the designation 'Hebrews' was confined to the inhabitants of Judæa. The letter itself sufficiently shews that the Hebrews, to whom it is addressed, were Jewish converts to Christianity. Although the writer was of the school of St Paul, and adopts some of his phrases, and accords with him in his general tone of thought, yet throughout this Epistle he ignores the very existence of the Gentiles to an extent which would have been hardly possible in any work of "the Apostle of the Gentiles" (Acts xviii. 6; Gal. ii. 7, 9; 2 Tim. i. 11), and least of all when he was handling one of his own great topics-the contrast between Judaism and Christianity. The word Gentiles (vn) does not once occur nor are the Gentiles in any way alluded to. The writer constantly uses the expression "the people" (ii. 17; iv. 9; v. 3; vii. 5, 11, 27; viii. 10; ix. 7, 19; x. 30; xi. 25; xiii. 12), but in every instance he means "the chosen people," nor does he give the slightest indication that he is thinking of any nation but the Jews. We do not for a moment imagine that he doubted the call of the Gentiles. The whole tendency of his arguments, the Pauline character of many of his thoughts and expressions, even the fundamental theme of his Epistle, that Judaism as such—Judaism in all its distinctive worship and legislation—was abrogated, are sufficient to shew that he would have held with St Paul that 'all are not Israel who are of Israel,' and that 'they who are of the faith are blessed with the faithful Abraham.' But while he undoubtedly held these truths,-for otherwise he could not have been a Christian at all, and still less a Pauline Christian,— his mind is not so full of them as was the mind of St Paul. It is inconceivable that St Paul, who regarded it as his own special Gospel to proclaim to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ (Eph. iii. 4-8), should have written a long Epistle in which the Gentiles do not once seem to cross the horizon of his thoughts; and this would least of all have been possible in a letter addressed "to the Hebrews." The Jews regarded St Paul with a fury of hatred and suspicion which we find faintly reflected in his Epistles and in the Acts (Acts xxi. 21; 1 Thess. ii. 15; 2 Cor. xi. 24; Phil. iii. 2). Even the

Jewish Christians looked on the most characteristic part of his teaching with a jealousy and alarm which found frequent expression both in words and deeds. It would have been something like unfaithfulness in St Paul, it would have been an unworthy suppression of his intensest convictions, to write to any exclusively 'Hebrew' community without so much as distantly alluding to that phase of the Gospel which it had been his special mission to set forth. The case with the writer of this Epistle is very different. He was not only a Jewish Christian, but a Jewish Christian of the Alexandrian school. We shall again and again have occasion to see that he had been deeply influenced by the thoughts of Philo. Now Philo, liberal as were his philosophical views, was a thoroughly faithful Jew. He never for a moment forgot his nationality. He was so completely entangled in Jewish particularism that he shews no capacity for understanding the universal prophecies of the Old Testament. His LOGOS, or WORD, so far as he assumes any personal distinctness, is essentially and preeminently a Jewish deliverer. Judaism formed for Philo the nearer horizon beyond which he hardly cared to look. Similarly in this Epistle the writer is so exclusively occupied by the relations of Judaism to Christianity, that he does not even glance aside to examine any other point of difference between the New Covenant and the Old. What he sees in Christianity is simply a perfected Judaism. Mankind is to him the ideal Hebrew. Even when he speaks of the Incarnation he speaks of it as ‘a taking hold' not 'of humanity' but 'of the seed of Abraham' (ii. 16).

In this Epistle then he is writing to Jewish Christians, and he deals exclusively with the topics which were most needful for the particular body of Jewish Christians which he had in view. All that we know of their circumstances is derived from the letter itself. They like the writer himself, had been converted by the preaching of Apostles, ratified 'by signs, and portents, and various powers, and distributions of the Holy Spirit' (ii. 3, 4). But some time had elapsed since their conversion (v. 12). Some of their original teachers and leaders were already dead (xiii. 7). They had meanwhile been subjected to persecutions, severe

indeed (x. 32-34), but not so severe as to have involved martyrdom (xii. 4). But the afflictions to which they had been subjected, together with the delay of the Lord's Coming (x. 36, 37), had caused a relaxation of their efforts (xii. 12), a sluggishness in their spiritual intelligence (vi. 12), a dimming of the brightness of their early faith (x. 32), a tendency to listen to new doctrines (xiii. 9, 17), a neglect of common worship (x. 25), and a tone of spurious independence towards their teachers (xiii. 7, 17, 24), which were evidently creating the peril of apostasy. Like their ancestors of old, the Hebrew Christians were beginning to find that the pure spiritual manna palled upon their taste. In their painful journey through the wilderness of life they were beginning to yearn for the pomp and boast and ease of Jewish externalism, just as their fathers had hankered after the melons and fleshpots of their Egyptian servitude. They were casting backward glances of regret towards the doomed city which they had left (xiii. 12). That the danger was imminent is clear from the awful solemnity of the appeals which again and again the writer addresses to them (ii. 1-4; iii. 7—19; vi. 4—12; x. 26—31; xii. 15—17), and which, although they are usually placed in juxtaposition to words of hope and encouragement (iii. 6, 14; vi. 11; x. 39; xii. 18-24; &c.), must yet be reckoned among the sternest passages to be found in the whole New Testament.

A closer examination of the Epistle may lead us to infer that this danger of apostasy-of gradually dragging their anchor and drifting away from the rock of Christ (ii. 1)-arose from two sources; namely (1) the influence of some one prominent member of the community whose tendency to abandon the Christian covenant (iii. 12) was due to unbelief, and whose unbelief had led to flagrant immorality (xii. 15, 16); and (2) from a tendency to listen to the boastful commemoration of the glories and privileges of Judaism, and to recoil before the taunt that Christians were traitors and renegades, who without any compensatory advantage had forfeited all right to participate in the benefits of the Levitic ritual and its atoning sacrifices (xiii. 10, &c.).

In the communities of Jewish Christians there must have

been many whose faith and zeal—not kindled by hope, not supported by patience, not leavened with absolute sincerity, not maintained by a progressive sanctification-tended to wax dim and cold. And if such men chanced to meet some unconverted Jew, burning with all the patriotism of a zealot, and inflated with all the arrogance of a Pharisee, they would be liable to be shaken by the appeals and arguments of such a fellow-countryman. He would have asked them how they dared to emancipate themselves from a law spoken by Angels? He would have reminded them of the heroic grandeur of Moses; of the priestly dignity of Aaron; of the splendour and significance of the Temple Service; of the disgrace incurred by ceremonial pollution; of the antiquity and revealed efficacy of the Sacrifices; of the right to partake of the sacred offerings; above all, of the grandeur and solemnity of the Great Day of Atonement. He would dwell much on the glorious ritual when the High Priest passed into the immediate presence of God in the Holiest Place, or when "he put on the robe of honour and was clothed with the perfection of glory, when he went up to the holy altar, and made the garment of holiness honourable," and "the sons of Aaron shouted, and sounded the silver trumpets, and made a great noise to be heard for a remembrance before the Most High" (Ecclus. 1. 5—16). He would have asked them how they could bear to turn their backs on the splendid history and the splendid hopes of their nation. He would have taunted them with leaving the inspired wisdom of Moses and the venerable legislation of Sinai for the teaching of a poor crucified Nazarene, whom all the Priests and Rulers and Rabbis had rejected. He would have contrasted the glorious Deliverer who should break in pieces the nations like a potter's vessel with the despised, and rejected, and accursed Sufferer-for had not Moses said "Cursed of God is every one who hangeth on a tree"?-whom they had been so infatuated as to accept for the Promised Messiah !

We know that St Paul was charged-charged even by Christians who had been converted from Judaism-with "apostasy from Moses" (Acts xxi. 21). So deep indeed was this feeling

that, according to Eusebius, the Ebionites rejected all his Epistles on the ground that he was "an apostate from the Law." Such taunts could not move St Paul, but they would be deeply and keenly felt by wavering converts exposed to the fierce flame of Jewish hatred and persecution at an epoch when there arose among their countrymen throughout the world a recrudescence of Messianic excitement and rebellious zeal. The object of this Epistle was to shew that what the Jews called "Apostasy from Moses" was demanded by faithfulness to Christ, and that apostasy from Christ to Moses was not only an inexcusable blindness but an all-but-unpardonable crime.

If such were the dangerous influences to which the Hebrew community here addressed was exposed, it would be impossible to imagine any better method of removing their perplexities, and dissipating the mirage of false argument by which they were being deceived, than that adopted by the writer of this Epistle. It was his object to demonstrate once for all the inferiority of Judaism to Christianity; but although that theme had already been handled with consummate power by the Apostle of the Gentiles, alike the arguments and the method of this Epistle differ from those adopted in St Paul's Epistles to the Galatians and the Romans.

The arguments of the Epistle are different. In the Epistles to the Galatians and the Romans St Paul, with the sledge-hammer force of his direct and impassioned dialectics, had shattered all possibility of trusting in legal prescriptions, and demonstrated that the Law was no longer obligatory upon Gentiles. He had shewn that the distinction between clean and unclean meats was to the enlightened conscience a matter of indifference; that circumcision was now nothing better than a physical mutilation; that the Levitic system was composed of "weak and beggarly elements;" that ceremonialism was a yoke with which the free converted Gentile had nothing to do; that we are saved by faith and not by works; that the Law was a dispensation of wrath and menace, introduced "for the sake of transgressions” (Gal. iii. 19; Rom. v. 20); that so far from being (as all the Rabbis asserted) the one thing on account of which the Universe had been created,