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from Nature; but we do not know Him immediately -we know Him through Nature, though we apprehend Him as above it.

One more point, however, is carefully to be secured. We have seen that God, who is mediately known, may be specially known to one individual or to a circle of individuals. The point to be added is this, that He is everlastingly free as to the medium which He may choose. He has been specially perceived in a 'burning bush,' in a 'still small voice,' in a whirlwind, and on a mountain-top. He may, in some small measure, be specially perceived in a generous action, in a kind word, and even in an appealing look.

Does it seem as if the recognition of this last point interferes with honour towards any medium whereby God has certainly become known? Surely it interferes with no due honour. You may most loyally cherish the medium, and yet remember how incomprehensible is the Fatherly government of the Most High.

The careless supposition that God has only a few fixed mediums through which He reveals Himself is part and parcel of the mental process which elevates mere defining agencies to seem to be attached to the very being of God, and to be not merely helps for perception, but measures for perception.

The term 'Protestant' is worthily applied to the

denoting of a determination to recognise no limitations in the ways in which God may reveal Himself, beyond such as may be created by the Divine perfection itself.1

And

And yet there is here no occasion for bitterness between existing Protestants and existing Catholics. For many so-called Protestants have just as unquestionably elevated a mere ‘lamp' to be a measure of the ways of God as any Catholics have. They have done this in the case of Bible-literalism. Literalism has been a crueller limitation than was the Catholic Church Guidance. The Church-guidance had at least something like a human heart about it, but not so the pronouncement that measured the sacred voice by writings, nay, by particular translations and interpretations. One might think of a Mother Church as a gentle nurse to whom one might go with perplexities; but oh, the cold desolation of believing that from words that make an end of hope there is no manner of appeal. Thus it seems reasonable to think that the dreadful shadows which were produced by Literalism in early times were softened by Church-guidance. A purgatory out of which an approachable priest might deliver a soul in

1 Compare the quotation from Zwingli, in ch. x.

2 This is suggested by Charles Kingsley, "Yeast,” ch. viii.

pain was at least something to turn to from the pictures which the exponents of Literalism have drawn. But let us humbly thank our Creator that He is Himself, in His continual presence, the Refuge from those imaginations of fierce men, and that the benign ideas that come from Him chase those fancies away. And without entering on party questions, one may worthily use the name 'Protestant' to denote the position in which any one may recognise that freeness in the Divine manifestation according to which the Divine Presence never fails as a centre of appeal.

God has vouchsafed to reveal Himself in two historical channels, through which we all ordinarily enjoy more benefit than we are apt to remember. First, He has pre-eminently revealed Himself in the experience of an ancient nation, and more particularly in the experiences of certain individuals within that nation. Second, and more signally, He has given to the world one central revelation, which it is ours to appropriate, so as to be none of us without a clear perception of Himself and His gracious gospel.

CHAPTER V.

THE GOSPEL IN THE OLD TESTAMENT.

THE Old Testament is a collection of books which, in the main, emanated from certain religious menwe can rightly say, inspired men, belonging to the ancient Israelite race. Students who have critically examined it agree very generally that, in its present form, it has been subjected to a process of formal reconstruction, at the hands of men who lived after the time of the original authors. These later contributors to its form are likely to have been the ordinary ministers of the people's established religion -priests and scribes. The whole collection of books, however, is sufficiently diverse to support the conviction that we have still, in the Old Testament, unaltered, a very large accumulation of original utterances, the product of inspired and rare religious perception.

The nation of the Israelites are proved, by the existence of the Old Testament, to have had inborn

a specially acute sense of the Divine Presence. At the same time, it was certain outstanding individuals that both kept the sense awake in the general body of the people, and applied it so as to enrich the knowledge of the whole world. Had it not been for these individuals, humanly speaking, the general body of the Israelites, as can clearly be seen from their books, would, like the general body of modern nations, have allowed the objects of the ordinary five senses to engage their chief attention. The individuals whose sense of God specially led the people and instructed succeeding ages, are rightly called Prophets.

The earliest prophet that can be pointed to with certainty is Moses. Moses belonged to a time when the people of Israel were a nation without a land, living under the alien rule of Egypt. God revealed Himself to Moses with a clearness and an overpowering urgency, under which Moses became one of the world's religious reformers. He had attained, we learn, to a special revelation, of which the outward occasion was a burning bush. Accordingly he appealed to his nation in the name of Jahveh '— in the name of God as his awakened perception made him conceive of God, and as their ancestors had already in some way conceived of Him. He appealed successfully. They listened to him, and

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