make every man guilty
before God, to prove that a greater salvation is still needed, and thus
to pave the way for the Messiah.

The second great principle of St. Paul is that faith in a divine help,
in pardon, blessing and support, was the true spirit of the Old
Testament as well as of the New. The challenge of the law was meant to
produce self-despair, only that men might trust in God. Appeal was made
especially to the cases of Abraham and David, the founder of the race
and of the dynasty, clearly because the justification without works of
the patriarch and of the king were precedents to decide the general
question (Rom. iv. 1-8). Now, this is pre-eminently the distinction
between Jewish history and all others, that in it God is everything and
man is nothing. Every sceptical treatment of the story makes Moses to be
the deliverer from Egypt, and shows us the Jewish nation gradually
finding out God. But the nation itself believed nothing of the kind. It
confessed itself to have been from the beginning vagrant and rebellious
and unthankful: God had always found out Israel, never Israel God. The
history is an expansion of the parable of the good shepherd. And this
perfect harmony of a long record with itself and with abstract
principles is both instructive and reassuring.

As the history of Israel opens before us, a third principle claims
attention--one which the apostle quietly assumes, but which is forced on
our consideration by the unhappy state of religious thought in these
degenerate days.

"They are not to be heard," says the Seventh Article rightly, "which
feign that the old fathers did look only for transitory promises." But
certainly they also would be unworthy of a hearing who would feign that
the early Scriptures do not give a vast, a preponderating weight, to the
concerns of our life on earth. Only very slowly, and as the result of
long training, does the future begin to reveal its supremacy over the
present. It would startle many a devout reader out of his propriety to
discover the small proportion of Old Testament scriptures in which
eternity and its prospects are discussed, to reckon the passages,
habitually applied to spiritual thraldom and emancipation, which were
spoken at first of earthly tyranny and earthly deliverance, and to
observe, even in the pious aspirations of the Psalms, how much of the
gratitude and joy of the righteous comes from the sense that he is made
wiser than the ancient, and need