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 loftier vantage-ground, to ignore its serious
defects and limitations. It was an exclusive faith. It magnified the
privileges of the Jews, but it shut out the Gentiles. God might be a
Father to Israel, but to no other nation under heaven did He stand in
any such relation. It was the refusal of Christ to recognize the
barriers which the pride of race had set up which more than anything
else brought Him into conflict with the authorities at Jerusalem. And
when once from the mind and heart of the Early Church the irrevocable
word had gone forth, "God is no respecter of persons; but in every
nation he that feareth Him, and worketh righteousness, is acceptable to
Him," the final breach was made; no longer could the new faith live with
the old. And even within the privileged circle of Judaism itself men's
best thoughts of God and of His relation to them were maimed and
imperfect. He was the God of the nation, not of the individual. Here and
there elect souls like the psalmists climbed the heights whereon man
holds fellowship with God, and spake with Him face to face, as a man
with his friend. But with the people as a whole, even as with their
greatest prophets, not the individual, but the nation, was the religious