It has been already observed in the course of the notes that the writer of the Epistle everywhere assumes that there is a spiritual meaning in the whole record of the Old Testament. This deeper sense is recognised in the history both personal (Heb. 7:1 ff.) and national (4:1 ff.): in the Mosaic ritual (9:8): in the experience of typical characters (2:13 note); and in the general teaching (2:6 ff.). Every detail in the record is treated as significant; and even the silence of the narrative suggests important thoughts (7:3).
Generally it may be said that Christ and the Christian dispensation are regarded as the one end to which the Old Testament points and in which it finds its complete accomplishment, not as though the Gospel were the answer to the riddle of the Law (as is taught in the Letter of Barnabas: see Introd. § XIII.), but as being the consummation in life of that which was prepared in life. Those therefore who acknowledged Jesus as the Christ, when they realised His Nature, could not fail to see that He had abrogated the outward system of Judaism by fulfilling it.
It follows that the historical truth of the Scriptural records is everywhere guarded, but the recorded facts are treated as signs, and the believer is led to see in them a fuller meaning as the course of life is unfolded. The records are not changed, but men are changed by gaining deeper insight into nature and history.
The use which the author makes of Holy Scripture is, in other words, not dialectic or rhetorical, but interpretative. The quotations are not brought forward in order to prove anything, but to indicate the correspondences which exist between the several stages in the fulfilment of the divine purpose from age to age. The Christian faith is assumed, and on this assumption the Hebrews are taught to recognise in the Old Testament the foreshadowings of that growing purpose which the Gospel completes and crowns. This being so, the object of the writer is not to shew that Jesus fulfils the idea of the Christ, and that the Christian Church fulfils the idea of Israel, but, taking this for granted, to mark the relation in which the Gospel stands to the Mosaic system, as part of one divine whole. Looking back therefore over the course of the divine discipline of humanity, outlined in the Old Testament, he indicates how Christ, Lawgiver and Priest, fulfilled perfectly the offices which Moses (Heb. 3), Aaron (ch. 5) and Melchizedek (ch. 7) held in typical and transitory forms; and yet more than this, how as Man He fulfilled the destiny of fallen man through suffering (ch. 2). In regard to God, the whole history of the Bible is, according to the teaching of the Apostle, a revelation of the progress of the unchanging method of salvation through which creation is carried to its issue. In regard to man, it is a revelation of the necessity and the power of faith, by which he attains to a realisation of the eternal and the unseen, through suffering and failure, in fellowship with the Christ (Heb. 11:26).
These general remarks require to be justified in somewhat fuller detail. The affirmation of the correspondence of the many stages of life according to that which we speak of as the divine plan contains, as has been already said, the principle which regulates the whole interpretation of Scripture in the Epistle. This principle is plainly laid down in the opening words which announce that there is a divine education of the world. Little by little men are brought to the end for which they were designed, now in one way and now in