realization. It shows us God in the Kosmos; that is to say, in an ordered Whole.

The progress of Humanity will consist in this, that the eternal principles which are being realized in the Finite, and are its germinating forces, that which is truly the Essence of Humanity, should be transfused out of the thought, the works, and the life of individuals, into the life of the peoples, and at last become the possession of the entire human race. Culture is the result of the individual's living for the community in which he is placed. The real living root of all voluntary self-limitation is what we call piety, the practical recognition, that the True, the Beautiful, and the Good ought not to subserve us and our selfish ends; but that they stand above us, demanding sacred reverence, reverence as we find them in God, and reverence also for their manifestation in every human soul.

The Bible testifies of personality, and so does the not inconsiderable section of our eternal orbit already traversed in historic time. What perishes in this great struggle that throbs through all history, is the limitation of the individual, and the limitation of the tribe or nation. But the Egotism of Nature desires to burst these bonds, and be itself the whole.

From such considerations Bunsen passes on to his second book, of eight chapters, devoted to the development of the "Consciousness of God among the Hebrews."

Their religious consciousness was rooted in two profound convictions, unique in the ancient world, that is, the unity of the human race, and the existence of one God, Creator, Preserver, and Governor. Abraham and Moses were the exponents of these intuitions, to which the Hebrews long clung with tenacious fidelity; until the one-sided manner in which the people worked out the national conception converted the representatives of Collective Humanity into an elect people, and deprived rites and ceremonies of their original meaning. Taking the term " prophet" in its widest sense, we have a succession, stretching over fifteen hundred years, which has no parallel in the world's history. Its meaning is the "man who beholds," the seer, the clairvoyant. The Hebrew prophets

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were the earliest historic persons in whom the perceptive faculty was raised to an apprehension of spiritual things. Their second sight was an inward perception of the soul. Any mingling of the idea of God with any thing Finite is hateful to a Hebrew. Even the vision of Him (the Angel of His Presence) is conceived of as distinct from himself. This faculty of open vision, latent in our nature, which in the case of the Hebrew prophets rose to a true intuition of the moral order of the world, forms the key to the prophetic writings and to the influence which they exerted on their age. The foretelling of external events is the lowest form of prediction.

The four leading persons in the history of the Religious consciousness of the nation were Abraham, Moses, Elijah, and Jeremiah. Abraham broke the curse of slavery to the bloody worship of Moloch, because he esteemed the voice of God speaking through his reason and conscience higher than all the traditions of his fellow-clansmen. With Abraham commences modern history; that is to say, the history of moral personalities and their influences. Relying on the authen. ticity of the records of his personal life, we are justified in believing that the account of his vision after his sacrifice is based on an ecstatic fact, if we regard the details as illustrating the manners of the times. His personality has influenced the history of mankind by the universal adaptation to human wants of its grand idea, which has made it operative from his day down to our own.

Abraham's theory of the world builds up a holy race, that of Moses, a great, free nation. And the fundamental thought of Moses corresponds to his singularly noble personal character. The last thing he thinks of is to spare himself in any respect. When it is reported to him that others were prophesying in the camp, he exclaims, "Enviest thou for my sake? Would to God that all the Lord's people were prophets!" After the lapse of the people into idolatry, the Lord refuses to go into Canaan with them: he will only send "an angel" before them; but Moses is not content until the "Presence" of God has been substituted, indicating a distinction which Bunsen finds occasion to use. The purely spiritual

interpretation assigned to the Divine Name spares us any perplexity over the narrative of his "beholding God." The distinction between the "face" and the "back" of the Lord opens a metaphysical sense. The looking at him from behind refers either to the reflection of Him in the Kosmos of Nature or the Kosmos of Humanity. The two precepts, to love God above all, and one's neighbor as one's self, were united by Christ in a single formula; but this springs directly from the conscious thought of Moses.

"Now Moses was a seer, such as none other after him; but his most distinctive characteristic was thoughtful, judicious, moral action in the exigencies of the life around him. He knew, as no other did, how to turn thought into deed. Finally, he is the sole example in history, with the single exception of Washington, of one who rose to be the deliverer and leader of his people, without making himself or his family lords over them. The commonwealth which he founded rested, like that of the Pilgrim Fathers, on the sense of the supremacy of God. He regarded his nation as the people of God, consecrated to the diffusion of God's counsels of righteousness and truth over the whole earth. Thus Moses was not alone the counsellor of his nation, but also its hero, lawgiver, king, general, and at the same time a citizen among citizens. But he was all these to the honor and glory of God. Moses, in the highest moments of his consciousness, both saw actual, practical realities, and possessed the power of carrying into effect as a leader what had been first revealed to him as a seer."

Bunsen here touches upon the great difficulty with which. Semitic nations organize a state or develop art. He believes that Assyria received its art from Ionia, and appeals to the statue of Niobe on the rock of Sipylus, near Magnesia, and referred to by Homer in the last canto of the Iliad, as a proof of the existence of art in Hellenic Asia Minor in primeval times. It is from the historical place which the Semitic tribes hold in respect to polity, art, and science, that we are to judge that attained by the Hebrews, in order to do the latter any justice. What effect had their sense of divine things upon marriage and the family, upon the patriarchal relations and the polity of clan-life, and upon the federal state into which that polity develops?

As far back as Abraham, Bunsen thinks that monogamy is recognized as the only legitimate state of things. Childlessness will justify the taking of a second or third wife; but as an exception, and as the privilege of the wealthy. The elevated conception of marriage presented in the account of the creation testifies to a profound understanding of the sacredness of the most intimate possible union of two persons. This is the true and lofty purport of the Canticles. It is true that the complete equalizing of man and woman in respect to marriage never took place till the contact of Christianity with the Teutonic mind; but its germs were latent in the sentiment, belief, and manners of the Hebrews; and to these Christ appeals when he made the declaration of the inviolability of the marriage tie, at which his disciples stumbled, words of Bunsen which bring a sense of invigoration to those of us who have had to hear lately of an inadequate and debasing view of marriage, entertained and taught by Jesus!

Under all the law, the underlying ideas are found to be, first, the strength of man's sense of the Divine Presence; second, a belief in the sacredness of his own person, based upon the fact of his being made in the Divine Image. It is the glory of the Hebrews, that they held fast to these ideas under all the vicissitudes of their national history.

In considering the religious consciousness of the nation, as shown in their philosophy in regard to the order of the universe, Bunsen examines the Book of Job, and Ecclesiastes or the Preacher. The latter he calls truly enough a purely contemplative, sceptical production of the later Persian period, the person of Solomon being an assumed disguise, as the writer tells us himself; but it is not quite so satisfactory to hear that Job is a Semitic drama of the time of the Captivity, the story itself being of Arabic origin, familiar long before the time of Ezekiel through an Aramaic popular book. "He had truly a grand genius," he says, "who out of an ancient bardic Arab recital, grown into a popular book, and dated originally from the time when flourishing states of Northern Arabia contended with the Himyaric empire for the palm of proverbial wisdom, constructed the first justification of the

ways of God to man, that has had permanent historical importance." The author soon rises above the view that suffering is a punishment for sin, to the only worthy view of God's government, that it is intended to purify. The fundamental idea in this book is the indestructible personal relationship between God and man. "To depart from evil is understanding," - that is, our perception of God's presence in the world is not seated in our intelligence, but in our conscience; in our moral sense and our actual practice. Job had erred through presumption; but his believing revolt against the mere outside shows of faith was reckoned to him for righteousness, as under other circumstances it had been in a former age to Abraham. The author, Bunsen thinks, was of the school of Jeremiah, a man of profound intellect, who had undergone severe trials; and the book bears signs of having been written in Egypt!

In the Maccabees and the Book of Daniel (dated by him at 169 B.C.), Bunsen finds the same leading consciousness. Out of it grew the expectation of a Messiah. For generating a new vitality in the nation, a national life and an inspired sacred Person were necessary. Among all the other Semitic nations, religious consciousness was lost in a profoundly materialistic and benighted condition. To the faith of Abraham it was that Mahomet returned, shouting, " Vain lies are vanquished." But he did it as a second Zoroaster,-"He that takes the sword shall perish by the sword." A wrathful spirit, the lust of conquest, the degradation of woman, paralyzed the wings of man's upward flight.

The union of the Old and New Testaments is not a forced one; for the purpose of the law and the prophets did not culminate till in Him who disclosed the secret core of all God's revelations to mankind, by turning the common heart and mind to the Great Father.

Bunsen's third book is devoted to the Religious Consciousness of the Aryans of Eastern Asia, prior to the introduction of Christianity. This concludes his first volume. After a preliminary outline, we are taught concerning this consciousness as it existed in a primeval period among Khamites,