Testament, and made it a textbook for Man in every age. Transcendent
benefactors of the race, they opened in it a never-failing well-spring
of the sweet waters of Consolation and Hope, which have flowed
over, fertilized, and made blossom as a rose the twenty-century
wide desert of the ills of human existence.

But they were not poets, as most of the authors of the Old Testament
were.

They were too much in earnest in their great work of carrying the
glad evangel of Redemption to all the earth--they so burned with
eagerness to pour their joyful tidings into every ear, that they
recked little of the FORM in which the saving intelligence was
conveyed.

Had they been poets would they have conceived Heaven as a place
with foundations of jasper, sapphires and emeralds, gates of pearl,
and streets of burnished gold that shone like glass? Never.

That showed them to be practical men, of a Semitic cast of mind,
who addressed hearers that agreed with them in regarding gold and
precious stones as the finest things of which the heart could dream.

Had they been such lovers of God's handiwork in Nature as the Greek
religious teachers--who were also poets--they would have painted
us a Heaven vaulted by the breath of opening flowers, and made
musical by the sweet songs of birds in the first rapture of finding
their young mates.

In other words they would have given us a picture of earth on a