of man; but in which, under the Divine government, all these providences, inexplicable as they are to our finite understandings, will be ultimately found to have worked together for good. But one thing is certain, that if death is the termination of the conscious existence of man, and if after death all sleep alike the sleep of unconsciousness, men, as individuals, are not rewarded or punished according to their deeds. What, however, if there be a God who is a moral being, is the inference from this? Not that He is indifferent to sin and holiness, to virtue and vice, but that, in the words of the apostle, "He has appointed a day in the which he will judge the world in righteousness," when all the inequalities of the present state of things will be redressed, and He will reward and punish men in accordance with the strictest principles of justice, holiness, mercy, and love; when, although clouds and darkness are in his present visible dispensations round about Him, it will be seen that righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His throne. As we shall prove hereafter, the present imperfection of the moral government of the world forms the strongest reason which we possess, independently of a revelation, for believing that our conscious existence will not terminate at death.

CHAPTER III.

THE SAME SUBJECT AS SET FORTH IN THE SCRIPTURES OF THE OLD AND THE NEW TESTAMENT.

THAT various utterances of the writers of the Old Testament in connection with this subject abound in difficulties, is unquestionable. Many of them ascribe to God the attributes of justice, holiness, mercy, and goodness in the most unqualified terms; others, not less numerous, seem to the ordinary student to affirm the contrary, Before I enter on their consideration, I must invite the reader's careful attention to the following all-important facts :

I. The Scriptures of the Old Testament nowhere profess to be the record of a single revelation, nor is this anywhere claimed for them by the writers of the New. On the contrary, the New Testament affirms that they contain the records of various revelations, "spoken unto the fathers in the prophets, by divers portions and in divers manners. "It is also obvious that they are addressed to men under a great variety of circumstances, on which their bearing is immediate and direct, but which have long since passed away. Consequently the bearing of such utterances is only indirect on Christian times.

II. These revelations are affirmed by our Lord to be only imperfect revelations of the Divine character and will, and

As a rule, the quotations in this work, from both the Old and the New Testament, are from the Revised Version.

He tells us expressly that so imperfect were they compared with the revelation made by Himself, that the greatest prophets and kings of the old dispensation had desired to see the things which His disciples saw, and had not seen them, and to hear the things which they heard, and had not heard them; and that although John the Baptist was greater than the greatest of the prophets of that dispensation, yet he that was little in the kingdom of God was greater than John.

III. Our Lord expressly affirms that there are precepts in the Old Testament which are not absolutely good in themselves, but are accommodations to the imperfect moral condition of the times, and that even the teaching of the Decalogue is so far imperfect that to enable it to realise the true ideal of morality it requires to be supplemented by His own; and that this is likewise true of the teaching of the prophets. He came to fulfil both," i.e. to realise the ideal which underlay them. (Matt. v. 11.)

IV. An overwhelming majority of the utterances of the Old Testament, its threatenings and its promises, are addressed to men not in their individual but in their national capacity. The reason of this is, as Professor Mozley has pointed out in his work entitled "Ruling Ideas in the Early Ages," that in those times the nation, the tribe, and its chief counted for everything, and the individual for little or nothing. Thus the individuality of the wife was swallowed up in that of the husband, of the child in the parent, of the slave in his master; the rights of individuals. as distinct from those of the families, tribes, or nations of which they formed a part, being scarcely recognised. Attention to this fact will help to explain many of the difficulties with which large portions of the Old Testament are attended, especially its narratives of wholesale slaughters without one word of censure or rebuke, which are SO startling to the Christian reader. The truth is that the

moral sentiment of these primitive times saw nothing wrong in them, but only what was a matter of ordinary practice. Let it be observed, however, that this imperfect appreciation of the rights of the individual was no peculiarity of the Hebrew race, but was nearly co-extensive with the ancient world. It was deeply impressed on Roman law and, through its agency, has been the means of transmitting not a few evils to times comparatively modern.

V. The revelations of which these Scriptures are the record are of an extremely fragmentary character, and are for the most part addressed to a single nation. The earlier ones are also accommodated to low forms of human thought and to imperfect conceptions of the character of God and of moral obligation; but the subsequent ones advance through a succession of gradual stages to more worthy conceptions of both, until they culminate in the person, work and teaching of Jesus Christ. This being so, the books of the Old Testament are, from a Christian point of view, of very unequal value. It is remarkable that in two of them the name of God is not once mentioned.

VI. The historical books constitute the remains of a far larger body of literature which has now perished, but which their authors repeatedly refer to as their authorities for not a few of the facts which they narrate. They do this precisely in the same manner as other historians are in the habit of doing, when they are not eyewitnesses of the events which they record. Further, of not one of the historical books do we know the name of the author with anything approaching to certainty, nor does the author of any one of them make a claim for superhuman guidance in the composition of his work.

VII. The Scriptures of the Old Testament prove beyond the possibility of question that their authors possessed very varied degrees of enlightenment. This is proved by the fact that they at one time apply to God some of the loftiest con

ceptions of which the human mind is capable, and at others the lower, and I might almost say the animal, passions of man. Nor is the same writer always consistent in this respect, for we not unfrequently find in the same book the loftiest conceptions and the baser passions of man attributed to the Most High. When this is the case, the writer, in attributing such passions to God, must have thought it necessary for the sake of his readers to clothe his utterances in language derived from the current religious and moral conceptions of his day. I will quote a few of these contrasted utterances for the purpose of making my meaning plain.

In Numbers xxiii. 19, Balaam is represented as uttering the following exalted truth :

"God is not a man that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?" But in Genesis vi. 6, we read

"And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart." And in 1 Sam. xv. 35," And Samuel mourned for Saul, and the Lord repented that he had made Saul King over Israel." And in Ezekiel xiv. 9, "And if the prophet be deceived, and speaketh a word, I the Lord have deceived that prophet." And in Micaiah's vision, the Lord is represented as saying to the spirit who offers to go forth and be a lying spirit in the mouth of Ahab's prophets, "Thou shalt entice him, and prevail also. Go forth and do so."

Jeremiah thus writes respecting God's omnipresence

"Am I a God at hand, and not a God afar off? saith the Lord. Can Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him? saith the Lord. Do not I fill heaven and earth? saith the Lord." (Jer. xxiii. 23, 24.)

Similarly grand is the description of His universal pre