sanitary law aimed at the good of the people. It sought to make men
clean and decent and human. So it was also in many of the rules
governing the daily work, the regulations as to the use of land, the
prohibitions of usury, the relations of servants and masters--all these
had back of them the driving force of an enlarging human ideal. The
trend was away from everything unhuman and inhuman. It is not necessary
for us to remark upon the outbursts of the prophets against those who
would put property interests above human interests. It is a matter of
commonplace that the call of the prophets was for larger devotion to a
genuinely human ideal: that the fires of their wrath burned most
fiercely against old-time monopolists who joined land to land till there
was "no place," and against old-time corrupters of the law who sold the
needy for a pair of shoes.

Not only did the emphasis on the human ideal show in laws, but in the
training up of types of life which should in themselves embody and
illustrate the conceptions of the biblical leaders. At the heart of the
Christian religion is incarnation, or divine revelation through the
human organism. We are told that this incarnation came in the fullness
of time. The passage seems to refer not merely to the rounding out of
historic periods, but also to the fashioning of an ideal of human
character, and at least a partial realization of that ideal in Hebrew
heroes. If the final ideal was to stand incarnate before men, there must
be approximations to that ideal before the crowning incarnation could be
appreciated. We look upon the character of Jesus as the complete
embodiment of human excellencies. Such a revelation, however, would have
been futile if there had not previously been glimpses of and
anticipations of the ideal in the lives of those who were forerunners of
Jesus. The Scriptures teach, or at least imply, that the life of a good
man is in itself a transcendent value.