What the student of the history of the continuous growth of religion looks for in vain in the books of the Old Testament, are the successive stages in the development of religious concepts. He does not know which books he may consider as more ancient or more modern than other books. He asks in vain how much of the religious ideas reflected in certain of these books may be due to ancient tradition, how much to the mind of the latest writer. In Exodus iii. God is revealed to Moses, not only as the supreme, but as the only God. But we are now told by competent scholars that Exodus could not have been written down till probably a thousand years after Moses. How then can we rely on it as an accurate picture of the thoughts of Moses and his contemporaries? It has been said with great truth that 'it is almost impossible to believe that a people who had been emancipated from superstition at the time of the Exodus, and who had been all along taught to conceive God as the one universal Spirit, existing only in truth and righteousness, should be found at the time of Josiah, nearly nine hundred years later, steeped in every superstition.' Still, if the writings of the Old Testament[1] were contemporaneous with the events they relate, this retrogressive movement would have to be admitted. Most of these difficulties are removed, or considerably lessened, if we accept the results of modern Hebrew scholarship, and remember that though the Old Testament may contain very ancient traditions, they probably were not reduced to writing till the middle of the fifth century B.C., and may have been modified by and mixed up with ideas belonging to the time of Ezra. _Gifford Lectures, II._ [Footnote 1: The reader is reminded that these lectures were published in 1891, before English theologians had reached any generally received results in the study of the dates of the various parts of the Old Testament. It would be more correct now to substitute 'the Pentateuch' in the above sentence for the 'Old Testament.' For a statement of the modern views of the several periods to which the different books may be assigned, see Canon Driver's _Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament_.] May we, or may we not, interpret, as students of language, and particularly as students of Oriental languages, the language of the Old Testament as a primitive and as an Oriental language? May we, or may we not, as true believers, see through the veil which human language always throws over the most sacred mysteries of the soul, and instead of dragging the sublimity of Abraham's trial and Abraham's faith down to the level of a merely preternatural event, recognise in it the real trial of a human soul, the real faith of the friend of God, a faith without stormwinds, without earthquakes and fires, a faith in the still small voice of God? _MS._