But to go on, in chronological order, with the particulars of the general fact: at last advancing knowledge and the progress of events began to give form to the ideas of order in nature, and of spontaneity and freedom, within certain limits, in man. The collapse of their own Theocracy, and their long subjection to Greeks and Romans, had obliged the Hebrews to understand the latter of these ideas. For those, therefore, among them who could understand facts it was an impossibility any longer to suppose that God was the sole, immediate, originator and executor of the law. In the minds of all such, the intellectual supports upon which that idea had rested had been completely cut away from beneath it. Still there was, but now removed back a step, an Originator and Governor of the universe, and of all that it contains, and of the moral sense among its other phenomena. This moral sense, therefore, must henceforth be the ground of religion; for that could not be found any longer in municipal law, which had become to their enlarged experience only a human manifestation of the divinely-ordained working of society. There was a Divine purpose and element in it; but in the results were blended so many elements of human error and wrong, especially when men were legislating, not for, or through inspiration from, the idea of God, but for themselves, and through the inspiration of their own supposed interests, as was the case with the heathen, that those results could not be accepted as the frame of religion. The moral sense must, therefore, be recognized, called forth, instructed, enlightened, purified, strengthened, and appealed to; and all this with a constantly understood reference to the knowledge of the day and to the existing conditions of society. But there could be no sanction for this moral sense excepting that of future rewards and punishments. They, therefore, must be recognized. They must be brought to the front. Belief in them must be laid in men’s minds as a foundation—the only foundation, with the mass of mankind—for the desired structure. This implied that the idea that God gives and executes here the law must be abandoned. And with it must go the idea of His maintaining by any means of this kind a kingdom of this world, such as the old Jewish polity had been. Thenceforth God’s kingdom would be within. Its law would be found, in the moral sense, in the conscience, in the moral consciousness of the God-respecting, and so of the God-taught, individual. The old kingdom had been external; the new would be internal. It would come without observation. Its citizenship would not be of this world. This is the interpretation of those chapters in the history of religion which are contained in the whole range of the old, and in the inception of the new, Dispensation.