In the first place, Paul, like the other Bible-writers, and like the Semitic race in general, has a much juster sense of the true scope and limits of diction in religious deliverances than we have. He uses within the sphere of religious emotion expressions which, in this sphere, have an eloquence and a propriety, but which are not to be taken out of it and made into formal scientific propositions. This is a point very necessary to be borne in mind in reading the Bible. The prophet Nahum says in the book of his vision: '_God is jealous, and the Lord revengeth_;'[20] and the authors of the Westminster Confession, drawing out a scientific theology, lay down the proposition that God is a jealous and vengeful God, and think they prove their proposition by quoting in a note the words of Nahum. But this is as if we took from a chorus of Æschylus one of his grand passages about guilt and destiny, just put the words straight into the formal and exact cast of a sentence of Aristotle, and said that here was the scientific teaching of Greek philosophy on these matters. The Hebrew genius has not, like the Greek, its conscious and clear-marked division into a poetic side and a scientific side; the scientific side is almost absent. The Bible utterances have often the character of a chorus of Æschylus, but never that of a treatise of Aristotle. We, like the Greeks, possess in our speech and thought the two characters; but so far as the Bible is concerned we have generally confounded them, and have used our double possession for our bewilderment rather than turned it to good account. The admirable maxim of the great mediæval Jewish school of Biblical critics: _The Law speaks with the tongue of the children of men_,--a maxim which is the very foundation of all sane Biblical criticism,--was for centuries a dead letter to the whole body of our Western exegesis, and is a dead letter to the whole body of our popular exegesis still. Taking the Bible language as equivalent with the language of the scientific intellect, a language which is adequate and absolute, we have never been in a position to use the key which this maxim of the Jewish doctors offers to us. But it is certain that, whatever strain the religious expressions of the Semitic genius were meant, in the minds of those who gave utterance to them, to bear, the particular strain which we Western people put upon them is one which they were not meant to bear. [Footnote 20: _Nahum_ i, 2.]