90 HUMAN NATURE AND BRUTE NATURE. 



the dead ? Is the Lord's arm shortened that it cannot 

 save, whether it be man, or the worm that Scripture 

 deems his fitting emblem? Or, as the Jews were 

 jealous that the Gentiles should be saved, are we jealous 

 that for creatures which we slaughter, trample on, 

 enslave, and crowd out of existence, happiness and life 

 should yet be in store as well as for ourselves ? 



Be willing to believe that language, reason, spiritual 

 insight, which is the reason elevated to the capacity of 

 knowing God be willing to believe that these have 

 been gradual acquisitions to humanity, and the whole 

 course of God's Providence will at once stand out in 

 a clearer, purer light. Supposing the soul of man 

 thousands of years back to have been precisely what 

 the soul of man is now, its requirements and its 

 aptitudes must have been the same then as they are 

 to-day, so that if the doctrine of the Trinity is essential 

 now, it must have been essential then, when it had not 

 been revealed. On the same supposition, too, either the 

 record of God's will in the earliest portion of the Bible 

 is incredibly defective, or the record of it in the com- 

 pleted canon of Scripture must be charged with be- 

 wildering superfluity. 



But God has not dealt so with His children. He has 

 given them their heavenly food as they were able to bear 

 it. First by allegory and parable He unfolds His will, 

 as a father tells his little ones the stories which they 

 love to hear, minding ever within the stories and by 

 means of the stories to present the truth, the lessons 

 of the beautiful and the upright. The earliest re vela- 



