Now, the books of life, as has
already been said, hold their place in universal literature because
they reveal and illustrate, in symbol and personality, these
fundamental ideas with supreme power and felicity. The large body of
literature in prose and verse which is put between the covers of the
Old Testament not only gives us an account of what the Hebrew race did
in the world, but of its ideas about that world, and of the character
which it formed for itself largely as the fruit of those ideas. Those
ideas, it need hardly be said, not only registered a great advance on
the ideas which preceded them, but remain in many respects the most
fundamental ideas which the race as a whole has accepted. They lifted
the men to whom they were originally revealed, or who accepted them,
to a great height of spiritual and moral vision, and a race character
was organised about them of the most powerful and persistent type. The
modern student of the Old Testament is born into a very different
atmosphere from that in which these conceptions of man and the
universe were originally formed; but though they have largely lost
their novelty, they have not lost the power of enlargement and
expansion which were in them at the beginning.
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