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historical evidence give us only two hypotheses to choose 
from. Either the first preachers of the religion of Christ were 
guilty of a deliberate imposture, or Jesus Christ is actually 
risen from the dead. 
24. I now come to the most important feature of the volumes 
which are before us. The one conviction which Mr. Arnold 
pursues with the most inextinguishable ridicule is that which 
regards God as a Personal Being. The only description of 
Him which Mr. Arnold will allow to be in any way “ verifi- 
able," is that He is the stream of tendency whereby all things 
fulfil the law of their being, or, since righteousness is very 
properly acknowledged to constitute the primary law of man's 
true being, “the not ourselves which makes for righteous- 
ness." This conception he admits that Israel by degrees 
personified for itself, but he repeatedly denies that this per- 
sonification formed any portion of Israel's original idea of 
God. He tells us that the Jews called this perception of a 
something without us, urging us to righteousness, by the name 
of the Eternal. But he forgets that, according to the best 
authorities, the unutterable name Jehovah is only the third 
person singular of the verb “ to be," and is therefore simply 
the expression of the truth revealed to Moses in the Bush. 
He says, and he quotes Gesenius as an authority for the 
statement, that the explanation of the word Jehovah, which 
would confine it to the assertion of God's Existence without 
adding the conception of His Eternity, would be a frigid and 
unsatisfactory one, and he is quite right. But he omits to 
inquire which is the primary and which the secondary idea 
implied in the word. He does not observe that the word 
implies self-Existence— the “great Personal First Cause" 
which Mr. Arnold dismisses with such contempt, while the 
tense, which implies a continuous or unfinished action,* is the 
portion of the word which implies Eternity. 
25. And then we are led off to a disquisition on the derivation 
of the word “ is,” “essence.” It signifies originally to breathe, 
and thence wo are invited to conclude that the idea of existence, 
or rather, essence, in early times was nothing but the idea of 
witness to the fact that the Resurrection of Christ was the doctrine of the 
Christian Church, though they invented all kinds of strange myths to account 
for it. This is the precise opposite of “ a legend growing under one’s very 
eyes.” On the contrary, it was a stubborn fact, the evidence of which 
the early heretics would have evaded if they could, but they found it too 
strong for them. 
* bee Evvald’s Hebrew Grammar ,— Tenses of the verb. 
