstitious beliefs. It was believed that nature observed it; all intermittent sources were accounted “Sabbatical.” This was, moreover, the point upon which Jesus most delighted in defying his adversaries. He openly violated the Sabbath, and only replied by subtle raillery to the reproaches that were heaped upon him. For a still stronger reason he despised a host of modern observances, which tradition had added to the Law, and which on that very account were dearer than any other to the devotees. Ablutions, and the too subtle distinctions between things pure and impure, found in him a pitiless opponent. “There is nothing from without a man,” said he, “that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man.” The Pharisees, who were the propagators of these mummeries, were the target for all his attacks. He accused them of 132exceeding the Law, of inventing impracticable precepts, in order to create occasions of sin in man: “Blind leaders of the blind,” said he, “take care lest ye also fall into the ditch.” “O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.”

He was not sufficiently acquainted with the Gentiles to think of founding anything lasting upon their conversion. Galilee contained a great number of Pagans, but, as it appears, no public and organised worship of false gods. Jesus could see this worship displayed in all its splendour in the country of Tyre and Sidon, at Cæsarea Philippi and in the Decapolis, but he paid little attention to it. In him we never find the wearisome Jewish pedantry of his time, nor those declamations against idolatry so familiar to his co-religionists from the time of Alexander, and which fill, for instance, the book of “Wisdom.” That which struck him in the Pagans was not their idolatry, but their servility. The young Jewish democrat agreeing on this point with Judas the Gaulonite, admitting no master but God, was hurt at the honours with which they surrounded the persons of sovereigns, and the mendacious titles frequently given to them. With this exception, in the greater number of instances in which he comes in contact with Pagans, he shows towards them great indulgence; sometimes he professes to conceive more hope of them than of the Jews. The kingdom of God is to be transferred to them. “When the lord, therefore, of the vineyard cometh, what will he do unto these husbandmen? He will miserably destroy those wicked men, and will let out his vine-yard unto other husbandmen, which shall render him the fruits in their seasons.” Jesus adhered so much the more to this idea, as the conversion of the 133Gentiles was, according to Jewish notions, one of the surest signs of the advent of the Messiah. In his kingdom of God he represents, as seated at a feast, by the side of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, men come from the four winds of heaven, whilst the lawful heirs of the kingdom are rejected. Sometimes, it is true, there is to be found, in the commands he gives to his disciples, an entirely contrary tendency: he seems to recommend them to preach salvation to the orthodox Jews only; he speaks of Pagans in a manner conformable to the prejudices of the Jews. But we must remember that the disciples, whose narrow minds did not lend themselves to this supreme indifference for the privileges of the sons of Abraham, may have given the instruction of their master the bent of their own ideas. Besides, it is very possible that Jesus may have vacillated on this point; just as Mahomet speaks of the Jews in the Koran, sometimes in the most honourable manner, sometimes with extreme harshness, according as he hoped or not to win their favour. Tradition, in fact, ascribes to Jesus two entirely opposite rules of proselytism, which he may have practised in turn: “He that is not against us is on our part.” “He that is not with me is against me.” Impassioned contention involves almost necessarily these sorts of contradictions.

It is certain that he numbered amongst his disciples many men whom the Jews designated “Hellenes.” This term had in Palestine divers meanings. Sometimes it designated the Pagans; sometimes the Greek-speaking Jews dwelling among the Pagans; sometimes men of Pagan origin converted to Judaism. It was probably in this last category of Hellenes that Jesus found sympathy. The affiliation with Judaism had numerous degrees; but the proselytes always remained in a state of inferiority 134as compared with the Jew by birth. The former were called “proselytes of the gate,” or “men fearing God,” and were subject to the precepts of Noah, and not to those of Moses. This very inferiority was unquestionably the cause which drew them to Jesus, and gained them his favour.

It was in the same manner that he treated the Samaritans. Surrounded like a small island, by the two great provinces of Judaism (Judæa and Galilee), Samaria formed in Palestine a kind of enclosure in which was preserved the ancient worship of Gerizim, closely related and rivalling that of Jerusalem. This poor sect, which had neither the genius nor the perfect organisation of Judaism, properly so called, was treated by the Jerusalemites with extreme harshness. They placed them on the same footing with Pagans, but hated them more. Jesus, from a spirit of opposition, was well disposed towards them. He often preferred the Samaritans to the orthodox Jews. If, on the other hand, he seems to forbid his disciples from going to preach to them, reserving his gospel for the Israelites proper, this was no doubt a precept dictated by special circumstances, to which the apostles have attached too absolute a meaning. Sometimes, in fact, the Samaritans received him badly, because they supposed him to be imbued with the prejudices of his co-religionists; in like manner as in our days the European free-thinker is regarded as an enemy by the Mussulman, who always believes him to be a fanatical Christian. Jesus knew how to rise above these misunderstandings. He had many disciples at Shechem, and he passed there at least two days. On one occasion he meets with gratitude and true piety from a Samaritan only. One of his most beautiful parables is that of the man injured on the way to Jericho. A priest passes by and sees him, but goes on 135his way; a Levite also passes, but does not stop; a Samaritan has compassion on him, approaches, and pours oil into his wounds, and binds them up. Jesus argues hence that true brotherhood is established amongst men by charity, and not by religious tenets. The “neighbour” who in Judaism was limited to the co-religionist was in his estimation the man who has pity on his fellow without distinction of sect. Human brotherhood in its widest sense abounds in all his teaching.

These ideas, which beset Jesus on his leaving Jerusalem, found vivid expression in an anecdote which has been preserved in regard to his return. The route from Jerusalem into Galilee passes Shechem at a distance of about half an hour's walk, at the opening of the valley commanded by Mounts Ebal and Gerizim. This route was in general shunned by the Jewish pilgrims, who preferred journeying by the long detour through Peræa rather than expose themselves to the ill-treatment of the Samaritans, or have to ask anything of them. It was forbidden to eat and drink with them; for it was an axiom of certain casuists that “a piece of Samaritan bread is the flesh of swine.” When they followed this route, provisions were always laid up beforehand; yet it was rarely they could avoid scuffles and ill-treatment. Jesus shared neither these scruples nor these fears. Arrived, by this route, at the point whence the valley of Shechem opens on the left, he felt fatigued, and stopped near a well. The Samaritans were then as now in the habit of giving to the different spots of their valley names drawn from patriarchal reminiscences. They called this well the well of Jacob; it was probably the same that is called even up to this day Bir-Iakoub. The disciples entered the valley and went to the city to buy provisions; Jesus sat by the side of the well, having Gerizim in front of him.

It was about noon, and a woman of Shechem came to draw water. Jesus asked of her to drink. which excited great astonishment in the woman, the Jews generally forbidding all intercourse with the Samaritans. Won by the conversation of Jesus, the woman recognising in him a prophet, and anticipating reproaches about her worship, she took up speech first. “Sir,” said she, “our fathers worshipped in this mountain, and ye say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, believe me, the hour cometh when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father. But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth.”

The day on which he uttered this saying, he was in reality Son of God. He uttered for the first time the sentence upon which will repose the edifice of eternal religion. He founded the pure worship, of all ages, of all lands, that which all elevated souls will embrace until the end of time. Not only was his religion on this day the best religion of humanity, it was the absolute religion; and if other planets have inhabitants endowed with reason and morality, their religion cannot be different from that which Jesus proclaimed near Jacob's well. Man has not been able to hold to it; for we can attain the ideal but for a moment. This sentiment of Jesus has been a bright light amidst gross darkness; it has taken eighteen hundred years for the eyes of mankind (I ought rather to say for an infinitely small portion of mankind) to become accustomed to it. But the light will grow into the full day, and, after having traversed all the circles of error, mankind will come back to this sentiment and regard it as the immortal expression of its faith and its hopes.