Page:Catholic Thoughts on the Bible and Theology.djvu/19



of mankind at large, or of any ordinary portion of mankind, but principally and professedly that of a peculiar people—of a people subjected to a special discipline for a special purpose; not simply a people favoured with more of that kind of culture which would be equally applicable to all peoples, but with a scheme of polity and a mode of Providential Interposition which was essentially inapplicable to the whole race of man. It is true that the earliest Scriptures do illustrate the infancy of the Race more than all other Scriptures whatever, while they are engaged with their own special purpose: but it is also true that as they proceed they become more and more limited in their human interest, save as they intensify by contracting our vision and fixing it on the Divine plan of introducing a Messiah for mankind, of whose History and Teaching the latest Scriptures are the Record and the Exposition. But even these later Scriptures consist rather of outlines of that history, and of specimens of the nature of that teaching, than of an unfolding and application of the principles and precepts of the New Dispensation in their most complete and catholic form.

And therefore in connexion with, and in consequence of, this special character of Revelation, it ought to be very distinctly borne in mind that a large portion of Revelation must be for us but Indirect. There is but very little indeed that is addressed to all men equally. The knowledge of will that comes to us through Written Revelations is for the most part only inferential: it has to be extracted by us out of a mass of historical as well as expressly didactic documents: and none of it has been addressed primarily to ourselves, or to the generation in which we live; nor is the existence of such a social and intellectual condition as that in which we live ever directly contemplated or referred to in the great majority of the Teachings of the Old and New Testament. Not only is Revelation for the most part specially adapted and addressed to peoples and generations very far removed from us—so far removed as to require from us a very considerable exercise of Imagination before we can understand their position—but it is absolutely necessary that we should in most instances detach and dis-