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whose image he is made. Man understands God only as far as he understands himself. What he does not know or feel intellectually, morally, or spiritually, in his own personality, he will not be able to ascribe in its infinity to God. While he seeks and loves and fears power only, God will be infinite power; intelligence only, God will be infinite intelligence; justice and truth, God will be all these raised to their highest power; goodness, mercy, gentleness, holiness, then these exalted to the utmost stretch of feeling and thought. And this is no hypothesis, but describes the history of God's revelations of himself. We may consider them as three, matching the three great historic periods, and the threefold nature of man in the order of its natural unfolding. Among these we do not reckon that original revelation of God, made in man's very nature, the condition, as it is the constant criterion and criticism, of all the others, a revelation which is alike old and new, uniting all the other revelations together, and perhaps really being that word, or supreme reason, which is the common basis of the divine Spirit and the human soul.

The three great revelations of God are, first, the Patriarchal, or ante-Mosaic; second, the Prophetic; and, third, the Apostolic, calling them after the names of the orders of persons through whom they were made: and these three revelations, as we shall see on examination, accommodated themselves in their order to the capacities and developments of the human

creature.

Contrary to the superficial view, man is, first, a creature of imagination, crude, but vast and vigorous; next, a creature of conscience; last, a creature of affections. For this reason, poetry is older than prose, justice older than mercy, law older than gospel.

I. The first revelation was, accordingly, a revelation which addressed the imagination, and was designed to make known to man as much of God as could be received through that faculty. We call it the Patriarchal revelation. It proclaimed God a person and a unit, but was principally engaged in establishing his superiority to all other gods, his awful and absolute authority. It did not concern itself much with his

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justice and goodness, or indeed with his character at all. That was not the thing the world needed most. It needed to bow itself before an awful Will, a Being so great, that his very greatness made Right. What He did was right because He did it. In an age of absolutism, of necessary concession to the strongest, an age of ignorance, both of laws of nature and laws of mind, when even the on-goings of the external world were attributed to deific caprice, we need not wonder that Jehovah was revealed as only the most absolute, the most jealous, the most arbitrary, of beings. This was the form most likely to win reverence, and indeed the only form in which the urgent wants of the human soul could be met. The God of Abraham, the God of the patriarchs, is therefore a God of mystery. He speaks in dark enigmas. He draws into himself the shuddering fears and hopes of a superstitious age. He meets the needs of wonder and awe and mystery. He works out his pleasure through solemn riddles. He is thus more attractive to the Oriental mind, by degrees, than their own false gods, because even more absolute, fatal, and invisible. He will have no name, but be known only as the "I am;" the self-existent, only, and self-sufficient monarch of the universe.

Let us remember, that, in those early days, questions of conscience were very little agitated, and matters of affection were by no means raised to the importance which the refinements of Christian life have given them. The imagination, the fears, the vague longings and dreads, of our nature, made that part of humanity alike its strongest and its weakest side. There only would it listen or could it learn. There only was it harassed and distressed; and we can well imagine the vast superiority which at once clothed the patriarchs, when their imaginations no longer wandered vaguely and fearfully from Baal to Belial, from Astaroth to the sun-god, but settled into a fixed awe and subjection to Jehovah the Almighty.

II. Next came the Prophetic revelation, including the Mosaic dispensation and its great prophets. The sense of right and wrong had now sufficiently awakened, under the political and social discipline of ages, to make it possible to address man as characteristically a moral being, an account

able creature. And to this end it became necessary that God should reveal himself, not merely as infinite power and absolute authority, but as the eternal Arbiter of right and wrong, as justice and truth, as law and retribution. This is the burden of the Mosaic revelation. Men by that time had begun to notice, that there was a method and a rule in the external universe; that nature herself was not caprice and chance, but law and order: and thus they were prepared to know, that there was not merely an arbitrary and absolute Ruler in heaven, but a Being who ruled by a plan, a moral order, and who himself loved and maintained justice and truth, hated and punished injustice and falsehood.

The emphasis which the Mosaic law laid upon positive duty has been of inconceivable importance in the development of humanity. The holiness of God, the great lesson of that dispensation, carried the Jewish people at once far beyond all contemporary nations, and made them the necessary medium of true civilization to the whole future. The patriarchs had learned God's being and power: the prophets learned his righteousness. How difficult a lesson to learn it was, how slow and severe the discipline of those it came to, we shall understand if we remember the steady evasions to which the essential and intrinsic significance of the law was subjected; how ritualism was honored as the substitute and shadow of righteousness, and external legality put for internal obedience. But, through all forms and rites, conscience was struggling into activity, and God was revealing his real holiness. The stiff-necked and crooked generation was continually suffering, and understood that it was suffering, the consequences of its moral perversity; and the tendency of the Mosaic law to establish absolute and not arbitrary rules of duty, a real and not a ritual consciousness of guilt, a true dutifulness and not a mere legal purity, is evinced in the sacred literature of that people, which is one long burst of eloquent, solemn, and august protest against misinterpretation and perversion of their own law.

No one can understand the dignified object of the Mosaic dispensation, without including in it the writings of the prophets. And it is only fair to the Jewish religion to acknowledge, that

it naturally flowered into the devout and tender strains of David, and the spiritual and searching exhortations, reproofs, and aspirations of Isaiah and Ezekiel.

The spirituality of God, his essential moral perfection and excellency, his goodness and general Fatherhood, were worked out by the prophets in a most extraordinary and perfect manner. The non-essential character of forms and ceremonies, too, was never more plainly taught than by all the prophets. Trust in God's wisdom, goodness, and justice, his mercy and truth, is commended with an earnestness and strength of faith which to-day we continue to draw upon in our neediest hours.

God is revealed in the Jewish prophetic books plainly, and he never can be revealed more eloquently or impressively, as the God of truth, justice, goodness, mercy, as a spiritual Being, impartial without arbitrariness, cruelty, or indifference: and there the revelation stops.

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III. But why should it not stop there? what remains to be known? what does the human soul need more than to know,-1. That God is, and that he is infinite in power and might and wisdom, all powerful to protect his people? 2. That he is just, holy, good, and wise; loves the good, hates the bad only; and desires only to see truth, justice, and mercy prevail among his children? Cannot the human soul rest in a faith like this a pure and high and holy and devout theism? Certainly it can rest there for a while. It did rest there for ages, and it were folly and wickedness to deny that some of the noblest, the most unselfish and sublime of all God's children had that faith only, and gloried in it; and, to as many as received that faith, gave he power to become the sons of God. To as many as receive it now, it gives a like power; and we have no sympathy whatever with the odious associations which vulgarize and take away the proper sanctity that belongs to a pure theism. Moses was a theist, David and Isaiah were theists; and those who make no distinction between theists and atheists ought to make none between light and darkness, right and wrong, since one are believers in one God, and the others are believers in none.

It is due, however, to a proper and candid explanation of this term to say, that theism has acquired its evil repute, not for what it believes, but for what it denies; that, denying Christianity, it naturally falls under the reproach of believers in Christianity, but not for believing in God. It is important to dwell a moment on this point, because theism has very much changed its character in our day, from a negative to a positive thing, from denying Christ to affirming God; and, as we are likely to have an extensive school of earnest theists, made up of scientific and rationalistic parties, men devoutly affirming and worshipping the only God, but denying the importance, or the miraculous claims, or the actual addition, of Christianity, it is well we should know that they are entitled to the respect which belongs to the devout Jews, and that it does not follow that they are irreligious or unworshipful, however unfortunate and unwise we may think them to be.

But, we ask again, what was there to be added to the revelation of God, as good, holy, just, merciful; a Father who pitieth his children? Nothing, if man be only a creature of imagination and conscience; but much, very much, if he be also a creature, still more characteristically, of the affections. That man is not, in the order of his unfolding, either firstly or secondly, a creature in whom the affections predominate, is very obvious from the history of opinions in this world. The first we hear of our race is always as tribes or communities, not as individual man and woman. The passions are rife enough, but the affections shallow and diffused. The individual is merged in the community. Then God communicates, if at all, with the high-priest for the people. His relation is with the social and communized man, not with the private person: he is too insignificant to be singled out, nor does he single himself out for attention. Therefore offences are visited not scrupulously on the offender, but on any of his people. As in our Indian tribes, if a man is killed, vengeance lies not against the murderer merely, but any one of his tribe. This it is that makes death such a trifle among rude peoples: they learn to defy or scorn it, because it is always before them; and they make light

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