Excerpt from The Expositor, Vol. 3

Proves the magnificent courage and sufficiency with which it answered every kind of challenge. In the Epistle to the Hebrews, for example, we see Christianity Vindicating itself in relation to the religion of the Temple. That religion, for Jews, may be said to have held the field; it rested on the authority of God, and it had a prima facie right to demand explanations from the new religion which was treating it as a thing waxing old and ready to vanish away. In the Epistle to the Hebrews the explanations are frankly given. The new is defined in relation to the old, conceived as a way of worshipping God, and its superiority at every point is asserted. The law made nothing perfect it did not bring anything in religion to the ideal goal' but Christ, by His one offering, has perfected for ever the people of God; the true religion is realized and guaranteed in Him as He appears in the presence of God on our behalf. Therefore in Him the shadows of the law are all fulfilled and now withdraw. We see a still more striking instance of this theologizing in response to a summons in the great theological passage of the New Testament, the prologue to St. John. Here Christian experience is challenged, not merely by the old religion, but by the philosophy (which means, by the science and the morality) of the pagan world. And it is not afraid to meet the challenge. It defines itself as frankly, and with as simple a sense of its own triumphant inclusive superiority, in rela tion to the universe and to humanity with all its achieve ments, as it had assumed in relation to the religion of Israel. Platonic and Stoic philosophers spoke of a Logos, a word or reason, which was the divine ideal of the world, the divine law or presence in it, the source of its rationality and of all the light and goodness it displayed. There is nothing in the history of the human mind like the courage with which the Evangelist defines the relation of the Christian faith to this sublime conception. He knows that in Christ he has.

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