connection with the reason of man,
and it must also have some relation to the progressive developments of
human thought in the ages which preceded the advent of Christ.
Christianity did not break suddenly upon the world as a new commencement
altogether unconnected with the past, and wanting in all points of
sympathy and contact with the then present. It proceeded along lines of
thought which had been laid through ages of preparation; it clothed
itself in forms of speech which had been moulded by centuries of
education, and it appropriated to itself a moral and intellectual
culture which had been effected by long periods of severest discipline.
It was, in fact, the consummation of the whole moral and religious
history of the world.

A revelation of new truths, presented in entirely new forms of thought
and speech, would have defeated its own ends, and, practically, would
have been no revelation at all. The divine light, in passing through
such a medium, would have been darkened and obscured. The lens through
which the heavenly rays are to be transmitted must first be prepared and
polished. The intellectual eye itself must be gradually accustomed to
the light. Hence it is that all revelation has been _progressive_,
commencing, in the infancy of our race, with images and symbols
addressed to sense, and advancing, with the education of the race, to
abstract conceptions and spiritual ideas. The first communications to
the patriarchs were always accompanied by some external, sensible
appearance; they were often made through some preternatural personage in
human form. Subsequently, as human thought becomes assimilated to the
Divine idea, God uses man as his organ, and communicates divine
knowledge as an internal and spiritual gift. The theistic conception of
the earliest times was therefore more or less anthropomorphic, in the
prophetic age it was unquestionably more spiritual. The education of
Hebraic, Mosaic, and prophetic ages had gradually developed a purer
theism, and prepared the Jewish mind for that sublime announcement of
our Lord's--"God is a spirit, and they that worship him must worship in
spirit." For ages the Jews had worshipped in Samaria and Jerusalem, and
the inevitable tendency of thought was to localize the divine presence;
but the gradual withdrawment from these localities of all visible tokens
of Jehovah's presence, prepared the way for the Saviour's explicit
declaration that "neither in this mountain of S