into a sin that, however innocently committed, sooner or later benumbs the conscience and, if historical experience has any lesson whatsoever to teach, paralyses social progress. But the legitimate distrust which the modernist feels for mere text-hunting can be, and often is, pushed too far. To construe it as a mandate contemptuously to ignore the thinking and ideals of the past is to be guilty of as foolish a blunder as ever was involved in the old method of determining an issue by proof-texts; for the relation between even the Old Testament and the social affairs of any modern community is far too valuable to be disregarded with impunity; and on these three grounds at least. _First_, the experiences of the Israelitish people constitute incomparably the most amazing national career the world has witnessed; and the story of their fortunes testifies for all time that one nation, situated in no secluded and sheltered corner of the globe, but occupying a little land encircled by vast and jealous Empires and covered time and again by the surge of successive civilisations, prolonged its life and in all essential respects maintained its identity, not by bread alone, but by words that proceeded out of the mouth of God. For, undeniably, Israel has preserved its continuity not merely through the stormy fourteen hundred years of which the Biblical records tell, but subsequently throughout the Christian era, in virtue of distinctive moral and religious qualities; and whatever view a man may hold regarding the truth of religion and the validity of morals, no serious student of human affairs can afford to overlook their practical effect in the history of the Jews. _Secondly_, in the course of that history (limiting our attention to the Old Testament literature) there appeared certain great personalities, in particular the true prophets, whose insight into the problems of society, whose enthusiasm for the welfare of men, and whose burning invective against all forms of injustice and oppression, ought to be familiar to every man who feels within him the sense of social obligation. The example of the Prophets of Israel and also, though less brilliantly, of her Psalmists, her Law-makers and her Wise-men, is a magnificent incentive to duty, quickening the conscience, stimulating one’s resolution under difficulties, and encouraging to good hope. _In the third place_, the record of these men’s thoughts frequently deserves our _intellectual_ consideration. Modern industrialism has created unsolved problems of organisation and production, upon which it would be idle to contend that the conditions of life in the Judæan highlands offer valuable comment; but since modern commerce, for all its marvellous development of wealth and resources, has signally failed to remove the vast inequalities between man and man, indeed has only accentuated them and made the contrast still more bitter for the unskilled, the weakly, and the