ruggling with God? What is it--what else
could it possibly be but the Hebrew soul, like a kind of pageantry down
the years between us and God, that would ever have made us guess--men of
the other nations--that a God belonged to us, or that a God could belong
to us and be a God at all? Have not all the other races, each in their
turn spawning in the sun and lost in the night, vanished because they
could not say "I" before God? The nations that are left, the great
nations of the modern world, are but the moral passengers of the
Hebrews, hangers-on to the race that can say "I"--I to the _n^th_
power,--the race that has dared to identify itself with God. The fact
that the Hebrew, instead of saying God and I, has turned it around
sometimes and said I and God is neither here nor there in the end. It is
because the Hebrew has kept to the main point, has felt related to God
(the main point a God cares about), that he has been the most heroic and
athletic figure in human history--comes nearer to the God-size. The rest
of the nations sitting about and wondering in the dark, have called this
thing in the Hebrew "religious genius." If one were to try to sum up
what religious genius is, in the Hebrew, or to account for the spiritual
and material supremacy of the Hebrew in history, in a single fact, it
would be the fact that Moses, their first great leader, when he wanted
to say "It seems to me," said "The Lord said unto Moses."

The Hebrews may have written a book that teaches, of all others,
self-renunciation, but the way they taught it was self-assertion. The
Bible begins with a meek Moses who teaches by saying "The Lord said unto
Moses," and it comes to its climax in a lowly and radiant man who dies
on a cross to say "I and the Father are one." The man Jesus seems to
have called himself God because he had a divine habit of identifying
himself, because he had kept on identifying himself with others until
the first person and the second person and the third person were as one
to him. The distinction of the New Testament is that it is the one book
the world has seen, which dispenses with pronouns. It is a book that
sums up pronouns and numbers, singular and plural, first person, second
and third person, and all, in the one great central pronoun of the
universe. The very stars speak it--WE.

We is a developed I.

The first person may not be what it ought to be either as a philosophy
or an experience, but it has been considered good