32 THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE

fairness and majesty of a building may or may not answer any moral purpose; it is not the result of labour in any sort of which we are speaking, but the bare and mere costliness-the substance and labour and time themselves: are these, we ask, independently of their result, acceptable offerings to God, and considered by Him as doing Him honour? So long as we refer this question to the decision of feeling, or of conscience, or of reason merely, it will be contradictorily or imperfectly answered; it admits of entire answer only when we have met another and a far different question, whether the Bible be indeed one book or two, and whether the character of God revealed in the Old Testament be other than His character revealed in the New.¹

§ 4. Now, it is a most secure truth, that, although the particular ordinances divinely appointed for special purposes at any given period of man’s history, may be by the same divine authority abrogated, at another, it is impossible that any character of God, appealed to or described in any ordinance past or present, can ever be changed, or understood as changed, by the abrogation of that ordinance. God is one and the same, and is pleased or displeased by the same things for ever, although one part of His pleasure may be expressed at one time rather than another, and although the mode in which His pleasure is to be consulted may be by Him graciously modified to the circumstances of men. Thus, for instance, it was necessary that, in order to the understanding by man of the scheme of Redemption, that scheme should be foreshown from the beginning by the type of bloody sacrifice. But God had no more pleasure in such sacrifice in the time of Moses than He has now; He never accepted, as a

¹ [The MS. here has the following passage (afterwards erased) amplifying this argument:-

“I cannot but think that a strange feeling which is under various disguises a ruling one with many Christians, that what was acceptable to Jehovah before the scheme of redemption was accomplished is less acceptable when that scheme is fulfilled; that He ever required from man what He is not, even when He does not require it, willing to receive; that Christ came to destroy the law instead of to fulfil it, and that the God whose angel dwelt in the tabernacle of the wilderness was less to be worshipped in spirit and in truth than the God who made His tabernacle the flesh of men.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]