for the second time by Moses, always striving to cling fast to monotheism.  It was the direct intervention of God that caused this people to come to life again.  And so it goes on through the centuries till the Messiah, announced and foreshadowed by the prophets and psalmists, at last appears, the greatest Revelation of God to the world.  Then he appeared in the Son Himself; Christ is God; God in human form.  He redeemed us, He spurs us on, He allures us to follow Him, we feel His fire burn in us, His sympathy strengthens us, His displeasure annihilates us, but also His care saves us.  Confident of victory, building only on His word, we pass through labour, scorn, suffering, misery and death, for in His Word we have God’s revealed Word, and He never lies.

“That is my view of the matter.  The Word is especially for us evangelicals made the essential thing by Luther, and as good theologian surely Delitzsch must not forget that our great Luther taught us to sing and believe—­’Thou shalt suffer, let the Word stand.’  To me it goes without saying that the Old Testament contains a large number of fragments of a purely human historical kind and not ’God’s revealed Word.’  They are mere historical descriptions of events of all sorts which occurred in the political, religious, moral, and intellectual life of the people of Israel.  For example, the act of legislation on Sinai may be regarded as only symbolically inspired by God, when Moses had recourse to the revival of perhaps some old-time law (possibly the codex, an offshoot of the codex of Hammurabi), to bring together and to bind together institutions of His people which were become shaky and incapable of resistance.  Here the historian can, from the spirit or the text, perhaps construct a connexion with the Law of Hammurabi, the friend of Abraham, and perhaps logically enough; but that would no way lessen the importance of the fact that God suggested it to Moses and in so far revealed Himself to the Israelite people.

“Consequently it is my idea that for the future our good Professor would do well to avoid treating of religion as such, on the other hand continue to describe unmolested everything that connects the religion, manners, and custom of the Babylonians with the Old Testament.  On the whole, I make the following deductions:—­

     “1.  I believe in One God.

     “2.  We humans need, in order to teach Him, a Form,
     especially for our children.

“3.  This Form has been to the present time the Old Testament in its existing tradition.  This Form will certainly decidedly alter considerably with the discovery of inscriptions and excavations; there is nothing harmful in that, it is even no harm if the nimbus of the Chosen People loses much thereby.  The kernel and substance remain always the same—­God, namely, and His work.

     “Never was religion a result of science, but a gushing out
     of the heart and being of mankind, springing from its
     intercourse with God.”