Page:The spirit of the Hebrew poetry 1861.djvu/127

 of the domestic relationships should be reverentially conserved. Within the precincts of this economy of unwritten obligation and of traditional veneration, piety toward God—the Invisible—was a higher species of that filial regard of which the senior and the chief was the visible centre.

The Patriarchal Idea is wholly Biblical, and as such it has suffused itself through the poetry of modern nations. And there is much in the mild domestic usages and sentiments of modern nations that is to be traced up to its rise in this conception. It is Biblical, not merely because it is monotheistic in doctrine; but because also it gives a most decisive prominence to the belief of the near-at-hand providence of God—of Him that immediately orders and appoints and controls all events affecting the individual man. This ever-present —Righteous and Benign—the Hearer of prayer—the Giver of all good—the Avenger of wrong—is held forth, and is vividly brought within range of human conceptions in the incidents of the Patriarchal history. Far away from the interference of futile speculative questionings, these religious beliefs, as exemplified in the life of the servants of God, received at once an historic warranty, and a dramatic—or, it might be said, even a picturesque—realization, in the records of this era.

The Paradisaical elements are conserved in the Patriarchal life—each of them attempered by blending itself with whatever in the actual lot of man has