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Looking back to the foot-note on the oriental idea of the hakim, as a mask politically assumed by Christ and the evangelists, under the conviction of its indispensableness to the free propagation of Christian philosophy, I am induced, for the sake of detaining the reader’s eye a little longer upon a matter so important in the history of Christianity, if only it may be regarded as true, to subjoin an extract from a little paper written by myself heretofore, but not published. I may add these two remarks, viz., first, that the attribution to St. Luke of this medical character, probably had its origin in the simple fact, that an assumption made by all the evangelists, and perhaps by all the apostles, had happened to attract more attention in him from merely local causes. One or two of the other apostles having pursued their labors of Propagandism under the avowed character of hakims, many others in the same region would escape special notice in that character, simply because, as men notoriously ready to plead it, they had not been challenged to do so by the authorities; whilst others, in regions where the government had not become familiar with the readiness to plead such a privilege as part of the apostolic policy, would be driven into the necessity of actually advancing the plea, and would thus (like St. Luke) obtain a traditionary claim to the medical title which in a latent sense had belonged to all, though all had not been reduced to the necessity of pleading it. Secondly, I would venture to suggest, that the Therapeutae, or healers, technically so called, who came forward in Egypt during the generation immediately succeeding to that of Christ, were neither more nor less than disguised apostles to Christianity, preaching the same doctrines essentially as Christ, and under the very same protecting character of hakims, but putting forward this character perhaps more prominently, or even retreating into it altogether, according to the increasing danger which everywhere awaited them from the hostile bigotry of expatriated Jews, as they gradually came to understand the true and anti-national views of those who called themselves Christians, or Nazarenes, or Galileans.

In short, abstracting altogether from the hatred to Christ, founded on eternal principles of the enmity between the worldly and the spiritual, and looking only to the political uneasiness amongst magistrates which accompanied the early footsteps of Christianity, one may illustrate it by the parallel feelings which in our own generation, amongst the Portuguese, for instance, have dogged the movements of free-masonry. We in England view this panic as irrational: and amongst ourselves it would be so; for British free-masonry conceals nothing worse than it professes. But, on the Continent, it became a mask for shrouding any or every system of anti-social doctrine, or, again, for playing into the hands of treason and conspiracy. There was always in the first place a reasonable fear of secret and perilous doctrines–Communism, for instance, under some modification, or rancorous Jacobinism. And secondly, suppose that for the present, or in the existing stage of the secret society, there really were no esoteric and mischievous doctrine propagated, there was at any rate the custom established of meeting together in secret, of corresponding by an alphabet of conventional signals, and of acting by an impenetrable organization, always applicable to evil purposes, even where it might not originally have been so applied. The machinery which binds together any secret society, as being always available for evil ends, must inevitably justify some uneasiness in all political authorities. And, under those circumstances, the public jealousy must have operated against the free movement of early Christianity: nothing could have disarmed it, except some counter-principle so managed, as to insure that freedom of public meetings which opened the sine qua non channel for the free propagation of religious truth. Such a counter-force was brought into play by Christ on that day when first he offered himself to Judea as a hakim, or popular physician. Under the shelter of that benign character, at one blow he overthrew an obstacle that would else infallibly have frozen the very element in which only any system of novel teaching could attempt to move. Most diseases were by the Jews invested with more or less of a supernatural character; and in no department of knowledge was the immediate illumination from above more signally presumed than in the treatment of diseases. A physician who was thus divinely guided in the practice of his art was a debtor to God and to his fellow-men for the adequate application of so heavenly a gift. And, if he could not honorably withdraw from the mission with which God had charged him, far less could politicians and magistrates under any allegation of public inconveniences presume to obstruct or to make of none effect the sublime mysteries of art and sagacity with which the providence of God had endowed an individual for the relief of suffering humanity; the hakim was a debtor to the whole body of his afflicted countrymen: but for that very reason he was also a creditor; a creditor entitled to draw upon the amplest funds of indulgence; and privileged to congregate his countrymen wherever he moved. Here opened suddenly a broad avenue to social intercourse, without which all communication for purposes of religious teaching would have been sealed against Christ. As a hakim, Christ obtained that unlimited freedom of intercourse with the populace, which, as a religious proselytizer, he never could have obtained. Here, therefore, and perhaps by the very earliest exemplification of the serpent’s wisdom and foresight engrafting itself upon the holy purposes of dovelike benignity, Christ kept open for himself (and for his disciples in times to come) the freedom of public communication, and the license of public meetings. Once announcing himself, and attesting his own mission as a hakim, he could not be rejected or thwarted as a public oracle of truth and practical counsel to human weakness. This explains, what else would have been very obscure, the undue emphasis which Christ allowed men to place upon his sanatory miracles. His very name in Greek, viz., Î�Î�σÎ�ς, presented him to men under the idea of the healer; but then, to all who comprehended his secret and ultimate functions, as a healer of unutterable and spiritual wounds. That usurpation, by which a very trivial function of Christ’s public ministrations was allowed to disturb and sometimes to eclipse far grander pretensions, carried with it so far an erroneous impression. But then, on the other hand, seventy-fold it redeemed that error, by securing (which nothing else could have secured) the benefit of a perpetual passport to the religious missionary: since, once admitted as a medical counsellor, the missionary, the hakim, obtained an unlimited right of intercourse. If medical advice, why not religious advice? And subsequently, by the continuance of the same medical gifts to the apostles and their successors, all exercised the same powers, and benefited by the same privileges as hakims.