ng, he was really contradicting
himself. For the blessing promised was a spiritual and, consequently,
personal one, with which nationality cannot possibly have any sort of
connection. It is a matter of profound joy to every lover of his people
to witness and share in the uprising of a national consciousness. Some
among us are beginning to know now for the first time that a national
ideal is possible in thought, and sentiment, and life. But there must
not, cannot, be a nationality in religion. A moral law in the heart does
not recognise the quality of the blood that circulates through. This
truth the prophets strove to utter, often in vain. Yet the breaking up
of the nation into Judah and Israel helped to dispel the illusion. The
loss of national independence prepared for the universalism of Jesus
Christ and St. Paul. Now also, when an epistle is written to the Hebrew
Christians, the threatened extinction of nationality drives men to seek
the bond of union in a more stable covenant, which will save them, if
anything can, from the utter collapse of all religious fellowship and
civil society. It is the glory of Christianity that it creates the
individual and at the same moment keeps perfectly clear of
individualism. Its blessings are personal, but they imply a covenant. If
nationalism has been dethroned, individualism has not climbed to the
vacant seat. How it achieves this great result will be understood from
an examination of Jeremiah's prophecy.

The new covenant deals with the same fundamental conceptions which
dominated the former one. These are the moral law, knowledge of God, and
forgiveness of sin. So far the two dispensations are one. Because these
great conceptions lie at the root of all human goodness, religion is
essentially the same thing under both covenants. There is a sense in
which St. Augustine was right in speaking of the saints under the old
Testament as "Christians before Christ." Judaism and Christianity stand
shoulder to shoulder over against the religious ideas and practices of
all the heathen nations of the world. But in Judaism these sublime
conceptions are undeveloped. Nationalism dwarfs their growth. They are
like seeds falling on the thorns, and the thorns grow up and choke them.
God, therefore, spoke unto the Jews in parables, in types and shadows.
Seeing, they saw not; and hearing, they heard not, neither did they
understand.

Because the former covenant was a national one, the conceptions o