216 REV. A. IRVING, D.SC., B.A., ON 
light of revelation given to us by Christ and His Apostles in the 
New Testament may be invoked to throw light upon the Old Testa- 
ment use of it, assuming (as we are justified in assuming) that 
Revelation was progressive, and that the same presiding Spirit 
illuminated the organs of both Old and New Testament revelation. 
Now the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews* speaks of God as 
the ‘Father of Spirits” in such a way as to appeal directly to the 
consciousness of the spiritual man, and he interprets all the discipline 
of life as the chastisement of sons, Paternity necessarily implies 
sonship ; and in the Introduction to St. John’s Gospel we are 
expressly told that those who (from the earliest dawn of the 
religious consciousness in man) received by a responsive faith the 
illumination of the divine Logos, in whom was “ that life, which is 
the light of men,” had given to them the “power” (A.V.) the 
“right” (R.V.) (e£ovore) to become the “sons of God” (John i, 
12). This I take to be the key to the whole teaching of the New 
Testament, as the thought is developed in St. Paul’s own masterly 
way in the eighth chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, which 
Dean Vaughan used to speak of as “the heart of the New Testa- 
ment.” At the same time, standing as it does, this phrase seems to 
me to link up the deepest teaching of the Old Testament (as that 
was understood in the time of Our Lord) with the fuller teaching of 
the New. It is moreover a favourite expression of St. John’s, and 
Christ the Lord clinches it, when He teaches us to say “Our 
Father.” The prophet Hosea (i, 10) uses the very expression when 
he predicts the status of the spiritual man in the Church of the then 
future, as St. John (I, iii, 1) applies it; and St. Luke expressly 
speaks of Adam as “the son of God.” For such reasons I am 
inclined to take the use of the term in Genesis to mean those to 
whom the God-consciousness was imparted, as to “living souls,” 
* In asermon published sixteen years ago I ventured to say that— 
“ Regarded from a philosophical point of view, that Epistle is the one 
supreme effort of Christian philosophy of the tirst ceutury in applying 
the inductive method of reasoning out from the records of the Old 
Testament the higher meaning, the heavenly interpretation, of the more 
material and earthly facts which were to be found in the law and history 
of Israel and in the Mosaic religion” (see Clergyman’s Magazine for 
February, 1894), 
