The reason why Christ denied and disproved the proposition that God is the Executor, here, in this life, of His own law—the proposition of which the old Dispensation was an expansion—was that it hindered the perception of, and barred Him from teaching the doctrine of future rewards and punishments. Moses had seen precisely the same point, only reversely: for he had seen that the doctrine of future rewards and punishments would have barred him from teaching that God is the Executor here, in this life, of His own law. He, therefore, and the Prophets after him, had not taught it. Christ was restricted to the promulgation of a law which is not directly, but mediately, from God; the mediate stage being the moral consciousness of man; and, therefore, if we may so put it, He had no choice but to insist on the demonstration of the fact that God does not Himself directly execute the moral law here, for His not executing it here is the only logical basis of the doctrine of a future life. And He had no choice but to establish the doctrine of a future life, for the rewards and punishments of that life are the only sanctions of the law written in the heart. And, again, He had no choice but to promulgate that unwritten law, for it alone could be the law of His kingdom—of the kingdom of heaven as distinguished from the kingdoms of the world. First, then, an examination of the position and aims of Moses, and of the means at his disposal, or, at all events, which he was led to adopt for effecting his work, tells us why he did not teach the doctrine of a future life. And then we see that Christ could not logically teach this doctrine, till He had undone that part of the work of Moses which had been a bar to his teaching it. The work of Moses, when analyzed and questioned, gives, itself and alone, the answer we are in search of. The work of Christ, when similarly analyzed and questioned, confirms the answer the work of Moses had already given. It makes clearer what was clear enough before. In order that the intellectual, or scientific structure of morality and of religion might stand, instead of collapsing, and be enlarged, and rendered more commodious, and be made suitable to the new conditions and requirements of the world, Christ had to take out a part of the foundations of Moses, and to substitute other foundations for them. The foundations He took out were what had hindered Moses from teaching the great doctrine. Having taken these out He could, as He did, insert the great doctrine in their place as a foundation for the new religion. He abrogated the two ideas, that God does, in this world, give and execute the municipal law. Those two ideas being indispensable for the work Moses had to do, contain the reason why the Hebrew Scriptures ignored the future life.