And if this is so, it needs to be borne in mind that the responsibility for bringing it home to the consciences of men, the responsibility for thus preventing that breach in religious continuity which the change in critical and literary conceptions of the Old Testament might otherwise occasion, lies in a preeminent degree upon those of us who are most impressed with the valid elements of the recent criticism. It belongs to us to see to it that, so far as lies with us, the Bible shall not be less prized by the generations that are coming, as the divine, the inspired volume, than it has been by the generations that are gone. It belongs to us to attend to the double admonition of the _De Imitatione_: 'Every scripture must be read in the same spirit in which it was written:' and 'Do not enquire who said this, but pay heed to what is said.' 3. There is one appeal which the New Testament makes to the Old which was not alluded to above, as it does not in fact fall naturally under S. Augustine's principle of the New Testament lying hid in the Old--namely the appeal to it as to a historical record of God's actual dealings with His people: a record of things which actually 'happened unto them for ensamples, and are written for our admonition.' But this appeal again would not be invalidated unless it were shown--not merely that there is an ideal element mixed with the history in the Old Testament record, but--that the element which is not mere narrative of events as they happened, the element of idealism, reaches to the point of obscuring the real significance of the facts and distorting their divine meaning. Whereas the truth is that the ideal element in the narrative comes from the real divine meaning in the facts being brought into emphatic prominence rather than overlooked; and we may depend upon it that no results of criticism have tended to weaken our belief that the chroniclers of Israel's history, whether prophetic or priestly, were inspired to see its true meaning and tendency, and from their different points of view to bring it out in its completeness. And it is important to remember in this connection that the Jewish idea of 'history' was never our modern critical idea of a mere record. They ranked their history from Joshua to the books of Kings under the head of 'prophecy,' and intimate to us by this very classification that they see in the historian one who not only records but interprets facts[27].