of this pile the genius of the nation, and laid at the feet of worthy builders the wealth of a people's resources. Each new master hand that wrought upon the structure bodied his own dream of what the work should be; and thus its parts took on most varied aspects, as of unlike and even incongruous designs. With a reverence for the human which saw nothing undivine in grinning gargoyles and grotesque shapes of dreamy fancy, each individual workman's free labor was left encrusted in the walls of Jehovah's temple. Yet when the structure was complete, the massive building stood a living whole; a composite indeed, but crystallizing around one dominating idea, rearing itself upon one inspiring thought; a work of most human handicraftsmen, yet solemn with the felt presence of the Most High; a Cathedral, into which scores of generations of the children of men have gathered, to bow down before the revelation there embodied-The Living God in Human History.

If we must name this work, let us call it, with De Wette, "The Theocratic Epic of the Israelites."

CHAPTER IV.

THE PRIMEVAL SAGAS.

GENESIS, the Book of the Beginnings, is the section of the five-fold book, or Pentateuch, which gives the origins of the Human Family, and of the Jewish race, as understood in Israel. What would we naturally look for in a book written among any other people, purporting to give similar accounts of the national origins and of the beginnings of the human race? We have such books, and from their contents we have come to expect, in all such early works, traditions of real historic personalities mantled in imaginative drapery ; stories of half-fabulous heroes, confounding individuals with tribes; poetical legends, seeming to be histories, but resolving themselves into naturemyths; and speculations concerning the origin of life upon the earth. Should we expect the Jewish people, so thoroughly human as they were, to form an exception to this general order? Such matter we ought to anticipate in a Hebrew book of originsand such matter, as we shall see presently, we find in it. But we should also expect these tradițions, legends, nature-myths and speculations to differ,

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in important respects, from those of other peoples. Each people has its own national characteristic, and Israel was "the a mission growing out thereof. people of religion"; a people made peculiarly sensitive to spiritual realities in their nature by God, and peculiarly educated by Providence in order to the development of this sensitiveness; so that at length, out of them might come the true religion, in the person of the holy Son of the Jewish Mary. We ought, then, to feel sure, even in the absence of data, that such a people had an exceptional ancestry ; that really great men were the fathers of the race, dowering it with its spiritual susceptibilities.

If the child be father to the man, there must have been among the ancestors of "the people of religion" beautiful and noble types of character; fine examples of the spiritual sensibility of childhood together with its intellectual simplicity, of the true feeling of religion co-existing with imperfect notions. concerning the Object of religion; men whose memories gave the outline which after ages might fill out, reverently, into real heroes of the soul. We should look, amid the usual growth of legend, for traces of their soulfulness. We ought to expect, when the mind of such a people turned back upon the national traditions, that its idea of the true use of history would show itself in breathing into the legends of its patriarchs a peculiarly noble and beautiful spirit; in trying to fashion out of the

memories of its ancestors religious heroes who yet were true to human nature as it is; and in picturing for all ages the rarest stories of noble men, such as should serve to feed the life of piety in all who read them. It should seem natural to us that in casting into poetic forms its deep thoughts of the origin of nature and of man, such a people would slough off most of the merely mythic tendency of other peoples, the tendency to read the secrets of nature. and of man imaginatively rather than spiritually and ethically; and that, enabled by the Divine Spirit, their seers would give us noble prose-poems, full of deep and searching truth, of truth which really interprets the great problems of nature and of man.

Such light as this we should hope to find in the Hebrew Genesis; because of which it has gained its place of honor among our sacred books. This light -but not any light of mere historical accuracy where there were no data for such accuracy, nor any light of scientific accuracy where was scarcely any science. The spiritual nature of the Hebrews won, through their earnest grappling with the moral problems of life, the religious truths which they have left for us in their Genesis; and our intellectual natures must, through hard study, win the historical and scientific truths which our age is seeking. Such is the plan of our schooling on earth.

Thus coming to the study of Genesis we shall escape the troubles of those concerning whom the

Jewish Rabbi long ago said "He who reads Genesis literally is a fool;" and, seeing what vast vistas of history it opens, what mighty problems it handles, what grace is in its charming stories, what wisdom lies in its philosophy, what life divine breathes through its human heroes, we will say with Luther "Than Genesis nothing is more beautiful, nothing is more useful.”

Let us open our Book of the Beginnings and take a bird's-eye view of its contents. Genesis parts, to any careful reading, into two general divisions. Chapters i.-xi. are occupied with the primeval human history; chapters xii.-1. are occupied with primitive Hebrew history. Our ordinary Bibles often confuse the movement of the thought, by their arbitrary breaking up of the text into chapters and verses; on which account a paragraph Bible is preferable. Thus we find that more exactly the division occurs at verse 27 of chapter xi., which commences, "Now these are the generations of Terah." There the book forks from the main stream of human history into the branch of Jewish history, and occupies itself with the stories of the Hebrew Patriarchs.

Now this phrase "These are the generations of " is the same which occurs frequently through the book; having at times other shades of meaning, e.g. "These are the generations" (beginnings, origins) "of the heavens and of the earth," etc. The

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