OLD TESTAMENT SCIENCE 549 



crete form of human society: associations of trade, industry, and 

 government; all sorts of employments, legislation, civic administra- 

 tion, diplomacy, international relations. It was once thought that it 

 was harder to acquire the finer graces of the New Testament than the 

 more elementary virtues of the Old. This is doubtful. At all events, it 

 is easier to feign the possession of the former than of the latter, and 

 an occasional indulgence in works or words of charity will throw 

 a successful disguise over a cold and deceitful heart or a selfish and 

 unwholesome life. Justice and mercy are really the rarest of virtues, 

 and they are sociologically the most precious. They have also the 

 wider range. Their proper application outside the sphere of individual 

 relations is the slowest of all social reforms. In the realm of corporate 

 interests it is still timid and unsure; in that of international relations 

 it has little more than just begun. 



Here the Old Testament is distinct from the New. Here the Old 

 Testament is not rudimentary or provisional or preparatory. If it is 

 of value it is independently valuable. Is it of value? If anything 

 historical or literary is of value for moral purposes, the sociological 

 principles of the Old Testament are valuable. They were the cardinal 

 principles of a community that struggled for centuries to enforce 

 them. They came to flower and fruit in the precepts and examples of 

 the prophets, and are celebrated in the sweetest lyrics of the prophetic 

 school of poetry. There is no other practical illustration or justifica- 

 tion of justice, righteousness, and mercy such as is given in the Old 

 Testament. 



The prophets introduced to the world these terms and these ideas. 

 They created practically a new vocabulary, and set up a new moral 

 and social code. And the outcome of justice and mercy is peace not 

 the peace of truce or compromise, of subjugation and submission, of 

 devastated lands and desolate homes and. ruined lives, but peace 

 wrought by righteousness. "The mountains shall bring forth peace, 

 and the little hills, by righteousness," is a forecast of the rule of the 

 " Prince of Peace." And a New Testament book with an Old Testa- 

 ment coloring reechoes the thought when it describes the coming 

 Saviour, "being first king of righteousness and afterwards king of 

 Salem, that is King of Peace." 



Consider but the single sphere of international relations and 

 obligations. The New Testament simply could not with propriety 

 deal with this most comprehensive and weighty of all sociological 

 matters, because there was no occasion. It was not merely because 

 the principles of social and civil righteousness had been established 

 once for all, but also because no international questions were possible 

 to the people of Judaea in the times of Jesus and the apostles. There 

 was practically but one nation in the whole Jewish world. Contrast 

 with this condition of affairs the political situation of the days of the 



