3, God's voice is ever the same although it has not always been heard with the same distinctness. The Old Testament is a record of religious evolution — not of the whole of it, but of a particular section of it, a section of it which is of peculiar and exceptional importance to the world for two reasons. It is a history of the process by which a certain little Syrian tribe with a primitive religion, originally not very different from that of
1 R. J. Campbell.
HEBREWS I. I, 2 277
surrounding tribes, gradually came to see in their tribal Deity Jehovali the Creator and Kuler of heaven and earth, the one only true God, a God perfectly righteous, and delighting in righteous- ness. And that is a process absolutely unique in the history of the world. Isolated thinkers elsewhere had glimpses of the truth, but the Jews were the first great monotheistic people. That fact alone must for ever give to the Old Testament a unique and imperishable predominance among the religious literatures of the ancient world for all who believe in God, though we shall do well at the same time to insist very strongly on the fact that it is the ultimate result of the development, rather than its earliest stages, that differentiates it so strongly from other collections of sacred books.
^ Every part of the universe interlocks by subtle and delicate links with every other part. You cannot disturb the balance anywhere without sending a shock of disturbance through the whole system. Just as in some majestic Gothic minster the same idea repeats itself in bolder or slighter forms, so do the same great thoughts recur in tree and flower, in molecule and planet, in diatom and man. And all this because, if you penetrate to Nature's heart, you meet God. " Of him, and througli him, and to him, are all things." " There are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all." The unity that pervades Nature's temple is the result of its having originated from one mind, and having been effected by one hand — the mind and hand of God. This holds true of Scripture. What else could have led mankind to look upon these sixty-six tractlets as being so unmistakably related to each other, that they must be bound up together under a common cover? There has been something so unique in these books that they have always stood and fallen together. To disintegrate one had been to loose them all. Behef in one has led to belief in all. Their hands are linked and locked so tightly that where one goes all must follow. And though wise and clever men have tried their best, they have never been able to produce a single treatise containing that undefinable quality which gives these their mysterious oneness ; and to lack which is fatal to the claims of any book to be included with them, or to demand the special veneration and homage of mankind.^
^ Do I value the locket less because I know it is a human handiwork ? It is not the locket I care for. It is the picture of the beloved that is in the locket. It is not the frame and form
1 F. B. Meyer, The Way into the Holiest, 10.
278 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION
and structure of the book, but it is the God who dwells in the book that makes it dear to me — dwelling in Moses, in David, in Isaiah, manifesting Himself through their lives, in fragmentary ways, imperfect in conduct, imperfect in experience, imperfect in expression ; at last to show Himself in Jesus Christ our Lord, the only perfect Life, the only perfect Teacher, the only perfect manifestation of God, in either word or deed. He that did speak in fragmentary forms and utterances through the prophets hath spoken in these last days by His Son. Christ in the Bible makes the Bible sacred.^
II.
The Two Dispensations.
This nameless Apostle is addressing men who have been expecting the visible triumph of Christ as the long-looked-for Messiah, and who now find that they are suddenly called upon instead to sacrifice many of the traditions from which they and their country had drawn the best that was in them. The Scriptures which they had loved and studied, the cherished worship of the Temple, the ancient priesthood, the glorious ritual, the institutions which they could not but feel to have been divinely appointed — all these they were now for ever to resign ; and who can wonder if some of them seemed to falter at this terrible breach with their past life ? But here begins the con- solation of the Epistle. The past revelation, the writer tells them, was imperfect; it grew and varied in its fulness, but it never reached perfection ; now it was made perfect in Christ. Christ had superseded the past because all that was good in it was also, with much else, to be found in Him. Indeed, the highest value of that past as viewed from the standpoint of the present, lay in the fact that it had been the introduction to a new order of things. In Judaism every institution — the priesthood, the ritual, the Psalms, the Temple — had been rooted in an unfulfilled Christianity : in Judaism the day had been slowly dawning ; in Christ it had come. The day-star had risen in men's hearts, and those many night-stars of varying brightness were needed no longer.