Nor must it be thought that the views of the Rabbis are so widely divergent from those enunciated in the Bible. The germ of almost all the later ideas is already to be found in the Scriptures. It only needed the process of time to bring into prominence those features which proved at a later period most acceptable. Indeed, it would seem that there is also a sort of domestication of religious ideas. On their first association with man there is a certain rude violence about them which, when left to the management of untutored minds, would certainly do great harm. But, let only this association last for centuries, during which these ideas have to be subdued by practical use, and they will, in due time, lose their former roughness, will become theologically workable, and turn out the greatest blessing to inconsistent humanity. IX. THE LAW AND RECENT CRITICISM(197) Professor Toy’s work, _Judaism and Christianity_, gives an admirable conspectus of the results of the modern critical school in their bearing on the genesis of Christianity. The author takes various important doctrines of Christianity, traces them back to their origin in Israelitism, pursues their course through their various phases in Judaism, until they reach their final development in the teaching of Jesus and His disciples, which, in the author’s judgment, is the consummation of that which the prophets and their successors had to give to the world. Laying so much stress as Professor Toy does on the saying, “By their fruits shall ye know them,” he ought also, perhaps, to have told us what, in the course of time, has become of these several doctrines. For when, for instance, with regard to the doctrine of original sin, he remarks that “in certain systems of Christian theology the human race is involved in the condemnation of the first man” (p. 185, n. 1); or that, in the New Testament, “the demand for a mediating power between God and humanity is pushed to the farthest point which thought can occupy consistently with the maintenance of the absoluteness of the one Supreme Deity” (p. 121), he is rather evading a difficulty than answering it. Such elaboration would, however, have been outside the scope of Professor Toy’s book, which claims only to be a sketch of the progress of thought from the Old Testament to the New. For his own solution of the indicated difficulty, Toy, to judge from his liberal standpoint, would probably refer us to Dr. Hatch’s Hibbert lectures; the issue of such an appeal must, I imagine, remain for long doubtful and disputed.