(Gen. xv. 1), appears in Moses' thoughts the "dwelling-place of His people in all generations" (Ps. xc. 1). By David's time the figures of confidence in His sure and widely-sufficing friendship are of great frequency and expressiveness. He is "their rock and fortress," the "portion of their inheritance, and their cup"-the past, present, future Keeper of their safety. He is their "Shepherd," who has "led them in green pastures and by the still waters," whose guidance they will follow without fear "through the valley of the shadow of death." In the devotional language of the Psalms, the law written on the heart rises above the earlier statutes of purification, the sacrifices of repentance above those of burntofferings. Even the Christian joy of faith, the dispensation of the Spirit, comes almost into sight. The thought of a personal Holy Spirit of God enlightening, healing, helping the human spirit, bringing a spirit of holiness into human life the thought so much perfected by Joel and Jeremiah's prophecies long after-appears in the "last words of David" (2 Sam. xxiii. 2), and in his penitent supplication (Ps. li. 11, 12). The completing thought of faith's privileged contemplation of the Lord of heaven and earth, the Holy One—namely, the thought of His nearness of affection, assured by so close assumed relationship to man-was approached in the Psalms with a fulness similar to the appreciation they show of His government and His holiness of nature. The recorded advance is from the national to the personal God, from the temporal to the spiritual King, and, above all, from the God to be feared to the God to be loved-a progress of believers' habitual thoughts of God from the class of thoughts with which Cain regarded Him towards those with which the evangelists would behold Him with the bodily eye. He is their "Father," the "Guide of their youth," the "Father of the fatherless, and the Judge of the widow," one not above and overruling, but in, under, pervading, actuating, or substituting all human means of happiness. Aftertimes were to hear Him seeking to be thought of as a husband to the wife of his youth, a husband beseeching the return of an erring spouse; and a father who could not punish as they deserved his erring children, could not destroy them, his

repentings were kindled together, he would heal their backslidings and forgive them freely (Hosea xiv. 4).

revealing

tions. The

hood.

10. The Historical revealing of God by His inseparable Progress of spiritual and secular government of Israel, advanced through instituprominent dispensations superseding or absorbing each other, Priesthood for the better declaring of His nature and designs. During and Kingthe consolidating period, when the collection of emancipated Hebrew slaves of Egypt were to be taught the sentiment of a religious nationality, and separated from their heathen habits of thought by a confining law of worship and self-government, the prominent visible guide and help of religion was the PRIESTHOOD, and their subordinates, the soldierly Levites, who were the immediate administrators of the separative confining discipline. The supremacy which the lawgiver Moses occasionally exercised over the priesthood, the ordinary guides of the people, when the importance of Jehovah's moral above His positive commandments had to be asserted, was continued to Joshua; but in the times of the Judges this occasional supremacy passed into something of a permanent prominence as a new development of the divine government. Jehovah's representative during those three centuries was less the priest than the magistrate; rulers called out of no special tribe; commissioned for the occasional or continued exercise of supreme authority; sometimes exercising the sacrificial office, which, by the ceremonial law, was confined to the priesthood; sometimes having the prophetic function, which was, some centuries after, to be Jehovah's instrument of government, superseding both priests and kings; but always having one characterising faith in their especial connection with and authority from Jehovah for their particular tasks; and all discharging one distinguishing function, the kingly one of government, defence, guidance in combined action, and judgment with authority. Samuel, the last of that transitional order of magistrates, and who, above all the others, united with the civil government the prophetic function, and at times the priestly one, uttered at the beginning of the permanent kingly dispensation the principle of religion, or man's connection with God, which contained the reason of this and succeeding

developments. It was the importance of righteousness, order, and obedience to God above ceremonial worship of Him. "Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt-offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams (1 Sam. xv. 22). That was the first prophetic rebuke of the new kinghood, repeated often in after-times, and disregarded till Jehovah destroyed the abused ordinance, which He had appointed for His people's education in holiness. The KINGHOOD, however, before its corruption and fall, had discharged a large religious task in accustoming Israel's thoughts to a higher view of their Jehovah's nature, and richer expectations, though only gradually becoming definite, of His gracious purposes. The developed kinghood of David, like the large portion of the psalter which belongs to the same period, was a great development of men's designed religious thoughts of God. The kingly power superseding the priestly in the government, defence, and edification of the sacred nation-a secular monarchy made the great means of religious guidance and constraint, the head over all things to His church, assuming at will the distinctive priestly functions of sacrifice, intercession, and consulting the oracle, adding also the spiritual function of instruction-was a development of the kind of thoughts which were to recognise the divine Helper, the Messiah, when He came. The assumption by the kings of the priestly dignity was the beginning, also, of the breaking down of that idea of caste in religious functionaries into which human nature has always been ready to be misled, and which the New Testament completely removed from spiritual religion when it taught that we are to be all kings and priests to God. The lesson of a saving, blessing, edifying kinghood becoming the great ordinance of God's grace, combined with, or in part absorbing or superseding, the first ordinance of a priesthood, which was exhibited to the chosen people in warm attractive colours in David's reign, was not an isolated lesson in the historical education which they received to expect a kingly, priestly Saviour. It was repeated by the reign of Joash, the youthful restorer of the obscured worship of

Jehovah-by that of Uzziah-and, above all, by the bright reign of Hezekiah, himself perhaps the prophesied type of the Messiah, and said by tradition to have believed himself to be the expected One. From his days, which were so speedily, by Manasseh's cruelty of heathenism, demonstrated not to have been the days of the Messiah, the thoughts of faith, so far forcibly released from strictly secular expectation, looked forward much to the times of a just and merciful King coming to the deliverance of His people. In the expressions of the prophets, whose visions occupied that era of Hebrew history, the metaphorical representations of the coming salvation rapidly condensed into distinct features of a personal Saviour; and expectation grew to the distinctness which, before the Messiah appeared, looked for His coming as the King of the Jews.

11. What was the progress of acquired faith under the Religious thought religious teaching given by the idea of divine kinghood? The under the advance of the spiritual to dominate over the formal, the moral Kinghood. over the positive, in the common religious thought, which we see so much in David's religious writings, was well pronounced in the reign of his son. It was manifested then, even in distinct and authoritative superseding of established form and traditional sacredness, in the interests of true religiousness. Solomon, who recorded it as of his faith that "to do judgment and justice is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice" (Prov. xxi. 3), showed that great principle advanced beyond the position of a theoretical thought, and able to break through all merely superstitious barriers which religious constitutionalism might oppose to justice; not hesitating to depose a treasonable chief priest, and to disregard the right of sanctuary, in the hope of which Joab fled to the altar (1 Kings ii.) His thoughts of the glory of Jehovah, rising above all forms of worship, which even Jehovah Himself had directed Moses to observe in the tabernacle service in the infancy of Hebrew faith, were larger than those possessed centuries after by the formalist Pharisee Jews; who were so often reproved by the Messiah for not knowing the spirit of their own religion, and who seem to have had no freedom of thought as to the matter

or manner of Jehovah's service beyond their patristic commentaries on the letter of Moses' ceremonial law. As examples, note that king's use of steps in the ascent to the altar, a thing forbidden by Moses, and his employment of a number of candlesticks in the holy place instead of the single sevenbranched one of the wilderness-innovations which were both resiled from in the second temple. Akin to these changes was his so un-Israelitish borrowing of the architecture of the temple from all nations around him in addition to the ideas of the primitive tabernacle, and not abstaining even from graphic ornamentation, no particle of which was allowed in the second more Jewishly correct edifice. In the material appointments of the worship of Him to whom he prayed as the hearer of supplications sent up to Him towards "this place" (2 Chron. vi.) of His earthly presence by men of all nations of the earth, Solomon freely gathered all that he knew of natural or artistic kind impressive to the human worshippers of One whom no outward things could fully correspond to. And, in the midst of the first and last, because never equally repeated magnificence which surrounded that inauguration of worship, in the feast of the dedication he uttered the grand truth of Jehovah's greatness which has never been surpassed in man's thoughts, and which was lost by the orthodox Jews of the last days: "But will God in very deed dwell on the earth? Behold, the heavens, and the heaven of heavens, cannot contain Thee; how much less this house which I have builded!" (1 Kings viii. 27). The century of general apostasy from Jehovah between the reigns of Solomon and Joash affords no light on Hebrew religious sentiment. The singular facts, however, of the revolution in favour of true religion which set the youthful Joash upon the throne, were significant of the supremacy of spirit over form which the faithful among the priesthood had come to believe in. That revolution, conducted by Jehoiada the chief priest, with all its carefully-planned details, and the forcible expulsion from the temple limits, and the execution immediately after of the idolatrous usurper Athaliah, took place on the Sabbath. The young king's roundhanded correction afterwards of the shortcoming stewardship