4. The changed view of the Old Testament books which modern criticism asks of us, concerns, then, not so much their contents, as the circumstances of their composition and the method by which they reached their present form. When we pass to this latter class of considerations we are prepared for any information which criticism or tradition can give us, while at the same time our indestructible conviction, fortified by the strongest internal testimony of the books, that here is the Holy Spirit's work, gives us an antecedent expectation that the mode of composition in the case of each book will be such as God in His condescension can have sanctioned and used. God, I say, in His condescension--because undoubtedly the whole Old Testament does represent a condescension of God to a low stage of human development. Here then we need the recognition of a second great principle which S. Augustine lays down, viz. that 'as wrong is done to the Old Testament if it be denied to come from the just and good God, so wrong is done to the New if it be put on a level with the Old[28].' For all the reality of its inspiration the Old Testament is on a lower level than the New. Thus it is now almost universally recognised that God in the Old Testament is seen appealing to the human conscience at a low stage of its development, tolerating what was not according to His original will or His ultimate purpose[29], as in the case of divorce, and even, as in the case of Abraham's sacrifice, appealing to men to do things which in a more fully developed state of the conscience could not be even conceived of as commanded by God, in order that through their very obedience to the appeal they might be led higher into the knowledge of what God could, and could not, enjoin. How fully this principle in God's dealings was recognised and justified by the early Christian authorities has been already brought out in this volume[30]. Again, the same method of condescending to what was not in itself perfect, but was susceptible of a gradual education, appears in the institutions of the Old Testament law of worship. Modern enquirers are pressing upon us the fact that the ritual law of Israel is closely akin to the common ritual customs of Semite races. 'What I may call the natural basis of Israel's worship,' says Prof. Robertson Smith, 'was very closely akin to that of the neighbouring cults[31].' The peculiarity of Israel's religion lay in fact not in the ritual itself, but in the moral and theological turn given to the ritual. According to this view God in the law appears as diverting to good uses, by an act of condescension, ritual customs which it would have been premature to abolish. Such a view of the ritual is somewhat strange to the ears of modern Churchmen, but it was undoubtedly the prevalent view of the law among the great writers of Christian antiquity. References to illustrate this have been given in the eighth essay[32].