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we conceive even of the Future Life of the Redeemed, but as of an eternal succession of Progressive Revelations a continually expanding development of the possible manifestations of Godhead ?
And if this is the case with the Revelation of Truth, so is it, and ought it to be, also with the Revelation of Duty. The Conscience, as well as the Intellect, of man is ever under a process of education and of growth, and the commands of Duty, to be either just or effective, must be proportioned to the moral condition of their subjects. The conscience of man is no invariable and definite endowment, the same in all men everywhere and always: it varies as much in different stages of man's social progress as it does in all the interval which lies between the first timid instincts of the untaught savage, and the large and prompt susceptibilities of the maturest Christian. A wide experience of good and evil is necessary for the due development of the moral judgements equally of a nation and an individual: and the father who should impose the obligations of manhood upon a yet lisping son, or the lawgiver who should enforce the prescripts of a high civilisation upon a people whom he was only for the first time attempting to reclaim from barbarism, would be as unjust as he would be unwise.
Now the Hebrews at the time of the delivering of their Law were as low in mental and moral condition as any people probably ever were who have been organised suddenly into national life. For two centuries and more they had been slaves-Egyptian slaves-and of such inveterate habits of Idolatry that amidst the very thunderings and lightnings of Sinai they made a calf to worship it for a God. For such a people then a law enjoining all that ought to be done by man, and forbidding all that ought not, would have been a burden far too heavy for them to bear: and accommodated and imperfect as it was, it remained for a thousand years, in respect of the merely elementary prohibition of image worship, a law too high for them to obey, or perhaps even to understand. For it would seem that for long centuries, and under the most pious of their
