What might have been the result had the nation lived up to its privileges in educational lines is not difficult to determine. Earth’s history would have been shortened by at least two thousand years; for the nation would never have gone into bondage, and Christ would never have been betrayed. As these principles of Christian education are again taking hold of people, with what interest must the progress of the work be watched by the inhabitants of other worlds, who have seen past failures through lack of faith! That Hebrew education tended mainly to a development of the inner man instead of giving merely a conglomeration of facts, is well expressed by Wines. He says: “The Hebrew law required an early, constant, vigorous, and efficient training of the disposition, judgment, manners, and habits, both of thought and feeling. The sentiments held to be proper to man in society were imbibed with the milk of infancy. The manners considered becoming in adults were sedulously imparted in childhood.” [Sidenote: The threefold nature educated] The education, however, was not only moral and intellectual, but physical as well; for every Jewish boy was taught some trade which rendered him self-supporting. Nor did wealth or position remove the need of this. Paul, who sat at the feet of Gamaliel while studying the law, was able to gain a livelihood as a tentmaker when preaching the gospel. [Sidenote: True teaching exemplified] There was, however, in it all this one thought: all instruction was intended to develop the spiritual nature. It was considered the highest honor to become a priest (every Jew might have been both priest and teacher), and in this office man stood next to God. This was wholly a spiritual position, and prefigured the work of the Messiah. True, Israel as a nation never reached the standard set for her, never mounted, as it were, that ladder reaching from earth to heaven; and it was left for the One Man, the Master of Israel, to bind together the two realms of the physical and the spiritual. But from time to time men arose in the Jewish nation who grasped in a far broader sense than the majority, the meaning of true education as delivered to the Jews, and who, by submitting to the educating influence of the Spirit of God, were enabled to become leaders of the people and representatives of God on earth. Such were Moses, Daniel, Job, and Ezekiel, and, to a certain extent, all the prophets of Israel. In each of these the soul rose above the physical man, until it met its parent force in the heart of God. This made it possible for Moses to talk face to face with the Father, and for Ezekiel to follow the angel of revelation to the border land of God’s home.