168 THE LIGHT OF DAY 



almost anywhere, and one seems to hear his awful 

 voice, and feel his terrible tread. It shakes the 

 earth ; it fills the heavens ; the universe is the 

 theatre of his love and wrath. What an abysmal 

 depth of conscience in those old Hebrews ; what 

 capacity for remorse, for reverence, for fear, for ter- 

 ror, for adoration ; what a sense of the value of 

 righteousness, and of the dreadfulness of sin ! In 

 them we see the unsounded depths of the religious 

 spirit, — its tidal seas ; bitter and estranging, but 

 sublime. As I have elsewhere said all other sacred 

 books are tame, are but inland seas, so to speak, 

 compared with this briny deep of the Hebrew Bible. 

 Little wonder it still sways the hearts and lives of 

 men. Their imaginations go out upon it. Im- 

 mensity broods over it. It is as tender as a tear or 

 as cruel as death. It is a record of the darkest 

 deeds, and luminous with the sublimest devotion 

 and piety. It is archetypal, elemental. The light 

 of eternity is upon its face. Other books, other 

 bibles, are as if written in houses or temples or 

 sheltered groves ; here is the solemnity and grandeur 

 of the mountain tops, or of the great Asiatic plains 

 under the midnight stars. Man is alone with the 

 Eternal, and with fear and trembling walks and 

 talks with him. 



How our fathers read and communed with this 

 book ! How much of the culture of the world has 

 come out of it ! The light, the entertainment, the 

 stimulus, which we find in literature, in art, in sci- 

 ence, our fathers found in this volume. 



