The appeal is to their personal experience and their gratitude: will this be enough? will they accept His yoke, as every convert must, not knowing what it may involve, not yet having His demands specified and His commandments before their eyes, content to believe that whatever is required of them will be good, because the requirement is from God? Thus did Abraham, who went forth, not knowing whither, but knowing that he was divinely guided. “Now, therefore, if ye will obey My voice indeed and keep My covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto Me from among all peoples; for all the earth is Mine, and ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” Thus God conveys to them, more explicitly than hitherto, the fact that He is the universal Lord, not ruling one land or nation only, nor, as the Pentateuch is charged with teaching, their tutelary deity among many others. Thus also the seeds are sown in them of a wholesome and rational self-respect, such as the Psalmist felt, who asked “What is man, that Thou art mindful of him?” yet realised that such mindfulness gave to man a real dignity, made him but little lower than the angels, and crowned him with glory and honour. Abolish religion, and mankind will divide into two classes,—one in which vanity, unchecked by any spiritual superior, will obey no restraints of law, and another of which the conscious pettiness will aspire to no dignity of holiness, and shrink from no dishonour of sin. It is only the presence of a loving God which can unite in us the sense of humility and greatness, as having nothing and yet possessing all things, and valued by God as His “peculiar treasure.”[34] And with a reasonable self-respect should come a noble and yet sober dignity—“Ye shall be a kingdom of priests,” a dynasty (for such is the meaning) of persons invested with royal and also with priestly rank. This was spoken just before the law gave the priesthood into the hands of one tribe; and thus we learn that Levi and Aaron were not to supplant the nation, but to represent it. Now, this double rank is the property of redeemed humanity: we are “a kingdom and priests unto God.” Yet the laity of the Corinthian Church were rebuked for a self-asserting and mutinous enjoyment of their rank: “Ye have reigned as kings without us”; and others there were in this Christian dispensation who “perished in the gainsaying of Korah” (1 Cor. iv. 8; Jude 11).