Page:The Life and Mission of Emanuel Swedenborg.djvu/439

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

injuring either the poetry or history which, knitting themselves into it, constitute it a complete unity. It is truly said, 'To explain belongs to God,' or to that man on whom there rests the spirit of the gods, the genius of all ages, and, so to speak, the childhood of the human race."

And again, "In order to be assisted, the revelation of God, as found in the Bible, and even in the entire history of the human race, must be believed, and thus ever return to the great centre about which everything revolves and clusters—Jesus Christ, the Corner-stone and inheritance, the greatest messenger, teacher, and person of the Archetype."

Hagenbach says, "The study of the Bible in the last decades has gained not only in impartiality, but in freshness and interest. How very different are a Pauline epistle and the Gospel of John now explained at the universities from what they were a quarter of a century ago? . . . There is no more a disposition to explain meagrely the written letter, but to penetrate the inmost depths of the Biblical writer's soul and by them to understand him."

Dr. Dorner says, "The extension of vision in modern theology to the entire history and philosophy of religion, has already produced not only new problems, but brilliant and fruitful results, profitable not only to the theology of the New Testament, but also to the elucidation and confirmation of Christianity itself. . . . The entire Old Testament and its religion is beginning to be treated . . . as one great prophecy, a rich compensation for those individual prophecies which had to be given up as exegetically untenable."[1]

The Rev. Andrew Jukes says, "The types of Genesis foreshadow God's great dispensational purposes respecting man's development; showing in mystery His secret will and way respecting the different successive dispensations. The types of Exodus bring out, as their characteristic, redemption and its consequences; a chosen people are here redeemed out of bondage, and brought into a place of nearness to God. Leviticus again differs from each of these, dealing, I think I may say solely, in types connected with access to God. Numbers and Joshua are again perfectly different, the one giving us types connected with our pilgrimage as in the wilderness; the other, types of our place as over Jordan,—that is, as dead and risen with Christ."

  1. History of Protestant Theology, ii. 443.