man that he had never been born. Much more might be cited to this effect, but this will suffice to indicate the nature of the objection to which I now refer. We do not deny that such pictures represent, though in exaggerated terms, yet represent truly, one of the attributes of the Deity of the Old Testament. But, notwithstanding them, the Jehovah of the Jews is the God of the Gentiles and of Christianity, and the representations of His attributes in the Old Testament are in harmony with His dealings with man as presented to us in the New. The following suggestions may be offered on this head. sent to us an angry and avenging aspect of the Deity, this is only what the course of nature and of the world also does. Man is not the object in this life only of indulgences, mercies, and enjoyments. Distress and sorrow are (to say the least) quite as widely dispensed in the world as pleasures and satisfactions. What are war, pestilence, and famine, or the more ordinary visitations of violence, disease, and pain, and the great final dissolution of our physical

If the Hebrew Scriptures pre

frame, but so many visitations of a terrible and avenging nature, of the same character with that aspect of Divinity portrayed in the Old Testament? It is not, then, the mere representation of man as a suffering and afflicted being at which the objector stumbles-for in this respect it seems that the Jewish prophet does but echo the declarations of nature and experience it is that other and further portion of this representation which speaks of this suffering as vindictive, as inflicted by a personal Providence as a personal retribution for sin. It is not the fact of human woe which is questioned, for to that fact experience bears its too plain testimony, but the doctrine that that woe is penal and judicial in its nature. But surely it is the fact of nature and not the doctrine of the Scripture in which the real difficulty consists. The doctrine that all pain is penal, that physical evil is a consequence of moral evil, that suffering is a visitation of a righteous Judge upon the sinner, is but an attempt to explain this phenomenon of suffering, to find a clue to this scene of misery and disorder which, without that clue,

would be hopeless and inexplicable indeed.

There is nothing in these invectives directed against the Jehovah of Moses which may not with equal fitness be directed against the Author of the course of this world. This abounding of natural evil is the effect of the divine abhorrence of moral evil, as asserted by Moses, or it is not-if it be so, then the Pentateuch and nature are so far in harmony; if it be not so, then nature is immeasurably more confounding in its moral mystery than revelation, inasmuch as it leaves us all the suffering without any adequate recognition of sin as its cause" (Vaughan). But the truth is, that this avenging aspect of the Divinity which offends so much in the Hebrew Scriptures is no peculiar feature of Judaism. The consciousness of moral delinquency in man, and the tokens of retribution and displeasure sent forth among us by the power or powers regarded as governing the world, have given this aspect of awfulness more or less to the religions of all nations. The Eumenides of Greek and the Loki of Scandinavian mythology, the Sheva of the

Brahminical and the Ahriman of the Magian theology, all owe their origin to the imperishable operations of human thought and human conscience, strengthened as these thoughts have been by seeing so much physical evil pressing everywhere closely on the heels of so much moral disorder. This darker aspect, then, of the Jehovah of the Old Testament which is so appalling to our weakness is nothing more than the Divine attribute of purity and holiness dwelt upon in its antagonism to sin. If the Almighty Being be absolute justice and righteousness-i.e. if there be a God at all-the regard which such righteousness must turn towards sin can only be that which the words anger, hatred, and aversion convey. The God of the Jews is not a mischievous spirit whose capricious personal favour is to be secured only by some fortunate individuals without reference to their moral character or conduct; it is the highest conception of absolute holiness regarded in relation to the aberrations of our free will. If morality be a truth, if the distinction between virtue and vice be anything, then in no other

colours can the Deity be represented to our minds than in those in which He is represented in the Old Testament; there can be no doubt, to use an expression of Butler, which side He is of that He is for virtue and against vice.

If, then, the proclamation of nature concerning the God of nature is so awfully to this effect, that every system of religion devised by man presents some counterpart to the threatenings of Jehovah against sinners, if the universal instinct of mankind requires some such attribute in its Moral Governor, we conclude that no supposed revelation which does not so speak can possibly be of divine origin. So far, then, from its being a mark of superiority in the Scriptures of the New Testament, that they present to us the Deity divested of the terrible and avenging aspect which He wears in the Old, it would rather create a presumption, if they did so do, against them. If Christianity does offer us a Deity who can behold moral iniquity without offence, Christianity is less, instead of better, adapted to the circumstances of and responds less to the demands of his

man,

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