The final revelation of Christianity came outwardly as a continuation and development of the religion of Israel, and claimed to be the fulfilment of Israel's hope. It was a 'republication' of the highest truth about God which had been realized hitherto. For it came 'not to destroy but to fulfil.' God is still the Eternally One, the Eternally Righteous. Not sacrifice but holiness, not external 'works' but inward 'faith,' not the deeds of the law, but the righteousness which is of God--this is what He requires. He is still the God of Israel. But Israel according to the flesh had ceased to be the Israel of God, and the children of faithful Abraham, in whom, according to the ancient promise, all the families of the earth should be blessed, are to be gathered from east and west and north and south, from circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, bond or free, and recognised as one family under the one Father. If Christianity had been this and this only, Christ might have claimed to be a great prophet, breaking the silence of 400 years, restoring the ancient faith, and truly interpreting and carrying forward the spirit of the ancient revelation. But He claimed to be more than this. He claimed, as the Son of God, to be not only the true, but the only, Revealer of the Father. For 'no man knoweth the Father but the Son, and he to whom the Son shall reveal Him.' What fresh characteristics, then, has this new revelation to add to the Old Testament teaching about God? He is still One, the only God. He is perfect Righteousness, yet, as even the older religion knew, a God of loving-kindness and tender mercy, 'Who wills not the death of the sinner.' But more than all this, He is now revealed to man as Infinite Love, the One Father of humanity, Whose only begotten Son is Incarnate and 'made man that we may be made God.' Not one jot or tittle of the old revelation of God, as a God of Righteousness, is lost or cancelled. The moral teaching is stern and uncompromising as ever. God's love, which is Himself, is not the invertebrate amiability, or weak good-naturedness, to which some would reduce it. 'The highest righteousness of the Old Testament is raised to the completeness of the Sermon on the Mount[88].' The New Testament,' it has been said, 'with all its glad tidings of mercy, is a severe book[89].' For the goodness and the severity of God are, as it were, the convex and the concave in His moral nature. But what seized upon the imagination of mankind as the distinctive revelation of Christianity was the infinite love and tenderness and compassion of this Righteous God for sinful man. It was this which shone out in the character of Christ, He was Very God, with a Divine hatred of evil, yet living as man among men, revealing the true idea of God, and not only realizing in His human life the moral ideal of man, but by taking human nature into Himself setting loose a power of moral regeneration, of which the world had never dreamed.