8. The Bible leads this sense of Law into that awful vision wherein "Conscious Law is King of kings."
The Laws appear substantial and real inasmuch as they are seen to be but phases of the Infinite and Eternal Being, the Righteous Lord who loveth righteousness. It is a conscious, intelligent, holy Being, whom Israel worships through these ideal forms of goodness. However He transcended their poor personalities, as transcend them they knew He must, God was yet best expressed in the form of the human, conscious personality. Man, the highest creature, must be, they said, most nearly in the form of God. As man takes up the noblest characteristics of the life below him, so his own noblest characteristics must be taken up into the Lord of Life. God cannot be less than personal, however much more than personal He may be. He is to be thought of by us, in lack of nobler imagination, as personal. Israel thus grew into the conception of the Infinite Power, manifest in the order of nature and in the order of conscience as conscious Power; One in whose image man was made, the Father of the mystic "I"; whose nature is the law of creation, whose purpose is its plan, whose will is its exhaustless energy.
This is the secret which has kept the religions inspired by the Bible from lapsing, as other religions have done, into lifelessness.
Egypt was the land of a religion which had won a high conception of the Divine unity; a religion which was scientific in its forms of thought, and earnestly moral in its spirit; but which failed to keep distinct in mind the order of nature from the Being on whom it reposes, and thus sank into the dreamy pantheism of its cultured classes, and the poetic polytheisms of its people. Of this lapse, Renouf writes:
All gods were in fact but names of the One who resided in them all. But this God is no other than Nature. Both individuals and entire nations may long continue to hold this view, without drawing the inevitable conclusion, that if there is no other God than this, the world is really without a God. But the fate of a religion which involves such a conclusion, and with that conclusion the loss of faith in immortality, and even in the distinction of Right and Wrong, except so far as they are connected with ritual prescriptions, is inevitably sealed.[62]
Neither Judaism, nor Mohammedanism, nor Christianity, the religions fed directly or indirectly from the Bible, have run, or can well run into this fatal error. The Divine Being who is mirrored in the Bible is the Conscious Intelligence to whom alone of right belongs that ineffable name—GOD. This is the thought and this is the word which hold the spell of the Bible power over the human soul. Nowhere else is the sense of God so alive, nowhere else does it so thrill the whole being of man. It was this living God whom these holy men of old were seeking; not simply the august ideals of the soul, but the Eternal Being who casts them as his shadows upon man:
Unto Thee lift I up mine eyes,
O Thou that dwellest in the heavens.
My soul truly waiteth still upon God,
For of Him cometh my salvation.
Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks,
So longeth my soul after Thee, O God.
My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the Living God;
When shall I come to appear before the presence of God?
It is God whom these holy men find. The Ineffable Presence rejoices their souls, and as we keep company with them rejoices our souls also:
Lord, Thou hast been our home
From one generation to another.
Whoso dwelleth in the secret-place of the Most High
Shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.
O Lord, Thou hast searched me out and known me.
Thou knowest my down-sitting and mine up-rising;
Thou understandest my thoughts afar off.
Thou art about my path and about my bed,
And spiest out all my ways.
For lo, there is not a word in my tongue
But Thou, O Lord, knowest it altogether.
The inspirations which we feel from the Bible-words are the breathings of the Eternal Spirit. The Divine whispers, which are too often inarticulate in nature and even in our souls, are articulate in the great Bible-words—the words proceeding from out of the mouth of God, on which man liveth. The power of the Bible is that the deafest souls can therein hear—GOD.