durable riches and righteousness. My fruit is better than gold, yea than fine gold, and my revenue than choice silver. I walk in the way of righteousness in the midst of the paths of judgment. That I may cause those that love me to inherit substance, and that I may fill their treasuries.” 1

No ethic but one that is eudæmonistic can win the suffrages of the race. There is an instinct in man which tells him that the moral life is also the happy or the blessed life, that obedience to the laws of his nature or to the will of God should lead to well-being. The Hebrew regarded the path of the just as "the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day." In its love of life and in its confidence that the best was yet to be the Hebrew spirit was akin to the Christian. Other nations might look back to a Golden Age in the past. The Hebrew looked to the future.

But the cosmic value of the Old Testament conception of God was not the only one or the chief one. The Creator and Upholder of the Universe included within the fullness of His Infinite nature all essential human qualities. Yet it was not as Creator and Upholder of the world that He revealed Himself most fully in human-wise. It was as the Guide and Shepherd of Israel. It was on the stage of history that God was best revealed.

God was in the midst of His people, leading them to a city of habitation, which He had prepared for them; encouraging, controlling, directing them. "I taught Ephraim to go; I took them on my arms; but they knew not that I healed them." 3 "In all their affliction He was afflicted and the angel of His presence saved them; in His love and in His pity He redeemed them, and He bare them and carried them all the days of old." It was this human view of God, God as fulfilling human functions and ministering in human ways to His people, that gave the highest ethical significance to the religion of Israel. The High and Holy One inhabiting eternity dwelt also with the 2 Prov. iv. 18.

1 Prov. viii. 18-21.

3 Hosea xi. 3.

4 Is. lxiii. 9.

humble and the contrite. It was the Divine gentleness that made men great."

In this idea of God manifesting Himself in the redemption, direction and discipline of men the ethics of the Old Testament prepared the way for the ethics of the Gospel. The Will of God was the law of life for His people. Hebrew, like Christian, ethics are definitely based on the Divine will, or rather upon the Divine grace, which is God's will in contact with human need. It is hardly necessary to illustrate this essentially Hebrew conception of the Divine Grace as the ground of the moral life. It meets us so frequently. And because of its resemblance to the Gospel its importance is very great. More completely than in any pre-Christian system of ethics the moral life was based upon the will of God, not simply as regulative, but as redeeming. Religions of redemption are to be found elsewhere. All religions, as Tiele has said, are in some sense religions of redemption; though the ideas and methods and effects of that redemption vary enormously. At one time it is from the hostile forces of the natural world that man seeks to be delivered, from pain and sickness and death, from famine or earthquake or pestilence. At another it is from matter itself. At another from finiteness. another from public or private foes. At another from the lower elements in one's moral constitution. At one time deliverance is sought from the past; at another from the present; at another from the future. The conception of the evil varies indefinitely; but redemption is the universal cry of the human heart.

At

The Biblical view embraces more than one of the foregoing. Men cried to God for deliverance from their enemies, whether private or national, from plague, and pestilence, and death, and Sheol. But the deepest longing of all, and one which may sometimes be detected at the base of the others, is the longing for the favour of God, and the desire to come into fellowship with Him. That which destroys the sense of the Divine favour is the greatest evil. 1 Isa. lvii. 15. 2 Ps. xviii. 35.

Reconciliation and obedience are seen to be the way of blessedness. God himself is the Chief Good: His will is Duty: His likeness the all-satisfying interpretation of human virtue.

God reveals Himself, His will, His character, where men can best understand it, in human history. What God is in Himself is a question which seems hardly to occur to the Hebrew seers. It is God in His relation to man, God as He appears in the lives of individuals and of societies, that chiefly concerns them. Religion is not speculation but experience, not contemplation but fellowship. Revelation is not the lifting by man of the veil of Isis, a beholding of the form and features of Deity; nor is it reading as in a book the truths concerning God and His Kingdom. It is God doing something; God acting on the minds and hearts and wills of men. Illumination is only one aspect of the activity of the word of God. It creates and destroys. It tries men. It cleanses and renews. It has all the properties of life. It is the medium of the manifold activity as well as the revelation of the manifold wisdom of God. When God comes through His Grace into contact with men, we have the beginnings of the moral life, as Christians understand it.

We do not need to confine, and no Christian will wish to confine, the action of God's providence within the limits of one nation or church. The Old Testament itself refutes such narrow theories. God "brought up the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Syrians from Kir." There were what Bushnell called "outside saints " in the Old Testament. God did not speak only to the circumcised. Jesus spoke of the sheep which He had outside "this fold." But we rightly look to the line of Hebrew revelation for the authentic knowledge of God's will. Greece has taught us much about man, but little about God. The Spirit of God revealed to the Hebrew people as to no other nation the intimate connection between religion and life, between theology and ethics. They would not have understood the 1 Amos ix. 7.

modern abstract treatment of morals in isolation from theology, or the modern attempt to found a religion on the moral nature of man. They thought things together in a way which has become strange to many in these days. They did not divide the universe of truth and fact into watertight compartments. They may have had a much smaller and poorer conception of the material universe; but they did not mistake the part for the whole of reality. Their world was infinitely larger than that of many to-day.

This concreteness, this power of thinking or seeing things together is a leading characteristic of Hebrew thought and prepared men for the teachings of One who united in Himself all worlds of truth and life, who “saw life steadily and saw it whole."

The union of religion and morality, or the moralising of the relation between God and man, makes the idea of the "covenant" of supreme importance. Morality is founded on choice, upon will rather than upon nature. Abraham becomes the father of the faithful, because God chooses him and he chooses God. Jehovah redeems Israel from the house of bondage and makes a covenant with them at Sinai. There is something here very much more than the obligation implied in physical sonship or any natural bond. It is the grace of God in the call of Abraham or in the redemption from Egypt that is the foundation of the moral relationship. This elicits the faith without which it is impossible to please God and leads to the life of righteousness.

The corporate or social character of the covenant which God made with Abram or with Israel is very evident, and has been fully recognised in recent years, when the claims of social ethics have been brought so much to the front. The imperfect ideas of individuality common among more primitive peoples, to which writers like Sir Henry Maine and others drew attention, may be found in Israel, and we can see how God was teaching His people the sacred rights of the individual man or woman as well as of the tribe. But as applied to Israel the idea of the primary character of the clan has been over-emphasised. What we find more

distinctly formulated in Jeremiah and Ezekiel regarding the separate responsibilities of the individual and God's ownership of each is foreshadowed not only, as Max Wiener pointed out, in Isaiah, but in Amos and in the earlier narratives of the Patriarchs. Sarah may have "called Abraham lord," but she also said "the Lord judge between thee and me." The old ideas of the family were seriously affected by God's repeated preference for the younger; and the attempted sacrifice of Isaac showed Abraham that while God had absolute power of life and death over his son, he had not.

In view of the many passages in the Old Testament which ascribe human attributes to God, some may be inclined to say, that He is "all too human." Is He not called a jealous God and is not His anger frequently mentioned ? It is so; and these qualities must be interpreted in the light of the fundamental conception of the Divine holiness. God" is not man that He should repent," still less that He should sin. But without jealousy and anger God would be less than man, not greater. Jealousy, even in sinful men, is not always ignoble. The jealous guarding of sacred and inalienable rights is not condemned by the highest ethic. The reason why jealousy is so often sinful is because it is unjust and selfish and unrestrained. But jealousy is the natural accompaniment of the love of God, and without it love itself would not be perfect. It stands for the watchful, protective aspect of the Divine love. It reminds us also of the truth, too little regarded in these days, that God has rights, which it would be weakness to surrender. How could He love the race with a love which would exalt and save, were it not that He loved honour and holiness also? These things are parts of Himself, and He cannot deny Himself. The self-love of God, of which the Puritan John Robinson and the Roman

1 Jer. xxxi. 30.

3 Gen. xvi. 5.

5

5

Essays or Observations Divine and Moral, ch. 2.

C