2 THE SABBATH. 



of ancient paganism, Principal Caird detects a power 

 ever tending towards amelioration, ever working towards 

 the advent of a better state, and finally emerging in 

 the purer life of Christianity. 1 



These changes in religious conceptions and practices 

 correspond to the changes wrought by augmented ex- 

 perience in the texture and contents of the human 

 mind. Acquainted as we now are with this immeasur- 

 able universe, and with the energies opeiant therein, 

 the guises under which the sages of old presented the 

 Maker and Builder thereof seem to us to belong to 

 the utter infancy of things. To point to illustrations 

 drawn from the heathen world would be superfluous. 

 We may mount higher, and still find our assertion 

 true. When, for example, Moses and Aaron, Nadab 

 and Abihu, and seventy Elders of Israel are represented 

 as climbing Mount Sinai, and actually seeing there the 

 God of Israel, we l^ten to language to which we can 

 attach no significance. 6 There is in all this,' says 

 Principal Caird, 'much which, even when religious 

 feeling is absorbing the latent nutriment contained in 

 it, is perceived [by the philosophic Christian of to-day] 

 to belong to the domain of materialistic and figurative 

 conception.' The reason is that the Christian philoso- 

 pher of to-day has larger capacities and fuller knowledge 

 than the Israelite of the time of Moses. What the one 

 accepted as literal truth the other cannot accept save 

 as a myth or figure. The children of Israel received 

 without idealisation the statements of their great law- 

 giver. To them the tables of the law were true tablets 

 of stone, prepared, engraved, broken, and re-engraved ; 

 while the graving tool which thus inscribed the law 



1 In Prof. Max Miiller's Introduction to the Science of Eeligion 

 some fine passages occur, embodying the above view of the continuity 

 of religious development. 



