gives us an account of what the He-
brew 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 re-
vealed, or who accepted them, to a
great height of spiritual and moral
vision, and a race character was or-
ganised about them of the most power-
ful 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

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p124 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p125w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p126

v?