Page:The spirit of the Hebrew poetry 1861.djvu/24

 styles which had exhausted the resources of human utterance to convey so much as is conveyed.

To give reality to what had been foreshown in shadows; to accomplish what had been predicted; to expound, in a higher sense, whatever is universal and eternal in morals; to authenticate anew what might have been called in question—these functions were proper to the ministers of the later Dispensation; and the books of the New Testament are the record of this work of completion, in its several kinds. Yet this is the characteristic of the Christian writings, that they abstain from the endeavour to throw into an abstract or philosophic form those first truths of theology to which the prophets of the Old Testament had given expression in symbolic terms and in the figures of the Hebrew poetry. The parables of —symbolic as they are, but not poetic—touch those things of the new "kingdom of Heaven" which belong to the human development of it; or to the administration of the Gospel on earth; or within the consciousness of men singly.

Those who choose to do so may employ their time in inquiring in what other modes than those which are characteristic of the Hebrew Scriptures the highest truths in theology might be embodied, and whether these principles may not be, or might not have been, subjected to the conditions of abstract generalization, and so brought into order within the limits of a logical and scientific arrangement. Let these philosophic diversions be pursued, at leisure,