And more than this development of
idea, the New Testament gives us a new picture of God in the personality
of Jesus, and we see the light of the knowledge of God's glory in his
face.

Moreover, this development, so plainly recorded in Scripture, was not
unconsciously achieved by the drift of circumstance; it represents the
ardent desire of forward-looking men, inspired by the Spirit. The
Master, himself, was consciously pleading for a progressive movement in
the religious life and thinking of his day. A static religion was the
last thing he ever dreamed of or wanted. No one was more reverent than
he toward his people's past; his thought and his speech were saturated
with the beauty of his race's heritage; yet consider his words as again
and again they fell from his lips: "It was said to them of old time . . .
but I say unto you." His life was rooted in the past but it was not
imprisoned there; it grew up out of the past, not destroying but
fulfilling it. He had in him the spirit of the prophets, who once had
spoken to his people in words of fire; but old forms that he thought had
been outgrown he brushed aside. He would not have his Gospel a patch on
an old garment, he said, nor would he put it like new wine into old
wineskins. He appealed from the oral traditions of the elders to the
written law; within the written law he distinguished between ceremonial
and ethical elements, making the former of small or no account, the
latter all-important; and then within the written ethical law he waived
provisions that seemed to him outmoded by time. Even when he bade
farewell to his disciples, he did not talk to them as if what he himself
had said were a finished system: "I have yet many things to say unto you,
but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is
come, he shall guide you into all the truth."

In Paul's hands the work which Jesus began went on. He dared an
adventurous move that makes much of our modern progressiveness look like
child's play: he lifted the Christian churches out of the narrow,
religious exclusiveness of the Hebrew synagogue. He dared to wage battle
for the new idea that Christianity was not a Jewish sect but a universal
religion. He withstood to his face Peter, still trammeled in the
narrowness of his Jewish thinking, and he founded churches across the
Roman Empire where was neither Jew nor Greek, barbarian, Scythian, male
nor female, bond nor free, but all were one ma