ledged Himself to the Incarnation,
being no dealer in half measures, nor likely to assume rhetorically a
relation to mankind to which in fact He would not stoop.

Every Christian feels, moreover, that it is by virtue of the grand and
final condescension that all the preliminary steps are possible. Because
Abraham's seed was one, that is Christ, therefore ye (all) if ye are
Christ's, are Abraham's seed, heirs according to promise (Gal. iii. 16,
29).

But when this great harmony comes to be devoutly recognised, a hundred
minor and incidental points of contact are invested with a sacred
interest.

No doctrinal injury would have resulted, if the Child Jesus had never
left the Holy Land. No infidel could have served his cause by quoting
the words of Hosea. Nor can we now cite them against infidels as a
prophecy fulfilled. But when He does return from Egypt our devotions,
not our polemics, hail and rejoice in the coincidence. It reminds us,
although it does not demonstrate, that He who is thus called out of
Egypt is indeed the Son.

The sober historian cannot prove anything, logically and to
demonstration, by the reiterated interventions in history of atmospheric
phenomena. And yet no devout thinker can fail to recognise that God has
reserved the hail against the time of trouble and war.

In short, it is absurd and hopeless to bid us limit our contemplation,
in a divine narrative, to what can be demonstrated like the propositions
of Euclid. We laugh at the French for trying to make colonies and
constitutions according to abstract principles, and proposing, as they
once did, to reform Europe "after the Chinese manner." Well, religion
also is not a theory: it is the true history of the past of humanity,
and it is the formative principle in the history of the present and the
future.

And hence it follows that we may dwell with interest and edification
upon analogies, as every great thinker confesses the existence of
truths, "which never can be proved."

In the meantime it is easy to recognise the much simpler fact, that
these things happened unto them by way of example, and they were written
for our admonition.

FOOTNOTES:

[32] Take as an example the assertion of Bunyan that the sea in the
Revelation is a sea of glass, because the laver in the tabernacle was
made of the brazen looking-glasses of the women. (_Solomon's Temple_,
xxxvi. 1.)

CHAPTER XIX.

_AT SINAI._

xix. 1-25.

In the third month fr