n must
begin with testimony, it ought always to grow up into an experience.
Thus it was that many of the Samaritans believed on Jesus because of the
word of the woman; but presently they said, "Now we believe, not because
of thy speaking, for we have heard Him ourselves, and know." And thus
the disciples who heard John the Baptist speak, and so followed Jesus,
having come and seen where He abode, could say, "We have found the
Messiah."

This prologue is vitally connected with both tables of the law. In
relation to the first, it recognises the instinct of worship in the
human heart. In vain shall we say Do not worship idols, until the true
object of adoration is supplied, for the heart must and will prostrate
itself at some shrine. A leader of modern science confesses "the
immovable basis of the religious sentiment in the nature of man," adding
that "to yield this sentiment reasonable satisfaction is the problem of
problems at the present hour."[35] It is indeed a problem for the
unbelief which, because it professes to be scientific, cannot shut its
eyes to the fact that men whose faith in Christ has suffered shipwreck
are everywhere seen to be clinging to strange planks--spiritualism,
esoteric Buddhism, and other superstitions,--which prove that man must
and will reverence something more than streams of tendencies, or
beneficial results to the greatest numbers. The Law of Moses abolishes
superstition by no mere negation, but by the proclamation of a true God.

Moreover, it declares that this God is knowable, which flatly
contradicts the brave assertion of modern agnostics that the notion of a
God is not even "thinkable." That assertion is a bald and barren
platitude in the only sense in which it is not contrary to the
experience of all mankind. As we cannot form a complete and perfect, nor
even an adequate notion of God, so no man ever yet conceived a complete
and adequate notion of his neighbour, nor indeed of himself. But as we
can form a notion of one another, dim and fragmentary indeed, yet more
or less accurate and fit to guide our actions, so has every nation and
every man formed some notion of deity. Nor could even the agnostic
declare that God is unthinkable, unless the word God, of which he makes
this assertion, conveyed to him _some_ idea, some thought, more or less
worthy of the thinking. The ancient Jew never dreamed that he could
search out the Almighty to perfection, yet God was known to him by His
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