Nor can it be proved that legalism or nomism has ever tended to suppress the spiritual side of religion, either in respect of consciousness of sin, or of individual love and devotion. With an equal logic quite the opposite might be argued. Professor Toy tells us himself that it is no “accident that along with this more definite expression of ethical‐religious law we find the first traces of a more spiritual conception of righteousness in the ‘new heart’ of Jeremiah and Ezekiel” (p. 235), whilst in another passage we read that “a turning point is marked by the Deuteronomist Jeremiah and Ezekiel, who announce the principles of individual responsibility and inwardness of obedience” (p. 184). Now, two things are certain; first, that Ezekiel urges the necessity of the new heart as well as of individual responsibility more keenly than any of his predecessors; secondly, that in Ezekiel the legalistic tendency is more evident than in Deuteronomy and Jeremiah. The logical conclusion would thus be that the higher ideals of religion are not only not inconsistent with legalism, but are the very outcome of it, and the so‐called Priestly Code, by the very fact of its markedly legalistic tendency, should be considered as a step in the right direction. The latter assertion sounds like a paradox, but it will seem less so when the prevailing characteristic of this portion of the Pentateuch, as given even by Kuenen, who is by no means a champion of the Law, is borne in mind. “The centre of gravity,” according to the great Dutch critic, “lies for the priestly author elsewhere than for the prophet; it lies in man’s attitude, not towards his fellow‐men, but towards God; not in his social, but in his personal life” (_Hibbert Lectures_, p. 161). It is here that we seem to strike the keynote of the _Weltanschauung_ of the Priestly Legislation. In it man is more than a social being. He has also an individual life of his own, his joys and sorrows, his historical claims, his traditions of the past, and his hopes for the future—and all these have to be brought under the influence of religion, and to become sanctified through their relation to God. Hence, the work of the Priestly narrator and legislator opens with a cosmogony of his own, in which we find the grand theological idea of man being created in the Divine image; hence, too, his religious conception of the history of the nation and the control claimed by him over all the details of human life, which became with him so many opportunities for the worship of God. To him, God is not a mere figurehead; He not only reigns, but governs. Everywhere,—in the temple, in the judge’s seat, in the family, in the farm, and in the market‐place,—His presence is felt in enforcing the laws bearing His _imprimatur_, “I am the Lord thy God.” By thus diffusing religion over the whole domain of human life—not confining it to the social institutions which are represented only by a few personages, such