"But God is one." Here again the unity is moral and essential--of character and action, rather than of number. In the Promise God spoke immediately and for Himself. There was no screen to intercept the view of faith, no go-between like Moses, with God on the mountain-top shrouded in thunder-clouds and the people terrified or wantoning far below. Of all differences between the Abrahamic and Judaic types of piety this was the chief. The man of Abraham's faith sees God in His unity. The Legalist gets his religion at second-hand, mixed with undivine elements. He believes that there is one God; but his hold upon the truth is formal. There is no unity, no simplicity of faith in his conception of God. He projects on to the Divine image confusing shadows of human imperfection. GOD IS ONE: this great article of faith was the foundation of Israel's life. It forms the first sentence of the Shemá, the "Hear, O Israel" (Deut. vi. 4-9), which every pious Jew repeats twice a day, and which in literal obedience to the Law-giver's words he fixes above his house-door, and binds upon his arm and brow at the time of prayer. Three times besides has the Apostle quoted this sentence. The first of these passages, Rom. iii. 29, 30,[107] may help us to understand its application here. In that place he employs it as a weapon against Jewish exclusiveness. If there is but "_one_ God," he argues, there can be only _one_ way of justification, for Jew and Gentile alike. The inference drawn here is even more bold and singular. There is "one God," who appeared in His proper character in the Covenant with Abraham. If the Law of Moses gives us a conception of His nature in any wise different from this, it is because other and lower elements found a place in it. Through the whole course of revelation there is _one God_--manifest to Abraham, veiled in Mosaism, revealed again in His perfect image in "the face of Jesus Christ." [107] Comp. 1 Cor. viii. 6; 1 Tim. ii. 5; also Mark xii. 29, 30; Jas. ii. 19.