I. As to the _Idea of God_,--how great was the chasm dividing the Hebrew God from all gods of idolatrous birth, and with what starry grandeur this revelation of _Supreme_ deity must have wheeled upwards into the field of human contemplation, when first surmounting the steams of earth-born heathenism, I need not impress upon any Christian audience. To their _knowledge_ little could be added. Yet to _know_ is not always to _feel:_ and without a correspondent depth of feeling, there is in moral cases no effectual knowledge. Not the understanding is sufficient upon such ground, but that which the Scriptures in their profound philosophy entitle the 'understanding heart.' And perhaps few readers will have adequately appreciated the prodigious change effected in the theatre of the human spirit, by the transition, sudden as the explosion of light, in the Hebrew cosmogony, when, from the caprice of a fleshly god, in one hour man mounted to a justice that knew no shadow of change; from cruelty, mounted to a love which was inexhaustible; from gleams of _essential_ evil, to a holiness that could not be fathomed; from a power and a knowledge, under limitations so merely and obviously human,[Footnote: It is a natural thought, to any person who has not explored these recesses of human degradation, that surely the Pagans must have had it in their power to invest their gods with all conceivable perfections, quite as much as we that are _not_ Pagans. The thing wanting to the Pagans, he will think, was the _right_: otherwise as regarded the _power_.] to the same agencies lying underneath creation, as a root below a plant. Not less awful in power was the transition from the limitations of space and time to ubiquity and eternity, from the familiar to the mysterious, from the incarnate to the spiritual. These enormous transitions were fitted to work changes of answering magnitude in the human spirit. The reader can hardly make any mistake as to this. He _must_ concede the changes. What he will be likely to misconceive, unless he has reflected, is--the immensity of these changes. And another mistake, which he is even more likely to make, is this: he will imagine that a new idea, even though the idea of an object so vast as God, cannot become the ground of any revolution more than intellectual--cannot revolutionize the moral and active principles in man, consequently cannot lay the ground of any political movement. We shall see. But next, that is,--