There is much obscurity about the beginnings of the laws of the Hebrews. One characteristic of those laws, however, is evident from a very early date--the regard for human life as such and the aim to make human existence increasingly worth while. It is a common quality of primitive religions that they are apt to lay stress on merely ceremonial cleansings, for example. The ceremony is gone through for the sake of pleasing a deity. There are abundant indications of this same purpose in the ceremonies of the early Hebrews, but there is even more abundant indication that the ceremonies were aimed at a good result for the worshiper himself. It is impossible to read through the Mosaic requirements concerning bodily cleanliness, the sanitary arrangements of the camps, the regulations for cooking the food, and the instructions for dealing with disease without feeling that there is a wide difference between such requirements and merely formal ceremonials. The Mosaic sanitary law aimed at the good of the people. It sought to make men clean and decent and human. So it was also in many of the rules governing the daily work, the regulations as to the use of land, the prohibitions of usury, the relations of servants and masters--all these had back of them the driving force of an enlarging human ideal. The trend was away from everything unhuman and inhuman. It is not necessary for us to remark upon the outbursts of the prophets against those who would put property interests above human interests. It is a matter of commonplace that the call of the prophets was for larger devotion to a genuinely human ideal: that the fires of their wrath burned most fiercely against old-time monopolists who joined land to land till there was "no place," and against old-time corrupters of the law who sold the needy for a pair of shoes. Not only did the emphasis on the human ideal show in laws, but in the training up of types of life which should in themselves embody and illustrate the conceptions of the biblical leaders. At the heart of the Christian religion is incarnation, or divine revelation through the human organism. We are told that this incarnation came in the fullness of time. The passage seems to refer not merely to the rounding out of historic periods, but also to the fashioning of an ideal of human character, and at least a partial realization of that ideal in Hebrew heroes. If the final ideal was to stand incarnate before men, there must be approximations to that ideal before the crowning incarnation could be appreciated. We look upon the character of Jesus as the complete embodiment of human excellencies. Such a revelation, however, would have been futile if there had not previously been glimpses of and anticipations of the ideal in the lives of those who were forerunners of Jesus. The Scriptures teach, or at least imply, that the life of a good man is in itself a transcendent value.