Page:The spirit of the Hebrew poetry 1861.djvu/23

 complement of the other; and the two constituting a homogeneous system. The Prophets (and they were Poets) of the elder Revelation, having fulfilled a function which demanded the symbolic style, and which could submit to no other conditions than those of this figurative utterance, the Evangelists and Apostles, whose style is wholly of another order, do not lay anew a foundation that was already well laid; but they build upon it whatever was peculiar to that later Revelation of which they were the instruments. In the Hebrew writings—poetic in form, as to a great extent they are—we are to find, not a crude theology, adapted to the gross conceptions of a rude people; but an ultimate theology—wanting that only which the fulness of time was to add to it, and so rendering the Two Collections—a One Revelation, adapted to the use of all men, in all times, and under all conditions of intellectual advancement.

If on subjects of the deepest concernment, and in relation to which the human mind labours with its own conceptions, and yearns to know whatever may be known— and His ministers are brief and allusive, they are so, not as if in rebuke of these desires; but because the limits of a divine conveyance of the things of the spiritual world had already been reached by the choir of the prophets. All that could be taught had been taught "to them of old;" and this sum of the philosophy of heaven had been communicated in those diverse modes and