looking after every special act of man, and of the whole
universe, from the fall of a sparrow to the fall of an empire.

And it is this intense faith in the living God, which can only come
by the inspiration of the Spirit of God, which proves the old
Testament to be truly inspired. This it is which makes it different
from all books in the world. This it is, I hold, which marks the
canon of Scripture. For in the Apocrypha--true, noble, and good as
most of it is--you do not find the same intense faith in the living
God, or anything to be compared therewith; and that for the simple
reason that the Jews, at the time the Apocrypha was written, were
losing that faith very fast. They felt themselves that there was an
immense difference between anything that they could write and what
the old psalmists and prophets had written. They felt that they
could not write Scripture. All they could do was to write
commentaries about it, and to carry out in their own fashion Moses'
command, 'Thou shalt bind my words for a sign upon your hands, and
they shall be as frontlets between your eyes, and thou shalt write
them upon the doorposts of thine house.' They were right in that;
but as they lost faith in the living God, they began to observe the
command in the letter, and neglect it in the spirit.

You know--some of you, at least--how these words were misused
afterwards; how the scribes and the Pharisees, in their zeal to
carry out the letter of the law, went about with texts of Scripture
on their foreheads, and wrists, and the hems of their robes,
enlarging their phylacteries, as our Lord said of them. But all the
time they did not understand the texts, or love them, or get any
good from them; but only made them excuses for hating and scoffing
at the rest of the world. They had them written only on their
foreheads, not on their hearts--an outside and not an inside
religion. They had lost all faith in the living God. God had
spoken, of course, to their forefathers; but they could not believe
that he was speaking to them--not even when he spoke by his only
begotten Son, the brightness of his glory, and the express image of
his person. God, so they held, had finished his teaching when
Malachi uttered his last prophecy. And now it was for them to
teach, and expound the law at secondhand. There could be no more
prophets, no more revelation; and when one came and spoke with
authority, at first hand, out of the depth of his own h