very new thought relates itself finally to all
thought, and is like the forward step which continually changes the
horizon about the traveller.

The history of man is the story of the ideas he has entertained and
accepted, and of his struggle to incorporate these ideas into laws,
customs, institutions, and character. At the heart of every race one
finds certain ideas, not always clearly seen nor often definitely
formulated save by a few persons, but unconsciously held with
deathless tenacity and illustrated by a vast range of action and
achievement; at the heart of every great civilisation one finds a few
dominant and vital conceptions which give a certain coherence and
unity to a vast movement of life. Now, the books of life, as has
already been said, hold their place in universal literature because
they reveal and illustrate, in symbol and personality, these
fundamental ideas with supreme power and felicity. The large body of
literature in prose and verse which is put between the covers of the
Old Testament not only gives us an account of what the Hebrew race did
in the world, but of its ideas about that world, and of the character
which it formed for itself largely as the fruit of those ideas. Those
ideas, it need hardly be said, not only registered a great advance on
the ideas which preceded them, but remain in many respects the most
fundamental ideas which the race as a whole has accepted. They lifted
the men to whom they were originally revealed, or who accepted them,
to a great height of spiritual and moral vision, and a race character
was organised about them of the most powerful and persistent type. The
modern student of the Old Testament is born into a very different
atmosphere from that in which these conceptions of man and the
universe were originally formed; but though they have largely lost
their novelty, they have not lost the power of enlargement and
expansion which were in them at the beginning.

In his own history every man repeats, within certain limits, the
history of the race; and the inexhaustible educational value of race
experience lies in the fact that it so completely parallels the
history of every member of the race. Childhood has the fancies and
faiths of the earliest ages; youth has visions and dreams which form,
generation after generation, a kind of contemporary mythology;
maturity aspires after and sometimes attains the repose, the clear
intelligence, the catholic outlook of the best mo