d. Again that was not His way.
He chose to speak in the concrete rather than in the abstract, and,
therefore, instead of defining God, He shows us how He acts. In parable,
in story, and in His own life He sets God before us, that so we may
learn what He is, and how He feels toward us.

Christ, I say, built upon the foundation of the Old Testament. To
understand, therefore, the true significance of His teaching about God,
we must first of all put ourselves at the point of view of a devout Jew
of His day, and see how far he had been brought by that earlier
revelation which Christ took up and carried to completion. What, then,
did the Jews know of God before Christ came?

They knew that God is One, Only, Sovereign: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord
our God is one God." It had been a hard lesson for Israel to learn.
Centuries had passed before the nation had been purged of its
idolatries. But the cleansing fires had done their work at last, and
perhaps the world has never seen sterner monotheists than were the
Pharisees of the time of Christ.[10] And He whom thus they worshipped as
Sovereign they knew also to be holy: "The Holy One of Israel," "exalted
in righteousness." True, Pharisaism had degraded the lofty conceptions
of the great Hebrew prophets; it had taught men to think of God as
caring more for the tithing of mint, and anise, and cumin than for the
weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith, making
morality merely an affair of ceremonies, instead of the concern of the
heart and the life. But, however Jewish teachers might blind themselves
and deceive their disciples, the Jewish Scriptures still remained to
testify of God and righteousness, and of the claims which a righteous
God makes upon His people: "Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil
of your doings from before Mine eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do
well." Nor, accustomed though we are to think of the God of the Old
Testament as stern rather than kind, were the tenderer elements wanting
from the Jewish conception of Deity. Illustration is not now possible,
but a very little thought will remind us that it is to the Hebrew
psalmists and prophets that we owe some of the most gracious and tender
imagery of the Divine love with which the language of devotion has ever
been enriched.

Nevertheless, with every desire to do justice to a faith which has not
always received its due, even at Christian hands, it is impossible for
us, looking back from our