And, after all, though details drawn out of a dead past permit obscurity, the nature and character of the main issue become ever more fixed and distinct, as the long roll of circumstances discloses its richer secrets. The very shift and confusion of the surface-material throws out, in emphatic contrast, the firm outlines of the gathering and growing mystery. Ever the advance proceeds, throwing off all that is accidental, immaterial, subservient: ever man becomes clearer in his recognition of the claims made on him by the hope which God keeps ever before Him, 'They shall be my people: I will be their God.' Ever the necessities of such an intimate affection point to the coming of the Christ. Christ is the end, the sum, the completion, of this historic friendship: and His advent is, therefore, absolutely unintelligible unless it is held in relation to the long experience, which He interprets, justifies, and fulfils. Faith in Christ is the last result, the ultimate and perfected condition of that faith of Abraham, which enabled him to become the first friend of God. And the immense experience that lay between Abraham and St. Paul, can alone bridge the interval, can alone exhibit the slow and laborious evolution, through which the primitive apprehension of God was transformed into the Christian Creed--that mighty transformation, spread out over two thousand years of varied history, which our Lord summed up in the lightning-flash, 'Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad.' The Book is the record of those tested and certified experiments, which justified our Lord in asserting that to believe in God was, necessarily, to believe in Him. No one can understand that assertion, unless by seeing it worked out, in detail, by the searching logic of experience.