346 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1874- 



The difficulty of bringing these two aspects of prophecy 

 under a single point of view cannot be conquered by 

 merely shutting our eyes to the lower and transitory 

 elements in the phenomena of prophecy, and spiritualising 

 everything that does not fit at once into the Christian 

 scheme. For, be it observed, the difficulty about pro 

 phecy is part of a larger problem. The real difficulty 

 lies not in any one institution of the Old Testament, but 

 in the fact that the Christian dispensation was preceded 

 by an Old Testament dispensation at all. Let individual 

 limitations be spiritualised away as far as you please, it 

 will still be true that the Old Testament dispensation as 

 such is full of national, local, temporary interests. It will 

 still be true that it was the history of a single nation that 

 led up to the manifestation of Christ. Unless we are 

 prepared to throw away the Old Testament altogether, 

 and to say with ancient and modern Gnostics that the 

 God of the Jews is not the God of Christians, we must 

 face the fact that from Moses to Christ all knowledge of 

 the true God and of His plan of Salvation was encased in 

 local, national, temporary, earthly forms. The limita 

 tions of prophecy are the historical limitations of the 

 whole dispensation, and from these limitations prophecy 

 could not have been freed without ceasing to be Old 

 Testament prophecy at all. 



Now the limitations of a dispensation of God s grace 

 must always be sought on the side of man, not on the side 

 of God, who is without limitation or mutability. If an 

 imperfect dispensation preceded Christianity, the meaning 

 of this is that God accommodated His work of revelation 

 and grace to the laws of limited human nature, that He 

 unfolded His plan under the conditions of historical pro 

 gress. The nexus of the successive steps in the develop 

 ment must be explained not with reference to Divine 

 omnipotence, which need not have been tied to a gradual 

 process at all ; but with reference to the incapacity of 

 man to receive spiritual truth except gradually, partially, 



