tery; their children growing up in such an atmosphere,
trained for the highest and best; the earth with all its wondrous forces
developed and mastered by man; full comradeship and partnership between
man and all the living creation, beast and bird; and in the midst of all
God Himself walking and working in closest touch with man in all his
enterprises--that was God's Eden plan for man. But it failed.

The Israel plan was a failure, too. The main purpose of Israel being made
God's peculiar people has failed up to the present hour. That plan
originally was a simple shepherd people, living on the soil close to
nature. They were to be, not a democracy ruled by the direct vote of the
people in all things; nor a republic ruled by the vote of selected
representatives; nor yet a kingdom ruled over by the will of an autocrat;
but something quite distinct from all of these, what men have been pleased
to call a theocracy.

That is to say, God Himself was to be their ruler in a very real,
practical sense, directing and working with them in the working out of all
their national life. They were to combine all the best in each of these
forms of government, with a something added, not in any of them as men
know them.

They were to be wholly unlike the other nations, utterly unambitious
politically, neither exciting war upon themselves by others nor ever
making war upon others. Their great mission was to be a teacher-nation to
all the earth, teaching the great spiritual truths; and, better yet,
embodying these truths in their personal and national life.

But the plan failed. The glitter of the other nations turned them aside
from God's plan. They set up a kingdom, "like all the nations," very much
like them.

Then God worked with them where they would work with Him. He planned a
great kingdom to overspread the earth in its rule and blessed influence,
but not by the aggression of war and oppression. Their later literature is
all a-flood with the glory light of the coming king and kingdom. Yet when
the King came they rejected Him and then killed Him. They failed at the
very point that was to have been their great achievement. God's plan
failed. The Hebrew people from the point of view of the direct object of
their creation as a nation have been a failure up to the present hour.

God's choice for their first king, Saul, was a failure, too. No man ever
began life, nor king his rule, with better preparation and prospects. And
no career