least a sympathy with the rule of life contained in the Scriptures, and
implies for its largest results a practical surrender to that rule of
life. He that doeth the will revealed in the Scriptures cometh to a
knowledge of the truth revealed in the Scriptures. We must next note
that an understanding of the Bible cannot advance far until it realizes
the emphasis on the human values set before us in the scriptural books.
We are to approach the distinctively religious teachings of the Bible
somewhat later. It is now in order to call attention to the truth that
the biblical movement is throughout the ages in the direction of
increasing regard for the distinctively human. The human ideal is not so
much absolutely stated as imposed in laws, in prophecies, in the
policies of statesmen, in the types of ideal erected on high before the
chosen people as worthy of supreme regard. And the place of the human
ideal in the Bible helps determine the place of the Bible in human life.
Mankind makes much of the Book because the Book makes much of mankind.

There is much obscurity about the beginnings of the laws of the Hebrews.
One characteristic of those laws, however, is evident from a very early
date--the regard for human life as such and the aim to make human
existence increasingly worth while. It is a common quality of primitive
religions that they are apt to lay stress on merely ceremonial
cleansings, for example. The ceremony is gone through for the sake of
pleasing a deity. There are abundant indications of this same purpose in
the ceremonies of the early Hebrews, but there is even more abundant
indication that the ceremonies were aimed at a good result for the
worshiper himself. It is impossible to read through the Mosaic
requirements concerning bodily cleanliness, the sanitary arrangements of
the camps, the regulations for cooking the food, and the instructions
for dealing with disease without feeling that there is a wide difference
between such requirements and merely formal ceremonials. The Mosaic