had to be changed. New standards made. Yet in making a standard there must
be a starting point. God's bother was to get a starting point. When man
was too impure in his ingrained ideas to receive any idea of what purity
meant, things were in bad shape. When he was grubbing content in the
gutter, how was he ever to be gotten up to the highlands, when you
couldn't even lift his eyes over the curbstone? All the prohibitions of
the Mosaic code are but faithful mirrors of man's condition. A wholly new
standard had to be set up. That was God's task. It must be set up
_through_ men if they were to be attracted to it. So God started on His
longest-way-around-shortest road into man's heart.

A man is chosen. Through this man, by the slow processes of generations, a
nation is grown. Yet a nation only in numbers at first; in no other sense;
a mob of men. Then this mob is worked upon. They are led through
experiences that will make them soft to new impressions. Then slowly,
laboriously, by child-training methods, the new standard is brought to
them. Yet after centuries the best attained is only that their tenacious
fingers have hold of a _form_, not yet the spirit. Yet this is an immense
gain.

By and by this is the pedigree: A man, a family, tribes, a nation, a
strong nation, a broken nation, a literature, ragged remnants of a nation,
an ideal the like of which could not be found anywhere on earth, and a
_book_ embodying that ideal written as with acid-point in metal, as with
sharpest chisel in hardest stone.

At last a start was made. God had gotten a hook inside man's will to
which He could tie His tether, and _draw_, lovingly, tenderly,
tenaciously, persistently, _draw_ up out of the mire, toward the
highlands, toward Himself.