types Humanity, freely thinking, freely worshiping, walking as the child of God-into which sonship the Elder Brother must ever lead the younger children.

(4) In the light of this essential Christianity the antagonism between it and other religions fades away. There is no longer any antithesis of true and false in human religion; there is only the distinction of perfect and imperfect. All religions, in so far as they are living, spiritual and progressive, are of God. Each ennobling aspiration, each purifying instinct and intuition, is an inspiration of the Eternal Spirit. Each truth leading man upward, each flash shining in the darkness of earth, is a beam of the Light which "lighteth every man that cometh into the world." The Word of God is heard in every tongue. The Christ cometh as the Son, sent after the servants of the Father. He denies nothing good in any teacher who has preceded him, among any of the nations of the earth-he interprets all truths of the Spirit, and fulfils all ideals of the children of God.

(5) In the light of this essential Christianity, the antithesis between religion and knowledge, between faith and reason, between the sacred and the secular, between the supernatural and the natural, is resolved into a correlation. Religion is the worshipful posture of all true knowledge and all noble life. Faith is reason's sight of realities beyond its power to resolve. The sacred is the secular grown conscious of its divineness. The supernatural is the natural, laying

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bare the soul of its order, revealing, in the shrine of law, an immanent God. "Conscious Law is King of kings." The Divine Personality, veiled in nature, is unveiled in man; and in the Perfect Man that revelation is of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Such in outline is the reconstruction of Christian Faith which is to follow the new reading of the Pentateuch.

VIII.

A master mind, far back in the dawn of Hebrew history, fashioned a rude shrine; and, dreaming of a nobler structure, passed away, with no more than the ground plans sketched for those he left behind him. The people who came after him looked with wonder and with awe upon his simple shrine, around which hallowed associations had gathered; and were content to add to it, bit by bit, as was found needful, in a loose, amorphous growth, which kept the name of the mighty master, whose primitive building was the centre of this straggling mass. At length the hour came when a worthier structure was desired. Another master arose, responsive to the instinct of a people, and a new building reared itself upon the site of the old shrine; preserving its original structure, as the walls of the most holy place in the grander temple of the later age. Successive epochs of creative power called to the development

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of this pile the genius of the nation, and laid at the feet of worthy builders the wealth of a people's reEach 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 origins— and such matter, as we shall see presently, we find in it. But we should also expect these traditions, 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 a mission growing out thereof. Israel was "the 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