But, after all, the greatest souls, at least in every highly-developed religion, have believed that God is righteous in Himself. What gives to Israel its supreme significance in the spiritual history of mankind is the conviction that this righteous God is daily and hourly at work in the history of men; and that conviction gives to the faith of Israel a primacy and supremacy over all the other partial faiths, even though they may be superior in certain departments. If we think of some of the conceptions by means of which we try to bring before our minds the meaning of the word "God," we may find that with regard to several of them, other nations had advanced further than Israel before the coming of the Lord. God is Spirit. The Hindu knew that, and knows it still, quite as much as Israel. God is Law. The more thoughtful at least among the ancient Romans, and particularly the great Roman Stoics, knew that with a vividness that was scarcely ever attained in Israel. God is Beauty. Assuredly the ancient Greeks knew that as Israel never realised it at all. But the conception of Israel that God is at work in history means that the God of Israel gives to these other gods or conceptions of God, each its own time and place of emergence and decay. The God who is revealed to us in the Old Testament is Himself the Being who appoints that the Indian or the Roman or the Greek should reach these particular convictions; and in these partial apprehensions of the Divine, before the full revelation came, the faith of Israel is determinative and regulative for all the other faiths; and moreover, it is this faith that God is at work in the actual daily history of men, which makes the faith of Israel the natural and proper introduction to the Incarnation, where God Himself took flesh and lived among men and died at a time and in a place—in Palestine and under Pontius Pilate. This exaltation of the Holy God, actually at work within men and at their side, while it leads to a sense of awe before the Holiness of the Almighty, also leads to a sense of the dignity of this world, and of man’s life in it, which is lacking, as a rule, from other great religions, and that too in proportion as those other religions are spiritual. For the Hindu, for example, this world and all that is in it is mere illusion. He is spiritual enough but he is not material enough; and we find there that contempt for the things of the body which invariably issues in a contempt for moral conduct; for our moral conduct here, while we live upon this planet, is wrought out through our bodies. But the religion of Israel, and especially its completion in the Incarnation, wherein God Himself came in the flesh, gives at once a dignity to this world of ours, to our bodies, and to all the material side of life.