282 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1870- 



have the proof of this, we must not turn our eyes to the 

 mere outward organisation of the Church we must not 

 even be content to behold the really great work which all 

 can see that Christianity has already wrought on earth ; 

 we must look up with the eye of faith to those heavenly 

 places where Christ our king, sitting at the right hand of 

 God, rules His kingdom with a wisdom and an omnipotence 

 far different from aught that appertained to the noblest 

 princes of the house of David. Now here again an objec 

 tion may be made. The theocracy of which we are 

 speaking, we may be told, is visible only to the eye of 

 faith ; but the old Hebrew theocracy, and similarly the 

 Messianic theocracy of the prophets, was seen by the eye 

 of sense. Between two such quantities there is no 

 compatibility. To say that the one is the fulfilment of 

 the other must be, after all, mere spiritualising. At first 

 sight, perhaps, such an objection is plausible ; but let 

 us ask : was the theocracy as a theocracy visible to the 

 Israelite by the eye of sense or by the eye of faith ? Was 

 not the Kingdom of Israel to the unspiritual man a mere 

 earthly kingdom ? That God was the true King of His 

 people, that His providence was everywhere the special 

 support of the nation, was then, as now, a doctrine of 

 faith ? True, the Old Testament dispensation was a 

 dispensation of miracles. But in this respect it differs 

 from the Christian dispensation only in this, that while 

 in the Old Testament the element of miracle runs through 

 the whole history, the miracles of the New Testament 

 were requisite only at the founding of the dispensation. 

 And in truth, the reason why the faith of the Old Testa 

 ment people needed to be maintained by constantly 

 recurring miracles, was just because in those days the 

 God-Kingdom was so much more easily lost sight of 

 so much more easily confused with the world-kingdom 

 than it is now ; because to us the one great miracle of the 

 resurrection of Christ contains within itself all that could 

 be shown to us by a whole dispensation of miracles. It is 



