Be willing to believe that language, reason, spiritual insight, which is the reason elevated to the capacity of knowing God--be willing to believe that these have been gradual acquisitions to humanity, and the whole course of God’s Providence will at once stand out in a clearer, purer light. Supposing the soul of man thousands of years back to have been precisely what the soul of man is now, its requirements and its aptitudes must have been the same then as they are to-day, so that if the doctrine of the Trinity is essential now, it must have been essential then, when it had not been revealed. On the same supposition, too, either the record of God’s will in the earliest portion of the Bible is incredibly defective, or the record of it in the completed canon of Scripture must be charged with bewildering superfluity. But God has not dealt so with His children. He has given them their heavenly food as they were able to bear it. First by allegory and parable He unfolds His will, as a father tells his little ones the stories which they love to hear, minding ever within the stories and by means of the stories to present the truth, the lessons of the beautiful and the upright. The earliest revelation of God presents Him in the simplest form, the easiest for us to understand, as the Great Patriarch of mankind. Along with this revelation came simple commands and prohibitions, the requirements of external sacrifice, the promise and warning of temporal rewards and punishments. The law of retaliation, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, seems brutal now, but it is the beginning of a noble education. It says indeed, ‘Do to others as they have done to you,’ but then in regard to injuries it bids you exact no more than you have suffered, instead of taking a brutal revenge by repaying the injury tenfold: and in regard to benefits it bids you never forget to be grateful. From it springs the higher and better law, of doing to others, not as they have done to you, but as you would have them do to you. Without these beginnings the human mind could never have comprehended or received the highest education--that we are not only to forgive but to love our enemies. The system of material sacrifices trained men to a capability of understanding and of offering the sacrifice of the heart; the outward cleansings demanded by the law led them by degrees to recognize the need of inward purity. By the law came the knowledge of sin. Not till man knew that sin was sinful could he either wish for or receive a Saviour. Hence it was that Christ came not at the beginning, but only in the fulness of time. The gift of the Holy Ghost was not outpoured till men in part were ready to receive it. That it is still bestowed with so sparing a hand is not the fault of God’s liberality, but of our backwardness to believe in God, to commune with Him, and thereby to grow up into His likeness. We are the mirror in which the divine image shines, if only the mirror can be made