It is to be feared that we do not often enough remind ourselves that man by his very constitution is a religious being. We are told that when man was made God breathed into him the breath of life. That is literally true: our life is from God. But when God breathed into man the breath of life, do we mean that he breathed into him only that one section of life which we call physical life? Or do we mean, in the larger sense, that all our life is of divine origin? Not only our physical life, but our mental life, our aesthetic life, our literary life, our spiritual life, comes from God. It must mean that or nothing.

Man is by his very constitution a religious being; he is an inspired creature. For inspiration is not sporadic, occasional, limited, temperamental. Inspiration is a part of our nature. Grant it, if you please, that man is the only being that we know of who is inspired; it is nevertheless true that man by the very law of his inheritance from the Divine is an inspired being. He has the capacity for genius. "There is in man," as the Old Testament says, "a Spirit." It is "the inspiration of the Most High that giveth him understanding," in whatever direction that understanding may be turned. When that Spirit is turned toward abstract or objective truth we call it the spirit of science. When it is turned toward the beautiful we call it the spirit of art. When it is turned toward the holy we call it the spirit of holiness, or the Holy Spirit; because there is that in us which craves holiness. We are inspired then, not simply with the passion for objective truth, the desire to collect data and deduce from them certain laws; we are inspired with the love of beauty; and best of all, we are inspired with the passion for holiness. When this Spirit is left free; when it is not meddled with; when it is directed positively and does not waste itself in protest or negations; when it is progressive and grows with our own growth; when it is practical and relates itself to the world in which we are now living; when it is inclusive and gathers itself into families irrespective of creed or color, but includes in its fellowship all kindred spirits touched with coals from the same altar; then we have a man who is inspired with the religion of the Spirit. This being so, it is perfectly obvious that the religion of the Spirit has been lived by men of different nations, at different times, and in various places. There is no monopoly of truth; good men are limited to no time and confined to no country.

This evening we are to consider together, simply as a type of this larger religious fellowship, the religion of the Spirit as exemplified and illustrated by that literature which we call the Old Testament. This view of the case sheds important light upon the Old Testament in two directions particularly.

First, it translates into its modern equivalent what to the average man is a confused idiom. In the Old Testament there occurs and recurs the expression "Thus saith the Lord;" or again we find the expression "The word of the Lord came to" so and so. Or again, we have the expression, as in our text for our evening meditation, "Obey my voice." Are these foreign expressions? are they simply survivals in our own day of language which no longer has meaning? or are they idioms struck from the eager, earnest, passionate soul which it becomes us to translate in our day into our own terms? If they are simply survivals of an older faith whose meaning has become sublimated with time the modern man may be excused for dismissing them more or less promptly. If, however, we believe that man is by his constitution a religious being, then any form of language in which he has expressed his religious conviction is valuable to us if we can only translate it into its modern equivalent.

Now the view of the case which we have presented to ourselves, that man is a spiritual being; that he is inspired; that the Spirit of the heavenly Father has always been in him and is in him now; gives us the material for translating this troublesome idiom into our modern equivalent. What does it mean, then, when in one-half of our Bible, the half which we call the Old Testament, we find these expressions: "Thus saith the Lord;" "The word of the Lord came to Jeremiah," or again: "Obey my voice." It can mean only one thing, and it means that thing eternally. And it means it so really that it is worth our while to seize it, to incorporate it into our modern thought, and to incorporate it better still into our own religious life. It means that the sanction for religion is the religious man himself; it means that the edicts of conscience are the voice of God; it means that the pronouncements of the moral sentiment are the word of God; it means that, when this passionate yearning for holiness becomes vocal, it is not we who speak, but the heavenly Father abiding in us.

It is difficult, I appreciate, for the modern man to accept this. He is likely to think of these Old Testament idioms as mere survivals of Oriental speech. He is likely to think, in a superficial way, that it may have been true that two thousand years ago more or less God did speak, but he is also sure that in that sense God does not speak to him. There can be no more fatal error than that, if we are trying to measure the value of religion by the contribution it makes to our own spiritual life. "I, the Lord, change not." He who is perfect cannot change. Man himself has not changed; precisely as you and I are here now, precisely so in their instincts were the ancient Egyptians, or the more ancient Aryans. Man has been and is the child of God; God spoke in the ancients precisely as he speaks in us. "As I was with Moses, so will I be with you." That is literally true. The pronouncements of man's moral sentiment are the word of God. When Duty speaks, it is not an impersonal thing that speaks; it is our heavenly Father speaking not to us, but through us. The best men have always realized that. I like those quaint lines of old Robert Herrick who, though he was an Anglo-Saxon, seems to have grasped the meaning of the Oriental idiom:

'Tis not every day that I Fitted am to prophesy; No, but when the Spirit fills The fantastic pannicles, Full of fire, then I write As the Godhead doth indite."

I like also that expression of the scientist Kepler, who after grappling with the scientific problem is able to say in the utmost reverence and with the profoundest truth: "Oh, God, I think thy thoughts after Thee."

So we are not dealing with a defunct literature; we are not trying to galvanize into a temporary life a dead expression when we recognize in these forms of the Old Testament language that which is philosophically true. If our thoughts did not come from God, where did they come from? If the passionate yearning of our heart for a higher and perfect good comes not from God, whence cometh it? So we say at the outset, this view of the case translates into its modern equivalent an idiom which to many religious people is troublesome.

Simply as corroborative of this simple axiom,  I am tempted to read a passage from a very memorable book which I hope many of you have read. One of the greatest theologians was named William Sanday. He wrote important articles in various encyclopedias; was a very conservative, I use the word in its etymological sense, a very conservative and sane scholar. Before he died he revised some of his opinions or rather his judgments; and, not wishing to shock his people, and in advanced years perhaps feeling that it was no more than just that he should shield himself from adverse criticism, the book was not published until after his death. Here is, as it were, a voice from the tomb; here is no gospel of strange heresies; here is no voice of one who likes to shock people; here is a soul on fire with the passion for religious reality. And in this book, "The Life of Christ in Recent Research," among other things he says this. He is referring to that part of the Old Testament in which it is related that Moses received the ten commandments from God; that the various commandments were written on the tablets of stone by the finger of God. These are his exact words: "These are just poetic accessories emblematic of the central fact that the words proceeded from God. The literal truth was that God spoke to the heart of Moses. The poetic truth was that he spoke in thunder and lightning from the crest of Sinai. This, I think, may be better described as historical symbolism or symbolic history." And then toward the end of his volume, he writes a few words which strike one as being so tender and pathetic, so considerate and so humble, that they are almost worth committing to memory: "I am coming to think myself that we shall have to take more account of this region than perhaps we have done. I take some blame to myself for not having perceived what I now seem to perceive before. I do not know that I shall have very much to retract because I have always wished to speak guardedly on this subject, and yet I confess that a good many things appear to me otherwise than they did."

So, the modern equivalent of "Thus saith the Lord," "The word of the Lord," "The voice of the Lord," is found in the behests of Conscience, back of which we can not go, and which is indeed vox dei. Our thinking, if it is honest thinking, is still "Thus saith the Lord." The word of truth found in the laboratory, in the study, through the telescope, is still not our word of truth, but the word of the God of truth. That voice which seems to thunder in the summits of our life, and in the darkness of complacency to let loose its lightnings of compulsion-this is still the thundering and the lightning of the Sinai which no man has climbed.

Second, this view of the case not only translates into its modern equivalent these expressions, but it gives us the material for a true apprehension of the majesty and worth of this Old Testament. literature itself. I must speak with some reserve here, a reserve not of thought, but of feeling; because I have often felt that there is a conspiracy on the part of people in churches to prevent our speaking the truth in these things, - a certain tacit understanding that when we come into the house of God we shall not say exactly what we think about these things. Now I am old-fashioned enough to believe what the Old Testament means when it says, "God desireth truth in the inward parts." I believe it is better for a man to express an honest conviction about this Old Testament, heretical as it may be, than to repeat the glib but unthinking and unmeaning phrases that he thinks agreeable to an unthinking people. This view of the case, I say, gives us the material for some apprehension of the majesty and worth of this Old Testament literature. As, for instance, in studying the stars we are dependent upon the telescope, and what we shall see depends, not only upon the training of the observer, but upon the size and quality of the lens; so, in the religion of the Spirit, the brain is the organ of observation. God speaks in and through the intelligence of man. He cannot, (or excuse me, I do not undertake to say what he cannot do), God does not communicate mature thought through a child. It is not our affair whether he can or not, but in all the times since the world began he never has. He speaks to the child in the child's way; he speaks to the man in the man's way. If, then, literature is the record of man's thinking, it must record the childhood of thought as well as the maturity of thought. Now the child's thought is inaccurate; it is not simply untrue. Many people think children are lying or telling an untruth when they are simply speaking from the realm of imagination. Children do not naturally lie, but they do not see things in true perspective; things look large to them; they are large to them. It is precisely so when they speak about religious things.

Now it will help us if, for the sake of clearness, we think of four progressive ways in which the religion of the Spirit finds utterance in this Old Testament. There are other ways, perhaps, not covered by these four ways, but this fourfold analysis will be sufficient to lay hold in some measure of appreciation of this vast body of literature which we call the Old Testament. Now, observe again, we are not trying to say pleasant things; we are endeavoring simply to say the thing as it comes to us. The first way it speaks is through the childish method of reporting, what we may call a religious scribe; one who has not much genius as yet, but who is content simply to tell things as they are or as he thinks they are, or as he thinks they ought to be. He is not accurate; he delights in large numbers. If he can make Methuselah 969 years of age, a number which in Hebrew is a wonderfully mouth-filling word, he has spoken God's truth as he sees it. It was not literally true that there ever was a man who lived to be 969 years of age; but the child's thought so apprehended it. Now there is much in our Old Testament that belongs in that era of childish scribal religious life. Much of the book of Judges, for instance, does not rank high as literature; it is the reporting by a mind not tutored in religious experience; it does not always report things accurately; sometimes it is anxious to force a moral when the moral might as well be drawn the other way. Much that is in the book of Joshua belongs to this early stage of religious experience. Much that is in first and second Kings; some that is in first and second Chronicles; a little that is in Samuel, etc., belongs to what might be called the undiscriminating age of religious experience. Now I have said the worst. It is not for a moment to be said that these people lied; they were perfectly honest; the Spirit of God was in them; the passion for truth was burning in their hearts; but they were children and they reported the truth as a child reports the truth. Now it is thoroughly unreligious on our part to take the deductions of children and to circulate them in modern life as science. It is not fair to the present generation of grown-ups; it is not fair to the present generation of children. They should be passed about as children's reports, and as children's reports they were true, and as children's reports they are true.

The next stage of development, a little better than the reporter's stage, is that of the ceremonialist, or man in whom the religion of the Spirit has not yet outgrown the need of ceremonies and rites. With such the rites of worship and the ceremonies of the church or temple are identical and synonymous with the religious life itself. Both books of Chronicles are largely colored by this attitude toward life. These writers did not hesitate sometimes to manipulate the facts in order to justify the importance of certain ceremonies in religious life. The book of Leviticus is almost wholly a hand-book for priests. A large part of the Old Testament represents this stage of development, when ceremonies and rites, sabbath observances and sacrifices, seem to be the all-absorbing topics of the religious life; and that he who observes these is a righteous and holy man, and he who disregards these is by virtue of that fact an unrighteous man, and an unholy man. Here again, these things are not lies; men did not write these things because they were hypocrites; believe it not; men wrote these things because in that stage of development they believed them with all their heart. It was God who was speaking in them, but he was speaking in them as God still speaks in the mind which is not yet discriminating and has not yet come to religious maturity.

First comes, then, in the religion of the Spirit the reportorial stage, the mere scribe who reports things without much genius or desire for accuracy, but to pass them on. Next comes the ceremonialist who likes to magnify the importance of sacrifice or incense. Then comes one stage beyond that, the moralist and philosopher. Much of the Old Testament is of that kind; the religion of the Spirit, the passion for holiness, has outgrown its undiscriminating stage; it has passed out of the region of rites and ceremonies, and is now beginning to teach personal and social life, not teaching it at its highest, but teaching it. Such, for instance, is the book of Ecclesiastes, a safe, sane, sober book. Such, indeed, is that collection which we call the book of Proverbs, prudential maxims, helpful to any young man or woman, counsels that can not always be defended by the highest morality, and yet on the whole a book which is a safe guide to a man who is perplexed, who is troubled not by the problems of religion, but by the most pressing questions of what he shall do today. And showing how this kind of literature can bloom and blossom like Aaron's rod, we have that wonderful book from which our second scripture lesson was read tonight, the book of Job, ranking easily with Hamlet, with Aeschylus, and the great classics of other nations. When we have done worshipping these books and attributing to them a genius which they have not, then we begin to read them and appreciate the genius which they have. This is not the highest literature of the Old Testament; they do not represent the high-water mark of the tide of the Spirit. Ofttimes they seem to lack the detailed accuracy of the photograph, and not yet to lay hold of the color scheme of the painter; but nevertheless they represent the artist at work with real brush, on real canvas, whose heart is on fire to paint things as he sees them. A great step that from the book of judges or Joshua, with its reporter's knack, to the almost genius of Proverbs and the absolute genius of Job.

Last of all, the religion of the Spirit asserts itself positive, free, progressive, practical, inclusive, in that vast body of saintly men and women in the Old Testament called prophets-men who prophesied, not in the sense of foreseeing, but in the sense of inseeing, men who see into the nature of things. I state what is a literal truth, that, though this be the year 1910, though the Anglo Saxon has produced its Shakespeare, and the Teuton has its Goethe, and the Roman has its Dante, and the English has rounded out again with a Milton; there is nowhere we can turn to find expressions and yearnings of the religious life equal to this Jeremiah, Isaiah, and the Psalms. That, I say, is literally true; and the more these things are studied, the more one will come back to this -old literature with a discriminating, and an appreciating, and an adoring reverence. That is what Jeremiah means when he says: "The ultimate message of the religious spirit in your fathers," even when they wrote the books of judges, or Joshua, or Proverbs, "the ultimate message was not concerning sacrifices and incense, but the inner meaning of that message was 'Obey my Voice.' "