The Fundamentals (1910), Vol.1

32

The Fundamentals. Testament without seeing that there gradually broke through the mists a clearer light concerning God. The fact of the unity of God; the fact of the might of God; the fact of the holiness of God; the fact of the beneficence of God; these things men had come to see through the process of the ages. Yet side by side with this growing intellectual apprehension of God there was diminishing moral result, for it is impossible to read the story of the ancient Hebrew people without seeing how they waxed worse and worse in all matters moral. The moral life of Abraham was far purer than life in the time of the kings. Life in the early time of the kings was far purer than the conditions which the prophets ultimately described. In proportion as men grew in their intellectual conception of God, it seemed increasingly unthinkable that He could be inter­ ested in their every-day life. Morality became something not of intimate relationship to Him, and therefore something that mattered far less. Think of the great Gentile world, as it then was, and as it still is, save where the message of the Evangel has reached it. We have had such remarkable teachers as Zoroaster, Buddha, Confucius; men speaking many true things, flashing with light, but notwithstanding these things a perpetual failure in morals and a uniform degradation of religion has been universal. The failure has ever been due to a lack of final knowledge concern­ ing God. At last there came the song of the angels, and the birth of the Son of God, through Whose Incarnation and ministry there came to men a new consciousness of God. He included in His teaching and manifestation all the essen­ tial things which men had learned in the long ages of the past. He did not deny the truth of the unity of God; He re-empha­ sized it. He did not deny the might of God; He declared it and manifested it in many a gentle touch of infinite power. He did not deny the holiness of God; He insisted upon it in

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