be virtually
comprehended in the first; and they all speak of the essential and
self-existent Being, unchanging and unchangeable.

I AM expresses an intense reality of being. No image in the dark
recesses of Egyptian or Syrian temples, grotesque and motionless, can
win the adoration of him who has had communion with such a veritable
existence, or has heard His authentic message. No dreamful pantheism, on
its knees to the beneficent principle expressed in one deity, to the
destructive in another, or to the reproductive in a third, but all of
them dependent upon nature, as the rainbow upon the cataract which it
spans, can ever again satisfy the soul which is athirst for the living
God, the Lord, Who is not personified, but IS.

This profound sense of a living Person within reach, to be offended, to
pardon, and to bless, was the one force which kept the Hebrew nation
itself alive, with a vitality unprecedented since the world began. They
could crave His pardon, whatever natural retributions they had brought
down upon themselves, whatever tendencies of nature they had provoked,
because He was not a dead law without ears or a heart, but their
merciful and gracious God.

Not the most exquisite subtleties of innuendo and irony could make good
for a day the monstrous paradox that the Hebrew religion, the worship of
I AM, was really nothing but the adoration of that stream of tendencies
which makes for righteousness.

Israel did not challenge Pharaoh through having suddenly discovered that
goodness ultimately prevails over evil, nor is it any cold calculation
of the sort which ever inspires a nation or a man with heroic fortitude.
But they were nerved by the announcement that they had been remembered
by a God Who is neither an ideal nor a fancy, but the Reality of
realities, beside Whom Pharaoh and his host were but as phantoms.

I AM THAT I AM is the style not only of permanence, but of permanence
self-contained, and being a distinctive title, it denies such
self-contained permanence to others.

Man is as the past has moulded him, a compound of attainments and
failures, discoveries and disillusions, his eyes dim with forgotten
tears, his hair grey with surmounted anxieties, his brow furrowed with
bygone studies, his conscience troubled with old sin. Modern unbelief
is ignobly frank respecting him. He is the sum of his parents and his
wet-nurse. He is what he eats. If he drinks beer, he thinks beer. And it
is the element