Hebrews and among their neighbors developed such different religious
meaning. This particular stream of religious life has a unity and a
character of its own. Its record brings into the succeeding centuries,
and still produces in our world, a distinctive relationship with God.

The Bible is a record of _progressive_ religious experience. As every
poet with a new message has to create his own public, so it would seem
that God had slowly to evolve men who would respond to His ever higher
inspirations. When scholars arrange for us the Biblical material in its
historical order, the advance becomes much more apparent. Its God grows
from a tribal deity to the God of the whole world; from a localized
divinity dwelling on Sinai or at Jerusalem, as the Greeks placed their
gods on Olympus, into the Spirit who fills heaven and earth; from "a
man of war" and a tribal lawgiver into the God whose nature is love. "By
experience," said Roger Ascham, "we find out a short way by a long
wandering," and it took at least ten centuries to pass from the God of
Moses to the Father of Jesus Christ.

Obviously we must interpret, and at times correct, the less developed by
the more perfect consciousness of God. The Scriptures, like the land in
which their scenes are laid, are a land of hills and valleys, of lofty
peaks of spiritual elevation and of dark ravines of human passion and
doubt and cruelty; and to view it as a level plain of religious equality
is to make serious mistakes. _Ecclesiastes_ is by no means on the same
level with _Isaiah_, nor _Proverbs_ with the _Sermon on the Mount_.
Doctrines and principles that are drawn from texts chosen at random from
all parts of the Bible are sure to be unworthy statements of the highest
fellowship with God.

Nor does mere chronological rearrangement of the material do justice to