thought and modern thought as influenced by the Greek. Nowhere in Hebrew literature do we find men, like Socrates or Newton, patiently comparing and generalizing till the heights of abstract thought are reached. The Bible lacks all ideas about the universe and about all secondary causes. Gardiner well comments:
"For the Hebrew thought, all things, great and small, rested immediately on the providence of God. Our modern thought has built up between the power of the Almighty and the phenomena so splendidly described in the later chapters of 'Job' a structure of general laws and theories, such as the nebular hypothesis and the law of adaptation to environment, by which, as we say, we explain the phenomena. The Hebrew sage felt no need of such explanation, for he had no faculty of reasoning by which he could construct such secondary causes. We rest our universe on this structure of natural laws, just as the Indian cosmogony made the world rest on an elephant, which stood on a turtle: and just as this turtle was left standing on space, so in the end do our systems and natural laws leave the universe unexplained. The simpler thought of the Hebrew accepted the inscrutability of life in the first instance: for them the universe lay directly in the hand of the omnipresent God who had created it."
This goes to the root of the matter, and the truth that lay behind such a conception of the universe manifests itself in the hold Hebrew literature has maintained on men.
The "Epistles of the New Testament" forms the subject of the succeeding chapter. Gardiner points out that the first three Gospels are strikingly similar to the Old Testament in mode of thought and general atmosphere. But in the fourth Gospel and in the Epistles we come at a step to the logic and analysis of the Greek. There is a rich apparatus of transition phrases to take the place of the unique Hebrew conjunction; there is thought consciously developed into a final generalization; there is the view point of science and philosophy; there is, in a word, modern complexity.
Here also we come on a strong tinge of mysticism and symbolism that colors the use of words beyond their obvious meaning. The philosophical tendency is present in Paul and particularly in John. Yet Gardiner carefully emphasizes the gap between even these and our modern logicians —Paul, especially, burned with intense ematinnalicm.
In the following chapter Gardiner reverts to the Old Testament with a consideration of “The Prophecy.” He draws a strong contrast between the prophets and their modern equivalent, the statesman. For the prophets were, in reality, “poets whose wo.ds had practica! influence on the life of their (time, whose utterances swayed public opinion, and guided the action of kings.” To-day we distrust our public men, if aught but “dry facts” appear in their communications and when poets enter public life, it ıs usually at the expense of their poetry—witness Bryant and Lowell. Gardiner traces the development of the genre, that reaches its height with Isaiah and Amos, to break up into the legalistic school of Ezekiel and the rather emotional rhapsody of the second Isaiah. After this historical survey, Gardiner passes to the New Testament representative of prophecy, namely the “Apo- aalyse.”
He emphasizes the fact that “the outward form of the apocalypses is sometimes fantastic, almost trivial,” and, indeed, it may at once be predicated of people who, to adapt Lincoln’s saying, don’t like this sort of thing, that this is just the sort of thing they won’t like. Yet Gardiner considers the apocalyptic vision of the New Testament.“the vehicle of the most elevated thought yet attained by the Jewish race.” He finds the germ of the apocalypse in such visions as those of Joel and the second Isaiah, and more particularly in the book of “Daniel,” the type of which is also represented in the Apocrypha by “II Esdras.” Gardiner defines the apocalypse as “a kind of writing in which the events of the immediate past and the present are set forth in elaborate imagery as the visions of a seer of a time long past.” Thus, as is well