9. Each particular communication from God to man must be, in its place and measure, perfect. For it proceeded from the infinite mind of God, who understood at the beginning the whole plan of redemption, and who, when he made the first revelation concerning it, knew all that was afterwards to follow, and said and did, in the most perfect way, what was proper to be said and done at the time.  The revelations of the Holy Spirit, therefore, admit of a stupendous development, but no rectification or improvement.  The very earliest of them contain the germs of all that is to follow without any admixture of falsehood.  There is a holding back of the full light reserved for future ages, but no mist of error—­nothing which, fairly interpreted, will ever need to be retracted.  For this reason the very earliest of God’s communications to men retain for us, who live in these latter days, their pristine freshness and power.  Take, for example, the great primitive prophecy:  “I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.”  Gen. 3:15.  We can find no words more pertinent to describe the mighty conflict now going on between the kingdom of God and that of Satan.  What are they but a condensation into one sentence of the history of redemption—­a flash of light from the third heavens, which discloses at a glance man’s destiny from Eden to the trump of the archangel?  And so is it also with the later prophecies concerning Christ and his kingdom.  What is true of the revelations of the Old Testament holds good of all its institutions.  In their place, and with reference to the end which they proposed to accomplish, they were all perfect; were the best that could be given under existing circumstances.  At the foundation of all our reasonings concerning the appointments of the Old Testament must lie the axiom:  “As for God his way is perfect.”

10. The later revelations must he taken as the true exponents of the earlier. This is but saying that the Holy Spirit is the true and proper expositor of his own communications to men.  Since, as we have seen, the first revelations were made in full view of all that was to follow, the later revelations must be considered not as a mass of foreign and heterogeneous materials superadded to the original prophecies, but as a true expansion of the earlier prophecies out of their own proper substance.  For example, the promise made to Abraham:  “In thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed” (Gen. 22:18), is not so much a new promise as a further unfolding of the original one:  “It shall bruise thy head.”  A further development of the same promise we have in Nathan’s words to David:  “Thine house and thy kingdom shall be established for ever before thee, thy throne shall be established for ever;” and in all the bright train of prophecies in which the glory and universal dominion of the Messiah’s kingdom are foretold down to the day of Gabriel’s announcement to Mary:  “He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest; and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David.  And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.”  Luke 1:32, 33.