Page:Catholic Thoughts on the Bible and Theology.djvu/20



engage it from its circumstances before we can make it either intelligible or applicable in our own case.

Unquestionably both the Jewish and the Christian Scriptures do contain Divine communications of a form the most general and of a character the most direct—Revelations of the essentials of Deity and of Humanity which are of perpetual and universal significance. And wherever these occur they may and must be considered as the most solemn and precious of all the contents of the Bible. But even of these it should be specially noted that they are for the most part Progressive. The Bible contains, in fact, a Series as well as a Collection of Revelations: a series of which the earliest terms are the least, and which but very gradually, and not quite uniformly, rises to its height, and only after long centuries reaches its final term in Him who was Himself the Highest Revelation which man can be conceived capable of receiving in the flesh.

That there is such a progression in the Revelation of Truth and Duty in the Bible must be obvious at once to any one who considers the gradual manner in which those two greatest of all Ideas— and Immortality—are disclosed in it, and how that great Duty of loving all men as ourselves and considering every man as our Brother, was never at all insisted on under the older Dispensations. Putting aside for the present any consideration of this latter point as one fundamentally involved in the very texture of the constitution of the Peculiar People, we cannot but observe how limited were the Revelations which is represented as making of Himself in the earliest Scriptures. The first Revelation indeed of is that of Creator of the Heavens and the Earth, and of Man: and then we have that which exhibits Him as the Moral Governor of the primeval Few, and the fearful Judge of the whole earth, but nowhere at first have we more than a faint outline and a few elements of that Great Idea which His later Revelations have enabled us to embrace. The first Revelation of Himself in that character which we have come now to consider as the highest and most influential on the heart of man was confined to an Individual, a Family, a Tribe: always in the