he breadth and length and height and depth, and to
know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye may be filled
with all the fulness of God."--EPH. iii. 17-19.

The task which now lies before me is to consider how far that type of
religion and religious philosophy, which I tried in my last Lecture to
depict in outline, is represented in and sanctioned by Holy Scripture.
I shall devote most of my time to the New Testament, for we shall not
find very much to help us in the Old. The Jewish mind and character,
in spite of its deeply religious bent, was alien to Mysticism. In the
first place, the religion of Israel, passing from what has been called
Henotheism--the worship of a national God--to true Monotheism, always
maintained a rigid notion of individuality, both human and Divine.
Even prophecy, which is mystical in its essence, was in the early
period conceived as unmystically as possible, Balaam is merely a
mouthpiece of God; his message is external to his personality, which
remains antagonistic to it. And, secondly, the Jewish doctrine of
ideas was different from the Platonic. The Jew believed that the
world, and the whole course of history, existed from all eternity in
the mind of God, but as an unrealised purpose, which was actualised by
degrees as the scroll of events was unfurled. There was no notion that
the visible was in any way inferior to the invisible, or lacking in
reality. Even in its later phases, after it had been partially
Hellenised, Jewish idealism tended to crystallise as Chiliasm, or in
"Apocalypses," and not, like Platonism, in the dream of a perfect
world existing "yonder." In fact, the Jewish view of the external
world was mainly that of naive realism, but strongly pervaded by
belief in an Almighty King and Judge. Moreover, the Jew had little
sense of the Divine _in_ nature: it was the power of God _over_ nature
which he was jealous to maintain. The majesty of the elemental forces
was extolled in order to magnify the greater power of Him who made and
could unmake them, and whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain. The
weakness and insignificance of man, as contrasted with the tremendous
power of God, is the reflection which the contemplation of nature
generally produced in his mind. "How can a man be just with God?" asks
Job; "which removeth the mountains, and they know it not; when He
overturneth them in His anger; which shaketh the earth out of her
place, and the pillars thereof tre