The Historical Scriptures [pp. 484-504]

Old Testament History.
the somewhat sudden limitation of the theophanic honours to a
single family, within which they are afterwards confined until
they give place to the permanent theophany embodied in the
theocratic institutions. The particular epoch or event associated with this change, is the calling of Abraham, the segregation of a single person, even from the race of Shem, to be
the founder of a new house, and at last, of a new nation, with
which the Church was to be not united merely, but identified,
for many ages. In the whole extent of the primeval history,
from Adam to Moses, there is no such salient point, or line of
demarcation, as the one afforded by the calling of Abraham to
be, in a peculiar sense, the Friend of God and the Father of
the Faithful.
If we now turn from the Theophanic to the Theocratic period, in search of some analogous division, we may find it by
observing, what indeed is spread upon the surface of the history,
that from the time of the Mosaic legislation there is nothing
more than a remote approximation to the full development of
that extraordinary system, till we reach the reign of David,
when it seems to unfold itself completely, as a matter of experience and practice, for the first and last time, since the reign
of David is succeeded by a process of national decline, almost
unbroken, till the birth of Christ. This upward and then downward movement, so distinctly marked in the whole drift and
current of the history itself, that it only needs to be suggested
to awaken the attention even of the superficial reader, marks
the reign of David as the culminating period of the whole theocracy, the highest ground that Israel attained while subject to
the legal dispensation, and therefore an appropriate dividing
line in the protracted interval from Moses to Christ.
In this way we obtain four great divisions of the history contained in the Old Testament; not conventional or fanciful divisions, but spontaneously arising from the natural relations of
the subject, and associated with the three great salient points
or critical conjunctures, the Call of Abraham, the Law of Moses,
and the Reign of David.
By a further application of precisely the same method, each
of these four parts may be subjected to a similar division,
founded exclusively on changes and diversities in the condition
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