/ r ^ ^ REESE LIBRARY > OF THK UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. Received \..A^MP so; for it is part of the glory of the Truth that it leads in procession no chained, no unwilling captives — none that do not rejoice in their captivity, and share in the triumph which they adorn. It is not therefore that arguments which address themselves to lower parts of man's being than the highest, are to be re- jected — but only their insufficiency acknowledged ; that they of themselves will never introduce any to the inner sanctuary of the Faith; but can only lead him up to the doors. Most needful are they in their 20 "* LECTURE I. place; most needful that Christianity should approve itself to have a true historic foundation ; that as a fact in history it should stand as rigid a criticism as any other fact ; that the books which profess to tell its story should vindicate for themselves an authentic character; that the men who wrote those books should be shown capable and credible witnesses of the things which they deliver ; that the outworks of our Faith should be seen to be no less defensible than its citadel. But, after all, the heart of the matter is not there; when all is done, men will feel in the deepest centre of their being that it is the moral which must prove the historic, and not the historic which can ever prove the moral ; that evidences drawn from without may be accepted as the welcome buttresses, but that we can know no other foundations, of our Faith than those which itself supplies. Revelation, like the sun, must be seen by its own light ; being itself the highest, the ultimate appeal with regard to it cannot lie with any lower than itself. There was indeed a sense in which Christ received the witness of John, but there was another in which He received not witness of any man, only his own witness and his Father's. Even so is it with his Word and his doctrine. There is a witness which they can receive of men ; there is also a witness which no other can yield them than them- selves. I trust, then, that taking for my argument The fit- ness of Holy Scripture for unfolding the spiritual life of men, and finding in its adaptations for this a INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 21 proof of its divine origin, I shall not fail in these pri- mary conditions, however immeasurably I shall of necessity fall below the greatness and grandeur of my theme. For first, this question. Whether Scripture be not a book capable of doing, and appointed to do, an higher work than every other book, cannot be re- garded as one which is not vital. It is felt to be vital by all those whose aim and purpose is to prove that it is but a book as other books, and therefore under- lying the same weakness and incompletenesses a^ every other work of men's hands. And these are many ; since for one direct assault on Christianity as a de- livered fact, there are twenty on the records of Chris- tianity, or the manner of its delivery. Many a one who would not venture boldly to enter on the central question, whether the Christ whom the Church be- lieves, w^hom not any one passage alone, but the col- lective sum of the Scriptures has delivered to us, be not the highest conceivable revelation of the Invisible God, and his Incarnation the necessary outcoming of the perfections of the Godhead, will yet hover on the out- skirts of the conflict, and set himself to the detecting, as he hopes, a flaw in this narration, or to the proving the historic evidence for that book insufficient. They who pass by the consideration as one which never rose up before their minds, whether there has not been a great education of our race, reaching through all ages, going forward from the day that God called Abraham from among his fathers' idols ; and whether this great idea be not as a golden thread, running 22 LECTURE I. through the whole woof and tissue of Scripture — they who shun altogether considerations such as these, will yet set themselves diligently to look for petty discrepancies between one historic book and another, or for proofs which shall not be put by, of some later hand than that of Moses in some notice in the book of Genesis. And however paltry and petty this war- fare may be, it is no doubt a true instinct of hate which makes them hope to discover vulnerable points in Scripture, as knowing that could they really find such, through them they might effectually wound Him, of whom the Scripture is the outcoming and the Word. Nor, again, can it be said that this is a matter, which though once brought into earnest debate, is now so no more; or that the earnestness of the strug- gle has been now transferred to other parts of the great controversy between the kingdoms of light and of darkness. It is not so: the Porphyrys, the Cel- suses, and the Julians of an earlier age, have never wanted their apt scholars, their worthy successors. The mantle of the false prophet is as surely dropped and bequeathed, as the mantle of the true. Who that knows aught of what is going forward among a peo- ple, who not in blood only, but in much besides, are most akin to us of all the nations of Europe, will deny that even now God's Word is tried to the uttermost; that it still has need to make good its claims; or knowing this, will presume to say how soon we may not find ourselves in the midst of controversies, which assuredly have not yet run themselves out, nor by the complete victory of the Truth brought themselves to a quiet end ? INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 23 Nor shall we with this theme be lingering about the outer precincts of our Faith. Not the external authority with which these books come to us, but the inner seal with which they are sealed, the way in which, like Him of whom they testify, they receive not witness of men, but by all which they are, by all which they have wrought, bear witness of themselves that they are of God, even the witness of power, this is our high argument. ^ And to it perhaps there will be no fitter introduc- tion than a few general remarks on the connexion in which a book may stand to the intellectual and spiri- tual life of men. And would we appreciate the im- portance of a book received as absolute law, for the mental and moral culture of those w^ho in such wise receive it, the influences which it will exert in mould- ing them, if only that book contain any elements of truth ; let v.s consider for an instant what the Koran has been and is to the whole Mohammedan world ; how it is practically the great bond and band of the nations professing that spurious faith, holding fast in a community, which is a counterpart, however feeble, of a Christendom, nations whom every thing else would have tended to separate; how it has stamped on them the features of a common life, and set them, however immeasurably below the Christian nations, yet well nigh as greatly above all other na- tions of the world ; — let us consider this, and then what the book is that has wrought the mighty effects — the many elements of fraud and folly which are mixed up with, and which weaken, the truth which 24 ^ LECTURE I. it possesses; and then let us ask ourselves what by comparison must be a Bible, or Scripture of absolute truth, to the Christian world ! Or to estimate the shaping moulding power which may lie in books, even when they come not as revela- tions, real or pretended, of the will of God, let us attempt to measure the influence which a few Greek and Latin books, (for the real effective books are but few,) exert and have exerted on the minds of men, since the time that they have been familiarly known and studied ; the manner in which they have modified the habits of thought, coloured the language, and aff'ected the whole institutions of the world in which we live ; how they have given to those who have se- dulously occupied themselves in their study and drunk in their spirit, a culture and tone of mind recognisa- bly different from that of any other men; and this, although they come with the seal of no absolute authority ; although, on the contrary, we feel that on many points (and some of these the very chiefest) we stand greatly above them. Let us take this into account, and we shall allow that it is scarcely possible to overrate the influence of a book which does come with highest sanction, to which men bow as contain- ing the express image of the Truth, and which is, as those are, only for a longer period and in a higher region of the spiritual life, the appointed instrument for calling out the true humanity in every man. At first, indeed, it seems hard to understand how any written w^ord should possess such influence as that which we attribute to this ; diflBcult to set a dispen- INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 25 sation of the Truth in that form at all upon a level in force and influence with the same Truth, when it is the living utterance of living men, or to ascribe to it powers at all equal to theirs. But when w^e consider *^ more closely, the wonder disappears; we soon per- ceive how, by the Providence of God, a written word, be it of man's truth or of God's Truth, should have • been charged with such important functions to fulfil. For first, it is plain that the existence of a written word is the necessary condition of any historic life or progress whatsoever in the world. If succeeding , generations are to inherit aught from those that went before, and not each to begin anew from first rudi- ^ ments, — if all is not to be always childhood, — if there is to be any manhood of our race, — it is plain that only thus, only through such an instrument could this be brought about. And most of all it is evident that through a Scrip- ture alone, that is, through a written record, could any great epoch, and least of all an epoch in which great spiritual truths were revealed or reasserted, transmit itself unimpaired to the after world. For every new has for a long while an old to contend with, every higher a lower, which is continually seek- ing to draw it down to itself. The most earnest oral tradition will in a little while lose its distinctness, undergo essential though insensible modifications. Apart from all desire to vitiate the committed word, yet, little by little, the subjective condition of those to whom it is intrusted, through whom it passes, will infallibly make itself felt ; and in such treache- ir 26 - ♦ . LECTURE I. ■*^ rous keeping is all which remains merely in the memo- ries of men, that after a very little while, rival schools of disciples will begin to contend not merely how their master's words were to be accepted, but what those very words were themselves. Moreover it is only by recurrence to such wit- nesses as are thus secured for the form in which the Truth was at the first delivered, that any great resto- ration or reformation can proceed ; only so can that which is grown old renew its youth, and cast off the slough of age. Without this, all that is once let go would be irrecoverably gone — all once lost would be lost for ever. Without this, all that did not interest at the moment, all which was laid deep for the uses of a remote posterity, of which they were first to discover the price and value, would long before it reached them have inevitably perished. And when the Church of the Apostolic age, with that directly following, is pointed to as an exception to this general rule, — as a Church existing without a Scripture, — even as no doubt for some while the Church did exist with a canon not full formed, but forming, and for a little while without any Scriptures peculiarly its own, it is left out of sight that the question is not, whether a Church could so exist, but whether it could subsist — not whether it could be, but whether it could conti- nue to be. That for a while, under rare combinations of favourable circumstances, with living witnesses and fresh memories of the Lord's life and death in the midst of it, a Christian Church without any actual writings of its new Covenant could have existed, is INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 27 one thing; and another, whether it could so have sur- vived through long ages; whether without them it could have kept ever before its eyes any clear and distinct image of Him that was its founder, or stamped any lively impress of Him on the hearts of its chil- dren. No; it is assuredly no happy accident of the Church that it possesses a Scripture ; but if the won- ders of the Church's first becoming were not to repeat themselves continually, if it was at all to know a na- tural evolution in the world; then, as far as we can see, this was a necessary condition of its very subsis- tence. This then, brethren, will be the aim of these Lec- tures which I am about to deliver in your hearing. I shall desire reverently, and with God's grace assist- ing, to discover what I may, of the inner structure of this Book which is so essential a factor in the spiritual life of men — humbly to trace where I can, the wisdom with which it is laid out to be the nourisher and teacher of all men, and of all men in all ages and in all parts of their complex being ; also to show, where I am able, how it has effectually approved itself as such. And yet, brethren, such considerations may not be entered on without one or two needful cautions, which I should wish to keep ever before myself, which I should wish to commend also to you. And first, let us beware lest contemplating this goodly fabric, we be contemplators only; as though we were to stand without Scripture and admire it, and not to 28 LECTURE I. stand within it and obey it. That were a mournful self-deceit — to see and marvel' at its fitness for every man, and never to have made proof of that fitness for the needs of one heart, for the healing the deep wound of one spirit, even of our own. And, indeed, only in this way of love and of obedience shall we enter truly into any of the hidden riches which it contains ; for that only which we love, we know. No book, much less the highest, yields its secrets, reveals its wonders, to any but the reverent, the loving, and the humble. To other than these, the door of higher understanding is ever closed. We must pass into and unite ourselves with that which we would know, ere we can know it more than in name. And then, brethren, again, when we propose to consider the structure of Scripture, it is not as though this were needed before men could enter into its fullest and freest enjoyment. It is far from being thus ; for as a man may live in an house without being an archi- tect, so may we habitually live and move in Holy Scripture, without consciously, by any reflex act, being aware of any one of the wonders of its construction, the secret sources of its strength and power. To know simply that it is the Word of God has sufficed thousands and tens of thousands of our brethren ; even as, no doubt, in this one affirmation is gathered up and anticipated all that the most earnest and devout search may unfold. We may say this, that it is God's Word, in other language, we may say this more at large, yet more than this we cannot say; after the widest range we shall only return to this at the last. INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 29 But while this is true, it remains true also that " the works of the Lord are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein,'^ if only leisure and opportunities are theirs — that if love is the way of knowledge, knowledge also is the food of love, the appointed fuel of the sacred fire; that, if the affec- tions are to be kept lastingly true to an object, the reasonable faculties, supposing them to have been actively called out, must find also in that object their satisfying employment. Many among us here have, or will have, not merely to live on God's Word our- selves, but, as our peculiar task, to unfold its secrets and bring forth its treasures for others. We there- fore cannot draw from it that unconscious nutriment which do many. Whatever may be the danger of losing the simplicity of our love for it, and coming to set that love upon other grounds than those on which the love of the humblest and simplest of our brethren reposes, and so of separating ourselves in spirit from him ; this, like any other danger of our spiritual life, must not be shrunk from, by shrinking from the duty to which, like its dark shadow, it cleaves; but in other and more manful ways must be met and overcome. We all of us have need, if not all from our peculiar functions, yet all from our position as the highest educated of our age and nation, as therefore the ap- pointed leaders of its thoughts and feelings, not merely to prize and honour this Book, but to justify the price and honour, in which we hold it ourselves, in which we bid others to hold it. May some of us be led by what shall be here spoken 3* 30 LECTURE I. to a fuller recognition of those treasures of wisdom and knowledge which are or may be, day by day, in our hands. May w^e be reminded of the high privilege which it is to have a book which is also, as its name declares, the Book ; which stands up in the midst of its brethren, the kingly sheaf, to which all the others do obeisance (Gen. xxxvii.7;) — not casting a slight upon them, but lending to them some of its own dig- nity and honour. May we in a troubled time be helped to feel something of the grandeur of the Scrip- ture, and so of the manifold wisdom of that Eternal Spirit by whom it came — and then petty objections and isolated difficulties, though they were multiplied as the sands of the sea, will not harass us. For what are they all to the fact, (I am here using and conclu- ding with words far better than my own,) that "for more than a thousand years the Bible collectively taken has gone hand in hand with civilization, science, law^, — in short, with the moral and intellectual cultivation of the species, always supporting, and often leading the way? Its very presence as a believed book, has rendered the nations emphatically a chosen race, and this too in exact proportion as it is more or less gene- rally studied. Of those nations which in the highest degree enjoy its influences, it is not too much to affirm that the differences, public and private, physical, moral and intellectual, are only less than what might be ex- pected from a diversity in species. Good and holy men, and the best and wisest of mankind, the kingly spirits of history enthroned in the hearts of mighty nations, have borne witness to its influences, have de- INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 31 Glared it to be beyond compare the most perfect instru- ment, the only adequate organ, of humanity; the organ and instrument of all the gifts, powers, and tendencies, by which the individual is privileged to rise above himself, to leave behind and lose his dividual phantom self, in order to find his true self in that distinctness where no division can be, — in the Eternal I AM, the ever-living Word, of whom all the elect, from the archangel before the throne to the poor wrestler with the Spirit until the breaking of day, are but the fainter and still fainter echoes." LECTURE 11. THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE. Ephesians I. 9, 10. Having made known unto us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasurCy which he hath pur- posed in himself; that in the dispensation of the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth; even in him* It is the necessary condition of a book which shall exert any great and effectual influence, which shall stamp itself with a deep impression upon the minds and hearts of men, that it must have a unity of pur- pose: one great idea must run through it all. There must be some single point in which all its different rays converge and meet. The common eye may fail to detect the unity, even while it unconsciously owns its power; yet this is necessary still; this growing out of a single root, this subordination of all the parts to a single aim, this returning of the end upon the begin- ning. We feel this in a lower sphere ; nothing pleases much or long, nothing takes greatly hold, no work of human genius or art, which is not at one with itself, which has not form, in the highest sense of that word ; which does not exclude and include. And it THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE. is hardly necessary to add, that if the effects are to be deep and strong, this idea must be a great one : it must not be one which shall play lightly upon the sur- face of their minds that apprehend it, but rather one which shall reach far down to the dark foundations out of sight upon which reposes this awful being of ours. Now what I should desire to make the subject of my lecture to-day is exactly this, that there is one idea in Holy Scripture, and this idea the very high- est; that all in it is referable to this; that it has the unity of which I spake ; that a guiding hand and spirit is traceable throughout, including in it all which bears upon one mighty purpose, excluding all which has no connexion with that, — however, from faulty or insufficient views, we might have expected it there ; however certainly it would have intruded itself there, had this been a work of no higher than human skill. I would desire to show that it fulfils this condition, the necessary condition of a book which shall be mighty in operation; that it is this organic whole, informed by this one idea; — how this one explains what it has and what it has not ; much in its form, and yet more in its substance ; why it should be brief here, and large there; why it omits wholly this, and only touches slightly upon that; why vast gaps, as at first sight might seem to us, occur in some portions of it; infinite minuteness of detail in others; how things which at first we looked to find in it, we do not find, and others, which we were not prepared for, are there. ^ 34 LECTURE II. And this unity if it can be shown to exist, none can reply that it was involved and implied in the ex- ternal accidents of the Book, and that we have mis- taken the outward aggregation of things similar for the inward coherence of an organic body : since these accidents, if the word may be permitted, are all such as would have created a sense of diversity : and it is only by penetrating through them, and not suffering them to mislead us, that we do attain to the deeper and pervading unity of Scripture. Its unity is not, for instance, that apparent one which might be pro- duced by a language common to all its parts. For it is scarcely possible, I suppose, for a deeper gulf to divide two languages than divides the two in which severally the Old and the New Testament are written. Nor can it be likeness of form which has deceived us into believing that unity of spirit exists; for the forms are various and diverse as can be conceived ; it is now song, now history; now dialogue, now narration ; now familiar letter, now prophetic vision. There is scarcely a form of composition in which men have clothed their thoughts and embodied their emotions which does not find its archetype here. Nor yet is the unity of this volume brought about through all the parts of it being the upgrowth of a single age, and so all breathing alike the spirit of that age ; for no single age beheld the birth of this Book, which was well nigh two thou- sand years ere it was fully formed and had reached its final completion. Nor can its unity, if it exists, be accounted for from its having had but one class of men for its human authors : since men not of one class THE UNITY OF SCRirTURE. 35 alone, but of many, and those the widest apart, kings and herdsmen, warriors and fishermen, wise men and simple, have alike brought their one stone or more, and been permitted to build them in to this august dome and temple which God through so many ages was rearing to its glorious height. Deeper than all its outward circumstances, since these all would have tended to an opposite result, this unity must lie — in the all-enfolding seed out of which the whole book is evolved. But this unity of Scripture, where is it ? from what point shall we behold and recognise it ? Surely from that in which those verses which I have taken from the Epistle to the Ephesians will place us ; when we regard it as the story of the knitting anew the broken relations between the Lord God and the race of man; of the bringing the First-begotten into the world, for the gathering together all the scattered and the sun- dered in Him; when we regard it as the true paradise Regained — the true De Civitate Dei, — even by a better title than those noble books which bear these names — the record of that mystery of God's will which was working from the first, to the end "that in the dispensation of the fulness of times He might gather together in one all things in Christ." And all nearer examination will show how true it is to this idea, which we affirm to lie at its ground. It is the story of the divine relations of men, of the divine life which, in consequence of those still sub- sisting relations, was struggling to the birth with more or less successful issues in every faithful man ; which 36 LECTURE il. came perfectly to the birth in the One, even in Him in whom those relations were constituted at the first, and perfectly sealed at the last. It is the story of this, and of nothing else ; the record of the men who were conscious of a bond between earth and heaven, and not only dimly conscious, for that all people who have not sunk into savage hordes have been, but who recognised these relations, this fellowship, as the great undoubted fact with which God had underlaid their life — the support not merely of their personal being, but as that which must sustain the whole society of earth — whether the narrower society of the Family, or the wider of the State, or the all-embracing one of the Church. How many temptations there were to wander out of and beyond this region, which yet every one of us must recognise at once to be the true region in which only an Holy Scripture should move; how many other regions in which, had it been other than what it is, it might have lost itself! For instance, other so called sacred books almost invariably miss the distinction between ethics and physics, lose themselves in theories of creation, endless cosmogonies, subtle speculations about the origin of the material universe. Such a deep ground has this error, so willing are men to substitute the speculative for the practical, and to lose the last in the first, that we find even after the Chris- tian Faith had been given, a vast attempt to turn even that into a philosophy of nature. What, for example, was Manicheism, but the attempt to array a philo- sophy of nature in a Christian language, to empty THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE. 37 Christian truths of all their ethical worth, and then to use them as a gorgeous symbolic garb for clothing a system different to its very core? But Scripture is no story of the material universe.* A single chapter is sufficient to tell us that " God made the heavens and the earth." Man is the central figure there, or, to speak more truly, the only figure; all which is there besides serves but as a background for him; he is not one part of the furniture of this planet, not the highest merely in the scale of its creatures, but the lord of all — sun and moon and stars, and all the visible crea- tion, borrowing all their worth and their significance from the relations wherein they stand to him. Such he appears there in the ideal worth of his unfallen condition ; and even now, when only a broken fragment of the sceptre with which once he ruled the world, remains in his hand, such he is commanded to regard himself still. It is one of Spinoza's charges against Scripture, that it does erect and recognise this lordship of man, that it does lift him out of his subordinate place, and ever speak in a language which takes for granted that * Compare the remarkable words of Felix the Manichaean, and the fault which he finds with it on this very ground (Augus- tine Acta c. Felice Manichseo, 1. 1, c. 9 :) Et quia venit Mani- chaeus et per suam praedicationem docuit nos initium medium et finem; docuit nos de fabrica mundi, quare facta est et unde facta et qui fecerunt; docuit nos quare dies et quare nox; do- cuit nos de cursu solis et lunae • quia hoc in Paulo non audivi- mus, nee in cffiterorum apostolorum scripturiSj hoc credimus, quia ipse est Paraclitus. 4 38 LECTURE II. nature is to serve him, and not he to acquiesce in nature, that the Bible every where speaks rather of a God of men than a Creator of the universe. We ac- cept willingly the reproach; we acknowledge and we glory in its entire truth, — that the eighth Psalm is but a single distinct utterance of that which all Scrip- ture proclaims; for that every where sets forth man as the crown of things, the last and the highest, the king to rule over the world, the priest to offer up its praises — and deals with nature not as co-ordinated with him, much less as superior; but in entire subor- dination; " Thou makest him to have dominion of the works of thy hands, and thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet." And herein Holy Scrip- ture is one, that it is throughout the history of man as distinct yrom nature, as immeasurably above nature — that it is throughout ethical, and does never, as so many of the mythic accounts of heathen religions, re- solve itself on nearer inspection into the mere setting forth of physical appearances. It is then the history of man ; yet not of all men, only of a chosen portion of our race ; and such, if we have rightly seized the purpose and meaning of a Scripture and what it is intended to tell, it must needs be. It is true that this too is often brought against it as a short-coming. It is a frequent sneer on the part of the master-mocker of France, that the Bible dedicates its largest spaces, by far the greatest num- ber of its pages, to the annals of a little tribe, which occupied, to use his very words, a narrow strip of mountainous territory, scarcely broader than Wales, THE UNITY^ OF SCRIPTURE.' 39- leaving almost unnoticed the mighty empire of Egypt and Assyria ; and he goes on to observe, that from a book which professes to go back, as this does, to the very beginning, and to be in possession of all authen- tic history from the first, to have in its keeping the archives of our race, we should gladly have received, even as we might have reasonably expected, a few notices of these vast empires; which had been cheaply purchased by the omission or abridgment of lives and incidents now written with such a special minute- ness. Now it is no doubt remarkable, and a fact to awaken our earnest attention, that in a Book, wherein, if in any, all waste of room would have been spared, the lives of an Abraham, a Joseph, a David, fill singly spaces so large ; while huge empires rise and fall, and all their multitudes pass to their graves almost with- out a word. These vast empires are left in their utter darkness, or if a glimpse of light fall upon them fora moment, it is only because of the relations in which they are brought to this little tribe; since no sooner do these relations cease, than they fall back into the obscurity out of which they emerged for a moment. But strange as this may at first sight appear, it belongs to the very essence of Scripture that it should be thus and no otherwise. For that is not a world- history, but a history of the kingdom of God ; and He who ever chooses " the weak things of the earth to confound the things which are mighty," had willed that in the line of this family, this tribe, this little people, the restoration of the true humanity should be 40 LECTURE II. effected : and each man who at all realized the coming Restorer, each in whom that image of God, which was one day to be perfectly revealed in his Son, ap- peared with a more than usual distinctness, however indistinctly still, — every such man was singly a greater link in the world's history than all those blind rail- lions of whom these records have refused to take knowledge. Those mountains of Israel, that little corner of the world, so often despised, so often wholly past over, was yet the citadel of the world's hope, the hearth on which the sparks that were yet to kindle the earth were kept alive. There the great reaction which was one day to fmd place against the world's sin was preparing ; and just as, were we tracing the course of a stream, not the huge morasses, not the vast stagnant pools on either side, would delay us; we should not, because of their extent, count them the river; but that we should recognise as the stream, though it were the slenderest thread, in which an onward movement and current might be discerned ; so it is here. Egypt and Assyria and Babylon were but the vast stagnant morasses on either side ; the man in whose seed the whole earth should be blest, he and his family were the httle stream in which the life and onward motion of the world were to be traced. For indeed, properly speaking, where there are no workings, conscious or unconscious, to the great end of the manifestation of the Son of God in the flesh, — conscious, as in Israel, unconscious, as in Greece, — where neither those nor these are found, there history THE UNITY OP SCRIPTURE. 41 does not and cannot exist. For history, if it be not the merest toy, the idlest pastime of our vacant hours, is the record of the onward march of humanity to- wards an end. Where there is no belief in such an end, and therefore no advance toward it, no stirrings of a divine Word in a people's bosom, where not as yet the beast's heart has been taken away, and a man's heart given, there history cannot be said to be. They belong not therefore to history, least of all to sacred history, those Babels, those cities of confusion, those huge pens into which by force and fraud the early hun- ters of men, the Nimrods and Sesostrises, drave and compelled their fellows : and Scripture is only most true to its idea, while it passes them almost or wholly in silence by, while it lingers rather on the plains of Mamre with the man that '' believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness," than by " populous No," or great Babylon, where no faith existed but in the blind powers of nature, and the brute forces of the natural man. And yet, that there were stirrings of a divine life, longings after and hopes of a Deliverer, at work in Israel, had not been, of itself, sufficient to exalt and consecrate its history into a Scripture. These such a history must contain, but also something more and deeper than these; else all in Greece and elsewhere that was struggling after moral freedom, that was craving afterlight, all that bore witness to man's higher origin and nobler destinies, might have claimed by an equal right to be there. But Holy Scripture, accord- ing to th§ idea from which we started, is the history 4* - 42 LECTURE II. * " of men in a constitution — of men, not seeking relations with God, but having them, and whose task is now to believe in them, and to maintain them. Its mournful reminiscences of a broken communion with heaven are evermore swallowed up in the firm and glorious assu- rances of a restored. The noblest efforts of heathen- ism were seekings after these relations with God, if haply man might connect himself anew with a higher world, from which he had cut himself loose. But here man does not appear as seeking God, and there- fore at best only dimly and uncertainly apprehending him ; but rather God appears as seeking man, and therefore not seeking in vain, but ever finding — and man only as seeking God, on the ground that God has already sought and found A/m, and has said to him, "Seek my face," and in that saying has pledged Him- self that the seeking shall not be in vain. With this, Scripture excludes all mere feelings after God, not as counting them worthless, — for precious and significant in the eyes of a Paul was the altar " To the unknown God" reared at Athens, — but excludes them, in that they belong to a lower stage of religious life than that to which it ministers, and in which it moves. It has no mythology; no ideal which is not also real; no dreams and anticipations of higher things than it is. itself destined to record as actually brought to pass. These may be deep out-speakings of the spiritual needs of man, precious recollections of a state which once was his, but which now he has forfeited; yet being only utterances of his want, cries of his need, confes- sions of his loss, sharing, too, as they must ever, in the THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE. 43 imperfections of which they testify, therefore they can find no place in a Bible. For that is in no way a re- cord of man's various attempts to cure himself of the deep "wound of his soul j it is no history of the expe- riments which he makes, as he looks round him to see if he may find on earth medicinal herbs that will meet his need ; but it presents him already in an hospital of souls, and under a divine treatment. Heathen philo- sophy might indeed be a preparation for Christianity — heathen mythology, upon its better side, an uncon- scious prophecy of Christ ; yet were they only the negative preparation and witness; Jewish religion was the positive ; and it is with the positive alone that a Scripture can have to do. Thus we have seen what, under some aspects, such a book must be: we have seen why it is not that, which men superficially looking at it, or in whom the speculative tendencies are stronger than the moral needs, might have desired to be. In the first place, that it is not the history of nature, but of man ; nor yet of all men, but only of those who are more or less conscious of their divine original, and have not, amid all their sins, forgotten that great word, "We are God's offspring;" — nor yet even of all these, but of those alone who had been brought by the word of the promise into immediate covenant relations with the Father of their spirits. We have seen it the history of an election, — of men under the direct and immedi- ate education of God — not indeed for their own sakes only, as too many among them thought, turning their election into a selfish thing, but that through them he 44 LECTURE 11. might educate and bless the world. That it does not tell the story of other men — that it does not give a philosophy of nature, is not a deficiency, but is rather its strength and glory; witnessing for the Spirit which has presided over its growth and formation, and never suffered aught which was alien to its great plan and purpose to find admission into it — any foreign elements to weaken its strength or trouble its clearness. Nor less does Holy Scripture give testimony for a pervading unity, an inner law according to which it unfolds itself as a perfect and organic whole, in the epoch at which growth in it ceases, and it appears henceforth as a finished book. So long as humanity was growing, it grew. But when the manhood of our race was reached, when man had attained his highest point, even union with God in his Son, then it comes to a close. It carries him up to this, to his glorious goal, to the perfect knitting again of those broken re- lations, through the life and death and resurrection of Him in whom God and man were perfectly atoned. So long as there was any thing more to tell, any new revelation of the Name of God, any new relations of grace and nearness into which he was bringing his creatures, — so long the Bible was a growing, expand- ing book. But when all is given, when God, w'ho at divers times spake to the world by his servants, had now spoken his last and fullest Word by his Son, then to this Book, the record of that Word of his, there is added no more, even while there is nothing more to add; — though it cannot end till it has shown in pro- phetic vision how this latest and highest which now^ THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE. 45 has been given to man, shall unfold itself into the glory and blessedness of a perfected kingdom of heaven. For thus, too, it will mark itself as one, by return- ing visibly in its end upon its beginning. Vast as the course which it has traced, it has been a circle still, and in that most perfect form comes back to the point from whence it started. The heaven, which had dis- appeared from the earth since the third chapter of Genesis, reappears again in visible manifestation, in the latest chapters of the Revelation. The tree of life, whereof there were but faint reminiscences in all the in- termediate time, again stands by the river of the water of life, and again there is no more curse. Even the very differences of the forms under which the heavenly kingdom reappears are deeply characteristic, marking as they do, not merely that all is won back, but won back in a more glorious shape than that in which it was lost, because won back in the Son. It is no longer Paradise, but the New Jerusalem — no longer the gar- den, but now the city, of God, which is on earth. The change is full of meaning ; no longer the garden, free, spontaneous, and unlaboured, even as man's blessed- ness in the state of a first innocence would have been ; but the city, costlier indeed, more stately, more glori- ous, but, at the same time, the result of toil, of labour, of pains — reared into a nobler and more abiding habi- tation, yet with stones which, after the pattern of the " elect corner-stone," were each in its time laboriously hewn and painfully squared for the places which they fill. And surely we may be permitted to observe by the 46 LECTURE II. way, that this idea, which we plainly trace and re- cognise, of Scripture as a whole, this its architectonic character, cannot be without its weight in helping to determine the Canonical place and worth of the Apo- calypse, which, as is familiar to many among us, has been sometimes called in question. Apart from all outward evidences in its favour, do we not feel that this wondrous book is needed where it is ? — that it is the key-stone of the arch, the capital of the pillar — that Holy Scripture had seemed maimed and im- perfect without it, — that a winding up with the Epis- tles would have been no true winding up ; for in them the Church appears as still warring and struggling, still compassed about with the weaknesses and infirmities of its mortal existence — not triumphing yet, nor yet having entered into its glory. Such a termination had been as abrupt, as little satisfying as if, in the lower sphere of the Pentateuch, we had accompanied the children of Israel to the moment when they were just entering on the wars of Canaan; and no book of Joshua had followed to record their battles and their victories, and how these did not cease till they rode on the high places of the earth, and rested each man quietly in the lot of his conquered inheritance. And again, this oneness of Holy Scripture, when we feel it, is a sufficientj even as it is a complete, an- swer to a very favourite topic of Romish controver- sialists. They are fond of bringing out how much there is of accident in the structure, nay, even in the existence of Scripture, — that we have one Gospel (the third) written at a private man's request, — another, THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE. 47 (the fourth) because heresies had risen up which need- ed to be checked — epistles owing their origin to causes equally fortuitous — one, because temporary disorders had manifested themselves at Corinth, — another, be- cause an Apostle, having promised to visit a city, from some unexpected cause was hindered — a third, to se- cure the favourable reception of a fugitive slave by his master — that of the New Testament at least, the chiefest part is thus made up of occasional documents called forth by emergent needs. And the purpose of this slight on Scripture is evident, the conclusion near at hand — which is this. How little likely it is that a book so formed, so growing, should contain an abso- lute and sufficient guide of life and rule of doctrine — how needful some supplementary teaching. But when once this inner unity of God^s Word has been revealed to us, when our eye has learned to re- cognise not merely the marks and signs of a higher wisdom, guiding and inspiring each several part, but also the relations of each part to the whole ; when it has risen up before us, not as aggregated from with- out, but as unfolded from within, and in obedience to an inner law, then we shall feel that, however acciden- tal may appear the circumstances of its growth, yet this accident which seemed to accompany its produc- tion, and to preside in the calling out of the especial books which we possess, and no other, was no more than the accident which God is ever weaving into the woof of his providence, and not merely weaving into it, but which is the staple out of which its whole web is woven. » 48 LECTURE II. Thus, brethren, we have been led to contemplate these oracles of God in their deep inner unity ; we have seen not merely how they possess, but how we can reverently trace them in the possession of, that oneness of plan and purpose, which should make them effectual for the unfolding the spiritual life of men. We have seen how men's expectations of finding some- thing there which they did not find, with their disap- pointments at its absence, have ever grown out of "a mistaken apprehension of what a Scripture ought to be ; how the presence of that which they miss would indeed have marred it, would have contradicted its fun- damental idea, would have been a discord amid its deep harmonies, even as the discords which men find in it come oftentimes as its highest harmonies to the purged ear. Nor is it without its warning to ourselves, that these murmurings and complaints do most often evidently grow out of a moral fault in them that make them. Men have lost the key of knowledge — the master-key which would have opened to them every door ; and then they wander with perplexed hearts up and down this stately palace which the Eternal Wisdom has builded, but of which every goodlier room is closed against them, till, in the end, they complain that it is no such peerless palace after all, but only as other works which man's art has reared. Nor is this con- clusion strange ; for unless they bring to it a moral need, unless that moral need be to them the interpre- ter of every part, and gather all that is apparently abnormal in it under a higher and reconciling law 'V THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE. 49 the Book, in its deepest meaning and worth, will re- main a riddle to them still. But this moral need, what is it ? It is the sense that we are sundered and scattered each from God, each from his fellow-man, each from himself — with a belief deep as the foundations of our life, that it is the will of God to gather all these scattered and these sundered together anew — this, with the conviction which will rise out of this, that all which bears on the circumstances of this recovering and regathering is precious ; that nothing is of highest worth which does not bear upon this. Then we shall see in this Word that it is the very history which we require — that al- together, nothing but that — the history of the resto- ring the defaced image of God, the re-constitution of a ruined but godlike race, in the image of God's own Son — the deliverance of all in that race, who were willing to be delivered, from the idols of sense, from the false gods who would hold them in bondage, and would fain make them their drudges and their slaves. And, brethren, what is it that shall give unity to our lives, but the recognition of the same great idea which gives unity to this Book ? Those lives, they seem often broken into parts, with no visible con- nexion between one part and another ; our boyhood, we know not how to connect it with our youth, our youth with our manhood: the different tasks of our life, we want to bind them up in a single sheaf, to feel that, however manifold and apparently disconnected they are, there is yet a bond that binds them into one. Our hearts, we want a central point for them, as it 5 50 LECTURE II. were a heart within the heart, and we oftentimes seek this in vain. Oh, what a cry has gone up from thou- sands and ten thousands of souls ! and this the burden of the cry, I desire to be one in the deep centre of my being, to be one and not many — to be able to reduce my life to one law — to be able to explain it to myself in the master-light of one idea, to be no longer rent, torn, and distracted, as I am now. And whence shall this oneness come? where shall we find, amid all the chances and changes of the world, this law of our life, this centre of our being, this key- note to which setting our lives, their seeming discords shall reveal themselves as their deepest harmonies? Only in God, only in the Son of God — only in the faith that what Scripture makes the end and purpose of God's dealing with our race, is also the end and pur- pose of his dealing with each one of us, namely, that his Son may be manifested in us— that we, with all things which are in heaven and all things which are in earth, may be gathered together in Christ, even in Him. . ,;3»- %,. LECTURE III. THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE. MATTHEW XIV. 20. They did all eat, and were filled. It was the aim of my preceding Lecture to trace the unity which reigns in Scripture, that it has a law to which each part of it may be referred, a root out of which it all grows. It will be my purpose in the present, to bring out before you how this Book, which is one, is also manifold ; a fact which we may not be so ready to recognise the instant that it is presented to us, as the other. For the truth which occupied us last Sunday, of the Bible as one Book, not merely one because bound together in the covers of a single vo- lume, but as being truly one, while it testifies in every part of one and the same Lord, while it is every where the utterance of one Spirit; this, whether consciously or unconsciously, has strong possession of men's minds in this our land. We feel, and rightly, that every at- tempt to consider any of its parts in absolute isolation from the other, rent away from the connexion in which it stands is false, and can lead to no profitable result ; and it is hardly possible to estimate too highly the blessing of this, that the band which binds for us the 52 LECTURE III. parts of this volume together is unbroken even in thought ; that we still feel ourselves to have, not a number of sacred books, but one sacred Book, which, not merely for convenience sake, but out of a far deeper feeling, we comprehend under one name. Yet, on the other hand, there are other truths which, if we mean to enter into full possession of our trea- sures, we need also to make thoroughly our own. This idea of the oneness of Holy Scripture is incom- plete and imperfect, till it pass into the higher idea of its unity ; till we acknowledge that it is not sameness which reigns there ; that, besides being one, it is also many ; that as in the human body we, having many members, are one body, and the perfection of the body is not the repetition of the same member over and over again, but the harmonious tempering of dif- ferent members, all being instinct with one life — not otherwise is it with Scripture. For in that, whether we look at the Old or New Testament, the same rich- ness and variety of form reveal themselves, so that it may truly be said, that out of the ground of this Paradise, the Lord God has made "to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food ;" all that the earth has fairest appearing here in fairer and more perfect form — the fable, only here trans- formed into the parable — the ode transfigured into the psalm — oracles into prophecies — histories of the world into histories of the kingdom of heaven. Nor is tragedy wanting, though for (Edipus, we have the man of Uz ; nor epos, though for " the tale of Troy divine," ours is the story of the New Jerusalem, \kV QY THE THE MANIFOLDNESS OP SCRIPtoHJeU I V wBi SIT "coming down out of heaven as a bride aa8fefefl^rfteW^T^§ **^ husband." And it will be my desire to shown? also was needful, if it w^as to be the Book which should indeed leaven the world, which should offer nutriment, not merely for some men, but for all men ; which should not tyrannically lop men till they were all of one length, but should encourage in every man the free development of all which God had given him. Thus it must needs have been, if the Spirit by this Word was to sanctify all in every man which was capable of being sanctified ; which, coming originally from God, could be redeemed from the defilements of this world, and in purer shape be again restored unto Him. It will be my task then to consider to-day the re- lations of likeness and difference in which various parts of Scripture stand to one another; to show how the differences are not accidental, but do plainly cor- respond to certain fixed differences in the mental and moral constitutions of men ; how there is evidently a gracious purpose of attracting all men by the attrac- tions w^hich shall be most potent upon them ; of spread- ing a table at which all may sit down and find that wherein their soul delights, till those words of our text, " They did all eat and were filled," shall not be less true in regard of all the faithful now, — true rather in a higher sense, — than they were in regard of those comparatively few, whom the Lord nourished with that bread of wonder in the wilderness. And truly this Book, in the plainness and simplicity of many, and those most important, parts of it, might be likened 5* 54 LECTURE III. well to the five barley-loaves of the Lord's miracle. Seeing them about to be set before the great spiritual hunger of the world, seeing the multitudes waiting to be fed, even disciples might have been tempted to exclaim, " What are they among so many ?" But the great Giver of the feast confidently replies, '*Make the men sit down ;" and they have sat down — wise men and simple, philosophers and peasants, " besides women and children," — and there has been enough and to spare ; all have been nourished, all have been quickened ; none have been sent empty away. And first, let us take those books which must ever be regarded as the central books, relating as they do to the central fact, to the life of our blessed Lord, and which will afford the fullest illustration of my mean- ing. It is a fact which would at once excite every man's most thoughtful attention, were it not that familiarity had blunted us to its significance, that we should have, not one history only, but four parallel histories, of the life of Christ — a fact which indeed finds a slight anticipation in the parallel records which the Old Testament has preserved of some portions of Jewish history. None will call this an accident, or count that the Providence which watches over the fall of a sparrow, or any slightest incident of the world, was not itself the bringer about of a circumstance which should have so mighty an influence on all the future unfolding of the Church. It is part, no doubt, of this spreading of a table for the spiritual needs of all, that we have thus not one Gospel, but four; which yet in their higher unity, may be styled, according to V THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 55 that word of Origen's, rather a four-sided Gospel* than four Gospels, even as out of the same instmctive sense of its unity, the whole Instrument, which con- tained the four, was entitled Evangelium in the early Church. And if we follow this more closely up, w^e can trace, I think, a peculiar vocation in each of the Evangelists for catching some distinct rays of the glory of Christ, which the others would not catch, and for reflecting them to the world — so that the terms, Gospel accord- ing to St. Matthew, according to St. Mark, and so on, are singularly happy, and imply much more than w^e, for whom the words are little more than a tech- nical designation of the different gospels, are wont to find in them. The first is the Gospel according to St. Matthew — the Gospel as it appeared to him. This which he has portrayed is his Christ: under this as- pect the Deliverer of men appeared to him, and in this he has presented Him to the world ; and so also with the others. For Christ, ever one and the same, does yet appear with different sides of his glory re- flected by the different Evangelists. They were them- selves men of various temperaments; they had each the special needs of some different classes of men in their eye when they wrote their Gospels; and as these classes, though under altered names, still subsist, they have in this respect also, as ministering to these various needs, an everlasting value. * EvayyBUov Tf sf pay iovov. Thus too Augustine (^InEv. Joh.^ Tract. 26 :) Qualuor Evangeliaj vel potius qualuor libri unius Evanffelii. 56 LECTURE III. Thus the first Gospel, that of St. Matthew, was evidently a Gospel designed for the pious Israelite, for him who was waiting the theocratic King, the Son of Abraham, the Son of David; who desired to find in the New Testament the fulfilment of the prophecies of the Old, and in Christianity the perfect flower, of which Judaism was the root and stem. And as among the Epistles that of St. James, so among the Gospels, this of St. Matthew was to serve as the gentle and almost imperceptible transition for so many as clung to the forms of Old Testament piety ; and desired to hold fast the historic connexion of all God's dealings from the first. But the second Gospel, written, as all Church tra- dition testifies, under the influence of St. Peter, and at Rome, bears marks of an evident fitness for the practical Roman world — for the men who, while others talked, had done; and who would not at first crave to hear what Christ had spoken, but what He had wrought. It is eminently the Gospel of action. It is brief; it records comparatively few of our Lord's sayings, almost none of his longer discourses; it occu- pies itself mainly with his works, with the mighty power of his ministry, into which ministry it rushes almost without a preparatory note. Some deeper things it has not, but presents a soul-stirring picture of the conquering might and energy of Christ and of his Word. But the third Gospel, that of St. Luke, composed by the trusted companion of St. Paul, and itself the correlative of his Epistles, while it sets forth one and THE MANIFOLDNESS OP SCRIPTURE. 57 the same Christ as the two which went before, yet in some respects sets Him forth in another light. Not so much, with St. Matthew, "Jesus Christ, a minister of the circumcision for the truth of God, to confirm the promise made unto the fathers" — not so much, with St. Mark, Jesus Christ, "the Lion of the tribe of Judah," rushing as with lion-springs from victory to victory ; but Jesus Christ, the Saviour of all men, is the object of his portraiture. This is what he loves to dwell on, — the manner in which not Israel alone, but the whole heathen world, was destined to glorify , God for his mercy in Christ Jesus ; he describes Him as the loving physician, the gracious healer of all, the Good Samaritan that bound up the wounds of every stricken heart ; in whom all the small and despised and crushed and down-trodden of the earth should find a gracious and ready helper. Therefore, and in accordance with this, his plan, has he gathered up for us much which no other has done ; he sets the seventy disciples for the world over against St. Matthew's twelve Apostles for Israel ; he breaks through narrow national distinctions — tells of that Samaritan, that alone showed kindness — of that other, who, of ten, alone remembered to be thankful; and his, too, and his only, the parable of the Prodigal Son, itself a gospel within the Gospel. But to hasten on from these characteristics of the earlier three, which might well detain us much longer, something was yet wanting; — a Gospel in which the higher speculative tendencies, which were given to men not to be crushed or crippled, should find ^^^^^ 58 LECTURE III. adequate satisfaction — a Gospel which should link it- self on with whatever had occupied the philosophic mind of heathen or of Jew — the correction of all which in this was false — the complement of all which was deficient. And such he gave us, for whom the Church has ever found the soaring eagle as the fittest emblem* — he who begins with declaring that the Word of God, whereof men had already learned to speak so much, was also the Son of God, and had been made flesh, and had dwelt among us, full of grace and truth, — who, too, has brought out the inner, and, so to speak, the mystical relations of the faithful with their Lord, as none other before him had done.f It is true that this fulness under which the life of our Lord has been set forth to us, being, as it is, one of the gracious designs of God for our good, has been laid hold of by adversaries of the Faith, who would fain wrest it to their ends. Taking the difference, where it is the most striking, they have bidden us to f * Thus the Christian poet: Coolum transit, veri rotam Volat avis sine me\A Solis ibi vidit, to tarn Quo nee vates, nee propheta Mentis figens aciem; Evolavit altius: Speculator spiritalis Tam implenda quam in)pleta Quasi Seraphim sub alis Nunquam vidit tot secreta Dei videt faciem. Purus homo purius. - f See Origen's interesting discussion (Comm. in Joan., Tom, 1.) on the relation of the Gospels to the other Scriptures, and their relation, within themselves, one to another. On this lat- ter subject he expresses himself thus : To^/tj^Woy toCvvv slTtdv THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 59 note how unlike the Christ of the first three Gospels and of the fourth; and what a different colouring is spread over this Gospel and over those; and they would draw their conclusion, that either here or there historic accuracy must be w^anting, that both portraits cannot be faithful. . We allow the charge, so far as the difference, and only reject it when it assumes a diversity, of setting forth. There are features of our Lord which we should have missed but for his por- traiture who lay upon the Lord's bosom; deep words which he has caught up, for which no other words that any other has recorded would have been ade- c^diiQ substitutes. But what then? This is not a weak point w^ith us, but a strong. We rejoice and glory in this, rather than seek to gloss it over or con- ceal it. So far from being first detected by a hostile criticism, an early Father of the Church had expressed this very distinction in w^ords which in sound perhaps are almost over-bold, styling the first three Gospels, fVoyyaT-ta cfco^at't.xa, and the fourth an svayys'Kiov Tivsv- fiatixov. Yet it is needless to observe, that herein he meant not to cast the faintest slight on those by com- parison with this, but would only imply that those set forth more the outer, and this the inner, life of Christ. And for the fact itself, do we not find analogies to it, however weak ones they may be, in lower re- gions of the spiritual life ? To take an example which. must be familiar to every scholar, — how different the Socrates of Xenophon, and the Socrates of Plato. Yet shall we therefore leap to the conclusion, that if the one has painted the master truly, then the other 60 LECTURE III. has portrayed him falsely? Such a conclusion may lie upon the surface ; it might appear to us an easy solution of the difficulty ; yet were it a very different solution from that to which all the profoundest inquirers into the matter have arrived. Were it not wiser to suppose, with them, that each of the great scholars of the Sage appropriated and carried away, as from a rich and varied treasure-house, that which he prized the most, that which was most akin to himself and his own genius, that which by the natural process of assimilation he had made most truly and • entirely his own ; — the practical soldier, the man of strong com- mon sense, appropriating and carrying away his world- wisdom, his popular philosophy ; the more meditative disciple taking as his portion the deeper speculations of their common Master concerning the Good and the True ? And if thus it prove with eminent servants of the Truth — if they are so rich and manifold that they present themselves under divers aspects to divers men, it being appointed them in their lower sphere to feed many, — if, like some rich composite Corinthian metal, they yield iron for this man's spade, and gold for the other's crown, how much more was this to be looked for from Him, who was the King of Truth, w^ho was to feed and enrich, not some, but all; and this, not in some small and scanty measure, but who was to satisfy all in all ages with goodness and truth? How inevitable was it that He, the Sun of the spirit- ual heaven, should find no single mirror large enough to take in all his beams — should only be adequately presented to the world, when many from many sides THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 61 did, under the direct teachings of God's Spirit, under- take to set him forth. Doubtless the pregnant symbol of the early Church, according to which the four Gospels found their type and prophecy in the four rivers of Paradise, that toge- ther watered the whole earth, going each a different way, and yet issuing all from a single head ; — a sym- bol, w^hich we find evermore repeated in the works of early Christian art, wherein, from a single cross-sur- mounted hill, four streams are seen welling out; this symbol was so great and general a favourite, because it did embody under a beautiful image, this fact, namely, how the Gospels were indeed four, and yet in their higher unity but one.* And so not less> when the Evangelists were found, as they often were, in the four living creatures of Ezekiel's vision, of whom each with a different countenance looked a different way, and yet all of therii together upheld the throne and chariot of God, and ever moved as being informed by * Allusions to it are frequent in the early hymnologists. Thus, one of them in a hynin, De SS. Evangelistis .- Paradisus his rigatur, Viret, floret, faecundatur, His abundat, his Isetatur, Quatuor fluminibus. Fens est Christus, hi sunt rivi, Fens est altus, hi proclivi, Ut saporem fontis vivi Ministrent fidelibus. Horutn rivo ebrctatis Sitis crescat caritatis, Ut de fonte Deitatis Satiemur plenius. Horum trahat nos doctrina Vitiorum de sentind, Sicque ducat ad divina Ab imo superius. Another, too, in a hymn, De S. Joanne Evangeltstd. Inter illos primitives Veres veri fontis rivos Joannes exiliit, 6 Toti mundo prepinare Wectar illud salutare Quod de throno prodiit. 62 LECTURE III. one and the self-same Spirit ; this too was something more and better than a mere fanciful playing with Scripture ; there was a deep truth lying at the root of this application, and abundantly justifying its use.' ^ * The first that we know of who connected these with the four Evangelists was Irenaeus. He says (^Con, Hasr., 1. 3, c. 2, § 8j) TfT'pa^op^a yap ta ^wa, TfEtpdixop^ov xai -to tvayyeX^ovt and draws out at length the fitness of each to represent each; on which see Suicer's Thes., s. v. BvaryyeUcnftii. It was taken up by many after him; thus by Jerome, Comm. in Ezeh. c. i. ; Prol. in Comm. super Matth. ,- and Ep. 50 : Ma:tthaBus, Marcus, Lucas, et Johannes, quadriga Domini, et verura Cherubim, per totum corpus oculati sunt, scintillas emicant, discurrunt fulgura, pedes habent rectos et in sublime tendentes, terga pennata et ubique volitantia. Tenent se mutuo, sibique per- plexi sunt, et quasi rota in rota volvuntur, et purgunt quoquum- que eos flatus Sancti Spiritiis perduxerit. Cf. Augustine, De Cons. Evang. 1. 1, c. 6; and the Christian poet sings thus : Circa thronum majestatis Cum spiritibus beatis Quatuor diversitatis Astant animalia. Formam primum aquilinam, Et secundum leoninam ; Sed humanam et bovinam Duo gerunt alia. And another: Curam agens sui gregis Pastor bonus, auctor legis Quatuor instituit : Quadri orbis ad medelam, Formam juris et cautelam Per quos scribi voluit Circa thema gencrale Habet quisque speciale Sibi privilegium ; FormoB formant figurarura Formas Evangelistarum, Quorum imber doctrinarum Stillat in Ecclesid. Hi sunt Marcus, et Matthaeus, Lucas, et quem Zebedaeus Pater misit tibi, Deus, Dum laxaret retia. Quos designat in propheta Form& pictus sub discrete Vultus animalium. His quadrigis deportatur Mundo Deus, sublimatur Istis area vectibus: Paradisi hasc fiuenta Nova fluunt sacramenta, Quae irrorant gentibus. THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 63 And as we have a Gospel which stands thus four- square, with a side facing each side of the spiritual world, so have we a two-fold development of the more dogmatic element of the New Testament. For, like as the seed, one in itself, yet falls into two halves in the process of its fructifying, or as the one force of the magnet manifests itself at two opposing poles, exactly according to the same law, reappearing in the spiritual world, we have two developments of the same Christian theology, which make themselves felt from the very first, whereof St. Paul may be taken as chief riepresentative of the one, and St. John of the other. We cannot do more than trace the distinction in some of its broadest features. We see then St. Paul making man the starting point of his theology. The divine image in man, that image lost, the impossibility of its restoration by any powers of his own ; the ever deeper errors of the sin-darkened intellect ; the ever vainer struggles of the sin-enslaved will; — it is from this human side of the truth that he starts ; these are the grounds which he first lays, — as eminently in his great dogmatic Epistle to the Romans. And only when he has brought out this confession of a fall, of an infinite short-coming from the true ideal of humanity, and from the glory of God, only when the cry, "Oh, wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me?" has been wrung out from the bond-slaves of evil, does he bring in the mighty Redeemer, and the hymn of praise, the "I thank God through Jesus Christ" of the redeemed. But St. John, upon the other hand, starts from the opposite point, from the theology in 64 LECTURE III. the more restricted sense of the word ; in this justify- ing the title o ©foxoyoj, which he bears. His centre and starting point is the Divine Love, and out of that he unfolds all; not delineating, as his brother Apostle, any mighty birth-pangs, in which the new creature is born ; since rather in that passing from death unto life, and in that abiding in the Father and in the Son which follows therefrom, the discovery of sin does not run long before, but rather goes hand in hand with, the discovery of the grace of God for forgiving, and the power of God for overcoming, that sin which by the Spirit of Christ is gradually revealed. Thus we have man delivered in St. Paul, God deliverinor in St. John ; man rising in the one, God stooping in the other; and thus each travels over a hemisphere in the great orb of Christian Truth, and they, not each singly^ but between them, embrace and encircle it all. For this is part of the glory of Christ as compared with his servants, as compared with the chiefest of his servants, that He alone stands at the absolute centre of humanity, the one completely harmonious man, un- folding all which was in that humanity equally upon all sides, filly upon all sides — the only one in whom the real and ideal met, and were absolutely at one. Every other man has idiosyncrasies, characteristics — some features, that is, of his character, marked more strongly than others, fitnesses for one task rather than for another, more genial powers in one direction than in others. Nor even are the greatest, a St. Paul or a St. John, exempted from this law ; but, according THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 65 to this law, are made to serve for the kingdom of God ; and the regeneration, even that mighty transformation itself, does not dissolve these characteristics, but rather hallows and glorifies them, using them for the work of God. And thus, in the power of these special gifts, that which lay as a fruitful germ in the doctrine, or, more truly, in the facts of our Lord's life, was by his two Apostles developed upon this side and upon that. And as it was meant that the Gospel of Christ should embrace all lands, should fix, at its first en- trance into the world, a firm foot upon either of its two great cultivated portions, so in these two, in St. Paul and in St. John, we recognise wondrous prepa- rations in the providence of God for the winning to the obedience of the cross both the western and the eastern world. Who can fail to see in the great Apostle of Tarsus, in his discursive intellect, in his keen dialectics, in his philosophic training, the man armed to dispute with Stoic and Epicurean at Athens ; who should teach the Church how she should take the West for her inheritance? — nor less was he the man who, by the past struggles of his inner life and the consequent fulness and power with which he brought out the scheme of our justification should become the spiritual forefather of the Augustines and Luthers, of all them who have brought out for us, with the sense of personal guilt, the sense also of personal de- liverance, the consciousness of a personal standing of each one of us before God. And in St. John, the full significance of whose writings for the Church is 6* 66 LECTURE III. probably yet to be revealed, and, it may be, will not appear till the coming in of the nations of the east into the fold, we have the progenitor of every mystic, in the nobler sense of that word — of every contem- plative spirit that has delighted to sink and to lose itself, and the sense of its own littleness, in the bright- ness and in the glory of God. Shall we not thank God, shall we not recognise as part of his loving wisdom, that thus none are left out ; that while there are evidently among men two leading types of mind, he has made provision for them both — for the dis- cursive and the intuitive, — for the schoolman and the mystic, — for them who trust through knowing to see, and for them also who believe that only through see- ing they can know; — that, whatever in their intel- lectual condition men may be, the net is laid out to catch them? For then, when once they are taken, all that might have been in them of overbalance in one direction, all of faulty excess, is gradually done away and redressed, till they and those that have been brought in by an opposite method, are more and more led to a mutual recognition and honouring of the gifts each of the other, and to the unity of a perfect man in Christ Jesus. Nor is it only that there is different nourishment for different souls, but the same nourishment is also so curiously mixed and tempered, that it is felt to be for all. As, perhaps, the most signal example of this, let us only seek to realize to ourselves what the Book of Psalms, itself, according to that beautiful expres- sion of Luther's, 'a Bible in little,' has been, and for THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 67 whom — how men of all conditions, all habits of thought, have here met, vying with one another in expressions of affection and gratitude to this book, in telling what they owed to it, and what it had proved to them. Men seemingly the most unlikely to express enthusi- asm about any such matter — lawyers and statists im- mersed deeply in the world's business, classical scholars familiar with other models of beauty, other standards of art — these have been forward as the forwardest to set their seal to this book, have left their confession that it was the voice of their inmost heart, that the spirit of it past into their spirits as did the spirit of no other book, that it found them more often and at greater depths of their being, lifted them to higher heights than did any other — or, as one greatly suffer- ing man, telling of the solace which he found from this book of Psalms in the hours of a long imprison- ment, has expressed it,— that it bore him up, as a lark perched between an eagle's wings is borne up into the everlasting sunlight, till he saw the world and all its trouble for ever underneath him. I can imagine no fairer volume than one of such thankful acknowledg- ments as I have described, and it is a volume which might easily be gathered, for such on all sides abound ; not a few of them as large, as free, as rapturous as that of our own Hooker, which must be present to the minds of many of us here. Nor is it wonderful that there should be such ; for, to quote but one noble ut- terance* in relation to this book, " the conflict of naked * Maurice's Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy in the En- cyclop, Metropolitana. \ \ 68 LECTURE III. power with righteousness, of the visible with the invi- sible, of confusion with order, of the devilish with the divine, of death with life, this is its subject. And because this is the subject of all human anxieties, this book has been that in which living and suffering men in all ages have found a language, which they have felt to be a mysterious anticipation of, and provision for, their own especial wants, and in which they have gradually understood that the Divine voice is never \^ so truly and distinctly heard, as when it speaks through- ^ human experience and sympathies."* ^ .J * The reader may be well pleased to see a few more of these brought at a single glance under his eye. St. Basil may fitly lead. In a passage Horn. I. in Psaimos, quoted at much greater length in Suicer's Thes. s. v. "^ifa^ixo^, ■*'a>-^6j Sat^vcov ^vyaBsv -tripiov' 'trji Tfiov dyye^v jBorjOsoa^ irCayioyri' orfkov iv ^6j3otg vvxtspi- vovi, avdrtavdc^ xortiov ruMspivutv' vtjTtiot,^ dcf(J>a7i?ta' ax^d^ovdtv eyxa'K' ^wrtttfjua' TtpsajM^tipovi Ttapr^yopla' yvvai^^i xosfios dpjU.oStwr'aT'oj' r'aj iprjl4>Lai olxl^s(,' td^ dyopdj cfco^pow^Et.* dsayofuvoti atoix^ioiaii, TtpoxojftovTfoiv au|jycftj, 'ts%£(,ovfi8vcov (JT'rjptyjUa, txx^rjrslai ^covri, oJt'oj fas eoptdi ^aiSpvvsu olto^ 'triv xafd ©sov T^vrirjv Srjfivovpyst, ^a^jitojydp xcu sx Xidivrjs xapSJaj 8dxpvov sxxaXsltav. '^aTifibi'tb tuiv ayyt'Kutv Ipyov^ -to ovpdviov TtoXiTfevfia, to rCvevfiatixov dvfji^lafia^ x. t. %. St. Ambrose, as it was often his manner to reproduce what he found in the Greek Fathers to his purpose, would seem to have had this passage of his great eastern contemporary in his mind when he composed his not less beautiful laud of the Psalms. Enarr. in Ps. i. Here too it is but a fragment which can be quoted : Historia instruit, Lex docet, prophetia annun- ciat, correptio castigat, moralitas suadet: in libro Psalmorum profectus est omnium, et medicina quaedam salutis humanae. Quicunque legerit, habet quo propriae vulnera passionis speciali possit curare remedio... Quantum laboratur in Ecclesia ut fiat THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 69 Indeed, in the fact of such a book as the Psalter forming part of our sacred Instrument, we trace a most gracious purpose of God. For in the very idea of a Revelation is implied rather a speaking of God silentiunij cum lectiones leguntur ! Si unus loquatur, obstre- punt universi: cum psalmus legitur, ipse sibi est effector si- lentii. Omnes loquuntur, 5t nullus obLtrepit. Psalmum reges sine potestatis supercilio resultant. In hoc se ministerio Da- vid gaudebat videri. Psalmus cantatur ab imperatoribus, ju- bilatur k populis. Certant clamare singuli quod omnibus proficit. Domi psalmus canitur, foris recensetur. Sine labore percipitur, cum voluptate servatur: psalmus dissidentes copu- lat, discordes sociat, offensos reconciliat...Certat in Psalmo doctrina cum gratis simul. Cantatur ad delectationem, dis- citur ad eruditionem. Nam violentiora praicepta non perma- nent: quod autem cum suavitate perceperis, id infusum semel praecordiis, non consuerit elabi. And Augustine {Confess.^ 1. 9, c. 4,) speaks of the manner in which he exulted in the Psalms at the time of his first conveijilon: Quas tibi, Deus meus, voces diedicum legerem psalmos David. ..et quomodo in te inflammabar ex eis, et accendebar eos recitare si possem toto orbe terrarum adversiim typhum humani generis... Qu km vehementi et acri dolore indignabar Manichaeis, et miserebar eos rursus, quod ilia sacramenta, ilia medicamenta nescirent, et insani essent adversus antidotum quo sani esse potuissent. Jeremy Taylor, in his Preface to the Psalter of David, speak- ing of the manner in which, by the trouble of the civil wars, he was deprived of his books and his retirements, and how in his deprivation he found comfort here, thus goes on : "Indeed, when I came to look upon the Psalter with a nearer observa- tion, and an eye diligent to espy any advantages and remedies there deposited . . .1 found so many admirable promises, so rare variety of the expressions of the mercies of God, so many con- solatory hymns, the commemoration of so many deliverances from dangers and deaths and enemies, so many miracles of 70 LECTURE III. to men than of men to God ; and such a speaking from heaven predominantly finds place in all other books of Holy Scripture. Yet how greatly had we been losers, had there been no corresponding record of the answering voices that go up from earth unto heaven. How earnestly should we have craved a standard by which to try the feelings, the utterances of our spirits, — -a rule whereby to know whether they were healthy and true, the same voices, the same cries, as those of each other regenerate man. Such a rule, such a standard we have here ; man is speaking unto God ; mercy and salvation, that 1 began to be so confident as to be- lieve tliere could come no affliction great enough to spend so great a stock of comfort as was laid up in the treasure of the Psalter; the saying of St. Paul was here verified, 4f sin' and misery Mid abound, then did grace superabound;' and as we believe of the passioj^ of Christ, it was so great as to be able to satisfy for a thousand worlds; so is it of the comforts of David's Psalms, they are more than sufficient to repair all the breaches of mankind." And Donne, {Sermon 66,) taking his text from Ps. Ixiii. 7, proceeds : " The Psalms are the manna of the Church. As manna tasted to every man like that that he liked best, so do the Psalms minister instruction and satisfaction to every man in every emergency and occasion. David was not only a clear prophet of Christ himself, but a prophet of every particular Christian; he foretells what I, what any, shall do and suffer and say. And as the whole book of Psalms is oleum effusum, an ointment poured out upon all sorts of sores, a searcloth that supples all bruises, a balm that searches all wounds, so are there some certain psalms that are imperial psalms, that command over all affections, and spread themselves over all occasions; catholic universal psalms that apply themselves to all necessities.' ;; THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRirXURE. 71 that which came from heaven is returning to heaven once more. Here we have insight into the mystery of prayer; streams of life are rising up as high as the heights from which first they came down; the moun- tain-tops of man's spirit are smoking, but smoking be- cause God has descended upon and touched them. These are but a few examples, brethren, — time will allow us to adduce no more, — of that which all Scrip- ture will abundantly supply, — the evidences, namely, of its own adaptation for the needs of all, for all the needs of each. And these things being so, let us for ourselves gladly enter into this many-chambered palace of the Truth, whereof the doors stand open to us ever- more. Let us thankfully sit down at this feast of many spiritual dainties, which is spread for us and for all. And if not every one of them at once delight us; if of some we have rather to take the word of others that they are good than as yet proved it so ourselves, let us believe that the cause of this lies rather in the sickness of our palate, than in the faulty preparation of that which the great Master of the feast has set before us; — and let us ask, not that these be removed, but that our true taste be restored ; and this the more, seeirig that unnumbered guests, who in time past have sat down, or are now sitting down, at this heavenly banquet, have borne witness that these meats which may be dull and tasteless to us, were life and strength to them, "yea, sweeter than honey and the honey- comb." We are sick, and these are medicines no less than food ; and for us that word must stand fast, JSTon corrigat aeger medicamenta sua. Let us thus bear 72 LECTURE III. ourselves towards Holy Scripture, and then presently, in that which seemed a stranger face we shall recog- nise the countenance of a gracious, a familiar friend. We shall more and more see how this Scripture was laid out by One who knew what was in man. One who desired also to unfold us on all sides of our moral and spiritual being ; who, too, in the largeness of his love, would send none empty away; but who does herein open his hand, that He may fill all things living with plenteousness. LECTURE IV. THE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE. * HEBREWS I. 1, 2. 1 God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son* We have seen how in Holy scripture one idea is dominant, the idea of a lost, defaced, and yet not wholly effaced, image of God in man, with God's scheme for its restoration and renewal : we have seen how that, which is one in having this for its suhject, and in knowing no other suhject, has yet a manifold development, marvellously corresponding to the mani- fold necessities of his nature to whom it is addressed, and who by its help should be renewed. But the pro- gressive unfolding of God's plan in Scripture, may well afford matter for another discourse^ and will supply our theme for this day. Nor shall 1 herein be wandering from my argument, since this progressiveness of Scripture is an important element in its fitness for the education of man. For this we claim of a teacher to whom we yield ourselves with an entire confidence, that there be advance and progress in his teaching ; not indeed that this should be at every moment distinctly perceptible, but that it 7 74 LECTURE IV. should be so when long periods and courses of his teaching are contemplated together. The advance may sometimes be rather in a spiral than in a straight line, yet still on the whole there must be advance ; he must not eddy round in ceaseless circles, leaving off where he began, but evidently have a scheme before him, according to which he is seeking to lead on unto perfection those that have committed themselves to his teaching. It is of the essence of a true teacher, be that teacher book or person, thus to carry forward. If it be a book claiming to educate, it must be itself the history of an education, the record of an intensive, as well as extensive development. We look for this, and we rest our expectation on a yet deeper feeling. We feel that as each individual man was meant to go on from lower to higher, and in the end to have Christ fully formed in him, so the Church as a living body could not have been intended to be a stationary thing, always conning over the same lessons, but rather ad- vancing in a like manner to perfection; — not in this advance leaving aught behind which God has taught it ; but ever carrying with it into its higher state, as part of its realized possession, all which it has gotten in a lower. And if so, that Book which was to be the record and interpreter of these dealings of God, ever running parallel with them, growing with their growth, explaining them as they unfolded themselves, that must bear the stamp and impress of the same progress. Does a nearer examination of Holy Scripture bear out this our expectation? Does it speak of itself as THE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE. . 75 a progressive revelation of the Name of God? And if soj can we discern it to be such, to be the gradual unfolding of the ideas of the kingdom, and of men's relations to it, to be a continual calling out in them the sense of new relations and new faculties and powers? I think, both. And, first. Revelation speaks of itself in such language. "I have many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now;" surely this was what God had been saying to his elect from the first, till that crowning day of Pentecost, when they were made capable of all mysteries and had the unction of the Holy One, and knew all things ; — and* with much before us, it needs not to tarry with the proofs of this. And as regards ourselves, we can trace, I think, the Scripture to be this which it aflSrms itself to be. Who, for instance, can help feeling that in the three memorable epochs by which it marks the greatest un- foldings of the kingdom of God,— I mean, in the calling of Abraham, the giving of the Law by Moses, the Incarnation of the Son of God, — we have the childhood, the youth, the manhood of our race, of that elect portion of it, at least, which God had ga- thered into a Church and constituted for the while the representative of all ; and that we have this with mar- vellous correspondencies of these epochs to similar pe- riods in the lives which we ourselves are living? In Abraham and the Church of the patriarchal age, we have that which exactly answers to childhood. Their relations to God were as a child's to a father, — the same undoubting, unquestioning affiance ; with 76 LECTURE IV. as yet no fixed code of law ; the deeper evils of the heart not as yet stirring, the awful consciousness of those evils as yet unawakened. So 'Abraham and the patriarchs walked before God, in the beauty and the simplicity of a childhke faith — love seeming as yet the only law, and no other law being needed, since not yet the whole might of the rebellious will had been aroused, since a sheltering Providence had hitherto kept aloof many temptations which should afterwards arrive. But a very different stage of man's history begins •with Moses. The father is thrown for awhile into the background by the lawgiver; God appears the giver of a " fiery law : " and the race having out- grown its childlike estate, with all the blessed privi- leges of that time, appears now as the youth, aware of this terrible law, and struggling against it ; and in this struggle brought to a consciousness of that which before was hidden from it, namely, the deep alienation of its will from the perfect will of God. This seems, at first sight, as though it were a retrograde step in man's progress, and regarded apart from the final issues it were ; as the Apostle himself confesses, when he says, "I was alive without the law once, but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died." Yet nor 'he, nor any, could have done without this coming in of the law. The opposition of his will to God's will being in man, most needful was it that it should not remain latent, but be brought out, yea brought out in all its strength, as a holy law could alone bring it out ; for thus only was it in the way of THE ADYANCE OF SCRIPTURE. 77 being subdued. God having made himself known as a God of love, most needful was it that men should know Him also the God of an absolute righteous- ness ; since without this that love itself had shown in men's eyes as a poor thing, as a weak toleration of their evil, instead of being, as it is, that which more than all else makes Him a eonsumins: fire for all im- purity and evil. * But with the entering of the Son of God into our nature, the manhood of the race begins — that which it was meant in its final perfection to be — that, for the sake of which it passed through those lower stages. The consciousness of the filial relation has again revived in all its full strength, and the suspended privileges are restored. "Abba, Father!" is once more on the lips of the Church, only with deeper ac- cents and a fuller sense than at that earlier day of all which in these words is included. The sense of God's love which belonged to its childhood, of God's righ- teousness which predominated in its youth, are recon- ciled; they have met and kissed each other. His love is seen to be righteous, and his righteousness to be loving. His law is no longer struggled against, for it is written in the heart, and it reveals itself as that which to keep is the truest blessedness. And how mysteriously, brethren, does this teach- ing of our race, which was thus written large, and acted out upon a great scale in the history of God's chosen people, repeat itself evermore in the smaller world, in the microcosm of elect souls, which are under the same divine education. Is there not many 78 LECTURE IV. f a one who can trace in himself the same process and progress as we have been following here? First was our childhood, corresponding to Abraham's state — the undeveloped, yet true affiance on a heavenly Father, — when we needed no more than this ; when as yet we had not looked down into the abysmal deeps of evil in our hearts, when we too were alive without the law, and dreamt not of the rebel, who was ready, when occasion came, to take arms against his Lord, though that rebel was no other than ourselves. But the years went on, with all which they brought, with their good and with their evil: and childhood was left behind ; and to us, too, the time arrived for the giving of the law; and then us, too, God led apart into the wilderness, separated us from every other living soul, made us feel the mystery of our awful personality, and spoke to us as He had never spoken before, even face to face, — revealing Himself to us no longer merely as the God of our fathers, but with a higher revelation, as the I AM, the Holy One. For us, too, was that terrible giving of the law in the deep of our souls, which he who has known will say boldly, that Sinai with its thunders and lightnings, its black- ness and its darkness, its unendurable voice w^hich he who heard craved that he might hear no more, was not more terrible; — and sin is no longer a word but a reality, is no longer felt as the transient grieving of a parent's heart, but as the violation of an eternal order, a violation w^hich cannot remain unavenged or unre- dressed. But dreadful as this law is, terrible and threatening shape as it rises o^ver the soul, does not THE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE. 79 each man make the same experience as did Israel of old, and find out its helplessness for the true ends of his life? It can kill the sinner, but it cannot kill the sin : that only shrinks deeper into its hiding-places in the soul, and needs another charmer to lure it out. This is our state of condemnation, which is yet most needful for a right entering into the state of life and freedom: this is the law preparing for, and handing over unto, Christ. And as there was the manhood of the race, as the Church which God had been training and disciplining so long, was introduced into the fulness of its inheri- tance, when Christ, who had upheld it always, came visibly into the midst of it ; so is it in like manner when God brings his First-begotten into the inner world of any single heart. Then that heart under- stands all the way by which it had been led, and sees how all things have worked for the bringing it into that grace in which now it stands. Then the child's faith returns; only is it now a mightier faith, a more heroic act of affiance, for it is a faith in God despite of and in full knowledge of our evil, instead of a faiih in God in ignorance of our evil. Marvellously does He thus run oftentimes the lives of his children parallel with the life of the Church at large, as that life is unfolded in Sacred Writ, bringing each in particular under the same teaching as the whole. Yet this is not all: we have not merely in Scripture God carrying Israel his Son through succes- sive stages, which may serve to explain "to us the stages of our own innermost spiritual life; but we may trace 80 " LECTURE IV. there another sequence, another progress — that by which He is training his people into a sense of ever- widening relationships, and this also making answer to the sequence in which He trains each one in parti- cular of his children into the same, and serving as a pattern thereto. For what are the great fellowships of men, which rest not upon man's choice, but upon God's will, which are not self-willed associations into which men gather of themselves, but societies wherein they are set by the act of God? Each will at once reply, The Family, The State, The Church. And this too is their order ; the Family must go before the State, being itself the corner-stone on which the State is built; and the State, which is the fellowship of cer- tain men to the exclusion of others, waits to be taken up into the Church, which is the fellowship of all men who believe in the risen head of their race. And this sequence is that maintained in the Bible; for what is the early history of the Bible, but predo- minantly the history of the Family? of the blessing which awaits reverence for the family order, of the sure curse which avencres its violation. On the one side, we have the men who were true to this divine institute; who, amid many weaknesses, recognised and honoured it — the Seths and Enochs before the flood, the Abrahams and Isaacs, the Jacobs and Josephs after. On the other side we have the Lamechs and Tubal Cains, and at a later day, the builders of Babel, the men who thought to associate themselves, to say, A confederacy, where God had not said it, to knit themselves into a body by bands of their own, instead THE ADVANCE OP SCRIPTURE. 81 of owning that God had knit them already — skilled masters, as we learn, in the arts of life, starting up, as •we are told, into a premature civilization ; yet having in themselves, through violations, which we can plainly trace, of that family order, of the primal institutes of humanity, the seeds of a sure and swift decay: so that presently they are lost to our sight altogether; while the Patriarchs, the honourers and sanctifiers of these relations, walk before us heads of a nation, of that kingly and priestly nation in which all other na- tions should be blest. But Holy Scripture does not linger here. It passes on, and its middle history is the history of this nation, of national life ; showing us, by liveliest ex- ample, all that can exalt, all that can degrade, a peo- ple: how Israel, so long as it believed in its invisible Lord and King, its righteous Lawgiver, was great and prosperous — how, when it lost that faith and bowed to idols of sense, it became of a surety inwardly dis- tracted, externally enslaved — forfeiting those very out- ward gifts for the sake of which it had turned its back upon the Giver — righteousness and truth and justice perishing between man and man, while He in whom alone these have any substantial existence was no longer held fast to and believed. And then in the New Testament, not the conditions under which the Family can exist, not the conditions under w^hich the State, but the idea of the Church, of that fellowship, which, including all, may itself be in- cluded by none, is unfolded to us. There we behold the laws of the universal kingdom, and Christ, not the 82 LECTURE IV. King of a single nation, but the Head of humanity, the Saviour of all. And this order of Sacred Scripture, is also the order of our lives. I mean not that we first become members of a family and then of a State, and lastly of a Church ; but this is the order in which we become conscious of relations. For what is it that a child first discovers? that it is the member of a family — that it has kindred. What are its earliest duties? a 'faithful entering into these relations; its earliest sins? a refusal to enter into them. And what next ? that there is a wider fellowship than this of home-love and home-affections, to which it belongs; that there are other men to whom it owes other duties; that it is the member of a State no less than a family, that it must be just as well as loving. And last of all is per- ceived that there is yet another fellowship at the root of both these fellowships, which gives them their mean- ing, which alone upholds and sustains them against all the sin and selfishness which are continually threaten- ing their dissolution — a fellowship with the Lord of men, and in Him with every man of that race which He has redeemed, of that nature which He has taken. And so the cycle of God's teaching is complete, and that cycle in which the Scripture shows us that He taught the world, is found here also again to be the cycle in which he teaches the individual soul. But to pass to quite another province of our sub- ject : — we must not leave unobserved the manner in which prophecy bears witness to this progressive un- THE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE. 83 folding of God's purpose with our race. Often we dishonour prophecy, when the chief value which it has in our eyes is the use to which it may be turned as evidence; when we regard it as serving no nobler ends, as having no deeper root in the economy of God than in this are presumed ; when it is for us merely a miraculum scientice, which, with the mira- cles properly so called, the miracula poientm, may do duty in proving against cavillers the divine origin of our Faith ; when all that we can find is that the doers of the works and the utterers of the words did and said what was beyond the reach and scope of common men. But the fact that prophecy should constitute so large an element in Scripture finds its explanation rather in that law which we have been tracing through- out all Scripture — the law, I mean, of an orderly de- velopment, according to which there is nothing sud- den, nothing abrupt or unprepared in his counsels, all whose works were known to him from the beginning. It is part of this law that there should ever be prefi- gurations of the coming, that truths so vast and so mighty as those of the New Covenant, so difficult for man's heart to conceive, should have their way pre- pared, should, ere they arrive in their. highest shape, give pledge and promise of themselves in lower forms and in weaker rudiments. Thus was it good that before the appearing of the Son of God in the flesh, there should be, in the lan- guage of Bishop Bull, " preludings of the Incarnation," transient apparitions of Him in a human form, though not in the verity of our human nature. — Thus was it 84 LECTURE IV. ordered that each one of the mighty acts of our Lord's life should not stand wholly apart, and without ana- logy in any thing which had gone before, but ever find in something earlier its lineaments and its out- lines. Weak and faint these lineaments may have been, weak and faint they must have been, when com- pared with the glory that excelleth ; yet sketches and outlines and foreshadowings still of the glory to be re- vealed. Thus, more than one was wonderfully born, with many circumstances of a strange solemnity, with heavenly announcements, with much that went beyond human expectation, ere He was born, by the annun- ciation of an Angel, through the overshadowing of the Holy Ghost, whose name should be called Wonderful, The Mighty God. So we may say that in the shining of Moses' face, as he came down from the mount of God, we have already a weaker Transfiguration, a feeble fore-announcement of that brightness which, not from without, but breaking forth from within, should clothe with a light which no words could ade- quately utter, not the face only, but the whole person, of the Son of God. So again, in the translation of Elijah, the lineaments of his Ascension appear, who, not rapt in a chariot of fire, not needing the cleansing of that fiery baptism, nor requiring that commissioned chariot to bear him up, did in the far sublimer calm- ness of his own indwelHng power arise from the earth, and with his human body pass into the heavenly places.* And once more, in the dividing of the Spirit * Gregory the Great (^Hom. in Evang.i) Elias in curru le- c '^/r^ THE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE. V^, 85 which Moses had, upon the seventy elders of Israe that they all did prophesy, we recognise ah earlier though a weaker Pentecost ; in which, however, the later was surely implied : for if from the servant could be imparted of his spirit, how much more and in what larger measure from the Son? All these should be contemplated as preparatory workings in alower sphere of the same Spirit, which afterwards wrought more gloriously in the later and crowning acts; as knit to those later by an inner law, as sharers of the same organic life with them. The rending away of isolated passages, and then saying. This Psalm, or That chapter of Isaiah, is pro- phetic, and has to do with Christ and his kingdom, — and this without explaining how it comes that these have to do, and those nearest them have not, can never truly satisfy ; men's minds resist this fragmen- tary capricious exposition. The portions of Scrip- ture thus adduced very likely are those in which pro- phecy concentrates itself more than in any other : they may be the strongest expressions of that Spirit which quickens the whole mass; but it has not forsaken the other portions to gather itself up exclusively in these. Rather the subtle threads of prophecy are woven gitar ascendisse, lit videlicet aperte demonstrarelur, quia homo piirus adjutorio indigebat alieno. Per angelos quippe facta et ostensa sunt adjumenta; quia nee in coelum quidem aerium per se ascendere poterat quern naturae suae infirmitas gravabat. Redemtor autem noster non curru, non angelis sublevatus ]e- gitur quia is qui fecerat omniaj nimirum super omnia sua vir- tu te ferebatur. 8 I 86 LECTURE IV. through every part of the woof and texture, not se- parable from thence without rending and destroying the whole. All the Old Testament, as the record of a divine constitution pointing to something higher than itself, administered by men who were ever look- ing beyond themselves to a Greater that should come, who were uttering, as the Spirit stirred them, the deepest longings of their souls after his appearing, is prophetic ; and this, not by an arbitrary appointment, which meant thus to supply evidences ready to hand for the truth of Revelation, in the curious tallying of the Old with the New, the remarkable fulfilments of the foretold, but prophetic according to the inmost necessities of the case, which would not suffer it to be otherwise. For how could God, bringing to pass what was good and true, do other than make it resemble what was best and truest, which he should one day bring to pass? Raising up holy men, how could he avoid giving them features of likeness to the Holiest of all? appointing them functions and offices in which to bless their brethren, how could these otherwise than an- ticipate his functions and his office, who should come in the fulness of blessing to his people? Inspiring them to speak, stirring by the breath of his Spirit the deepest chords of their hearts, how could He bring forth from them any other notes but those which made the deepest music of their lives; their longings, namely, after the promised Redeemer, their yearnings after the kingdom of his righteousness, — mere longings and yearnings no longer now, since the Spirit that inspired THE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE. 87 such utterances, being the very Spirit of Truth, gave pledge, in sanctioning and working the desire, that the fulfilment of that desire in due time should not be wanting? If the poet had right when he spake of " the prophetic soul Of the great world, dreaming of things to come;" by how much higher reason must a prophetic soul have dwelt in Israel, by which it not vaguely dreamed, but in some sort felt itself already in possession, of the great things to come, whereof it knew that the seeds and germs were laid so deeply in its own bosom ? We may say of Judaism, that it bore in its womb the Messiah, as the man-child whom it should one day give birth to, and only in the forming and bearing of whom it found its true meaning. This was its function, and according to the counsel of God it should have been saved through this child-bearing; though by its own sin it did itself expire in giving birth to Him who was intended to have been not its death but its life. This, then, is another remarkable aspect under which the progressiveness of God's dealings, and of that Book which is their record, presents itself to us — this long and patient training of his people through many a preceding word and institution and person into the capacity of recognising his glory, of whom all that went before was but the shadow and the sym- bol. In all this was a prelude to prepare the spiri- tual ear for the full burst of a later, and but for that, an overwhelming harmony ; — a purpling of the east, 88 LECTURE IV. 'which might tell in what quarter the Sun of Righteous- ness would appear, and whither the straining eyes must turn, that would catch the first brightness of his rising. Nor is it unworthy of observation, that prophecy did never run before that actual development, which alone would enable it to speak a language which men should understand. It did not paint upon air; but ever claimed forms of the present in which to array its promises of the future. Thus we have no mention of Christ the Prophet till a great Prophet had actually arisen, till Moses could say, "The Lord thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet like unto me." We hear nothing of Christ the King, till there were kings in Israel — theocratic kings — who should give the pro- phecy a substance and a meaning ; who should make men know, though with many imperfections, what a sceptre of righteousness was, and a king ruling in judgment. And thus (did time allow) we might trace in much more detail how not only in the idea of type and prophecy there is obedience to that law of advance and progress, which we have every where been finding, but in the very order and sequence of the prophecies themselves. Yet this matter we must leave. Sufficient for us to have seen how in prophecy are the outlines and lineaments which shall indicate, and fit men to know the very body of the Truth, when that at length shall come; — to have considered under another as- pect to-day, how Scripture is its own witness, gives proof that it is what it affirms itself to be, a Book for the education of men, — in that it plainly contains the THE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE. 89 ' gradCial unfolding of a great idea, such a thought as only could have entered into the mind of God to con- ceive, such a thought as He only who is the King of ages could have carried out. And without question, for ourselves, brethren, the lessons which the Scripture contenaplated as this Book of an ever-advancing education may suggest, are not very far to seek. And this first. God has taken our whole race by the hand that He may lead it on toge- ther ; even so will he lead every single soul that will trust itself to Him. He will speak to us first as " lit- tle children," then as " young men," and then as " fa- thers." His Word in our hearts shall be as the blade, and the ear, and the full corn in the ear. He will give us, as we are faithful, an ever larger horizon, a widening horizon of duty, with an increasing con- sciousness of powers and faculties for fulfilling that duty. And our second lesson lies also at the door, — that seeing, as we do in Scripture, what the school has been in w^hich all God's saints have been trained, we be well content to learn in the same, nor count that we can learn better in any other. The study of this Scripture shows us how, through the everlasting ordi- nances of the Family, the State, the Church, God trains into nobleness and freedom the souls and spirits of men ; how he calls out in their strength, first the affections, then the conscience, and last of all, the reason and the will of men. It teaches us that, not in self-willed separation from common duties, but in a lowly and earnest fulfilling of them, men have grown . 8* 90 LECTURE IV. up to their full stature as men. Often in that evil pride which makes us rather to follow after that which w^ill divide us from our brethren, than that which will unite us to them, we have counted, it may be, that, we could discipline ourselves better, that w^e could train ourselves higher, than by those common ways in which all our fellows are being trained,— better than through the ordinances of the family, better than through the duties which devolve on us as citizens, better than by the teaching and Sacraments of Christ's Church. It has seemed to us a poor thing to walk in those trite and common paths wherein all are walking. Yet these common paths are the paths in which bless- ing travels, are the ways in w^hich God is met. Wel- coming and fulfilling the lowliest duties which meet us there, we shall often be surprised to find that we have unawares been welcoming and entertaining An- gels; and nurturing ourselves upon these, it shall be with us in our souls and spirits as it was with Daniel and his young companions, when they showed fairer and better liking, and had more evidently thriven upon their common food, their ordinary pulse, than had all their compeers upon their royal dainties, their profane meats, brought from the table of the Babylonian king. LECTURE V. THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. JOHN XII. 16. These things understood not his disciples at the first; hut when Jesus was glorified^ then remembered they, that these things were written of him. The subject of the Lectures which I am now per- mitted to resume, is the fitness of Holy Scripture for unfolding the spiritual life of men, and the arguments which we may from this fitness derive for its being the gift of God to his reasonable creatures, whom He has called to a spiritual fellowship with Himself. So many who are now present cannot have heard the ear- lier discourses, so little have I a right to expect that those who did, should vividly retain them in their me- mories, that I shall just mention at this resumption of the course the point at which I have arrived, not at- tempting to retrace even with hastiest steps, but indi- cating merely by lightest hints, the way by which we hitherto have gone. Passing by, then, the external arguments, not as comparatively unimportant, but as not belonging to the domain of my peculiar subject, I have sought, after some preliminary observations which filled the chief part of my first Lecture, in the second to trace the oneness of Scripture; how there runs 92 LECTURE V. through it one idea, that of the kingdom of God, and how by that one are knit into unity its most diverse parts and elements; in the third, how this Scripture, which is one, is also manifold, so laid out that it shall nourish all souls, and make wonderful answer to the moral and intellectual needs of all men ; and then in the fourth, the latest of that series, I endeavoured to show how Scripture is fitted to be the Book of our education, the furtherer of our spiritual growth, through itself being the history of the progressive edu- cation of our race into the fulness of the knowledge of God. An ample task remains for us still : this day's por- tion of that task will consist in an attempt, it must be indeed a most imperfect one, to show how this treasure of divine Truth, once given, has only gradually re- vealed itself; how the history of the Church, the dif- ficulties, the trials, the struggles, the temptations in which it has been involved, have interpreted to it its own records, brought out their latent significance, and caused it to discover all which in them it had ; how there was much written for it there as in sympa- thetic ink, invisible for a season, yet ready to flash out in lines and characters of light, whenever the ap- pointed day and hour had arrived. So that in this way the Scripture has been to the Church as their garments to the children of Israel, which during all the years of their pilgrimage in the desert waxed not old, yea, according to rabbinical tradition, kept pace and measure with their bodies, growing with their growth, fitting the man as they had fitted the child, THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 93 and this, until the forty years of their sojourn in the "wilderness had expired. Or, to use another compari- son which may help -to illustrate our meaning, Holy Scripture thus progressively unfolding what it con- tains, might be likened fitly to some magnificent land- scape on which the sun is gradually rising, and ever as it rises, is bringing out one headland into light and prominence, and then another; anon kindling the glory-smitten summit of some far mountain, and pre- sently lighting up the recesses of some near valley which had hitherto abided in gloom, and so travelling on till nothing remains in shadow, no nook nor corner hid from the light and heat of it, but the whole pros- pect stands out in the clearness and splendour of the brightest noon. And we can discern, I think, in some measure, causes which in the wusdom and providence of God worked together to constitute Scripture as this glo- rious landscape which should ever reveal new features of wonder and beauty, this boundless treasure with riches laid up for all future times and all future needs. The apostolic Church — that of which the sacred writings of the New Covenant are a living transcript — was not merely one age and one aspect of the Church, but we have in it the picture and prophecy of the Church's history in every future age. All which in those after ages should only slow^ly declare itself, is there presented in one great image, — the most amazing contrasts, the best and the worst, the highest and the lowest, the noblest assertions, and the deadliest perversions, of the Truth. It is, if we may SQ speak. 94 LECTURE V. ji rapid rehearsal of the great drama of God's provi- dence with His Church, which should afterwards be played out at leisure on the world's stage. Nothing, which was after to be, was not there ; although, by the necessities of the case, all compressed and brought into narrowest compass, and, so to speak, all fore- shortened, and, as a picture of the future, wanting in perspective and in distance. But this glimpse once vouchsafed to us of all, the wondrous picture dislimns and dissolves aorain; that era in which were all other eras wrapped up, closes, and the period of gradual de- velopment begins ; but yet not this, before every error and the antidote of every error had been set down, every heresy which should afterwards display itself full-blown, had budded, and the witness against it had been clearly borne ; not till it had been seen how Jew- ish legality and heathen false liberty would equally seek to corrupt the Truth, and with what weapons both were to be encountered ; not till missions to the Jew and missions to the heathen had alike been founded, and the manner of conducting them been shown ; not till many Antichrists had rehearsed and prefigured the final one, and tried the faith of God's elect. And thus it was ordained that the canonical Scriptures, which seem to belong only to one age, should indeed belong to all ages ; inasmuch as that age, that fruit- ful time, that middle point of the world's history, in which an old world died and a new world sprang to life, had the germs and rudiments of all other times within its bosom. It is this fact, — that the Holy Scripture contains THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 95 ■within itself all treasures of wisdom and knowledge^ but only renders up those treasures little by little; and as they are needed or asked for, — which justifies us in speaking of a development of doctrine in the Church, and explains much in her inner history that might else startle or perplex. But about this matter so much has lately been spoken, and another theory of the manner in which the Church unfolds her doc- trine, looking at first sight the same as this, but at heart entirely different, has so diligently been put forth, — and that with purposes hostile to that sound form of faith and doctrine, which it is given us to maintain and defend, — that it might be worth our while to linger here for a little, and consider wherein the essential difference between the false theory and the true is to be found, and in what sense, and in what only, the Church may be said to develop her doctrine. It is familiar to many who have watched with interest the course of the controversies of our day, that those who have given up as hopeless the endeavour to find in Scripture, or in the practices or creeds of the early Church, evidence for the accretions with which they have overlaid the Truth, have shifted their ground, and taken up a position 'entirely new. True, they have said, these additions are not there, but they are the unfolding of the Truth which is there ; they are but the producing of the line of Truth, the later num- bers of a series, whereof the earlier in Scripture are given; they are necessary developments of doctrine, such as the Church has ever allowed to herself, and which will alone explain many of the appearances which she presents. 96 LECTURE V. Now doubtless there is a true idea of Scriptural developments, which has always been recognised, to which the great Fathers of the Church have set their seal '* and it is this, that the Church, informed and quickened by the Spirit of God, more and more dis- covers what in Holy Scripture is given her; but it is not this, that she unfolds by an independent power any thing farther therefrom. She has always pos- sessed what she now possesses of doctrine and truth, only not always with the same distinctness of conscious- ness. She has not added to her wealth, but she has become more and more aware of that wealth ; her dowry has remained always the same, but that dowry was so rich and so rare, that only little by little she has counted over and taken stock and inventory of her jewels. She has consolidated her doctrine, com- pelled thereto by the provocation of enemies, or in- duced to it by the growing sense of her own needs. She has brought together utterances in Holy Writ, and those which apart were comparatively barren, when thus married, when each had thus found its com- * Thus Augustine {Enarr. in Ps. liv. 22 :) Multa enim la- tebant in Scripturis, et quum prae6isi essent haeretici, quaes- tionibus agitaverunt Ecclesiam Dei ; aperta sunt quas latebant, et intellecta, est voluntas Dei....Numquid enim perfecte de Trinitate tractatum est antequam oblatrarent Ariani? num- quid perfecte de pcsnitentibus tractatum est antequam obsiste- rent Novatianil Sic non perfecte de baptismate tractatum est antequam contradicerent foris positi rebaptizatores. Cf, Enarr. inPsAxvii, 31; and Confess., 1. 7, c. 19. Improbatio haereticorum facit eminere quid Ecclesia sentiat, et quid habeat Sana doctrina. THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 97 plement in the other, have been fruitful to her. Those which apart meant little to her, have been seen to mean much, when thus brought together and read each by the light of the other. In these senses she has enlarged her dominion, her dominion having be- come larger to her. And yet all this which she has laboriously won, she possessed before, implicitly though not explicitly, — even as the shut hand is as perfect a hand as the open ; or as our dominion in that huge island of the Pacific is as truly ours, and that region as vast in ex- tent now, as it will be when every mountain and valley, every rivulet and bay, have been explored and laid down in our maps, and the flag of England has waved over them all. All, for example, which the later Church slowly and through centuries defined upon this side and that, of the person of the Son of God — of the relation of his natures and the communication of their properties — of his divine will and his human, — all this the earliest had, yea and enjoyed, not having arrived at it by analytic process, not able, per- haps, as not needing, to lay it out with dialectic accu- racy, but in total impression, in synthetic unity. She possessed it all, she lived in the might and in the glory of it ; as is notably witnessed by the prophetic tact, if one may venture so to call that divine instinct, by which she rejected all which was alien to and would have disturbed the true evolution of her doctrine, even before she had fully elaborated that doctrine; by which she refused to shut the door against her- self; and even in matters which had not yet come 9 98 LECTURE V. before her for decision and definition, preserved the ground clear and open from all that would have em- barrassed and obstructed in the future. We do not object to, rather we fully acknowledge, the theory of the development of religious Truth so stated. We no more object, than we do to a Nicene Creed following up and enlarging an Apostolic, which rather we gladly and thankfully receive as a rich addition to our heritage. But that Nicene creed in the same manner contains no new truths which the Church has added to her stock since the earlier was composed, though it may be some which she has brought out with more distinctness to herself and to her children, — as it contains broader and more ac- curately guarded statements of the old. But the essen- tial in this progress of Truth is, that the later is always as truly found in Scripture as the earlier — not as easy to discover, but when discovered, as much carrying with it its own evidence; — and there, not in some obscure hint and germ, putting one in mind of an inverted pyramid, so small the foundation, so vast and overshadowing the superstructure — as for instance, the whole Papal system, which rests, as far as Scripture is adduced in proof, on a single text — nor yet there in some passage which is equally capa- ble of a thousand other turns as that given ; as, for example, when the worship of the Blessed Virgin is found prophesied and authorized in the Lord's answer to her at the marriage in Cana of Galilee. But with these limitations the scheme is altogther different from that which some of late have put for- THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 99 ward, — different not in degree only, but in kind ; and it is that mere confusion of unlike things under like terms, which is so fruitful a source of errors in the world, to call by this same name that theory which, refusing the Scriptures as, first and last, authoritative in and limitary of the Truth, assumes that in the course of ages there was intended to be, not only the discovery of the Truth which is there, but also, by independent accretion and addition, the further growth of doctrine, besides what is there ; which recognises such accretions, when they fall in with its own notions, for legitimate outgrowths, and not, as indeed they are, for noxious misgrowths, of doctrine; and which thus makes the Church from time to time the creator of new Truth, and not merely the guardian and definer and drawer out of the old. This is all that she assumes to be ; whatever she proclaims, she has ever the con- sciousness that she is proclaiming it as the ancient Truth, as that which she has always borne in her bosom, however she may not have distinctly outspoken it till now; as part of the Truth once delivered to her, though, it may be, not all at once apprehended by her. Thus was it felt in the ages long past of the Church ; thus also was it at the Reformation ; for that too was an entering of the Church on a portion of the fulness of her heritage, on which she had not adequately en- tered before. It is hardly too much to say, that the Reformation called out from their hiding-places the Epistle to the Romans, the Epistle to the Galatians, and generally the Epistles of St. Paul, which then N 100 LECTURE V. becarpe to the faithful all which they were intended to be. It is not, of course, implied that these were not read and studied and commented on before, or that much and varied profit was not drawn from them in every age, or that they had not been full of blessing for unnumbered souls. But with all this, men's eyes were holden, and had been for long, so that the inner- most heart of them, the deepest significance, was not seen. For they were the needs of souls, the mighty anguish of men's spirits, which were the true interpre- ters of these portions of God's Word. When that vast and gorgeous fabric, the Papal Christendom of the middle ages, dissolved and went to pieces, — that which, as one contemplates it on its bright side or its dark, one is inclined to regard as a glorious realiza- tion, or an impious caricature, of the promised king- dom of Christ upon the earth; — when the time arrived that men could no longer live by faith that they were members of that great spiritual fellowship, (for it was felt now to be only the mockery of such ;) when each man said, ''I too am a man, myself and no other, one by myself, with ray own burden, my own sin, the in- alienable mystery of my own being, which I cannot put off on another, and, as such, I must stand or fall ; it helps me nothing to tell me that I belong to a glorious community, in which saints have lived and doctors taught, wherein I am bound in closest fellow- ship with all the ages that are past; this helps me nothing, unless I too, by myself, am a healed man, with the deep wound of my own spirit healed, unless you show me how my own personal relations to God, M. THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 101 which sin has utterly disturbed, may be made firm and strong again ; — then, when men thus felt, where should they so naturally turn as to those portions of Scripture especially designed to furnish a response to this deep cry of the human heart, and which are occupied with setting forth a personal Deliverer from this personal sense of guilt and condemnation? And not any thing else but this mighty agony of souls would have sup- plied the key of knowledge to the Epistles of St. Paul, w^hich had remained otherwise to the faithful as writ- ten in a strange language, to be admired at a distance, but dealing w^ith matters in which they had no very close concern. But with this preparation, and thus initiated by suffering, men came to them with ineffable joy, as to springs in the desert, and found in them all after which their inmost spirits had yearned and thirst- ed the most. Thus at the Reformation the relations of every man to God, consequent on the Incarnation and death and resurrection of the Son of God, were those for which the Church mainly contended ; — that those relations were perfect, — that by one oblation Christ had per- fected for ever them that were sanctified, that nothing might come between God and the cleansed conscience of his children, to bring them nearer than they were brought already, — no pope, no work, no penance, — that all which pretended to intrude and come between was a lie. And by consequence those records of Scrip- ture which were occupied with declaring the perfect- ness of these relations, were those most sedulously and most earnestly handled; bright beams of light flashed 9* 102 LECTURE V. out from them, at once enlightening and gladdening and kindling, as they had never done until now. But in our own day, as we see in that country where alone a speculative philosophy, with which theology has to put itself in relation, exists, the con- troversy has drawn, as was to be looked for, even nearer yet to the very heart of the matter. For now it is not, What is the meaning for us of this constitu- tion in the Son? but whether there is such a constitu- tion at all? it is not what follow^s on the relations which the Incarnate Word established between God and men, but whether there have been any such rela- tions at all established — any meeting of heaven and earth in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, — whether all which has been spoken of such has not been merely dreams of men, and not, as the Church affirms, facts of God ? And therefore the Gospels, as we see, come mainly into consideration now ; round them the com- batants gather, the battle rages: they are felt to be the key of the position, which, as it is won or lost, will carry with it the issues of the day. Every one that would strike a blow at Christianity, strikes at them; criticizes the record or the fact recorded; — the record, that it is a loose and accidental aggregation of floating materials, of insecure traditions, which crum- bles to pieces at any accurate handling — or the fact recorded, that a man who was God, and God who was man, is inconceivable, and carries its own contra- diction on its front. And as the Gospels are the point mainly assailed 5 so are they the citadel in which they must make them- THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 103 selves strong, from which they must issue, who would win in our day any signal victory for the Truth. First, the record itself must be vindicated, the glory and per- fectness of its form, the mystery of those four Gospels in their subtle harmonies, in the manner wherein they complete one another, handing us on, the first to the second, and the second to the third, and the third to the last: — the wondrous laws of selection, and laws of rejection, which evidently presided at their con- struction, and do continually reveal themselves to the deeper inquirer, however the shallow may miss or deny them. And then, secondly, the facts, or, to speak more truly, the fact must be justified, which in those Gospels is recorded, — that it is the highest wisdom, — that a Son of God, who is also the Son of man, is the one, the divine fact, which alone explains either God or man, — is that which philosophy must end by ac- cepting at the hands of Theology as the crowning Truth, and only in accepting which it will find its own completion, and the long and weary strife between the two obtain an end. And as it was at the Reformation with the Pauline Epistles, — as it is now with the Gospels, — so, I can-' not doubt, a day will come when all the significance of the Apocalypse for the church of God will be ap- parent, which hitherto it can scarcely be said to have been ; — that a time will arrive when it will be plainly shown how costly a gift, yea rather, how necessary an armour was this for the Church of the redeemed. Then, when the last things are about to be, and the trumpet of the last Angel to sound, when the great 104 LECTURE V. drama is hastening with ever briefer pauses to its catastrophe, — then, in one unlooked for way or an- other, the veil will be lifted up from this wondrous Book, and it vt^ill be to the Church collectively, what, even partially understood, it has been already to tens of thousands of her children — strength in the fires, giving her "songs in the night," songs of joy and de- liverance in that darkest night of her trial, which shall precede the break of her everlasting day ; and enabling her, even when the triumph of Antichrist is at the highest, to look securely on to his near doom and her own perfect victory. But we are dealing to-day with the fast develop- ment of Scripture, not with the future — with what it has already unfolded, not with what it may have still in reserve. That may well occupy us hereafter; for the present, let us ask ourselves what is the great lesson which we should draw from this aspect of the subject which we have been this day contemplating. A lesson surely of the very deepest significance. For if other generations before us have had their especial task and work, so also must we ; a work which none other have done for us, even as none other could; for just as each individual has some task which none other can fulfil so well as he, for it is his task, so every generation has its own appointed labour, and only can be at harmony with itself, when it has faithfully girded itself to that. Let us not then, under show of humi- lity, flatter our indolence, and say that in this matter of the treasures of the knowledge of God all is searched out ; that for us it remains only to live on the THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 105 handed down, on that which others have already won from his Word. Let us not, in this manner, turn that into a standing pool or reservoir, which might be a spring of water springing up as freshly and newly to our hps as to the lips of any who have gone before us. Shall we determine, for instance, to know no other Theology, no other results of Scripture, save those of the Church of the first ages? Are we thus honouring Christ's promise to His Church, when we imply, as so we do, that the Spirit of wisdom and understanding was given to her once, but is not given to her always? Shall all history, as an interpreter of God's Word, go for nothing with us — be assumed to stand in no rela- tion to that Book, of which surely the very idea is, that as it casts light upon all, so it receives light from all? Or do we presume too far in believing that there are portions of its vast and goodly field, which we can cultivate with larger success than those who preceded us, to which we shall bring experience which they did not and could not bring, which will yield therefore to us ampler returns than they yielded to them? Or, again, were it not as great a mistake, as partial a view upon another side, to require that the Theology of the Reformation should be the ultimate term and law to us, — to say that we would know nothing fur- ther, and to look, respectfully it may be, but still coldly, on any truths which were not at that day counted vital? Surely our loss were most real, re- fusing to take our part in cultivating this field which the Lord has blest, and which he has now delivered 106 LECTURE V. to US, that we in our turn might dress and keep, and enrich ourselves from it ; — a loss we know not how great! for we too, had we been faithful and earnest, might have found hid in that field some treasure, for joy whereof we should have been ready to renounce all that we had, all our barren theories, and hungry speculations, and mutual suspicions, if only w^e might have made that treasure our own ; so reconciling, so evidently fitted would it have shown itself for all our actual needs. We may purpose indeed to live on what others have done, the mighty men of the days which are past, the fathers or revivers of our faith ; and we may count that their gains will as much enrich us as they en- riched them. But this will not prove so indeed ; for it is a just law of our being, one of the righteous compen- sations of toil, that what a man wins by his labour, be it inward truth, or only some outward suppliance of his need, is ever far more really his own, makes him far more truly rich, than aught which he receives or inherits ready made at the hands and from the toils of others. And they of whom we speak earned their truths, by toil and by struggle, by mighty wrestlings till the day broke; watering with the sweat of their brow, oftentimes with tears as of blood — yea, with the life-blood of their own hearts, the soil which yielded them in return a harvest so large. So was it, and so only, that they came again with joy, bearing their sheaves with them. And would we do the same, let us first indeed see that we let nothing go — that we forfeit no part of that which we inherit at their hands. THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 107 But also with a just confidence in that blessed Spirit, who is ever with His Church, who is ever leading it into the Truth which it needs, — let us labour, that through prayer and through study, through earnest knocking, through holy living, that inexhausted and inexhaustible Word may render up unto us our truth, — the truth by which we must live, — the truth, what- soever that be, which, more than any other, will deliver us from the lies with which we in our time are beset, which will make us strong where we are weak, and heal us where we are divided, and enable us most effectually to do that w^ork which our God would have done by us in this the day of our toil. LECTURE VT. THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE. k ISAIAH XII. 3. With joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation. It was my endeavour in my last Lecture to bring before you the progressive unfolding of the Scripture for the Church — the manner in which for the company of faithful men in all ages, considered as one great organic body with one common life, there has been such a lifting up of veil after veil from the Word of God ; they only gradually coming into the knowledge of all the riches which in that Word were their own. It were a \vorthy task for us to-day to consider, what no doubt all of us must often have felt, the way in which it has been ordained that the treasures of Holy Scripture should for the individual believer be inex- haustible also, — should be quarries in which he may always dig, yet which he can never dig out, — a world of wisdom in which the most zealous and successful searcher shall ever be the readiest to acknowledge that what remains to know is far more than what yet he has known. For this is a most important need for a Book such as we affirm the Bible to be, a Book for the culti- THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE. 109 valing of humanity, for the developing, by the ministry of the Church, through the teaching of the Spirit, the higher hfe of every man in the world. It belongs to the very primal necessities of a Scripture which is ordained for such ends as these, that it should be thus inexhaustible; — that no man should ever come to its end, himself containing it, instead of being contained by it, as by something far larger than himself. The very idea of such a Book, which is for all men and for all the life of every man, is that it should have treasures which it does not give up at once, secrets which it yields slowly and only to those that are its intimates; with rich waving harvests on its surface, but with precious veins of metal hidden far below, and to be reached only by search and by labour. Nothing were so fatal to its lasting influence, to the high pur- poses which it is meant to serve, as for any with justice to feel that he had used it up, that he had w^orked it through, that henceforward it had no " fresh fields," nor "pastures new," in which to invite him for to- morrow. Even where this did not utterly repel him, where he maintained the study of this Book as a com- manded duty, his chiefest delight and satisfaction in the handling of it would have departed ; he no longer would draw water with joy from these wells of salva- tion, for they would be to him fresh springing wells no more. It will be my purpose on the present occasion to trace, as far as I may, what there is in the structure and conformation of Scripture to constitute it this Book of unsearchable riches for each ; and in so doing I 10 110 LECTURE VI. shall not, as might perhaps at first sight appear, be going over again the subject which was treated last; for that was the organic unfolding of the Word for the Church considered as a whole ; this the wealth which there is stored for each one of the faithful in particu- lar, and which all, given to hira in his Baptism, he yet only little by little can make his own, appro- priating and transmuting it into the substance of his own life. Now the first provision made for this by the grace and wisdom of God, — the first at least which I would note, — is one which by shallow or malignant objectors has been often turned into a charge against it, I mean the absence of a systematic arrangement; for such is the shape which the complaint generally assumes. But this complaint of the \vant of method in Scrip- ture, what is it in fact but this, that it is not dead, but living ? that it is no herbarium, no hortus siccus, but a garden ? a wilderness, if men choose to call it so, but a wilderness of sweets, with its flowers upon their stalks — its plants freshly growing, the dew upon their leaves, the mould about their roots — with its lowly hyssops and its cedars of God. And when men say that there is want of method in it, they would speak more accurately if they said that there was want of system ; for the highest method, even the method of the Spirit, may reign where system there is none. Method is divine, is inseparable from the ideas of God and of order ; but system is of man, is a help to the weakness of his faculties, is the artificial arrangement by which he brings within his limited ken that which ■A THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE. Ill in no other way he would be able to grasp as a whole. That there should be books of systematic Theology — books with their plan and scheme thus lying on their very surface, and meeting us at once — this is most need- ful; but most needful also that Scripture should not be such a book. The dearest interests of all, of wise men equally as of women and children, demand this. It is true that one of the latest assaults on Scrip- ture by a living adversary of the faith, by one who, at first attacking only the historical accuracy of the Gospels, has since gone rapidly the downward way, till he has sunk at last, as his latest writings testify, into the bottomless pit of sheerest atheism,* — it is true that his assault is mainly directed against this very point. He demands of a book, which claims to be the appointed book for the guidance and teaching of hu- manity, that he should be able to lay his finger there upon a precept or a doctrine for each occurring need, — that he should be able to find in one place and under one head all which relates to one matter; and because he cannot find this in the Bible, he opens his mouth against it, and proclaims it insufficient for the ends which it professes to fulfil. But Holy Scripture is not this book for the slothful — is not this book which can be interpreted without, and apart from, and by the deniers of, that Holy Spirit by whom it came. Rather is it a field, upon the surface of which if some- times we gather manna easily and without labour, and ♦■ Strauss. Compare his Lehen Jesu with his Christliche Glaubenslehre. # 112 LECTURE VI. given, as it were, freely to our hands, yet of which also many portions are to be cultivated with pains and toil, ere they will yield food for the use of man. This bread of life also is to be often eaten in the whole- some sweat of our brow. It is not a defect in Scripture, it is not something which is to be excused and explained away, but rather a glory and a prerogative, that there reigns in it the freedom and fulness of nature, and not the narrow- ness and strictness of art; — as one said of old who adorned this University, and is yet numbered among the honoured band of the Cambridge Platonists, when speaking of the delightful exercise of the highest fa- culties of the soul, which is thus secured: "All which gratulations of the soul in her successful pur- suits of divine Truth would be utterly lost or prevented, if the Holy Scripture set down all things so fully and methodically that our reading and understanding would every where keep pace together. Wherefore that the mind of man may be worthily employed, and taken up with a kind of spiritual husbandry, God has not made the Scriptures like an artificial garden, wherein the walks are plain and regular, the plants sorted and set in order, the fruits ripe and the flowers blown, and all things fully exposed to our view ; but rather like an uncultivated field, where indeed we have the ground and hidden seeds of all precious things, but nothing can be brought to any great beauty, order, fulness, or maturity, without our industry, — nor indeed with it, unless the dew of his grace descend upon it, /without whose blessing this spiritual culture will thrive THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE. ' 113 as little as the labour of the husbandman without showers of rain."* * But to pass to another branch of the subject; — it is part of this absence of System, with the presence in its stead of a higher method, of this constitution of Scripture as a Book which no man should ever search to the end, and then be tempted to lay aside as known and finished, that so much of it should be occupied with the history of hves. That which is to teach us to live, is itself life — not precepts, not rules alone, but these clothing themselves in the flesh and blood of action and of suffering. A system of faith and duty, however intricate, one might come to the end of at last.. One might possess thoroughly a Summa Theologice, however massive and piled up; for after all, however vast, it yet has its defined bounds and limits. But life stretches out on every side, and on every side loses itself in the infinite. An Abraham, a David, a Paul — there is always something incomplete in the way in which we have hitherto realized their characters; they always abide greater than our con- ception of them, and at the same time always ready to reveal themselves in some new features to the * Henry More, in his Mystery of Godliness. B. i., c. 2. Another in our own day has expressed himself in likejnanner: " Scrip- ture cannot, as it were, be mapped, or its contents catalogued ; but after all our diligence to the end of our lives and to the end of the Church, it must be an unexplored and unsubdued land, with heights and valleys, forests and streams, on the right and left of our path and close about us, full of concealed wonders and choice treasures." ' 10^ 114 LECTURE VI. loving and stu^lious eye. Beheld in some niew combi- nation, in some new grouping with those by whom they are surrounded, they wuU yield some lesson of instruction which they have never yielded before. And if they, how much more He, whom we are bidden above all to consider, looking unto whom we are to run our course, and whose every turn and gesture and tone and word are significant for us. We might study out a system; but how can we ever study out a per- son? And our blessedness is, that Christ does not de- clare to us a system, and say, " This is the truth; " so doing he might have established a school: but he points to a person, even to himself, and says, " I am the Truth," and thus he founded, not a school, but a Church, a fellowship which stands in its faith upon a person, not in its tenure of a doctrine, or, at least, only mediately and in a secondary sense upon this. But another reason w^hy the Word of God should be for us this mine which shall never be worked out, is, no doubt, the following: — that our own life brings out in it such new and undreamt-of treasures. What an interpreter of Scripture is affliction ! how many stars in its heaven shine out brightly in the night of sorrow or of pain, which were unperceived or over- looked in the garish day of our prosperity. What an enlarger of Scripture is any other outer or inner event, which stirs the deeps of our hearts, which touches us near to the core and centre of our lives. Trouble of spirit, condemnation of conscience, pain of body, sudden danger, strong temptation — when any of these overtake us, what veils do they take away, that we fer- THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE. 115 may see what hitherto we saw not; what new domains of God's word do they bring within our spiritual ken ! How do promises, which once fell flat upon our ears, become precious now; psalms become our own, our heritage for ever, which before were aloof from us ! How do we see things now with the eye, which before we knew only by the hearing of the ear; which, be- fore, men had told us, but now we ourselves have found ! How much, again, do we see in our riper age, which in youth we missed or passed over! And thus, on these accounts also, the Scripture is well fitted to be our companion, and to do us good, all the years of our life.* Another provision which in it is made fOr aw^aken- ing attention, and for summoning men to penetrate more deeply into its meaning, is to be found in its ap- parent, I need not say only apparent, contradictions. But it is not at pains to avoid the semblance of these. it is not careful to remove every handle of objection which any might take hold of. On the contrary, that saying, " Blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in me," finds as true an application to Christ's Word * Fuller. " The same man at several times may in his ap- prehension prefer several Scriptures as best, formerly most affected with one place, for the present more delighted with another; and afterwards conceiving comfort therein -not so clear, choose other places as more pregnant and pertinent to his purpose. Thus God orders it that divers men, (and per- haps the same man at divers time) make use of all his gifts, gleaning and gathering comfort, as it is scattered through the whole field of the Scripture." 116 LECTURE VI. as to his person. For that Word goes on its way^ not obviating every possible misconception, not giving anxious pains to shov^ how this statement which it makes and that agree. It is satisfied that they do agree, and lets those that are watching for an offence take it. They whose hearts were already alienated from the Truth are suffered to stumble at this stone, which was set for this very fall and rise of many, that the thoughts of many hearts might be revealed, and that they who were longing for an excuse for un- belief might find one. • And with the same challenge to the false-hearted, the same fruitful supply of suggestive thought for the devout inquirer, these matters claiming reconciliation will meet us, not in the history only, but also in the doctrine. For it is ever the manner of that Word with which we have to do, now boldly to declare its truth upon this side, and then presently to declare it as boldly and fearlessly on the other — not painfully and nicely balancing, limiting, qualifying, till the whole strength of its statements had evaporated, not caring even though its truths should seem to jostle one another. Enough that they do not do so indeed. It is content to leave them to the Spirit to adjust and reconcile, and to show how the rights of each are compatible with the rights of the other — and not com- patible only, but how most often the one requires that the other have its rights, before it can have truly its own. Thus how profitable for us that w^e have the divers statements of St. Paul and St. James — divers, but not diverse — each, in the words of St. Chrysos- THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE. 117 torn, declaring the same truth, Sta^opcoj, but not ^vav■r'^co? — how do they summon us to a deeper entering into the doctrine than might otherwise have been ours, bidding us not to be satisfied till we reach that central point where we can evidently see how the two are at one, and do but present, from different points of view, the same truth. How useful to find in one place that God tempted Abraham, and in another, that God tempteth not any.* Should we have learned so well the significance of temptation, should we have been set to think about it so effectually by any other pro- cess? Or when the Lord sets before the pure-hearted, that they shall see God, that God whom his Apostle declares that no man hath seen nor can see,t how does this set us to meditate on that awful yet blessed vision of God, which in some sense shall be vouchsafed to his servants, even as in some it shall remain incommu- nicable even unto them. If indeed these diflficulties had been artificially con- trived, if they had been puzzles and perplexities with which the Bible had been sown, that it might last us the longer, that in the explaining and reconciling of them we might find pleasant exercise for our facul- ties, they would be but of slightest value. But they grow out of a far deeper root than this; they have nothing thus forced and unnatural about them. Ra- ther is it here as in the kingdom of nature. How often does nature seem to contradict herself, so beckon- ing us onward to deeper investigations, till we shall * Compare Gen. xxii. 1, with Jam. i. 13. f Compare Matt. v. 8, with 1 Tim. vi. 16. 118 LECTURE VI. have reached some higher and more comprehensive law, in which her seeming contradictions, those which lie upon her surface, are atoned. And this because she is infinite: for it is of the essence of manifold and endless life that it should at times thus present itself as at variance with its own self. It is the glory of Scripture that its harmonies lie deep, so deep, that to the careless or perverse ear they may be sometimes mistaken for discords. There might have been a consistency of its different parts — a poor and shallow thing — lying on the outside, traced easily and at once, which none could miss ; but such had been of no value, had been charged with no deeper instruction for us. To look, on another side, at the manner in which Holy Scripture presents itself as this inexhaustible treasure, — what riches are contained in its minutest portions! As it can bear to be looked at in its largest aspect, so it challenges the contemplation of its small- est details — in this again like nature, which shows more w^onderful, the more microscopic the investiga- tion to which it is submitted. Here truly are maxima in minimis — the sun reflecting itself as faithfully in the tiny dewdrop, as in the great mirror of the ocean. The most eminent illustrations qf this widest wealth laid up in narrowest compass must naturally be found in single sayings of our Lord's. How do they shine, like finely polished diamonds, upon every face! how simple and yet how deep! apparent paradoxes, and yet profoundest truths! Every one can get something from them, and no one can get all. He that gathers little has enough, and he that gathers much has no- THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OP SCRIPTURE. 119 thing over: every one gathers there according to his eating."* For example, " Whosoever will save his life shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it ; " — who sees not that in these words the keys of heaven and of hell are put into his hands? and yet who will venture to affirm that he has come to their end? that he has dived down into all their deeps, or that he ever expects to do so ? that he has made altogether his own the mysteries of life and of death which are here ? Or again, " Every one that exalteth himself shall be abased, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted ; " — what is all the history of the world, if read aright, but a comment on, and a confirmation of, these words? In the light of them what vast pages of men's destinies, of our own lives, become clear! Even the sceptic Bayle was compelled to call them an abridgment of all hu- * Augustine {Enarr. in Ps. ciii.) making" spiritual applica- tion of the words, ^^ All beasts of the field drink thereof,'* (Ps. civ. 11,) to the streams of Holy Scripture, beautifully says: Inde bibit lepus, inde onager: lepus parvus et onager magnus; lepus timidus, et onager ferus, nterque inde bibit, sed quisque in sitim suam. Non di6it aqua, Lepori sufiicio et repellit onagrum : neque hoc dicit, Onager accedat, lepus si accesserit, rapietur. Tam fideliter et temperate fluit, ut sic onagrum satiet ne leporem terreat. Sonat strepitus vocis Tul- lianse, Cicero legitur, aliquis liber est, dialogus ejus est, sive ipsius sive Platonis, seu cujuscumque taliura: audiunt impe- riti, infirmi minoris cordis, quis audet illuc aspirare? Strepi- tus aquae et forte turbatae, certe tamen tam rapaciter fluentis, ut animal timidum non audeat accedere et bibere. Cui sonuit In principio fecit Deus ccelum et terram, et non ausus est bi- bere? Cui sonat Psalmus, et dicat, Multura est ad me? 120 LECTURE VI. man history ; and such they are, setting us as they do at the very centre of the moral oscillation of the world. These examples of that, whereof hundreds might be adduced, must suffice. Nor is it only what Scripture says, but its very si- lence which is instructive for us. It was said by one w^se man of another, that more might be learned from his questions than from another man's answers. With yet higher truth might it be said that the silence of Scripture is oftentimes more instructive than the speech of other books ; so that it has been likened to " a dial in which the shadow as well as the light in- forms us."* For example of this, how full of mean- ing to us that we have nothing told us of the life of our blessed Lord between the twelfth and the thirtieth years — how significant the absolute silence which the Gospels maintain concerning all that period; that those years in fact have no history, nothing for the sacred writers to record. How much is implied herein ! the calm ripening of his human powers, — ^the contentedness to wait, — the long preparation in secret, before he began his open ministry. What a testimony is here, if we will note it aright, against all our striving and snatching at hasty results, our impatience, our desire to glitter before the world; against all which tempts so many to pluck the unripe fruits of their minds, and to turn that into the season of a * Boyle {Style of Holy Scripture t) "There is such fulness in that book, that oftentimes it says much by saying nothing • and not only its expressions, but its silences are teaching, like a dial in which the shadow as well as the light informs us." Llfiff^ V' OF THE THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCR|fc»|Jrw:I V iHiEw 5 I T J stunted and premature harvest, which sh^ulit^fWg^TS *>-'' been the season of patient sowing, of an eanSsT tul" , ' ture and a silent ripening of their powers. How pregnant with meaning may that be which ap- pears at first sight only an accidental omission ! Such an accidental omission it might at first sight appear that the Prodigal, who while yet in a far country had determined, among other things which he would say to his father, to say, " Make rae as one of thy hired servants," when he reaches his father's feet, when he hangs on his father's neck, Says all the rest which he had determined, but says not this.* We might take this, at first, for a fortuitous omission; but indeed what deep things are taught us here ! This desire to be made as a hired servant, this wish to be kept at a certain distance, this refusal to reclaim the fulness of ^ a child's privileges, was the one turbid and troubled element in his repentance. How instructive then its omission; — that, saying all else which he had medi- tated, he yet says not this. What a lesson for every penitent, — in other words, for every man. We may learn from this wherein the true growth in faith and in humility consists — how he that has grown in these can endure to be fully and freely blest— to accept all, even when he most strongly feels that he has forfeited all; that only pride and the surviving workings of self- righteousness and evil stand in the way of a reclaim- ing of every blessing, which the sinner had lost, but which God is waiting and willing to restore. * Compare in Luke xv. ver. 19 and 2U 11 122 LECTURE VI. Many other of the apparent accidents of Scripture, on what deep grounds do they rest! Thus, for exam- ple, in the history of Pharaoh's trial, that God should ten times be said to have hardened his heart, and he ten times to have hardened his own, or to have had it hardened, without any reference to other than him- self. The least attentive reader will scarcely have failed to observe this hardening attributed sometimes to God, and, sometimes, more or less directly, traced to the king's own wilfulness and pride. But in the history of that great strife between the will of God and the will of his creature, in this the pattern history of that struggle, such exactly equal distribution of the language which assumes the freedom of man's will, and that which assumes the ultimate lordship of God over the course of the world — a lordship which even the resistance of the wicked does not derange or im- pugn — this exactly equal distribution of either lan- guage is surely most remarkable. The great, how- ever mysterious, fact of the freedom , of man's will going hand in hand with the sovereignty of God is not put in question by an exclusive use of a language resting on or assuming one of these truths or the other — nay rather, exactly equal rights are given to them both; for both are true, both of paramount im- portance to be affirmed. The sinner does harden his own heart ; his resistance to God is most real ; and yet there is a sense, a most true sense also, in which God hardens it; for, to use the old distinction. He who is not the aucfor is yet the dispositor malorum — determines that the evil of the sinner shall break THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE. 123 out in this form or in that, works even the dark threads of that resistance into the woof of providence which He is weaving; and as Solomon, in Jewish le- gend, compelled the wicked spirits to assist in the temple which he was building, so does God compel even his enemies, and them, when they are striving most fiercely against Him, to do his work, though they mean not so, and to contribute their stones to that heavenly temple of which He is the builder and the maker. Neither let us leave out of sight, when we are taking into account the provision which Scripture makes for nourishing the faithful in all the stages of their spiritual life and growth, that infinite condescen- sion, according to which, like the prophet who made himself small, that he might stretch himself, limb for limb, upon the dead child, it, in some sort, contracts itself to our littleness,'* that we, in return, may become able to expand ourselves to its greatness. We see this gracious condescension in nothing more strongly than in that teaching by parables and similitudes, which there occupies so prominent a place. No one turns away from them in pride, as too childish ; none retreat from them in despair, as too high. In the parable the Truth of God is not sought to be trans- planted, as a full-grown tree, into our minds ; for, as * Or as one said in the middle ages: Tola sacra Scriptura loquitur nobis tanquam balbutiendo, sicut mater balbutiens cum filio suo parvulo, qui aliter non potest intelligere verba ejus. 124 LECTURE vr. such, it would never take root and flourish ; we never could find room for it there. But it comes first as a seed, a germ — small to the small, but with capacities of indefinite expansion ; it grows with our growth, enlarging the mind which receives it to something of its own dimensions. Little by little the image reveals itself more fully ; some of its fitnesses are perceived at once, and more and more, as spiritual insight ad- vances; all of them perhaps never, lying as they do so deep, and having their roots in the mind of God, who has constituted this outward world to be an ex- ponent of the inner, a garment of mysterious texture which his creative thoughts have woven for them- selves. But for this very reason, we come back again and again to these divinely chosen similitudes with fresh interest, with new delight, being continually re- warded with glimpses, unperceived before, of the strange and manifold relations, in which the visible and the invisible stand to one another. Thus, brethren, have I endeavoured to present to you this day a few of the aspects under which this Word of the Scripture may be contemplated as one fitted evermore to provoke, and evermore to reward, our inquiries. As one said of old, Habet Scriptura, Sacra haustus primos, hahet secundos, habet teriios. There is, indeed, a tone and temper of spirit, in which if we allow ourselves, all its wells will seem dry, and all its fields barren. The superficial dealer with this Word, he who reads, formally fulfilling an unwelcome task, he who feels in no livings-elation with the things THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE. 125 which he reads, who consults the oracle, hut expects no living answer from its lips, who has never known himself a pilgrim of eternity, to whom life has never, like that fabled Sphinx, presented riddles which either he must solve, or, not solving, must perish, — such a one may say, as in his heart he will say. What is this Word more than another ? It may bring to him no other feelings but those of tedious monotony and inex- pressible weariness. But with the loving and earnest seeker it will prove far otherwise: he will ever be making new discoveries in these spiritual heavens; ever to him will what seemed at first but a light vaporous cloud, upon closer gaze, to his armed eye, resolve itself into a world of stars. The farther he advances, the more will he be aware that what lies be- fore him is far more than what lies behind — the readier will he be to take up his hymn of praise and thanks- giving, and to wonder with the Apostle at " the depths of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God " which are displayed at once in his works and in his Word. IV LECTURE VII. THE FRUITFULNESS OF SCRIPTURE. EZEKIEL XLVII. 9. Jind it shall come to pass, that every thing that liveth, which moveth, whithersoever the rivers shall come, shall live. The aspect of my subject, which I desire this day to bring under your notice is this, namely, the fruitfulness of Holy Scripture; in other words the manner in which it has shown itself a germ of life in all the noblest regions of man's activity ; has with its productive energy impregnated the world; and how, to use the image suggested by my text, every thing has lived where these healing waters have come ; so that in this way, too, this Word has attested itself that which in my preceding lectures I have endea- voured to prove that it was fitted for being, that which we might beforehand presume it would be, namely, the unfolder of all the nobler and higher life of the world. And these are considerations which will suit as well at a period of these discourses, when they are drawing nigh to their conclusion. For it were to lit- tle profit to have shown how the Scripture ought to have been all this, how it was fitted for being all this, unless it could be shown also that it had been ; unless THE FRUITFULNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 127 we could point to the world's history in evidence that it had done that, which we say it was adapted for doing. " The Wind see, the lepers are cleansed, the dead are raised ;" — it was to these mighty works that Christ appealed in answer to the question, " Art thou He that should come, or look we for another? " And this is the true answer to every misgiving question of a like kind. The real evidence for aught which comes claiming to be from God, is its power — the power which it is able to put forth for blessing and for heal- ing. If the Scriptures manifested no such power, all . other evidence for their divine origin, however con- i vincing we might think it ought to be, yet practically \ it would fail to convince. Men will not live on the report that aught is great or true, unless they so see it and so find it themselves. But if they do, no as- sertion on the part of others that it is small, will pre- vail to make them count light of it. For a moment the confident assertions of gainsayers may perplex, or even seriously injure, their faith: but presently it will resume its hold and its empire again. Thus it has been well and memorably said, that the ! great and standing evidence for Christianity is Chris- tendom; and it was with good reason, and out of a true feeling of this, that Origen and other early apo- logists of the Faith, albeit they had not such a full- formed Christendom as we have to appeal to, did yet, when the adversaries boasted of their Apollonius and other such shadowy personages, and sought to set them up as rivals and competitors with the Lord of glory, make answer by demanding, " What became of these 128 - LECTURE VII. men? what significance had they for the world's after development? what have they bequeathed to show that they and their appearance lay deep in the mind and counsel of God? what society did they found? where is there a fellowship of living men gathered in their name ? or where any mighty footmarks left upon the earth to witness that greater than mortals have trodden it? " And the same answer is good, when it is transferred to the books which at any time have made ungrounded claim to be divine records, and as such, to stand upon a level with the Canonical Scrip- tures; and which sometimes even in our day are brought forward in the hope of confounding the Ca- nonical in a common discredit with them. We in the ' same way make answer. Is there not a difference ? besides all other condemnation under which they lie, besides the absence of historic attestation, and the want of inward religious meaning and aim, are they not self-condemned, in their utter insignificance — in their barrenness — in the entire oblivion into which they have fallen — in the fact, in short, that nothing has corae of them? What men have they moulded? what stamp or impress have they left of themselves upon the world? Where is there a society, or even a man, that appeals to them or lives by them? Thus, let any one acquainted with the apocryphal gospels, compare them for an instant with the sacred : Four which we recognise and receive. It is not merely that there is an inward difference between these and those, which would be characterized not too strongly as a difference like that which finds place between THE FRUITFULNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 129 stately forest-trees and the low tangled brushwood which springs up under their shadow ; it is not merely that those spurious gospels are evermore revolting to the religious sense, abandoning earth without soaring to heaven ; robbing the person of Christ of its human features, without lending to it any truly divine; ever mistaking size for greatness, and the monstrous for the miraculous. It is not this only, but the contrast is at least as remarkable in this respect, that w^hile the Canonical Gospels have been so fruitful, from those other nothing has sprung; while the Canonical have been as germs unfolding themselves endlessly ; winged seeds endued with a vital energy, which, where they have lighted, have taken root downward and sprung upward; those other might be likened to the chaff borne about by the winds of chance, having no repro- ductive powers; owing their origin to obscure hereti- cal sects, never extricating themselves from those nar- row circles in which they first were born ; and, save only as literary curiosities, with the perishing of those sects themselves perishing for ever. They have re- mained as dry sticks, as the barren rods which refused to blossom, — and as such not to abide in the sanctuary. (Numb, xvii.) But the Canonical Gospels have wit- nessed for themselves, as did Aaron's rod, when it budded and clothed itself with leaves and blossoms and almonds. They too, blossoming and budding, have borne witness to themselves, and to their right to be laid up in the very Ark of the Testimony for ever. For it is not the authority and decision of the Church w^hich has made the Canonical Gospels potent, 130 LECTURE VII. and the apocryphal impotent, those fruitful and these sterile; rather that decision is the formal acknowledg- ment of a fact, which was a fact before; a submission to authority, to the authority of the Spirit witnessing to and discerning that Word which is the Lord's ; this, rather than any exercising of authority. That deci- sion was the spiritual instinct of the Church recog- nising and setting her seal to a fact which was a fact before — namely, that these were false and those true ; she distinguished thus the chaff from the corn, but it was not her decision which had any thing to do with making these to be chaff and those wheat. It is the task which 1 propose to myself to-day, to consider a few aspects under which the Scriptures have thus shown themselves strong ; have approved themselves quickeners of the spiritual and intellectual life of men; although here, in treating such a subject as this, one is tempted, as more than once has been my lot, to start back at the greatness of the theme, the vastness of knowledge of all kinds which to handle it worthily would require the fragmentary nature of aught which, even were the knowledge possessed, one could hope within the limits of a single discourse, to present. As the matter, however, may not be passed by, I will seek to present to you one or two reflec- tions, in the hope that they may be only as the first thoughts of a more fruitful series which your own minds will suggest. And, perhaps one of the first which suggests itself, is this, namely, how productive the Holy Scriptures have been, even in regions of inward life and activity, THE FRUITFULNESS OP SCRIPTURE. 131 where, at first sight, one would least have expected it, where we should have been tempted, for many rea- sons, to anticipate exactly opposite effects. How many things Christianity might, at first sight, have threatened to leave out, to take no note of, or indeed utterly to suppress, which, so far from really warring against, it has raised to higher perfection than ever in the old world they had attained. With what de- spair, for example, a lover of art, one who at Athens or at Rome fondly had dwelt among the beautiful creations of poet and of painter, w*ould have contem- plated the rise of the new religion, and the authority which its doctrines were acquiring over the hearts and spirits of men. What a death-knell must he have heard in this to all in which his soul so greatly de- lighted. He might have been ready, perhaps, to acknowledge that our human life under this new teach- ing, w^ould be more rigorously earnest, more severe, more pure: but all its grace and its beauty, all which it borrowed of these from the outward world, he would have concluded, had been laid under a ban, and must now vanish for ever. This was evidently, in great part, the cause of the unhappy Julian's mis- like of the rising faith — of his alienation from it, as of that of many other heathens, like-minded with him. It is true, their hostility lay much deeper than this; that it grew out of a far bitterer root. But this was evidently one of their griefs against the doctrine of the Nazarene. They could not consent to lose the grace and beauty of the Hellenistic worship: all art seemed inextricably linked and bound up with the 132 LECTURE VII. Willie lilt /longer, th (lion at t] iamentati( forms of the old religion, and, if that perished, inevi- tably doomed to perish with it: and so they resisted while they could; and when they could resist no they sat down and made passionate lamenta- the grave of the old world, which all their imentations could not call back to life; instead of rejoicing at the birth and by the cradle of the new, w^ith which indeed all the hopes of the future were bound up. And the Christian himself of those earliest ages might almost have consented to take the same view — even as we do find a Tertullian, and others of his temper, actually doing: nor in this was he at all to be wondered at, least of all did he deserve the sneers with which the infidel historian of the later empire has, on this account, visited him. His exaggerations were only those into which a man of strong moral earnestness might most naturally have fallen. So had all skill and device of poet and of painter engaged then in the service of the flesh, so did they do ex- clusive homage to the old idolatries, so deeply pol- luted, for the most part, were they, so far sunken with a sunken moral world, that the Christian neo- phyte, when he renounced, in his baptismal vow, all pomps of the devil, might easily have deemed that these were certainly included; and that to forego them wholly and for ever, was his one duty, his only safety. How little, at any rate, could one or the other, could friend or foe of the nascent faith, have forecast that out of it, — that, nourished by the Christian books, THE FRUITFULNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 133 by the great thoughts which Christ set stirring in humanity, and of which these books kept a lasting record, there should unfold itself a poetry infinitely greater, an art infinitely higher, than any which the \ old world had seen ; — that this faith, which looked so / rigid, so austere, even so forbidding, should clothe itself in forms of grace and loveliness, such as men had never dreamt of before? that poetry should not be henceforward the play of the spirit, but its holiest earnest; and those skilless Christian hymns, those hymns "to Christ as to God," of which Pliny speaks, so rude probably in regard of form, should yet be the preludes of strains higher than the world had listened to yet. Or, who would have supposed that those art- less paintings of the catacombs had the prophecy in them of more wondrous compositions than men's eyes had ever seen — or that a day should arrive when, above many a dark vault and narrow crypt, where now the Christian worshippers gathered in secret, should arise domes and cathedrals, embodying loftier ideas, because ideas relating to the eternal and the infinite, than all those Grecian temples, which now stood so fair and so strong, but which yet aimed not to lift men's minds from the earth which they adorned. How little would the one or other, would Christian or heathen have presaged such a future as this — that art was not to perish, but only to be purified and re- deemed from the service of the flesh, and from what- ever was clinging to and hindering it from realizing its true glory,— and that this book, which does not talk about such matters, which does not make beauty, 12 ^ 134 LECTURE VII. but holiness, its end and aim— should yet be the truest nourisher of all out of which any genuine art ever has proceeded; the truest fosterer of beauty, in that it is the nourisher of the affections, the sustainer of the relations between God and noen; which affections and which relations are indeed the only root out of which any poetry or art worthy of the name, ever have sprung. For these affections being laid waste, those relations being broken, art is first stricken with bar- renness, and then, in a little while, withers and pines and dies — as that ancient art, which had been so fertile while faith survived, was, when the church was born, already withering and dying under the influence of the skepticism, the profligacy, the decay of family and national life, the extinction of religious faith, which so eminently marked the time: only having a name to live, resting merely on the traditions of an earlier age, and on the eve of utter dissolution. Such was its condition when Christ came, and cast in his Word, as that which should make all things new, into the midst of an old and decrepit and worn-out world. , Yet here it may be as well to observe, that when I use this language, it is not as assuming that the Bible, merely as a book apart, had done, or could have done, this, or aught else whereof presently there may be occasion to speak— not as though the book had been cast into the world and had leavened it, itself the sole and all-sufficient gift which Christ had bequeathed unto men. Rather, the Spirit, the Word, and the church are the three mighty factors which THE FRUITFULNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 135 have wrought together for the great and glorious issues of a Christendom such as that in the midst of which we now stand. The church, taught and enhght- ened by the Spirit, unfolds and lays out the Word, and only as it is informed and quickened by that blessed Spirit of God, can lay it out for the healing of' the nations. We cannot think of this book by itself doing the work, any more than we can think of the church doing it without this book, or of the two doing it together without the ever-present breath of an Almighty Spirit. But while this work is thus the result of a three- fold energy; while we can never, so long as we think correctly, separate one of its factors, save for distinc- tion's sake, from the others; while therefpre, speaking of the Scripture and what it has wrought, we must ever conceive of it as in the possession of a living body of interpreters, the company of the faithful, and of them as enlightened by the Holy Spirit to use it aright; yet not the less may I ask you to contemplate the mighty work of the world's regeneration in those features upon which the influences of a Scripture are mainly traceable, to note the part which this scripture has borne in bringing about that new creation, where- in the old things of the world have passed away, and all things have become new. For, without running into the tempting error of painting the old world black, for the purpose of bring- ing out, as by a dark back-ground, the brightness ard glory of the new ; without denying to that old world what it had of noble and true, or calling, as some have 136 LECTURE VII. done, its virtues merely showy and splendid sins ; yet it is not easy to estimate how much was to be done, how much to be undone, ere a Christendom, even such as we behold it now, could emerge out of that world which alone yielded the materials out of which the new creation should be composed; The Word of the Cross had need, as a mighty leaven, to penetrate through every interstice of society, leavening language, and laws, and literature, and institutions, and manners. For it was not merely that at that change the world changed its religion, but in that change was implied the transformation, little by little, of every thing be- sides; every thing else had need to reconstruct itself afresh. And in this Word there resided a power equal to this need. The pattern of Christ, kept in the record of Scripture, ever clear in all its distinctness of outline before men's eyes, his work thus ever repeat- ing itself for them over again, has given, as we our- selves see and fee], a new, inasmuch as it is an infi- nitely higher, standard of ideal goodness to the world — has cast down usurping pretenders to the name of virtues from their seats, has lifted up despised graces in their room. That Word has every where given to lis graces for virtues, and martyrs for heroes; it has so reversed men's estimate of greatness, that a wreath of thorns is felt to be a far w'orthier ornament for a brow than a diadem of jew^els — a Christ upon his cross to be a spectacle more glorious far than a Caesar on his throne. From that Word, too, w^e have derived such a sense of the duties of relation, of the debt of love which THE FRUITFULNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 137 every man owes to every other, as was altogether strange to the heathen world. For when, in that well- known story, the poet awoke shouts of a tumultuous* applause by declaring nothing human alien from him- self who was a man, deep as was the feeling in men's hearts which was here appealed to, yet in those very shouts of applause, it was declared to be as new as it was deep. In those was the joyful recognition of a truth which lay deep in every man's bosom, but which had not taken form or shape or found utterance until then. Yet, with all our practical shortcomings in love to our brethren, how different is the condition marked by this little incident from ours, in which this noble utterance of the Roman poet is felt to be so true as hardly to escape from being a truism; and the love which men owe to one another on the score of their common stock, is so taken for granted, and the idea of it has so penetrated even into our common speech, that kind and kinned^ human and humane, are, with us, but different pronunciations of the same words. And, at least as wonderful, at least as fruitful, is the incoming of the Word of Christ, not into the midst of an old and corrupt civilization, but when it kindles for the first time a savage people into life. How does it seem to brood with a creative warmth and energy over all the rudiments of a higher life, which lay in that people's bosom, and yet but for this never could have come to the birth, rather were in danger of utterly dying out. How does it arrest at once that centrifugal progress of sin, which is ever drawing the men or the nations that have wandered 12* 138 LECTURE VII. out of the sphere of the divine attraction, farther and farther from God, the true centre of their being. Tribes which were in danger of letting go the last remnant of their spiritual heritage, nay, of utterly and literally perishing from the face of the earth, victims of their own vices, and of that uttermost degradation which had caused them at length to let go even those lowest arts by which animal existence is sustained, even these, that Word finds, even in these nurses up the dying embers of life; till the savage re-awakens to the consciousness of a man, and the horde begins, however feebly at first, to knit itself into the promise of a nation. There may be spectacles which attract us more, there may be tidings to which we listen with a keener interest, but surely there can be no tidings worthier to be listened to, no spectacle upon which angels look down with a livelier sympathy, than those which such a land and time will often present; when, it may be, '^ some gray-beard chief, stained in times past with a thousand crimes, but now having washed away them all in the waters of baptism, hangs upon the words of life, makes himself, perhaps, the humble and willing scholar of some little child, that he may learn to read with his own eyes of that Saviour who has pardoned even him. And ever, as he reads of " the gentleness of Christ," of his prayers for his crucifiers, of Him who, being first, made himself the last, who, being Lord of all, became servant of all, there dawns upon him more and more the glory of meekness, of over- coming evil with good,of serving others in love, instead THE FRUITFULNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 139 " of being himself served in fear: and he understands that this only is truly to live, and all which- he has lived contrary to this, has been not life, but a hideous denial of life. Such sights other days have seen ; such are to be seen in our own: for, blessed be God, it is not our fathers only who have told us of such things done in their times of old, but our own report the same. We, too, " see our tokens." In New Zealand, in the far islands of the Pacific, we have proof that this Word is yet mighty, through God, for casting down the strong holds of Satan and of sin. Nor needs it to look thus far abroad to be reminded of w^hat this Word has done. The Scripture itself is full of remembrancers of its own power. He who, tolerably acquainted with the past history of the Church, with the struggles which accompanied the unfolding, fixing, and vindicating of her dogma, — he who, furnished with this knowledge, passes over Scrip- ture, may in some moods of his mind pass over it as over a succession of battle fields. He may be likened to a traveller journeying through some land, which, by the importance of its position or the greatness of its attractions, has drawn contending hosts to its soil, and been a battle ground for innumerable generations. Besides in all those pages which speak more directly to himself, they are eloquent to him walh a thousand stirring recollections. For at every step which he advances, he recognises that which has been the mo- tive of some mighty and long-drawn conflict, in which* the keenest and brightest intellects, thekingliest spirits, the Bernards and the Abelards of their day, were en- 140 * LECTURE VII. gaged. Here, there, and every where, be it that he wanders among the extinguished volcanoes of contro- versies which have now burned themselves out, or among those which are flaming still, he meets with that, to maintain their conviction about which, men have been content to spend their lives, to make ship- wreck of their worldly hopes, have dwelt in deserts, in caves, and in dungeons, yea, gladly have encountered all from which nature most, and most naturally shrinks. And whatever there may have been of earthly and of carnal mingling in the motives of the combatants, however in some of them he can recognise only the champions of error, yet in these mighty and passionate strivings, in these conflicts which generation has be- queathed to generation, he reads the confession which all past ages have borne, that this Word was worth contending for, — being felt by those worthiest to judge, dearer than life itself, and such that things else were cheap by comparison with it. Strange, too, that even where there have not been these stirring excitements, where there has been no trumpet-peal sounding in men's ears, and summoning them to do battle for some perilled truth, that even here, too, multitudes of men should have been well- pleased to employ their lives in learning themselves better to understand, in seeking to make others un- derstand better, this one Book — should have counted those lives worthily spent, and all other wisdom and knowledge than only to have found their true meaning and destination, when doing service as of handmaids unto it. For vast as is the apparatus of helps of al THE FRUITFULNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 141 kinds which have accumulated round such other books as are signal monuments of human intellect and power; many as we find well satisfied to be nothing as inde- pendent labourers in the fields of knowledge, content to be only ministrant to the better understanding of this author or that book ; yet are these taken alto- gether few and insignificant beside those that have thus felt in regard of the one Book with which we have to do. Surely the spectacle of any great library, and of the volumes there which stand in immediate relation to this one, with the certainty, that so long as the world stands, they will go on accumulating and multiplying, must to a thoughtful mind suggest many meditations of what the meaning and significance of that one must be, and the manner in which it must set in motion the minds of men. Nor will he, in esti- mating this, fail to call to mind that those which stand in direct relation to that Volume, which bear upon the front that they are thus connected with it, multitu- dinous past all count as they seem, are yet but a small fraction of those which owe to this one all which is most characteristic in them — their impulse, their mo- tive, their form, their spirit; that all modern European literature is there as in its germ ; that even the works which seem to stand remotest from it, least to own a fealty to it, do yet pay to it the unconscious, it may be the unwilling homage of being wholly different from what they would have been, — had they indeed at all existed, — without it. Such, brethren, are a few aspects under which I 142 LECTURE VII. would ask you to consider how the Holy Scriptures have justified themselves by the effects which they have brought about, by the mighty deeds which they have done; showing themselves seeds of life, leaven of power in the world. And I should be untrue to my position here, did I conclude without asking you to make personal application of the things which you have heard to yourselves. This Word which has thus been fruitful every where, which has supplied what was lacking, and healed what was sick, and revived what was ready to die, will it be less effectual in us, if only "we receive it aright? This, which has made so much else, like the dry rod of Aaron, to blossom and to bud, will it not be as potent in our hearts, till they too are clothed with foliage and fruits and flowers which are not naturally their own? Shall we say, *'I am a dry tree," when we might be as trees planted by rivers of water, which should not fear the drought of the desert, nor see when the heat cometh? All things have lived j;^ whithersoever these waters which issue from the sanc- tuary have come. Shall not our hearts live also, until we too have like reason with the Psalmist for prizing these testimonies of God, even because with them He has quickened us? * "J . , LECTURE VIII. THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. REVELATION VI. 2. Conquering and to conquer. An earlier lecture in this present course was dedi- cated to the manner in which Holy Scripture had, lit- tle by little, laid bare its treasures to the Church ; and in my very latest I had occasion to speak of the vic- tories which the Truth had won and was winning still — the way in which the word of the Scripture was vindicating itself to be all that it claimed to be, show- ing itself mighty, through God, for doing its appointed work; how, like the personal Word, it had ridden .forth, and was riding yet, a victorious conqueror over the earth. It remains to consider, and with this con- sideration we shall fitly conclude our subject, in what way it is likely to approve itself a conqueror to the end; what preparations we can trace in it for meet- ing the future evils of the world, the future needs of the Church ; how far we may suppose that this Book, which has revealed so much, may yet have much more to reveal. And this is our confidence, that as the Scripture has sufficed for the past, so also it will suffice for the time to come ; that it has resources adequate to meet 144 LECTURE Till. all demands which may be made on it ; that it has in reserve whatsoever any new conditions of the world, — any new shapes of evil, any new, if they be righ- teous, cravings of the spirits of men, — may require. We believe that as the Scripture is an armory in which the Church has found weapons for all past conflicts, so will it find them there for all which are yet to come — conflicts, which, it may be, we as little forecast or dream of now, as we do of the weapons which are ready wrought in this armory for bringing them to a glorious termination ; and the weapons, too, themselves being oftentimes such, that they who were by God employed to forge them, while they knew that they would serve present needs, yet hardly knew, perhaps knew not at all, what remote purposes they should also serve, to what great ulterior purposes they should one day be turned. Yet thus, no doubt, it shall be: for just as in works of man's mind, talent knows all which it means, but genius, which is nearer akin to inspiration, means much more than it consciously knows; even so wise men and prophets and evan- gelists, who were used for the uttering of this Word, knowing much of that which they spake and recorded, yet meant still more than they knew — the Holy Ghost guiding and shaping their utterances, and causing them oftentimes to declare deeper things, and things of wider reach and of more manifold utility, than even they themselves, enlarged and enlightened by that Spirit as they were, were conscious of the while. That which they spake being central Truth, presented a front, not merely to the lies of their day, THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 145 not merely to the falsehood which they distinctly had in their mind to encounter, but presents a front to every later lie as well; and so we. have entire confi- dence that the Truth being ever, in the language of Bacon, "a hill not to be commanded," the same those Scriptures, which are Scriptures of very truth, shall show themselves — a hill which shall never be commanded, but which rather shall itself command all other heights and eminences of the spiritual and in- tellectual world. However high these tow^er, this Word will always have heights which tower above them all; judging all things, it will be judged of none; itself the measure of all, no other thing will bring a measure unto it. We can indeed guess but uncertainly what may be the future unrolling of the world's history — what anti- christian forms of society may rise up for the moment seeming to keep their promise, consecrating the flesh, breaking down the walls of separation between the holy and profane, making all profane while they pre- tend to make all holy — what master-works of Satan, his latest and crowning forms of opposition to the Truth. Or, again, we can only uncertainly apprehend what heresies may appear, subtler and more attractive even than any which the world has yet beheld — coming with greater semblance of holiness, and well-nigh causing even the elect to fail. But our reliance in this Word and the revelation of the Name of God which is there, is this, that out of it the Church will be able to refute those heresies — by the help of its warnings and intimations to detect and to defy the at- 13 146 LECTURE yiii. tractions of Antichrist, even when he comes with all the lying wonders, and in all the false glory, of his kingdom. For while it is hard for us to say what may be the exact forms of those future evils, while we cannot dis- cern accurately beforehand the lineaments and propor- tions of these latest monstrous shapes which shall as- cend from the pit, — as neither would this foreknow- ledge profit us much ; — yet the hints which in God's prophetic word we have, the course of the mystery of iniquity as it is already working, seem alike to point to this, that as there has been an aping of the monar- chy of the Father, in the absolute despotisms of the world, an aping of the economy of the Son, as though he already sat visibly on his throne, in its spiritual des- potisms, and eminently in that of Rome ; so there re- mains yet for the world, as the crowning delusion, a lying imitation of the kingdom and dispensation of the Spirit — such as in the lawless Communist sects of the middle ages, in the Familists of a later day, in the St. Simonians of our own, has attempted to come to the birth, though in each case the world was not ripe for it yet, and the thing was withdrawn for a time. Yet doubtless only for a time; to reappear in an after hour — full of false freedom, full of the promise of bring- ing all things into one; making war on the family, as something which separates between man and man, breaking down and obliterating all distinctions, the dis- tinctions between nation and nation, between the man and the woman, be v een the flesh and the Spirit, be- tween the Church and the world. So seems it ; and * • THE FUTURE t)EVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 147 when we translate St. Paul's words, with which he characterizes the final Antichrist, as though he had simply called him " that wicked one,"* we lose a con- firmation of this view which his words more accurately rendered would have given us. He is not simply the wicked one, but 6 avofiog the lawless one ; and the mys- tery is not merely a mystery of iniquity but of lawless- ness (^avofiia?.) Law, in all its manifestations, is that which he shall rage against, making hideous misappli- cation of that great truth, that where the Spirit is, there is liberty. Then, when this shall have come to pass, then at length the great anti-trinity of hell, the dragon, the beast, and the false prophet, will have been fully re- vealed in all deceivableness of unrighteousness ; — and yet not so mighty to deceive, but that the Church of the redeemed, armed and forewarned by this Word of God, shall see in all this, only what it looked to see, only what it had been taught to expect ; and in the might of the counter-truth, in the confession of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, shall be saved even in its weakest and simplest member, from that strong delusion, which shall be too much for every one besides. - And in thus speaking of Holy Scripture, I am but expressing a confidence which those who have searched the deepest into it have oftentimes expressed. Thus, to take but one name and another out of the noble catalogue of English worthies, Robert Boyle expresses I . * 2 Thess. ii. 8. 148 LECTURE VIII. himself thus: "I consider here that as the Bible was not written for any one particular time or people, but for the whole church militant diffused through all na- tions and ages, so that there are many passages very useful, which will not be found so these many ages ; being possibly reserved by the prophetic Spirit that indited them, (and whose omniscience comprises and unites in one prospect all times and all events,) to quell some future foreseen heresy, which will not, per- haps, be born till we be dead, or resolve some yet un- formed doubts, or confound some error that hath not yet a name." And Bishop Butler uses language well nigh the same: " Nor is it," he says, "at all incredible that a Book which has been so long in the possession of mankind should yet contain many truths as yet un- discovered. For all the same phenomena and the same faculties of investigation from which such great dis- coveries in natural knowledge have been made in the present and last age, were equally in the possession of mankind several thousand years before. And possibly it might be intended that events as they came to pass should open and ascertain the meaning of several parts of Scripture." But, besides these mighty mischiefs which may hereafter arise, of which we can at most discern now only the dim beginnings, the obscure foreshadowings, there are also others which have already taken form and shape — some of them such as have stood strong and in the main unshaken for thousands of years; w^hich yet we believe, which indeed yet we know, shall one day be overthrown by the greater power and pre- THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 149 valence of the Truth. For we are sure that the re- ligion of Christ is as the rod of Moses, which did in the end swallow up every rod of the magicians — that the Church shall possess the earth — that " the field" in which the Son of Man sows his seed is not this land or that land, but "the world." And anticipating, or to speak more truly, being sure of this, it may not be unbecoming to see if we can at all discern in Scripture the preparations which have been there made, and the might which is there slumbering, against each of those closer conflicts, which the Church, by its help, must one day wage with those forms of untruth and error. Such inquiry will, at any rate, not be foreign to our subject ; for that subject being the fitness of Holy Scrip- ture for unfolding the spiritual life of men, a great part of that fitness must lie in its capacity to meet and over- come each deadlier form of superstition and error, which, under one name or another, cramps and con- fines, or wholly hinders, the true development of the spirits of men. jl How profitable were it, in regard of the more ef- fectual conducting of Christian missions, to be more conscious than generally we seek to be, of what is our peculiar strength, and what the peculiar weakness of each of those systems of error, which we seek, in love to the souls which are made prisoners by it, to over- throw ; — so that we should not blindly run a tilt against it, with no other preparation save a confidence in the goodness of our cause, but wisdom and insight assail it there, where there were best hope of assailing with success. For every one of these, while their strength 13* loO LECTURE VIII. is in that fragment of Truth, which, however maimed and marred, with whatever contradictions and under whatever disguises, they hold, have also eminently their weak side, that on which they signally deny some great Truth which the spirit of man craves, w-hich the Scriptures of God affirm — a side, therefore, on which, if assailed, they must sooner or later perish, or rather will not always continue at strife with their own blessedness. To know this, and to know, also, what engines out of the divine armory ought to be especially advanced against each of these strong-holds of confusion, to know not merely that w^e are strong and they weak, but where and why strong in regard of each, and where and why they are weak ; this is surely a needful, as it is a much-neglected, discipline ; this is a duty not indolently to be foregone by a Church like our own, a Church which God's provi- dence and leading has so clearly marked out to do the w^ork of an Evangelist on vast continents and in far islands of the sea. To give such a training as this, was no doubt the meaning and purpose of the catechetical schools of Alexandria, so famous through all Christian antiquity ; they were instituted to afford the highest culture to the evangelist, to give him the fullest understanding of what he was to oppose, and how he was to do it. And such an insight as this, could we have it clear, into Scripture and its adaptation for overcoming each shape of falsehood, how would it make us workmen that did not need to be ashamed. How would it enable us at once, and without beating the air, to ad- THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 151 dress ourselves to the points really at issue between us on one side, and Jews, Mohammedans, and infidels, on the other. For the Truth which is still the same, which might not give up one jot or tittle of itself, though it had with this the certainty of winning a world, may yet of infinite love continually change its voice, and present itself ever differently, according to the different necessities of those whom it would fain make its own. And on the other hand, we address ourselves but In a slight and inefficient manner to our work, when, without discrimination, without acquaintance with those systems which hold souls in bondage, which hinder them from coming to the light of life, we have but one method with them all — one language in which to describe them all — one common charge of belonging to the devil on which to arraign them; instead of re- cognising, as w^e ought, that each province of the dark kingdom of error is different from every other; instead of seeing that it is not a lie which can ever make any thing strong — that it is not certainly their lie which has ever made them strong, and enabled them to stand their ground so long, and some of them, saddest of all ! to win ground for awhile from Chris- tendom itself; but the truth which that lie perverts and denies, Handling them in that other way, we turn but to little advantage that manifold Word of wisdom with which God has enriched his Church, and which, containing as it does its own special antidote for every error, would allow, and indeed demands, a much more special dealing with each, and one which 152 LECTURE VIII. would get much more nearly to the heart of the matter. Thus, the Mohammedan is strong in that h6 affirms God to be distinct from the creature, so that he may ^not without blasphemy be confused with it — a jealous God, who will not give his glory to another. In the \ might of this faith, in the conviction that God had raised him up to assert this truth in the face of all who were forgetting it, he overran half a world. But he is weak, and the moon of Islam, as it has waxed, so will it wane before the Sun of RighteousnewSs, inas- much as he makes the gulf which divides God and man to be a gulf which can never be bridged over, an impassable chasm, fixed for eternity; he is weak, be- cause he knows not, and will not know, of one, the /Son of Mary, the Son of God, in whom the human and divine were not confounded, nor lost one in the \ other, but united. He does not satisfy the longings I of the human race, which was made for this union as J its highest end and crowning perfection, which will be '\ satisfied with nothing short of this; and therefore we are sure th at the day will come, however little we may as yet discern its signs, when the fiery sword of Mo- hammed will grow pale before the ever-brightening lustre of the cross of the Son of Man ; when the Scrip- tures will show themselves over all the dark places of the earth mightier than the Koran. We are sure'of this, because those Scriptures maintain all which is there of truth — are as jealous and more jealous of the incommunicable name of God, — say, and say far more clearly, Our God is one God ; but in addition to this, THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 153 affirm that which is there denied, but which the spirit of man will never rest till it has found and known, a Son of God, and him also the Son of Man. The Indian religions, — they, too, are not without their elements of an obscured truth — and in this mainly, that they declare it to be most worthy of God to reveal Himself as man — that this is the only true revelation of Him, that an incarnation is the fittest /outcoming of the glory of God. But, not to urge that what they have to tell of such matters are only dreams of men, and not facts of God — besides this, they are comparatively worthless, in that they do not concentrate and gather up this revelation of God in one incarnation, but lose and scatter it through unnum- bered. For while one incarnation is precious, a thou- / sand are worth nothing; they become mere transient I points of contact between God and man, momentary Vdocetic apparitions of the divine under human forms. And the books which are the records of these, and the religion which rests on those books, must give way before that Book, which can say in holiest, yet sober- est earnest, " The Word was made flesh " — and which knows not merely of an Incarnation, but of a Resur- rection and an Ascension, in which the Son of God /made manifest that he had wedded the humanity for 'ever, that he had not come merely into transient rela- tion with it, but had made it his own for eternity; sitting down in it on the right hand of the Majesty on high. And that other later birth of Hindooism, that other vast system of further Asia, which we are continually 154 LECTURE VIII. perplexed whether to call it a pantheism, or a gigantic atheism, that which in the end loses every thing in God, and makes absorption in Him the ultimate end of being, that, too, begins with fairer promises. For it starts with that which is so deeply true,^that in God we live and move and have our being — that as man came from God, so he must return to God — that there is but one Spirit which moves through all things. But then, refusing to know aught but the Spirit, re- fusing to know the Father and the Son from whom that Spirit proceeds, so neither can it save its votaries ,from that gulf wherein all things, and man the first, are annihilated in an abysmal deep, which is not the less dreadful, because it calls itself God; that gulf which is ever yawning for every nobler and deeper speculator in theology, who has not the mystery of the ever-blessed Trinity, three Persons and one God, for his safeguard and his stay, — an ever-abiding wit-, ness to him for the distinctness of personal being. And we are sure that neither will this system stand before that Word which affirms, and only with far higher clearness, that " God is a Spirit;" but affirms also, that " there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost ;" without which that other truth is only as a noble river pre-, sently to lose itself among the sands. . These, brethren, are the great rival religions fo Christianity, which yet contend with it for the pos- session of the world — each of them, as you see, pre- senting points of contact for the absolute Truth ; and at the same time all presenting points of weakness — THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 155 sides upon which they durably crave to be fulfilled by this Truth, even while they are striving the most fiercely against it ; the Truth in Holy Scripture being at once the antagonist and the complement of them all. Nor may I not observe that any other dealing with them than this, which, even while it wars against them, welcomes and honours the wreck and fragment of Truth which they still may retain — any ruder and less discriminating assault on that which men have hitherto believed, and which, however mixed up with falsehood and fraud, has yet been all whereby they have holden on to a higher world, — any such attack, even when it seems most successful, may be full of the utmost peril for them whom we thus coarsely seek to benefit, and with these unskilful hands to deliver. For, indeed, there is no office more delicate, no task need- ing greater w^isdom and patience and love, than to set men frpe from their superstitions, and yet, with this, "^NHot to lay waste in their hearts the very soil in which the Truth should strike its roots — to disentangle the tree from the ivy which was strangling it, without, in the process and together with the strangling ivy, de- stroying also the very life of the tree itself, which we designed to save. Where this process of men's extri- cation from error has been rudely or unwisely carried out, either by their own fault or that of others, where they have been urged to rise up in scorn, and to trample upon their past selves, and all that in time past they have held in honour, how mournful fre- \quently the final issue ! Thus, how unable do we often prove to retain the converts from Romanism which we 156 LECTURE VIII. have won. They do not return to that which they have left, but they pass on, they pass through the Truth into error on the other side. They pass from / darkness into the sunlight, and that sunlight scarcely / gilds and brightens them for an instant, ere they glide ; into another and thicker darkness again; scarcely are they in the secure haven a moment, ere they put forth, as though incapable of enjoying its repose, among the shoals and eddies once more. And so, too, the Hindoo children in our Indian schools, when we have gathered them there, and shown them in the hght of modern philosophy, the utter ab- surdity and incoherence of their sacred books, and provoked them to throw uttermost scorn on these, w^e yet may not have brought them even into the vesti- bule of the Faith, rather may have set them at a greater distance than ever; for to have taught them to pour contempt on all with which hitherto they have linked feelings of sacredness and awe, is but a ques- tionable preparation for making them humble and re- verent scholars of Christ. Wiser surely was St. Paul's method, who ever sought a ground common to him- \ self and him whom he w^ould persuade, though it were but a handbreadth, upon which to take his stand — who taught men reverently to handle their past selves and their past beliefs, — who to the Athenians said, " Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship. Him declare / I unto you," and spake of the Cretan poet as " a pro- phet of their own ; " who re-adopted into the family of the Truth its lost and wandering children, however they might have forgotten their true descent, in what- fHE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. i'j7 ever far land, under whatever unlikely disguises, he found them. Thus, and because he thus dealt, he be- came, in the language of a Greek father, which con- tains scarcely an exaggeration, the w^^ayuyos tr^^ oixovfiv£7j5, he who led up the world as a bride unto Christy But I must draw my subject to an end, and with a few general remarks on the aim and scope of what here I have been permitted to deliver, will conclude. My purpose has been, as I trust even they may have gathered who have heard but a part, and that the latest, of these discourses, to bring out an inner wit- ness for Scripture from that which, to an earnest and devout examination, it show^s itself as fitted for doing — from that ,which it has already done — from that which we may believe it will accomplish yet. And this subject I have chosen out of those which were before me, because truly there is great strength and comfort and assurance for us in these evidences for the things that we have believed, which are drawn, not from without, but from within — from their inner glory, their manifest fitness. Thus, for example, if gainsayers at any time should adduce apparent disagreements be- tween one Gospel or one book of history and another, as between Matthew and Luke, Chronicles and Kings, and seek to trouble and perplex us with these, surely the true way to meet them w^ere to bring first the whole question into a higher court. Let vs put rather the question to be resolved as this, In what traceable connexion do these books, each by itself, 14 158 ■ # LECTURE VIII. '^ each in relation to the -whole of the other books, stand to the great purpose of God with humanity? Can they be shown evidfntly to form integral parts of a mightier whole? Do they reveal the Name of God? Do they yield their nourishment for the divine life of man? Have they yielded such for our own? And then — not indeed to refuse entering into those lower and merely critical questions of detail; but if it has been found that the book satisfies higher needs, fulfils loftier requirements — claiming for it on the score of this, the entire, the trustful confidence of faith, that it will justify itself in all lesser matters, that it will come out as clear and clean in them, as in its greater purpose and aim. Here too that word will hold good, " He that believeth vshall not make haste." He will be content to wait. For what weakness does it manifest, what inner ijaistrust of the things which we have believed, how feebly must we hold them, how little can they have blest us, when we raise a cry of fear at any new and startling results to which science or criticism may have, or may seem to have, arrived. These, too, will presently be shown what they are; if true, they will fall into their place, and that place a place of subjection to revealed Truth: if false, however noisy now, however threatening to carry the whole world before them, will vanish away in a little while. But to dread any thing, to wish that any thing which has been patiently sought or honestly won, should be ignored or kept back, betrays an ex- treme weakness; Christ has not laid his hand on us with power, or we should not be so easily persuaded THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 159 to believe his cause tottering, or his Truth endan- gered, And, indeed, as regards aught which may be brought forward with purposes hostile to the Faith, may not the past well give us confidence for the fu- ture? One and another adversary has risen up; for what has not the world beheld in this kind? Essays on the Miracles, Ages of Reason, Lives of Jesus, Theories of Creation. And then, in the first deceit- ful flush of a momentary success, oftentimes the cry has gone forth, It is finished ; and the fortress of the t Faith is held to be so fatally breached, as hencefor- ward to be untenable, and its defenders to have no- thing more to do than to lay down their arms, and surrender at discretion. And already those that dwell upon the earth begin to make merry over the slain witnesses ; and already the new Diocletians rear their trophies and stamp their medals, the memorials of an extinguished Faith — they themselves being about to perish for ever, and that Faith to go forward to new victories. For anon the floods retreat; and temple and tower of God, round whose bases those waters raged and foamed and fretted for an instant, stand calmly and strongly as ever they did before. We, too, some of us have heard, and probably we shall hear again, such premature hymns of an imaginary triumph. And w^hen such are confidently raised, the ^unstable are perple ed, and the waverers fall off", and see is of doubt, to be reaped in a harvest of weak- ness, are sown in many minds. But let us, brethren, have a sanctuary to retreat to, till each such tyranny 160 LECTURE VIIT. is overpast, as overpass it surely and shortly will. Let us have that immediate syllogism of the heart, against which no argument is good. Let us be able to say. These words, we have found them words of healing, words of eternal life. This is our sole se- curity — to have tasted the good Word, to have known the powers of the world to come. And what if Theology may not be able, on the instant, to solve every difficulty, yet Faith will not therefore abandon one jot or tittle of that which she holds, for she has it on another and a surer tenure, she holds it directly from her God. \ THE END OF THE LECTURES FOR 1845. CHRIST THE DESIRE OF ALL NATIONS, OR, THE UNCONSCIOUS PROPHECIES OF HEATHENDOM: BEING THE HULSEAN LECTUEES FOR THE YEAR M.DCCC.XLVI. 14^ CHRIST THE DESIRE OF ALL NATIONS, OR THE UNCON- SCIOUS PROPHECIES OF HEATHENDOM. ^ LECTURE I. INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. HAGGAI II. 7. The Desire of all nations shall come. Although the Founder of these Lectures, which it is permitted me a second time to deHver in this place, did by no means offer a narrow range of subjects, from which the preacher should make his choice, but on the contrary, so expressed himself, that it would be quite possible to adhere to the letter of his injunctions, and still, at the same time, altogether to quit the region of Christian apology ; yet I cannot but believe that in so doing I should be forsaking the spirit of these in- junctions, and hardly fulfilling the intentions with which these Lectures were founded by him. Those who have gone before me in this honourable office, arguing, probably, from the subjects which he has placed in the foremost rank; from the purpose which kindred foundations, by him established among us, were evidently meant to serve; from the especial im- 164 LECTURE I. portance attached by good men in the age wherein he lived, to such defences of our holy faith, have gene- rally concluded that they should best be fulfilling his intention, to which they felt a pious reverence was due, if they undertook the maintenance of some por- tion of the truth, which had been especially assailed or gainsayed. Nor do I purpose, on the present oc- casion, to depart from the practice which the example of my predecessors has sanctioned; having rather chosen for my argument a subject recommending itself to me, first, by a certain suitableness, as I trust will appear, to our present needs, and to controversies of our day, such as are approaching, if we were not actually in the midst of them as yet ; and secondly, by an evident bearing which it has upon one of the two great branches of study cultivated among us in this University. Christ the Desire of all JYaiions, or, The Unconscious Prophecies of Heathendom — such appears to me the title which will best gather up and present at a single glance to you the subject, which it will be my aim in the following discourses, if God will, under successive aspects to unfold. Leaving aside, as not belonging to my argument? what there was of positive divinely constituted prepa- ration for the coming of Christ in the Jewish economy, I shall make it my task to trace what in my narrow limits I may, of the imphcit expectations which there were in the heathen world — to contemplate, at least under a few leading aspects, the yearnings of the nations for a redeemer, and for all which the true Redeemer only could give, — for the great facts of his INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 165 life, for the great truths of his teaching. Nor may this be all : for this, however interesting in itself, would yet scarcely come under the title of Christian apology ; of which the idea is, that it is not merely the truth, but the truth asserting itself in the face of error. It will therefore be my endeavour further to rescue these dim prophetic anticipations of the hea- then world from the abuse which has sometimes been made of them, to show that these dreams of the world, so far from helping to persuade us that all which we hold is a dream likewise, are rather exactly that which ought to have preceded the world's awaking: that these parhehons do not proclaim every thing else to be an optical illusion, but announce, and witness for, a sun that is travelling into sight ; that these false ancilia of man's forging, tell of a true which has in- deed come down from heaven. I would fain show that there ought to have been these ; the transcend- ing worth and dignity of the Christian revelation not being diminished by their existence, but rather en- hanced ; for its glory lies, not in its having relation to nothing which went before itself, but rather in its having relation to every thing, in its being the middle point to which all lines, some consciously, more un- consciously, were tending, and in which all centred at the last. And this it is worth our while to show : for we do not here, as the charge has sometimes been made against us, first set up the opponent, — whom we after- wards easily overthrow, for he was but the phantom of our own brain. On the contrary, it has been at 166 LECTURE I. tlivers llraes from the very first, and is in our own day, a part, and a favourite part, of their tactics who would resist the Faith, to endeavour to rob it of its significance as the great epoch in the world's history, by the production of anterior parallels to it. These may be parallels to its doctrines and ethical precepts ; and they are brought forw^ard with the pur- pose of showing that it is therefore no such wisdom of God, no such mystery that had been kept secret from the beginning of the w^orld ; that what it pro- fessed to give as a revelation from heaven, men had attained before by the light of reason, by the unas- sisted efforts of their own minds. The attempts to rob Christianity in this way of its significance are, as I observed, not new. If such objections have been zealously urged in modern times, they belong also to the very earliest. To take two examples, one old, one new. Celsus, in the second century, quoting words of our blessed Lord's, in w^hich he exhorts to the for- giveness of enemies, remarks that he has found the identical precept in Plato, — with only the difference, as he dares to add, that it is by the Grecian sage better and more elegantly spoken.* And Gibbon, * Origen, Con. Cels., 1. 7, c. 58. In like manner Celsus affirmed that our Lord's words, Matt, xix, 23, were transferred from Plato, De Legg., 1. 5. 742. (^Con. Cek., 1. 6, c. 16.) Augustine too (De Dodr. Christ., 1. 2, e. 28) makes mention of some in his own time, readers and lovers of Plato, — qui dicere ausi sunt omnes Domini nostri Jesu Christi sententias, quas mirari et prsedicare coguntur, de Platonis libris eum di- dicisse. St. Ambrose also, as we learn from Augustine, [Ep. 31.) had found it necessary to write against such ; which he INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 167 having occasion to speak of one of Christ's most me- morable moral precepts, '* Whatsoever ye v^'ould that men should do to you, do ye even so to them," cannot resist the temptation of adding — **a rule which I read in a moral treatise of Isocrates four hundred years before the publication of the Gospel." And in like manner we all probably remember, if not the contents, yet the title which the book of an English deist bore, one of the ablest of that unhappy band, " Christianity as old as the Creation;^' a book which by that title at once indicated the quarj;er from which its author ad- vanced to the assault of revealed religion. And not seldom this charge appears in an aggra- vated form ; and it has been sought to be proved, not merely that others had said the same before the Gospel, but that it had covertly borrowed from them — that so far from being more and higher than an- other birth of the human mind, it possessed so little vital and independent energy, as to have been com- pelled to go back to prior sources, and to build with the materials of others, and to adorn itself with their spoils. Urged by their desire to prove this, hoping to convict it thus of being in possession of things not its own, the adversaries of the Christian faith have gone did in a work that now has perished. How excellent is Au- gustine's own answer {Enarr. in Ps. cxl. 6:) Dixit hoc Py- thagoras, dixit hoc Plato.. ..Propterea si inventus fueritaliquis eorum hoc dixisse quod dixit et Christus, gratulamur illi, non sequimur ilium. Sed prior fuit ille qu^m Christus. Si quis vera loquitur, prior est qukm ipsa Veritas? O homo, attende Christum non quando ad te venerit, sed quando te feeerit. 168 LECTURE I. far to seek for the anticipations and sources of its doctrine. Thus, with Voltaire, India, and still more, China, were the favourite quarters from which he laboured to show that its wisdom had been drawn ; although his almost incredible ignorance exposed him to the most ridiculous errors, and made him the dupe of poorest forgeries, palmed on him as works of the ancient wisdom of the East, and w^hich by him were again confidently produced as such.* Somewhat later the Zend-Avesta and the religion of Zoroaster were triumphantly appealed to, as having been the true sun from which the borrowed light of Judaism and Chris- tianity had proceeded. Then again, men said that our blessed Lord had been educated and initiated in the secret lore of the Essenes, and that he, the Wisdom of God, had first learned wisdom in these schools of . * There is a curious account of a fraud which was played off on him, in Von Bohlen's Das Jilte Indien, v. 1, p. 136, con- necting itself with a singular piece of literary forgery. A Jesuit missionary, whose zeal led him to assume the appear- ance of an Indian Fakir, in the beginning of last century forged a Veda, of which the purpose was, secretly to undermine the religion which it professed to support, and so to facilitate the introduction of Christianity — to advance, that is, the king- dom of truth with a lie. This forged Veda is full of every kind of error or ignorance in regard of the Indian religions. After lying, however, long in a Romanist missionary college at Pondicherry, it found its way to Europe, and a transcript of it came into the hands of Voltaire, who eagerly used it for the purpose of depreciating the Christian Books, and show- ing how many of their doctrines had been anticipated by the wisdom of the East. The book had thus an end worthy of its beginning. INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 169 men. Or by others, Rabbinical parallels to various sayings in the New Testament, to evangelical parables and doctrines, have been solemnly adduced, as solving the riddle of Christianity, as enough to dissipate that nimbus of glory with which it had been hitherto sur- rounded, to refute its loftier claims, and to prove its origin of earth, and not of heaven. So has falsehood travelled round the world, as inconsistent with itself as it is remote from the truth, each later birth of it devouring the preceding. And they have wrought in the same spirit, and in reality with the same weapons to the same ends, who yet, somewhat shifting their ground, have not so much sought to turn our Christian faith into a doc- trine which had been often taught before, as into a dream which has been often dreamed before ; who have not therefore laboured to produce parallels to its isolated sayings or doctrines — to rob it here and there of a jewel in its crown ; but have aspired to a com- pleter victory, striking at the very person and acts of Him on whom it rests, and out of whom it has un- folded itself. And in this w^ay ; — they have ransacked all records of ancient religions for such parallels, nearer or more remote, as they could in them find, not now any more to the sayings, but rather to the doings, of his life; and having mustered and mar- shalled in threatening order as many of these as they could draw together, they have turned round and said to us — "In all times, and all the world through, men have been imagining for themselves, as you see, sons of God, expiations by sacrifice, direct communications 15 170 LECTURE I. with a higher world, oracles and prophecies, wielders of a power mightier than nature's, restorers of a lost Paradise, conquerors of Hades, ascensions into heaven. They have imagined them, and nothing more ; for the things which they thus in spirit grasped at, never found an historic realization, however men may have en- riched themselves, and we do not deny that they did so, with the thought that such things had been, or one day should be." And then it has been further asked us. What right had we to difference our hope from the hope of all others? They longed so earnestly, that at last their longing wove a garment, made even a body, for itself; what right have any to affirm that it is otherwise with the things which they believe ? And thus, because men have hoped for, and reached * after, that which in Christ is given, and hoped so in- tensely, that they have sometimes imagined it to be actually theirs, so projecting their hope, as to give it at last an objective reality, we are bidden to believe that ours is but such an ardent desire, fashioning at length a body for itself. Parading a long hne of shadows, these adversaries require us to acknowledge the substance we have embraced to be a shadow also ; showing how^ much false money is in the world, and has at different times passed current, they demand of us, how we dare to assume that which we have accepted to be true; — when they should see that the shadows imply a substance somewhere, that the false money passes only under shelter of a true. Proving, as it is not hard to prove, those parallels to be groundless and mythical, to rest on no true historic basis, they INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 171 hope that the great facts of the Christian's belief will be concluded to be as weak — that they will be in- volved in a common discredit* — and the faiths of which those other formed a part having come to nothing, or evidently hastening to decay, that this may be assumed to underlie the same judgment, and to be hastening to the same inevitable dissolution, however the signs of it as yet may not appear. This scheme of attack has been so long and so vigorously plied, so much success has been expected from it, that in the works of the later assailants of revelation from this quarter, there speaks out a cer- tain indignation, mingled with astonishment, at the resistance which it is still presuming to offer ; as though it were not to be endured, that every other religion should have confessed itself a mythology, and that this should deny it still — that each other, like a startled ghost, should have vanished at the first cock-crowing of an intellectual morn, but that this should continue to affront, as boldly and as confidently as ever, even the light of the world's middle day — that each other should have crumbled into nothing at the first touch * TertuUian (Jlpol. 47,) speaks of the way in which these parallels were played off against the Christian verities — Elysium not only having forfeited belief in itself, but having helped to destroy a belief in heaven — Minos and Rhadaman- thus having rendered the judgment-seat of Christ a mockery ; — though in his narrow fashion he sees in them nothing but the adulteria veritatis — the work of the jealous envy of evil spirits, quae de similitudine fidem infirmarent veritatis. But if the truth was hard to receive with these, mijrht it not have been impossible to receive without them 1 172 LECTURE I. of the wand of a critical philosophy, but that this should entirely refuse to obey its dissolving spell. Now all charges against the truth, however desti- tute of any solid foundation, out of whatever perversity of heart or mind they may have sprung, yet, when continually re-appearing, when repeating themselves in different ages, and by the mouths of different ob- jectors, and those independent of one another, have yet, we may be sure, something which has rendered them not merely possible, but plausible ; which sug- gested them first, and, with the frivolous and thought- less, with those that have been eager to believe them, and to be quit of the restraints of a positive faith, has given them currency and favour. Let me seek, then, as an important element of my subject, to consider what that something is, which has served to suggest, and afterw^ards to give a point to these charges; and, not pausing here, to show that the truth, which, how- ever distorted, is at the bottom of these charges, is one w^hich we may cheerfully and without any mis- giving, recognise. And this is not all: for I would fain also show that it would be a grievous deficiency, if that were absent from our Christian faith, which has been the motive and hint to these accusations — if that faith, as far as regards the whole anterior world except the Jewish, stood in relation to nothing which men had thought, or felt, or hoped, or believed; with no other coefficient but the Jewish, and resting on no broader historic basis than that would supply. It will be my purpose to inquire whether wp may not contemplate the rela- INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 173 tions of the absolute truth to the anterior religions of the world, in an aspect in which we shall cease altogether from regarding with suspicion these ap- parent anticipations of good things given us in Christ, in which, instead of being secretly embarrassed by them, and hardly knowing exactly how to deal with, or where to range them, we shall joyfully accept these presentiments of the truth, so far as they are satisfac- torily made out, as enhancing the greatness and glory of the truth itself; and as being, so far as they are allowed to have any weight, confirmations of it. Nor will it be a small satisfaction, — if this be pos- sible, as I believe it easy, — to make our adversaries do drudging work for us; to plough with their oxen; to enter, as we shall do then, upon their labours; and all that they have painfully gathered up with purposes hostile to the faith — to appropriate and make defen- sive of it; not so much anxiously defending our own position, as confidently turning theirs; wresting from them their own weapons, and then wielding them against themselves. And first, in regard of the ethical anticipations of what is given to us in the gospel, — the goodly max- ims, the striking precepts, the memorable sayings, which are gathered from the fields of heathen philo- sophy, and then sometimes used to depress the original worth of the teaching of Christ and his apostles, — I will not urge here, and I have no object in urging, though I may, in passing, remark, how many that are sometimes adduced of these are wholly deceptive, as parallels to Christian truths. How often in their 15* 174 LECTURE I. organic connexion they would be very far from con- taining that echo or presentiment of truth which we deem we catch in them ; how often they have indeed a very different significance from that which we first put in them, and only afterwards educe from them. Nor yet will I press how the goodliest maxim is indeed nothing, save in its coherence to a body of truth ; how a world of such maxims, were they gotten together, would be only as ten thousand artificial lamps, failing altogether to constitute a day, and not in the remotest degree doing the work, or supplying to the world the place of a single sun. Not to press this, and accepting fully and freely what has been said wisely and well before the gospel and apart from the gospel, and allowing to the full that it has many times touched the heart of the matter, yet still is there nothing here which we need wish we could deny, which we should not rather desire to find. Indeed, so far from there having been, in time past, a shunning or ignoring of these heathen parallels, the early apologists perhaps only admitted them too freely: yet thus at any rate they testified that to acknowledge them they felt to be no confession of a weakness in their position. Thus more than one has likened the faithful delivered from an evil world to the children of Israel brought out of Egypt, who borrowed and carried forth from thence vessels of gold and vessels of silver, the same which probably afterwards furnished the precious metals which they dedicated to the holier uses of the sanctuary. In like manner, they said, there was much which the faithful, delivered out of INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 175 the spiritual Egypt, would leave behind him, as all its abominable idolatries; but something also which he would carry forth, and which he had a right to carry forth, for it was not truly the riches of that land. This silver and this gold had been originally dug from mines of divine truth, and bearing it with him, he only reclaimed to its noblest purposes that which had been more or less alienated and perverted from them.* Nor need we deal more timidly with these parallels than they did. So long, indeed, as we regard God's * Thus Augustine (De Dodr. Christ., I. 2, c. 40 :) Philo- sophi autem qui vocantufj si qua forte vera et fidei nostriB accommodata dixerunt maxinie Platonici, non solum formi- danda non sunt, sed ab eis etiam tanquam injustis possessori- bus in usura nostrum vindicanda. Sicut enim jEgyptii non solum idola habebant et onera gravia, quae populus Israel detestaretur et fugeret, sed etiam vasa atque ornamenta de auro et argento, et vestem, quae ille populus exiens de^Egypto sibi potius tanquam ad usum meliorem clanculo vindicavit, non auctoritate propria, sed praeeepto Dei, ipsis^gyptiis nes- cienter commodantibus ea, quibus non bene utebantur, sic doctrinae omnes Gentilium non solum simulata et superstitiosa figmenta gravesque sarcinas supervacui laboris habent, .... sed etiam liberales disciplinas usui veritatis aptiores, . . . quod eorum tamquam aurum et argentum, quod non ipsi instituerunt, sed de quibusdam quasi metallis divinae providentise, q.uae ubique infusa sunt, eruerunt, .... debet ab eis auferre Chris- tianus ad usum justum prasdicandi Evangelii. Origen (Ep. ad Gregnr., t. 1, p. 30,) uses the same illustration, observing, however, that, according to his experience, the gold which is brought out of Egypt is oftener used for the fashioning of an idol, a golden calf, the work of men's own hands, which they worship, than for the adorning of the tabernacle of God. 176 LECTURE I. revelation of Himself in Christ, as a revelation merely of certain moral truths, it may be startling to find aught that is therein anticipated in any other quarter. But when we more rightly contemplate it as the ma- nifesting of life, that the Life was manifested, and dwelt among us, then we feel that they who gave, and could give, precepts and maxims only, however precious these were, whatever witness they bore to a hght shining in the darkness, to a divine spark not trodden out in man, to a God nurturing the heathen, with all this yet gave not that, which, for man, is the gift of gifts and blessing of blessings. And this is the true way in which to contemplate it. That which differ- ences Christianity from all other religions, is not its theory of morals; this is a most real, yet at the same time, only a relative difference, for there were ethics before there were Christian ethics.* But its difference is, that it is life and power, that it transforms, that it * Grotius, indeed, says, (^De Verit.Rel. Christ.,]. i,c. 12:) Ejus [scil. religionis Christianae] partes sin^ulai tantae sunt honestatiSj ut suapte luce animos quasi convincant, ita ut inter paganos non defuerint qui dixerint singula, quae nostra religio habet universa. Lactantius expresses himself more cautiously, and is careful to add how none but a "teacher sent from God could have knit these scattered limbs into a body. He says, Jnst. Div., 1. 7, c. 7: Nullam sectam fnisse tam deviam, nee philbsophorum quendam tam inanem, qui non viderit aliquid e vero. Quodsi extitisset aliquis, qui veritatem, sparsam per singulos, per sectasque diffusam, colligeret in unum, et redi- geret in corpus, is profecto non dissentiret k nobis. Sed hoc nemo facere, nisi veri peritus ac sciens, potest: verum autem non nisi ejus scire est, qui sit doctus k Deo. INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 177 transfigures, that it makes new creatures, that it does for all what others only promised to do for a few. Herein the essential difference resides. Men, for in- stance, before it came, could speak worthy things, and could really feel them, about the beauty of overcoming their desires, of forgiving their enemies, of repaying injuries with kindness, of coming to God with clean hands and a clean heart. Such sayings abound in every code of morals:* but the unhappiness was, that they who uttered these sayings and they who admired them, did little more than this. It was not that there was any falseness in their admiration: they delighted in them after the inner man, but in the actual struggle with evil, they were ever weak to bring them to effect. There was a great gulf between the saying and the doing, which never till in Christ, was effectually bridged over ; so that the Christian speaker in that beautiful dialogue, the Odavius of Minucius Felix, exactly hit the mark, when, to characterize the practical of Chris- tian life as distinguished from the speculative of hea- then philosophy, he exclaimed of that sect every where spoken against, to which he belonged, Mn eloqiiimur magna, sed vivimus. And yet, brethren, -when we thus trace the misera- ble contradiction that ever existed in a world out of Christ, between the good seen and the evil done, the vast chasm between the two, let this be with no pur- * See. for instance, in Von Bohlen, {Das Mte Indien. v, 1, p. 364,) a beautiful collection of Indian sayings of this kind, on the love of our neighbour, and the forgiveness of injuries. 178 - LECTURE I. pose of laying bare their sores, with no thought of glorying in their infirmities, to whom in a less favoured time the only fountain of effectual strength and heal- ing had not yet been opened. For indeed, brethren, may there not be many a one among ourselves to whom, with far less excuse, all this explains itself, alas ! only too easily ? many a one, it may be, who remembers times of his own life, before his moral con- victions had been gathered up and found their middle point in Christ — and in those times repeated falls under temptation, which explain to him only too vividly the condition in which this ever-recurring infidelity of men to their moral convictions found place — in which they were thus able to trace the out- lines of a righteousness, but impotent to fill them up, and so ever leaving it in outline stijl — well skilled to draw a ground-plan, but weak to badd any superstruc- ture thereon — the virtue loved, till the opportunity came for practising it; the sin hated, till the moment for testifying that hatred had arrived. But to pass on to the other charge, to the resem- blances to the great facts on which our faith reposes, to the great events of our Lord's life, which are ad- duced from other quarters, with the requirement, be- cause those have proved weak to stand, that we should acknowledge these to be weak also ; — they only will consent to such a conclusion, who have failed to per- ceive that according to the very highest idea of Chris- tianity, such there needs must have been. For what do we affirm of Christ? when do \ve conceive worthily of Him? When we conceive of Him, in the prophet's INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 179 words, as "the Desire of all nations" — the fulfiller of the world's hopes — the stiller of creation's groans — the great birth of time, unto which all the unspeakable throes of a suffering humanity had been tending from the first. These resemblances disturb us not at all, — they are rather most welcome ; for we do not believe the peculiar glory of what in Christ we possess to consist in this, that it is unlike every thing else, "the cold denial and contradiction of all that men have been dreaming of through the different ages of the world, but rather the sweet reconciliation and exquisite har- mony of all past thoughts, anticipations, revelations." Its prerogative is, that all whereof men had a troubled dream before, did in Him become a waking reality; that what men were devising, and most inadequately, for themselves, God has perfectly given us in his Son ; that in the room of shifting cloud-palaces, w^ith their mockery of temple and tower, stands- for us a city, which hath come down from heaven, but whose foun- dations rest upon this earth of ours ; — that we have diwine facts — facts no doubt which are ideal, in that they are the vehicle of everlasting truths; history in- deed which is far more than history, for it embodies the largest and most continually recurring thoughts which have stirred the bosom of hunlanity from the beginning. We say that the divine ideas which had wandered up and down the world, till oftentimes they had well nigh forgotten themselves and their own ori- gin, did at length clothe themselves in flesh and blood ; they became incarnate with the Incarnation of the Son of God. In his life and person the idea and the fact 180 LECTURE I. at length kissed each other, and were henceforward wedded for evermore. If these things be so, and it will be my desire in this place, and in these lectures, to trace how they are, one or two considerations will lie very near to us; and with the pressing of these on your thoughts and hearts I will this day conclude. And first, the general consideration, that what there may have been in the world obscurely struggling to be Christian before Christ and his Church, so far from suggesting to us poorer thoughts of what in Him we possess, under how far more glorious aspect does it present that to us I All which men before could conceive, but could not realize, could feel after, but could not grasp, could dream of, but ever when they awoke found nothing in their hands, — it is here; '^ the body is of Christ." And the Church which he has founded, we behold it as sitting upon many waters, upon the great ocean of truth, from whence every stream that has at all or at any time refreshed the earth was originally drawn, and to which it duteously brings its waters again.* We may contemplate that Church as having, in that it has the Word and Spirit of its Lord, the measure of all partial truth in itself; receiving the homage of all human systems, meekly, and yet, like a queen, as her right; understanding them far better than they ever understood themselves; disallowing their false, * Clement of Alexandria on this very matter (Strom., 1. 1, C. 5:) Mia [xkv ovv t'^j aKy^Oatas oSoj* aTJK^ ttj avT'^r xaduTttp ei^ aivvaov Tiotafiovj tpcpioufft ta pilOipa {iXka aVKoOtv. u- ,• INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 181 and what of true they have, setting her seal upon that true, and issuing it with a brighter image, and a sharper outline, and a more paramount authority, from her own mint. Again, if the more excellent glory of that which we possess in Christ is, that it is not shadow but sub- stance, not anticipation but possession — not the idea, but the fact, or rather the fact and the idea in one, — how are we letting go our most precious gains, when we at all let go, or when we even slight, our historic faith, resting on and finding its object in the person of the Saviour ! What a miserable exchange, to give up this, and to accept the largest, the most vaunted theories concerning the godlike and the true in its room and as its adequate substitute, the most magni- ficent ideas in the place of the humblest affiance on the Son of God — soon to find that we have gotten pebbles for jewels, words for things, that we are in a world peopled only with ghosts and phantoms! Oh, loss unutterable, if we allow any to strip off for us the historic realization of the truth in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, as though it were not of the essence of the matter, as though it were a thing indifferent, use- ful perhaps for the simpler members of the Church, but for others hindering rather than helping the con- templation of the pure idea, which they would persuade us it is alone needful to retain. They promise, it is true, who invite to this sacrifice, that if only we will destroy this temple of our historic faith, in three days, yea, in an instant, as by a magic wand, they will raise up for us a goodlier and more gorgeous fabric in its 16 182 LECTURE I. room. Let it be our vs^isdom to give no credence to their words ; knowing this, that it was the very bless- edness which the coming of the Son of God in the flesh brought us, that it brought us that, which these would fain persuade us to relinquish and renounce, that it lifted men out of and above that condition into "which these deceivers would willingly persuade them to return. No doubt there is a temptation to give in to this, a temptation w^orking in each one of us — to take up, that is, with a religion which shall consist in the con- templating of great and ennobling ideas, instead of in the serving with a straightforward and downright obe- dience a personal God. Those ideas we feel that we can deal with them as we like; they exert no con- straining power upon us; we are their masters, and not they ours: or if we have allowed them any rule over us, when the stress comes, w^e can withdraw it again; allowing them just as much authority as is convenient to us. There is no " Be thou holy, for I am holy," in them — no pointing to the rugged way of the Cross, with a Forerunner walking there, and a command that we follow him in it. Let us watcli earnestly against so subtle a temptation, showing as it does so fair, and finding so much in our slothful and sinful hearts that makes them only too ready to em- brace it. And surely, brethren, at this season the Church suggests and presents to us mighty helps against all this. What help so effectual as to enter truly and deeply into the Passion of our Lord — to carry at no INT&ODUCTORY LECTURE. 183 cold and careless distance from that cross to which each day of this lenten season is now bringing us nigher? but to seek to draw forth the riches of grace which are laid up for us in it, and in the considering of Him that hanged thereon. Let us determine, bre- thren, that in this coming week, the beginning it may be of a more holy life, we will bring ourselves con- tinually within the sphere of those mighty, those trans- forming influences, which are ever going forth from thence* Let us make proof how it can open for us the fountain of purifying tears, sealed it may be for long — how a burden can be laid down at its foot which is crushing us to the earth, and from which nowhere else is deliverance. Let us seek to enter into nearer fellowship with the Man of sorrows, with our crucified God. And then, when we have proved how this fellowship can bless us, how it can cleanse us from our impurities, how it can. strengthen us for our tasks, can enable us to tread under foot our enemies, we shall not readily exchange such a fellowship as this with a living Lord, so full fraught with blessings, for that of mere notions and phantoms; which, however much they may promise, will desert us in the hour af need, and prove utterly helpless, whensoever the real stress of life's trial comes. LECTURE II. THE VANQUISHER OF HADES. {Preached on Easter Sunday,) MARK XVI. 3. Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre? The heathen expectations of a deliverer I ventured in my preceding lecture to characterize as "the un- conscious prophecies of heathendom;" — prophecies indeed which knew not at what they pointed, of which the lines were most wavering and indistinct when set beside the clear outlines of Jewish hope — yet in a wider and laxer sense prophecies still ; or, if we will not make that word common, but reserve it for the highest of all, we may call them the world's divination at the least. For in t4iese expectations of a world, which, though deeply fallen, remained God's world still, it was divining what it needed, and obscurely feeling after it. And this divination, these guesses at, and Teachings out after, the truth, so far from shunning and keeping out of sight, we may use, I said, not of course putting them in the forefront of our array, yet may we use them still, as arguments for that Faith, to which all has thus tended from the first, THE VANQUISHER OF HADES. * 185 which the world was craving for before it received, and short of which it never found its perfect satisfac- tion or rest. It is the same argument, applied in a different region, of Christianity as evidently the complement of all that went before, which the early apologists were wont to use in their conflict with Gnostic and Mani- chsean. They urged the manner in which the Chris- tian revelation as the Church received it, rooted itself deeply in an anterior constitution, was evidently not a sudden improvisation, but the culminating fact of an idea which had been realizing itself through all the sacred history of the past, was as the perfect flower, of which all genuine Judaism had been the stalk and stem. And they founded on this traceable connexion the superiority of its claims to those of all rival sys- tems, which could produce no such accordance of their new with pre-existing and pre-established harmonies in the spiritual world ; but had rather abruptly and violently to force a place for themselves, than to fit into one already prepared for their reception, which rested on an undoing and denying of the past, rather than a sanctioning and perfecting of it*^* And as there was, no doubt, a most real force in their argu- ment, exactly so has it for the thoughtful mind a deep *" See especially Tertullian, Adv. Marcton., 1. 3 and 4, pas- sim, in which this is his ever-recurring thought, re-appearing in an infinite variety of forms. Oh Christum et in novis ve- lerem! he exclaims, having shown how the rudiments of al- most all Christ's miracles are to be found in the Old Testa- ment. 16* . 1S6 LECTURE II. significance, that Christ should have met and satisfied all nobler longings of the heathen world — that all deeper and better impulses which were any where at w^ork, should have been tending toward Him, The worth of the unspeakable gift which in Christ is ours, is w^onderfully testified by the fact that all should have been in one way or another either asking for that gift, or fancying that they had gotten it, or mourning its departure, or providing substitutes for it. For, however in the one elect -people, as the bearers of the divine promises, — the beating heart pf the spiritual world, — the appointed interpreters to the rest of their blind desires, this longing after a Redeemer came out in greater clearness and in greater strength, and with no troubling disturbing elements, — their educa- tion being far more directly from God, and being ex- pressly aimed at the quickening of these longings to the highest, — yet were those longings themselves not exclusively theirs. They, indeed, yearned, and knew what they yearned for : the nations yearned, and knew not for what. But still they yearned : for as the earth in its long polar night seeks to supply the absence of the day by the generation of the northern lights, so does each people in the long night of its heathen darkness bring forth in its yearning after the life of I Christ, a faint and glimmering substitute for the same. From these dreamy longings after the break of day have proceeded oracles, priests, sacrifices, lawgivers, and the like. Men have no where given up hoping ; nor acquiesced in the world's evil as the world's law. Every where they have had a tradition of a time when V THE VANQUISHER OF HADES. 137 they were nearer to God than now, a confident hope of a time w^hen they should be brought nearer again. No thoughtful student of the past records of man- kind can refuse to acknowledge that through all its history there has run the hope of a redemption from the evil which oppresses it ; nor of this only, but that this hope has continually linked itself on to some single man. The help that is coming to the world, it has ever seen incorporated in a person. The genera- -tions of men, w^eak and helpless in themselves, have evermore been looking after one in whom they may find all which they seek vainly in themselves and in those around them — redressers of the world's wrong, deliverers from the world's yoke, vindicators of the honour of the race, souls of heroic stature, in which alL the features of greatness that are imparted with niggard hand unto others shall be found gloriously and prodigally combined. Such in almost every reli- gion men have learned to look back to, as having al- ready come : such we find that they are every where expecting as yet to appear. As little can one deny that there is that in men, which prepares them to welcome these at their appear- ing. ^There is a natural gravitation of souls, which attracts them to mighty personalities ; an instinct in man, which tells him that he is never so great as when looking up to one greater than himself — that he is made for this looking upward — to find, and, finding to rejoice and to be ennobled in, a nobler than himself. And doubtless this instinct in itself is divine. {It is the natural basis on which the devotion of manicind to 18S ' LECTURE II. Christ is by the Spirit to be built ; it is an instinct which, being perfectly purified of each baser admix- ture, is intended to find its entire satisfaction in Him. True, it may stop short of Him ; true, it may turn utterly away from Him. It may stop short of Him, resting in human heroes, in men glorious for their gifts, eminent for their services to their kind ; and we have then the worship of genius instead of the worship of God. Or it may turn utterly away from Chrisf, and then, being in itself inextinguishable, and therefore surviving even in those who have wholly forsaken Him, it will, thus perverted and depraved, lay them open to all the delusions of false prophets and of antichrists. For it is this, this attraction of men to a mightier than themselves, which, being thus perverted, has filled the world with deceivers and deceived ; which has gathered round the hunters of men the ready instru- ments which have executed their will. It is this which has drawn souls, as moths to the candle, to rush into and to be scorched and to be consumed in the flame, which some wielder of heavenly gifts for hellish aims has kindled. It is this which swells the train round some conqueror's car, as he urges his destructive course through the world. What, for instance, to take a near illustration, was the devotedness of the French soldiery to their great leader but this? Who does not feel that this devotion, out of which thousands and tens of thousands were ready to meet, and did joy- fully meet, dangers and fatigues and agonies and deaths, only for the hope of one word of approbation, one smile from him, counting all more than repaid by THE VANQUISHER OF HADES. 189 this — who does not feel that this was the inverted side of something in itself most true and most noble, to which even in its degeneracy it bore witness; and only had now run wild and lost its appointed destina- tion ? It is this, this craving of men passionately to devote themselves to some one, which makes an Anti- christ possible, w'hich will make him so terrible when he appears — men by a just judgment of God being permitted to dedicate all which they ought to have dedicated to Christ, to his opposite, to him who comes in his own name, — -because they refused to give it, because they refused to give themselves, to Him who came in the name of his Father. It will then be fear- fully seen that there can be an enthusiasm of hell, no less than an enthusiasm of heaven. And as on the one side there is a preparedness to acknowledge these kings of men^ these spiritual and intellectual chiefs of our race, so soon as they show themselves ; thus too, upon the other hand, such have never been wanting to claim the reverence and the homage of their fellows, to seat themselves on these prepared thrones of the world. Certainly there is nothing in the study of the past which fills- one w^ith more awe and wonder than the infinite significance of single men in the development of the world's history. That history lies out before our eyes no Tartarian steppe, no Indian savannah, stretching out atone vast level, or with only slight elevations or depressions ; but with marvellous inequalities, and here and there with ravines deep almost as hell itself, and again with mountain summits towering w^ell nigh unto heaven. 190 LECTURE II. Every where we encounter those that brhig to their brethren a new blessing or a new curse, that gather , as at a centre the world's light or the world's darkness ; from whom that light or that darkness diffuses itself anew and with a new energy — benefi- cent lords or baleful tyrants in the spiritual kingdom of men's thoughts and feelings — each one for w^eal or for wo, in narrower and wider circles, for longer or shorter spaces, wielding his sceptre over the hearts and spirits of his fellows; helping to make them slaves or to make them free, to exalt or to cast them down. On the one side august lawgivers, founders of stable polities, bringers in of some new element of civilization, restorers, even amid heathen darkness, of some purer knowledge of God; on the other side, destroyers that have known how to knit to them as with magic bands multitudes of their brethren, and to make them the passionate servants of their evil will ; proclaimers of sensual philosophies, that have assisted to make our life cheaper than beasts'5 to empty it of its loftier hopes and its faith in a higher destination ; seducers after whom the world has wondered; stars whose name has been Wormwood, that, falling fcom heaven, have made the waters of earth bitter, so that the men died who drank of them. Thus has it been, brethren, that the world has been ever opening wide its arms to welcome its redeemers, — oftentimes cruelly deceived, counting oftentimes, like Eve, that it had gotten a man from the Lord, even him who should comfort it under the curse, when indeed it was thus welcoming only the THE VANQUISHER OF HADES. 191 deepener of the curse, and it may be the author of some new mischief; — yet hoping ever, with hopes that even at the best were only most imperfectly and in- adequately fulfilled. Thus have the multitudes of men still gathered and grouped themselves round central figures in history, giving testimony even by an oftentimes fatal readiness for this, that mankind w^as made for a Christ, for a divine leader in whom it should be set free, by the mightier and holier magic of his will, by the prevalence of a divine attraction which he should exercise upon them, from all the potent spells of seducing spirits and seducing men — that humanity was made for one to whom it should be able to deliver itself perfectly and without reserve, and to be blest in so delivering itself. For he being ' identical with righteousness, and wisdom, and love, they who lose themselves in Him, only lose to find themselves again for ever, , So much, brethren, we may say general!}" con- cerning the hope which the world has cherished of redeemers and saviours — a hope which at length was fulfilled so perfectly in Him, and only in Him, who bears both these titles, that we well nigh feel as if the titles themselves, to say nothing of any deeper homage or devotion, cannot, without wrong to Him, and encroachment upon his due honour, be lent to any other. And upon this day, brethren, upon this resurrection morn, it will fall in well with the joyful solemnities of the time, with the current in which our thoughts must needs be running, and from which it would only be a loss if the discourse you heard in 192 - LECTURE II. this place should awhile divert them, to address our- selves to a part of the subject, which, had not this high day come upon us/ might perhaps have been more conveniently reserved to a later occasion ; but which if now, moved by the fitnesses of the season, I a little anticipate, you will pardon me this wrong. The aspect of the subject which I mean is this, — the world's hope of its deliverers as conquerors of death, its expectation of One who should lead captivity cap- tive, in whom mortahty should be swallowed up in life, who should be a vanquisher of hell, a bringer back of souls, and first and chiefly of his own, from the prison-house of the grave. Such expectations in abundance there were ; for no- where have men sat down content under the heavy laws of death which bound them. They have ever been imagining a reversal of the curse, a breach or a repeal of those inexorable laws. The old world was ever feeling after " Jesus and the Resurrection." And being full of this thought, it traced it every where. Thus, in the cycle of the natural seasons, when the earth in spring starts up from its long winter sleep, men saw a symbol and a never-failing prophecy of life rising out of death : that winter was as the world's death, this spring as the world's resurrection. The enthusiasm which the spring woke up, the rapture with which the outbursting of bud and blossom, the signs of the reviving year, were hailed — the way in which the chiefest and joyfulest feasts of almost all religions were coincident with, and evidently cele- brated, this time, being full of this spring gladness, — THE VANQUISHER OF HADES. 193 all this was not an evidence, as some would have us to believe, that those religions were merely physical, did merely commemorate the revolutions of the na- tural year. But this rapture and delight with w^hich the outer tokens of renovation and revival were hailed, had their root in a profound and instinctive sense of the connexion between man and nature, in a most true feeling that the symbols of renovation in nature could not be aimless and unmeaning, symbols of no- thing, but must needs point to deeper realities in the life of man.* The spring time suggested such joyful * 1 may quote, though long, the sublime passage in Tertul- lian on the vestiges of a resurrection which we may trace every where in nature {De Resurr. Carnis^ c. 12 :) Dies mori- tur in noctem, et tenebris usquequaque sepelitur. Funestatur mundi honor; omnis substantia denigratur. Sordent, silent, stupent cuncta: ubique justitium est. Ita lux amissa lugetur: et tamen rursus cum suo cultu, cum dote, cum sole, eadera et Integra et tota universo orbi reviviscit- interficiens mortem suam, noctem; rescindens sepulturam suam tenebras; heres si- bimet existens, donee et nox reviviscat, cum suo et ilia sugsestu. Redaccenduntur enim et stellarum radii, quos matutina suc- censio extinxerat: reducuntur et siderum absentiae, quos tem- poralis distinctio exemerat: redornantur et specula lunae, quae menstruus numerus atiriverat : revolvuntur hyemes et aestates^ verna et autumna, cum suis viribus, moribus, fructibus. Quippe etiam terrae de ccelo disciplina est arbores vestire post spolia, flores denuo colorare, herbas rursus imponere, exhibere eadem quae absurapta sunt semina; nee prius exhibere, qu^m absumpta. Mira ratio! de fraudatrice servatrix: ut reddat, intercipit; ut custodiat, perdit; ut integret, vitiat; ut etiam ampliat, prius decoquit... Nihil deperit, nisi in salutem. Totus igitur hie ordo revolubilis rerum, testatio est resurrectionis mortuorum. Operibus earn praescripsit Deus antequ^m Uteris j 17 194 LECTURE II. solemnities, because it was felt to be in some sort the Easter of nature, and obscurely to give pledge, or at least intimation, of a higher Easter in store for man. And if it may be permitted me to take a little wider range, and to gather proofs and confirmations of what I am affirming, of the manner in which hu- man nature has claimed a resurrection as its own, not from the heathen world only, but wherever in po- pular faith or tradition I can find them, I would then adduce, as a remarkable illustration of this, the ex- ceeding difficulty with which the world has ever per- suaded itself of the death of any who have mightily blest it, or with whom it has confidently garnered up its dearest hopes— the eagerness with which it snatches at the thought, that such a one has not truly died, making much of the slightest hint that seems to give a colour to this hope; so congenial is it to the heart of man. It was said of Moses, " No man knoweth his sepulchre unto this day," (Deut. xxxiv. 6,) and these words, despite the plain declaration that went before, were sufficient provocation for a whole family of Jewish legends, to the effect that he had not really paid the debt appointed to every man living. In like manner we know how that word of the Lord concern- ing the beloved apostle, " If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?" this was enough to viribus praedicavit antequam vocibus. Praemisit tibi naturam magistranij submissurus et prophetiam, quo facilius credas propbetiee, discipulus naturae; quo statim admittas, ciim audi- eris quod ubique jam videris, nee dubites Deum carnis etiam resuscitatorenij quern omnium noris restitutorem. THE VANQUISHER OF HADES. 195 cause the report to go forth that he should not die; and not the express denial by St. John himself of any such significance in the words, was able to extinguish this belief, which continued to propagate itself from age to age.* In hke manner we sometimes see a w^hole nation which has found it impossible to believe that he on whom its hopes were fondly built, whom it had trusted should at length have delivered it, and with whose death those hopes have all fallen to the ground, — that he indeed has come, like other men, under the law of mortality,— has passed away, and left his work, as it seems, unconcluded. How long Britain was waiting for her Arthur; how long did the legends that told of him as surviving yet in the far valley of Ava- lon live on the lips and in the hearts of a people. And exactly in the same manner, in a later and more historic age, Portugal waited for her youthful king, looking fondly and with aching expectation for his re- turn — and this, for many a weary year after he had perished, not obscurely, but in open fight, among the sands of Africa.f * See Augustine, In Ev. Joh,^ Tract 124: Tertullian, De Animd, c. 50; Hilary, De Trinit. 1. 6, c. 39; Jerome, Mv. Jovin.^ 1. 1, c. 26; Neander's Kirch. Gesch., v. 5, p. 1117. I Thus Michelet (Hist, de France, 1. 17,) having told the death of the last Duke of Burgundy ; " 11 n'etait pas facile de persuader au peuple que celui dont on avait tant parle etait bien vraiment mort. II etait cache, disait on, il etait tenu en- ferme, il s'etait fait inoine; des pelerins Pavaient vu, en Alle- magne, k Rome, k Jerusalem ; il devait reparaitre tot ou tard ; comme le roi Arthur ou Frederic Barberousse. on etait sur 196 LECTURE II. ' And may not some of us have known, brethren, in our own experience, something that quite explains to us this difficulty of believing in death ? Have we not found this difficulty ourselves ? and how, when the loved are gone, when they have left their places empty, it is only by repeated efforts that we can realize to ourselves that it indeed is so — how we have to say again and again to hearts half incredulous still, that it will never again in this world be otherwise — that so much truth and faith and love have indeed been withdrawn from hence and for ever. Thus ear- nestly does the spirit of man protest even against that semblance of annihilation, which death seems to wear. Nor need it of necessity be the loved or hoped in, those in whom the expectations of others have in- tensely centred: let it be only some terrible man, one that has curdled the life-blood of the world with fear; and even such a one as this, having once been so much to men, though only so much to their fears, they will hardly be persuaded to have indeed passed away from the earth which so quaked and shuddered at his tread. How long after the death of Nero did the firm persuasion survive, that he was only hidden for a season, and that the earth should once more be cursed with his presence — the Christians of the Ro- qu'il reviendrait. II se tronvait des marchands, qui vendraient k credit pour etre payes au double, alors que reviendrait ce grand due De Bourgogne. It is well known how many ob- scure rumours have in like manner found favour with the com- mon people in different parts of Europe, that Napoleon is yet alive. THE VANQUISHER OF HADES. 197 man Empire giving this expectation a colouring natu- ral to them, and conceiving of him as the personal Antichrist, who should make presently his terrible re-appearance from the East, to carry forward against them the work of blood which he had commenced.* But to return to the sphere more directly marked out for me by my subject, and to look there for evi- dences of the manner in wiiich the spirit of man is in- credulous of death, witnesses, protests against it, as by a second sight sees what shall be in the fulness of time, and prematurely grasps at it, — what frequent mention in the Greek fable we meet of visiters of Hades, of those that have descended and held inter- course with the spirits there, those who have in a sense " preached to the spirits in prison," and then returned from the kingdom of night — or it may be burst for others, as well as for themselves, the gates find barriers of the grave, rescuing and bringing back from that dark region to the glad light of life some delivered soul. I may spare any great details in proof of this; time would not allow them; such might scarcely seem in place; and to a congregation like that which I address they would be evidently super- fluous. By one example only I would indicate that which I mean, but that example the most illustrious w^hich ancient fable supplies. It is familiar to us all how the great cycle of the labours of Hercules was not finished till he had done battle with Death. * Tacitus, Hist.^ 1. 2, c. 8; Suetonius, Nero, c. 57; Augus- tine, De.Civ. Dei, 1. 20, c. 19; Lactantius, Be Mort. Pers., 2. 17* 198 LECTURE II. Earthly exploits, even the mightiest and most mar- vellous of these, were not sufficient. It was felt, and most truly, that to complete even the idea of the hero-champion of men, something more was needed, a greater victory was demanded at his hands : he must wrestle with, and in personal conflict overcome, foes mightier than those of flesh and blood — even the last enemy, death and the grave. Nor even then had his own life attained its perfect consummation; since for this it was needed that all which was of earth in him- self should be burned out, that the dregs of mortality should be cleansed away in the purifying flames of a funeral pyre, willingly ascended — and this being done, that he himself, in sign that he could not die any more, that he was indeed made partaker of immortality, that death could have no more dominion over him, should be wedded to eternal Youth amid the blissful mansions of the immortal gods.* * In Buttmann's Mythologus, v. 1, p. 252 seq., the higher significance of the whole mythus of Herakles is unfolded with an exquisite tact and beauty. Without entering into the me- rits or demerits of other parts of the book, it may yet be as well to say that it is only this single treatise which 1 wish to speak of in this language of admiration. If K. O. Miiller is right in his conjecture that AS^u.^/'r'oj-ASa^aofT'oj (//. 9, 158,) the indomitable, a name belonging to Hades, and that Apollo's service of Admetus is his passing down to the infernal world in consequence of having slain the earth-born Python; if this be true, and he brings much that is curious in confirmation of this view, we may then add one more, and that not the least remarkable, to the Greek mythic narrations of this description. (See his Scientific Mythology, p. 243—246 Engl. Transl.) THE VANQUISHER OF HADES. 199 Such, no doubt, is the interpretation of this preg- nant S3?rabol; and thus, brethren, by a thousand voices, in a thousand ways, the world has been de- claring that it was not made for death, for that dread and alien thing, which, notwithstanding, it found in the midst of it. Thus has it looked round for one w^ho should roll away the stone from the door of that sepulchre, to w^hich it had seen its sons one after ano- ther unreturningly descend ; and eking out the weak- ness of its arguments for immortality by the strength of its desires, it has been forward to believe that for this one and that the stone had been actually rolled away. But yet presently again, it has felt only too surely that it had but the shadow, and not the very substance, of the things hoped for: and in doubt and perplexity, in despondency and fear, has made the words of the Psalmist its own : " Dost thou show wonders among the dead? Shall the dead rise up and praise thee?" but, unlike to him, it has not known what answer to give to its own question. And so it went on, until at length, after many a false dawn, the world's Easter morning indeed broke, and from beside an empty tomb they went forth, the witnesses of Jesus, preaching Him and the resurrec- tion ; men able to declare things which they had seen, — that there was indeed a risen Head of our race, one who had tasted death for every man, w^ho, not in poet's dreams, or in legend of olden time, but in very truth, had burst its bands, because it was impossible He should be holden by them; that there was one for whom death was what men had so often, and so fondly 200 LECTURE II. and significantly called it — even a sleep; for He had laid Him down and slept, and after his three days' rest in the grave, risen up again, because the Lord had sustained Him. The day at length arrived, when men were able to go forth, preaching Him who had shown himself alive by many infallible proofs ; in whom too, being risen, mortality was swallowed up in life ; and who was now seated at the right hand of the Ma- jesty on high, angfels and principalities and powers being made subject unto Him. Such was the word of their message — that the stone t^a^ rolled away, that the riddle of death was solved ; and hearts unnumbered welcomed the tidings, and expanded themselves to it, as flowers, shut through some long dreary night, unfold themselves to the warmth and the hght of the returning day. And shall not we, brethren, bear our part in the great jubilee which that message of theirs has summoned the world to keep, in the glory and gladness of this day and of this day's mystery, before which all phantoms and shadows of the night flee away, before which all sad- ness and despair are weak to stand? Truly, with a deep insight into the mystery of this Easter morn, did the great poet of our modern world make the Easter hymn — the glad voices which said Christ is risen, these, caught by accident, of potency sufficient to wrest the poisori-cup untasted from the hand of the despairing one, who had already raised it to his lips.* And ho^v, brethren, fares it with ourselves ? Is ^* See Goethe's Faust, Scene 1. THE VANQUISHER OF HADES. 201 that word for us a scatterer of sadnesses, a quickener of joys? Does it enable us to put off the sackcloth of our spirits, and to gird ourselves with gladness? Let us earnestly ask ourselves this question ; for surely it is a sign that all is not right with us, when other things make us glad, but not this — when the natural spring fills our hearts with a natural joy, but this with no spiritual — when we stand aloof, cold and unsympa- thizing, as the wondrous cycle of the Christian year goes round, as the great events of our Lord's life and death and resurrection and glory succeed one another in a marvellous order; not humbling ourselves in the humiliations of that life, and therefore not exulting in its triumph; never having stood beside the cross of Jesus, and therefore having no right and no desire to stand beside that open tomb, where he reared his first, his everlasting trophy over death. If we feel not this gladness, let us take shame to our dull hearts, and claim it as a gift from our God, which he will not deny us. Let us ask that we too may be borne up- ward and borne onward on the great stream of the Church's exultation. Let us ask this earnestly ; let us ask it as something which we ought not to be without. For of this let us be sure, that now, after eighteen hundred years, that announcement of the angel, " He is not here, but risen," should he as fresh ahd new, as full of an unutterable joy to us, as it was to those weeping women, who came to pay the last sad honours to their dead Lord, but found only his empty and forsaken grave. LECTURE III. THE SON OF GOD. ACTS XIV. 11. And when the people saw what Paul had done, they lifted up their voices, saying, in the speech of Ly- caonia. The gods are come down to us in the likeness of men. It was my endeavour when we last met, to trace out the manner in which humanity has ever been looking in one quarter or another for its redeemers and sa- viours — for deliverers from physical, deliverers from moral evil. Carrying forward my subject a step, it will be now my aim to show how it has not merely been heroic men, men who triumphed over all, even death itself, but divine men, for whom the world has been craving; in whom it has felt deeply that its help must lie — a most true voice of man's spirit ever tell- ing him that only from heaven the true deliverance of the earth could proceed. We shall see how men have been ever cherishing the conviction of a real fellow- ship between earth and heaven, and that not merely an outward one, but an inward ; a conviction that the two worlds truly m£t, not by external contact only, but in the deeps of personal life, in persons that most really belonged and held on to both worlds. We shall THE SON OF GOD. 203 see how the worhl, with all its discords, has had also its preludes to the great harmonies of redemption ; has had its incarnations — sons of God, that have come down to live a human life, to undertake human toils, to die a human death: its ascensions — sons of men, that have been lifted up to heaven, and made partakers of divine attributes: we shall see how^men have never conceived of this world around us as totally dissevered from that world above us, with an impassable gulf between them, but always as in living intercommu- nion the one with the other. And to this subject the words of my text will form a fitting introduction, yielding, as they do, a signal testimony to a wide-spread faith through the heathen world in these livins relations between heaven and earth ; for no sooner did those men of Ljstra see in Paul and Barnabas, beneficent healing presences, with power to chase away the sicknesses of men, than^ at once they leaped to the conclusion, "The gods are come down to us in the likeness of men," and could hardly be restrained from offering them divine ho- nours. The words themselves are a noticeable evidence of the world's preparedness, even in that day, when so- much of an earlier and more childlike faith had pe- rished, to welcome its deliverer from heaven. Nor are we without a parallel evidence to the same in that exclamation of the awe-struck heathen centurion, who, at sight of nature suflfering WMth her suflfering Lord and setting her seal to the aw^ful meaning of his death, could come to no other than a like conclusion, and exclaimed, ** Truly this was the Son of God." For indeed this, which is peculiar to our Christian 204 LECTURE III. faith, namely, that in it at length, and in it only, a real meeting-place between heaven and earth has been established in the person of Jesus of Nazareth — that the divine vt'as born into the human, and so, not by transient and external contact, but in very deed, hea- ven came down to earth, and the earth was lifted up into heaven, God became a man, and man God — this, which is the peculiar prerogative and glory of our Christian faith, is yet not so peculiarly ours, but that every religion has, in some shape or other, made pre- tension to the same. It was claimed of all, though fulfilled only in one, " The tabernacle of God is with men, and he will be their God, and dwell among them" — this in positive fulfilment did only in the Only-begotten come true; yet, as far as the idea reaches, is the essence and centre, not of one religion, but of all. Men may conceive it under different aspects, may imagine it to be brought about in various ways; some of these ways will approach nearer to the heart of the matter than others; but this idea, in one shape or another, must constitute the central one of every religion. I will endeavour to trace a few proofs of this, as in the heathen religions of antiquity they meet us every where, — to hold up before you a few forms in which, with more or less distinctness, men expressed their desire after, or embodied their belief in, this fellowship,— and more than fellowship, this union be- tween God and man ; and then to show how far short, even in idea, not to speak of the realization of that idea, all which men ever conceived in this way fell of the actual fact upon which the Church is founded. THE SON OF GOD. 205 And first, would we trace what is nearest to a na- tion's heart, we should turn to its poetry ; there we shall find not what it has, but what it is reaching after — not its actual work-day world, but that ideal world after which it is longing. If, then, we turn to the oldest, the epic, poetry of Greece, we behold heroes and gods and men mingling familiarly together. In this free intercourse, in this beaten and well-trodden way between earth and heaven, we have what we might venture to call the heathen counterpart to the heavenly ladder seen by Jacob in dream, on which an- gels were ascending and descending, with the Lord himself at the summit ; even as that was but the weak intimation of a closer union between earth and heaven to be effected in the person of the Son of Man — a union wherein God should no longer appear at the sum- mit of the ladder, but at its foot — no longer a God far off, but near ;— men now at last beholding the " hea- ven open, and the angels of God ascending and de- scending upon the Son of Man." We may select one instance more, which Greek art will supply, of the sense of so intimate relations between God and man, as only the Incarnation could at length adequately express. We oftentimes take it as a matter of course, one which therefore excites in us no reflection or surprise, that the statues of the Grecian gods should be in human forms, in the pei- fection of human grace and beauty — the highest which the skill of artist could attain. And vet, what a won- derful thing was this,— to have arrived at the convic- tion that the human was the most adequate expression 18 206 LECTURE III. for the divine — that if God did reveal himself, it would be as man — that the nearest approximation to the ideal of humanity was the worthiest type of the Godhead. These too in their kind we must regard as prophecies of the Incarnation ; not, indeed, of the deeps of that mystery, but weak prophecies of it still. Not, however, in the ideal world of art only did this faith find utterance, but in the actual world as well. The whole scheme of an Oriental court, aiid eminently that of the Great King, was laid out on the idea that it was the visible representation of the court of heaven, and the king himself a visible incarnation of the highest God. The sense of this speaks out in every arrangement, in the least as in the greatest, and is the key to them all. Thus, the laws of that kingdom, when once uttered, could not be reversed or changed, (Dan. vi. 8,) because the king who gave them was the incarnation of God, and God cannot repent, or alter the thing which has gone out from his lips. * * God is aT'pETtT'os, bis counsels afiitofit'k^'ta, and he not a man that he should repent; and even such his visible repre- sentative on earth must be. It was on this unchangreableness of vifhat had once gone forth from the lips of the king, which itself was thus no capricious state rule, but grew out of the very idea on which the Persian monarchy rested, that the enemies of Daniel founded their confident expectations of suc- cess in their conspiracy against him. (Dan. vi. 8, 15.) So, too, when then the purposes of Ahasuerus the king were altered concerning the Jews, he yet could not reverse the edict which permitted them to be attacked by their enemies: he could only give another edict, allowing them to stand upon their defence. (Esth. viii. 10, 11.) THE SON OF GOD. 207 None, as again we learn from the Book of Esther (iv. 11,) might come into the king's presence unbidden and live, save by a distinct act of grace. They must die, unless the golden sceptre, in token of this grace, was held out to them; because none but the pardoned can behold the countenance of God and not perish at its intolerable brightness. So, as that same book teaches us, it was forbidden to one clothed in. sack- cloth to enter within the palace ; (iv. 2 ;) and this, because heaven, of which that palace was the image, is the region of life and gladness, not of sorrow or of death; which, therefore, as they might not enter there, so neither might these things, which are their visible signs and symbols, enter into the palace of the king. The seven princes that stood nearest to the throne, and saw the king's face, (i. 14,) corresponded to the seven highest angels that were supposed to stand before, and nearest to the throne of God. Nor was the adoration offered to the Persian king a mere act of homage or sign of fealty, but was most truly, and in the highest sense, a worshipping; and exactly because felt as such, was so earnestly resisted, though from different motives, by the Greek alike and the Jew — by the Greek, as dishonouring to himself, by the Jew, as dishonouring to his God. It was a wor- shipping of the king's person for the presence of God, which was supposed to dwell singularly in him. Again, when the foremost place in all the earth had passed into the possession of another, what was the apotheosis of a Roman Caesar, in life, or after death, but a troubled speaking out of men's sense, 208 LECTURE III. that he who stood in the forefront of humanity, the chiefest of the sons of men, should also be more than man? This, in itself most true, did only become the fearful blasphemy it was, when the worship was mis- applied, and the object to which it was due had been mistaken. It was indeed an irony of the heathen world, and of its magnificent pretensions, worthy of the great author of mischief, when the honour that it owed to Christ the Lord, being diverted on the way, was rendered to a Nero or a Tiberius. The prince of this world was herein mocking his votaries, exactly as he mocked the Jews, when they too were led to incorporate their rejection of all that was best, and their choice of all which was worst, in an out- ward fact, in that cry of theirs — " Not this man, but Barabbas." And I may perhaps be permitted to observe as not alien to cur present argument, but as another striking proof of this craving of men for that which is given to them in Christ and in his incarnation, for such a bridal of two worlds as was celebrated therein, that whenever, even in Christendom, men have lost their faith in this gift, or have suffered that faith to grow weak, then they have not rested till they have created for themselves a substitute for that truth which thus they have let go. Thus, no sooner had men's faith in a present, though invisible. Head of his Church waxed feeble — no sooner did the God-man, because he could not be seen, or touched, or handled, appear far off to carnal and sense-bound generations, than they began to yearn for a substitute, who should THE SON OF GOD. 209 give them in palpable form all which they no longer felt that they possessed in Him. And thus men began to lend questionable honours and ambiguous titles to a pope ; and ever as they more let go their sense of the reality of Christ's headship, they lent more of his glories, of his names, his honours, his divine attributes, to the man who had placed himself in his seat, and offered them in a gross and visible way that connexion between earth and heaven, which they were intended to have found in Him of whom it is written, " The Head of every man is Christ." Exactly in the same manner, a thoughtful observer of the progress of Unitarianism in our own day, will not have failed to note that a system which shrinks from saying " Christ is God," yet finds it impossible to rest in that denial, and is rapidly and inevitably hastening to say, even as it has already said plainly enough by the lips of its most forward votaries, " Man is God," giving, in the end, to every man, that which it started with affirming it was blasphemy to give to any, even to the Son himself. And were that, or any other yet barrener form of unbelief, to succeed for a time in emptying the throne in men's hearts wherein the Son of God is sitting, on the instant we should behold impious and frantic enthusiasts springing up on every side, claiming the vacant seat, and obtaining, too, the homage which was withholden from Him. For truly, our deliverance from superstition lies not in unbelief but in faith. In holding fast the truth, and only in that, are we delivered from its distorted coun- terfeit. Thus the Holy Eucharist, satisfying^ as it 18* 210 ' LECTURE III. does, the solemn and mysterious cravings of the human soulj delivers the Christian world from hateful mys- teries and dark orgies. Thus, again, faith in the sacrifice once offered upon Calvary hinders and cuts off those hideous attempts at expiation, which, but for that, the sin -laden heart of man would inevi- tably devise for itself. And thus, too, an exalted Saviour preserves us from blasphemous usurpers of divine honours, the truth of God from the lie of the devil. But let us see, brethren, what nearer to the heart of the matter the old world had, of incarnations and ascensions; let us see the highest form in which it presented these truths to itself. And, contemplating that highest, let us still take note how the Christian truth of the Word made flesh, even as a doctrine, was original — not to say that alone in Christ it passed from a speculation, and became a fact. It will be instruc- tive to mark how all other systems not merely did not give what they professed to give, (for that of course,) but how even what they professed to give, fell .short of,, and was only an approximation to, the actual needs of humanity. Thus the Greek mind could conceive of a much- siifTering man lifted up for his toils' and virtues' sake into the highest heaven. Their -pantheon is full of such, — of heroes after the toils and conflicts of a life worthily spent for their fellow-men, made free of heaven, and admitted even into the circle of the immortal gods; and so far they had in their popular THE SON OF GOD. 211 belief anticipations of Him, the man Christ Jesus, ^vhom, because He humbled Himself, and for our -sakes became obedient to the death of the cross, therefore God greatly exalted Him, setting Him at his own right hand. But yet how little was there here any true blend- ing of the human and divine, and how truly men felt this; as is wonderfully testified by the fact that this exalted and glorified man, however many divine attri- butes were added to him, yet did not get the name of God; he was but a W^wi/ after all; he was not, to use language which has been well used of the Son, Deus ex radice. They felt with a right instinct that a deified man did not thereby, and thart indeed he could not, become God — that no accumulation of divine honours could make one truly God, who was not such already; even as the church, in a later day, was not to be deceived into accepting the Arian theory con- cerning the Son of God as an adequate substitute for her own, by the utmost prodigality of divine names, and titles, and honours which were proposed to be lavished upon Him. She felt rightly that all these would not in the least fill up the chasm that divided, and must divide for ever, God from that which was not God. So was it with the apotheosis of heroic men: the divine glory did but gild and play upon the surface of their being; if a man was to be also God, if there was to be any perfect union of the two, it must be by other means, by a process which must reach deeper and much farther back than this. But, moreover, the other half, the other factor. 212 LECTURE III. even of the idea of such a person as this, was alto- gether strange to the Greek mind. A God coming down from heaven, emptying himself of his glory, and in a noble suffering undertaking a human life, and, that he might be the helper and deliverer of men, enduring all, even the hardest, for them, tasting death itself, — all this, a God thus stooping, and suffering, and dying, was wholly alien to every conception of theirs. The very idea of the gods with them was of beings free from all care, untouched by any sorrow, living ever joyful, and ever at ease: or, if they so- journed for awhile in this toilsome and tearful world, yet sojourning as visiters only — not touching the bur- den of its wo with the tip of their finger — under- taking it might be human tasks, yet undertaking them in sport, not really coming under, or feeling their weight. True, indeed, that this conception of a suf- fering God, which was so strange to all western habits of thought, was familiar to the mythologies of the East. They have their Osiris, — and not him alone, though in him these sufferings of a divine nature come the most prominently and gloriously out — who, in the fulness of his beneficent purposes for the race of men, and in mighty and earnest conflict with the prince of evil, endures all things, going down even to the deeps of death: and thus, no doubt, the Eastern religions were not without their, anticipations of Him, who, though He was rich, yet made Himself poor, even the poorest, for us, that we through his poverty- might be rich. And yet how imperfect, even as regards the idea, THE SON OF GOD. 213 was this too. Humanity, however it craved a God for its deliverer, yet craved just as earnestly a man ; it wanted a redeemer out of its own bosom, one in whose every triumph over moral or physical evil it could rejoice that " God had given such power unto men." It felt, and truly, that no other would serve its turn — that, forasmuch as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also, if he would be every man's brother, and thus able to be every man's redeemer, must be partaker of the same; "fairer than the chil- dren of men," and yet himself a child of man — that from the midst of itself, from the depths of its own life, its redeemer must proceed. A God who was only God, might conquer for himself, but there was no pledge or proof in his conquest, that man could conquer; a God who overcame death and rose from the dead, gave no assurance thereby of a resurrection for the race of man. And thus each of the great divisions of the Gentile world had but a fragment, even in thought and desire, of the truth : the Greek world, the exaltation of man- hood — the Oriental, the glorious humiliations of God- head; and thus it came to pass that each of these, even as a speculation, was maimed and imperfect. These systems, so far from providing what man needed, had not satisfactorily and on every side even contemplated what he needed ; much less had they given it. And how indeed could it be given ? This was the riddle which He alone whose counsels were from ever- lasting, who knew all the true needs of man, and 214 LECTURE III. meant to satisfy them all, could solve. It seemed in- deed that the world, craving one who should be man no less than God for its deliverer, put its demands in irreconcilable contradiction with themselves; and, again, that demanding for its redeemer one in whom the human and divine should not slightly and tran- siently touch one another, but should be brought into innermost union, it here too required that which it was impossible that it ever should receive. And yet the same wonder -stroke of God solved both these problems. The first difficulty was this, If the world needed a man, yet where should it find the man that it needed? It had often put forth its champions, but there was ever found an attainder of blood in every man's de- scent, a blot on every man's scutcheon, a flaw in every man's armour. If no helper of humanity but one born out of its bosom would do, and yet every one born from thence partook in its sin, was one needing to be healed, and who could not therefore be himself the healer, was a sharer in the diseased organism, and could not therefore expel its poison from others, whence was such a one to come ? The answer was at length given in the Virgin-born. Men had long before had an obscure apprehension that only so could the difficulty be solved. The birth from a pure virgin had been attributed to many.* For there was that in men's hearts w^hich told them that for one to be an effectual Saviour he must be a new beginning, a new * Especially to founders of religions, as Buddha, Zoroaster. J/ X^^ OF THB ^^ THE SON OF GOD. ((U IT I T'^S R S I T head of the race; not a mere link in t^^^^nr^&p -^^ b»* sinful humanity, since of the sinful the sinle^^coutdj J," " never come; but by such marvellous means as that miraculous conception he must be exempted from the corruption transmitted from generation to generation of the children of men. " ■ But this was not all; this Virgin-born was also Immanuel, was that which men had asked for, " God with us." He had, indeed, a Father, but that Father was God ; and thus in the deepest deep, in the inner- most core and centre of his life, this man was also God. In the cradle of Bethlehem, when a pure Vir- gin had been touched with fire from heaven, and had borne a Son, in Him, at length, the world found all its longings fulfilled, its seemingly irreconcilable de- sires all satisfied and atoned. Thus, brethren, I have sought to trace out before you, to-day, that which was perhaps the w^orthiest element in the religions of the heathen world — that which, indeed, entitled them to the character of re- ligions at all — their recognition, with all shortcomings and deficiencies, of a real bond between earth and heaven, their sense that the Divine could reveal itself no way so fitly as in the forms of the human, that the human could be lifted up to, and made to bear the weight of, the Divine — that man was God's offspring, of the blood royal of creation. The pervading sense of this was indeed what mainly constituted them, in God's providence, preparations and predispositions for the absolute truth which should in fulness of time be revealed. For that there were upon these points cer- 216 LECTURE HI. tain predispositions for the reception, of the truth in heathendom, which did not exist among the Jews, no one, I think, can deny. None can thoughtfully read the early history of the church, and mark how hard the Jewish Christians found it to make their own the true idea of a Son of God, as 4ndeed is witnessed by the whole Epistle to the Hebrews — how comparatively easy the Gentile converts; how the Hebrew Christians were continually in danger of sinking back into Ebi- onite heresies, making Christ but a man as other men, refusing to go on unto perfection, or to realize the truth of his higher nature; — no one can mark this, and contrast it with the genial promptness of the Gentile church to embrace the offered truth, " God manifest in the flesh," without feeling that there must have been effectual preparations in the latter which wrought its greater readiness for receiving and heartily embracing this truth when it arrived. And what other preparations could they have been, but these which we have been tracing?* , It is true that there was with this, infinitely too feeble a sense, too feeble even in the best, of the manner in which sin had cast them down from the * The Christian apologists often find help here. Thus Arnobius, (Adv, Gen., 1. 1, c. 37:) Natuin hominem colimu?. Quid eninij vos hominem nullum colitis natum ? Non unum et alium, non innumeros alios, quinimmo non omnes quos jam templis habetis vestris, mortalium sustulistis ex numero, et ccelo sideribusque donastis T He could appeal to such pas- sages as that of Cicero, {Tusc. Qusest., 1. 1, c. 13:) Totuni prope ccelum nonne humano genere completum est ? THE SON OF GOD. 217 high places of their birth — a confession far too weak and wavering, (for only the Holy Ghost could have Wrought a right confession,) of that attainder that was in their blood, the utter forfeiture of their in- heritance which their sin had brought about. It was not seen how man had ceased to be a son of God, could never, but by a new adoption, a regeneration, become such again. But man's divine original, his first creation in the image of God, was so firmly held fast to by all nobler spirits, that St. Paul, upon the hill of Mars, could at once take his stand on this as a great meeting point between himself and his Athenian hearers — as the ground which was common to them and him: " Certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring." (Acts xvii. 28.) Here at least, they were at one. And, brethren, it is possible that we may learn a lesson which we need, or at least remind ourselves of truths which we are in danger of suffering to fall too far back in our minds, by the contemplation of those, who, amid all their errors and darkness and confusion and evil, had yet a sense so deeply imprinted, a faith so lively, that man was/Vom God, as well as to God; capable of the divine, only because himself of a divine race. Oftentimes it would seem as if our theology of the present day had almost lost sight of this, or at least held it with only too feeble a grasp; beginning, as it so often does, from the fall, from the corruption of human nature, instead of beginning a step higher up — beginning with man a liar, when it ought to 19 218 LECTURE III. have begun with man the true image and the glory of God. , And then, as a consequence, the dignity of Christ's Incarnation, of his taking of humanity, is only imper- fectly apprehended. That is considered in the main as a make-shift for bringing God in contact with man ; and not to have been grounded on the perfect fitness of man, as the image of God, of man's organs, his affections, his life, to be the utterers and exponents of all the life, yea, of all the heart of God. It is oftentimes considered the chief purpose of Christ's Incarnation, that it made his death possible, that it provided him a body in which to do that which merely as God he could not do, namely to suffer and to die ; while some of the profoundest teachers of the past, so far from contemplating the Incarnation in this light, have rather affirmed that the Son of God would - equally have taken man's nature, though of course under very different conditions, even if he had not fallen — that it lay in the everlasting purposes of God, quite irrespective of the fall, that the stem and stalk of humanity should at length bear its perfect flower in Him, who should thus at once be its root and its crown. But the Incarnation being thus slighted, it follows of necessity, that man as man is thought meanly of, though indeed it is only man as fallen man, as separated by a wulful act of his own from God, to whom this shame and dishonour belong. In his first perfection, in the truth of his nature, he is the glory of God, the image of his Son, as the Son is the image THE SON OF GOD. 219 of the Father, declaring the Son as the Son declared the Father: — surely a thought, brethren, which if we duly lay to heart, will make us strive that our lives may be holy, that our lives may be noble, worthy of Him who made us after his image, and when we had marred that and defaced it, renewed us after the same in his Son. LECTURE IV. THE PERFECT SACRIFICE. MICAH VI. 6, 7. Wherewith shall I come hefore the Lord, and how my- self before the high God? shall I come before him with burnt-offerings, with calves of a year old ? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit ^f i^y hody for the sin of my soul ? There are few facts more mysterious, brethren, than the prevalence of the rite of sacrifice through the world. Nations which it is impossible could have learned it of one another, nations the most diverse in culture, the highest in the scale, and well nigh the lowest, differing in every thing besides, have yet agreed in this one thing, namely, in the offering of things ' which have life to God, — or when the idea of the one God has been lost, — to the gods many, of heathenism — the essential of that offering in every case being that the life of the victim was rendered up. And they have all agreed in considering that this act of theirs had a value, that it did place upon a new and better footing the relations in which they stood to the hea- venly powers; that by these sacrifices they might THE PERFECT SACRIFICE. 221 more or less re-constitute the relations between them- selves and God, which by any cause had been dis- turbed, bringing themselves nigher to Him, and ren- dering: Him more favourable to them. Now there are few or none in our day who would count that they had explained the prevalence of these convictions, in the conspiracy of the more artful few to hold the simpler many in bondage. These convic- tions were too wide-spread, too universal ; moreover, men we/e too direfully earnest in carrying them out, to allow us to accept any such explanation as this. Sacraments they might be, and often were, of the devil, and not of God, but yet dreadful sacraments still — bonds and bands by which men -knit themselves to one another, and knit themselves also to a spiritual world, — if not to heaven, yet to hell. Those w^ho explain them into artful contrivances, may so give witness for their own shallow insight into the past history of the world, for the absence of any deeper needs at work in their own hearts, since if there had been such, they would have suggested a profounder explanation : but the time is past when they will find any number of persons to accept their explanation as sufficient. As little can their theory be historically justified, who trace up the existence of sacrifice to the rude notions about God which belonged to an early age; for then we should see a people, as it attained worthier views about Him, gradually outliving and renouncing the practice of this rite. But, contrary to this, we find in the most cultivated nations the theory of sacri- 19* 222P LECTURE IV. flee only the more elaborately worked out, the sacri- fices themselves only multiplied the more. Here and there there might be found in some obscure corner of the earth, a savage tribe or horde, which had sunk below the idea and practice of sacrifice ; though one in which, in one form or another, it did not survive, it would be difficult to point out; but nowhere a peo- ple that had risen above it. Here and there a philoso- pher may have set himself against the popular belief, but nowhere has he been able to change it ; he has ever stood single and alone, and has as little carried with him the more thoughtful and deeper spirits of his time as the common multitude. He may have eloquently declaimed on the absurdity of supposing the gods would be pleased with the death-struggles of animals, with the blood of bulls and of goats; but there was ever something in men, though they might not be able to explain it to themselves, which told them that sacrifice had a significance and a meaning, which a few plausible words could not get rid of or destroy. Such, brethren, I think you will admit are the facts, for I speak to those capable of judging. Whe- ther we turn to those pages of Greek and Roman literature, brought by our studies in this place espe- cially before us, or whether we take a wider range within our ken, every where alike we encounter a con- sciousness upon man's part, that the relations between him and the powers in whose hand he is, have been interrupted and disturbed. The fact might be some- times overlooked and forgotten by him in times of THE PERFECT SACRIFICE. 223 prosperity, but we see it evermore mightily emerging from the deep of his heart, when the judgments of offended heaven w^ere evidently abroad. Every where, too, we encounter the effort by certain specific and definite acts of expiation and atonement to restore those disturbed relations again. " Without blood is no remission of sin," was a truth as deeply graven on the heart and conscience of heathen as of Jew. For vast and complex as is the Jewish system of offering, yet it is hot a greater body of sacrifice than we meet almost every w^here else, when we turn to the ritual of heathenism. That Levitical system is of course in every way more complete : it is an organic whole; excluding all individual caprice, all too into which the true idea of sacrifice, when escaping from God's control, would inevitably degenerate. More- over it was no will-worship, but the appointed way in which God was to be sought, and not that in which men out of their own hearts imagined that they would seek Him. But with all this, it does not, I think, run into greater detail, nor take more entire possession of the whole life of man, nor demand a more continual recognition of a distance and separation from God which has need to be removed, than did the heathen systems of sacrifice with which it was surrounded, when we take them in their sum total, when we count up all their infinite forms and varieties. For doubtless it was meant that they too, by this their multitude and repetition, should give testimony against them- selves, should witness as plainly as did the Jewish' in the same way, for their own weakness and unprofit- 224 LECTURE IV. ableness; since of them, too, we may say, that had they been effectual to do what they professed to do, *' would they not have ceased to be offered, because the worshippers once purged would have had no more conscience of sin ?" But thus, by their endless multi- plication, and by the confession of weakness contained therein, they pointed, though not with prophetic ex- plicitness, yet still in their degree, away from them- selves, and to that one all-sufficient sacrifice once of- fered upon Calvary. Nor need we, when we look a little deeper into the matter, when we come to apprehend what was the central idea of sacrifice, be so much surprised, as at first we are, to find it this rite of an almost universal character. For then we perceive that it was no arbitrary invention, for which a thousand others might have been substituted as well; but rather that the essence of all religion lies in that of which sacrifice was the symbol — namely, in the offering up of self, in the rendering up of our will to the will of God, the yielding of our life to Him as something which had been rebellious in time past, and therefore worthy to die, but of which we desire that the rebellion may cease, that so we may of his mercy receive it back a life pardoned and forgiven. The blood is the seat of the life, the seat therefore of the (TuOvfua, the desire, which in fallen man as a desire at variance with the will of God. In sacrifice, in the pouring out of the blood, is the symbolic rendering up of this rebellious principle; a confession that it is only worthy to die; that as the thing offered died, so the offerer might THE PERFECT SACRIFICE. 225 justly (lie — the act having of course only its true sig- nificance when the offerer did realize to himself what he did — rested not in the outward work, but said to himself and to God, " I stand in living communion with this which I offer; even as this blood, so I offer myself; dying that I may live ; giving myself to Thee, that I may receive my true life back again at thy hands ; losing my life that I may find it." Of course, it is not to be supposed that each worshipper so dis- tinctly gave to himself an account of what he was doing ; but this lay more or less obscurely in the back- ground of his mind, and gave a meaning to his act. Our ordinary use of the word sacrifice, shows how truly we have gotten to the innermost heart of its meaning ; for it is ever used to signify the giving up of something dear. And what so dear as our self- will? The giving up of that is indeed the giving up of all. ' .. ' But when we speak of the idea of sacrifice as being this giving up of the self-will, there may seem a dif- ficulty in applying^ this, when we come to the great and only perfect sacrifice offered by Christ on the cross. Of course it was not there — no one would dare to suppose it was — the offering up of a rebellious will ; we hardly dare speak of such a thing, though it be but to deny it. But it was the giving up of his own will* — that will which had the liberty of choosing for ' * And therefore the controversy of the Church with the Monothelites in the seventh century, a conflict in which com- monly so little interest is taken even by Students of Church History, was one for life and death. The denial of a human will in Christ was in fact a denial of his sacrifice. 226 LECTURE IV. itself what the Father had not chosen for it, but in the entire rendering up of which he realized the Very cen- tral idea of all sacrifice, which all that had gone before had only pointed at weakly: "Sacrifice and burnt-of- fering Thou wouldst not ; then said I, Lo^ I come to do thy will, O God." In other words, sacrifice and burnt-offering God was weary of — those shadows' of the true; and Christ came to give the substance; and his actual pouring out of his soul to death was the outer embodiment of the inw^ard truth, that this yield- ing of his will to his Father's reached to the uttermost, did not shrink from or stop short of the last and most searching proof to which it was put. In sacrifice, then, was the confession of a life for- feited, and this confession incorporating itself in an act, wherein the forfeiture was actually carried out. This however is but half the idea of sacrifice: for it is ever this confession made in another. If a man had given himself to death, because he felt that he was "W'orthy to die, he would but have involved his already confused relations to God in deeper confusion. He might be unworthy to live, but was not therefore at his own choice to die. If as a sinner, he owed God a death, yet as God's creature, made to serve Him, he equally owed Him a life. The premises are right, that man's Hfe is forfeited ; but the conclusion fear- fully wrong, when he carries out himself and in his own person the forfeiture. Such false conclusions from right premises they draw, the miserable victims that in our day fling their bodies to be crushed beneath the wheels of some idol car; the same they have drawn. THE PERFECT SACRIFICE. 227 who, in despair at the greatness of their sins, have lifted up their hands against their own life; for even self-murder, that most hideous perversion of the idea of sacrifice, yet grounds itself on a sense of life being the only worthy offering. Thus a Judas goes and hangs himself, because he feels his sin so great that it cannot be left without an atonement, and in the dark- ness and unbelief of his heart, he has put back the one atonement which would have been sufficient even for a sin so great as his; and this too is the thought of each other, who by a like fearful act of self-violence has denied the love, though he cannot deny the righ- teousness, of God. Never then in himself, never by means of his own life, could man's acknowledgment that that life was forfeited rightly be carried out. It must needs be in another. And the same reason exists against making that other some fellow-man. His life too is a sacred thing, is itself an end. It could not therefore be used as this means to some other end. In human sacrifices, in the offering of other men's lives, there appear the same false consequences from right grounds as in men's offering of their own. It remained that, if sacri- fice was to be, the sphere of animal life must be that of which it should take possession, and in which it must move — the life of animals being the nearest akin to, and the noblest after, man's — and therefore fitter than any meaner for the setting forth his oblation of himself. And man thus taking possession of this, either at God's express command, or moved by his own religious instincts, was indeed taking possession 228 LECTURE IV. of that over which he had entire right, of that which having been given him for the use of his body, was much more given him for the spiritual needs of his soul. Such, I think, we may venture to say was the nor- mal unfolding of the idea of sacrifice; the abnormal appears in those revolting caricatures of the true idea, on which we have lightly touched — in human sacri- fices — in dreadful self-oblations — in Baal priests cut- ting themselves with knives, and so pouring out, if not all, yet a part of their life — in the self-inflicted tortures and living death of Indian Fakirs — in the blind de- spair of mighty sinners, who with profane hand have broken in upon and laid waste the awful temple of their own lives. Wonderful indeed, brethren, is the manner in which, armed with the truth, we may look upon past pages of the religious history of man, some of the most soiled and blotted, and decypher there an original writing of God, which all those stains and blots have not availed to render illegible altogether.* If only we have an ear to hear, marvellous voices will reach us, and from quarters most unexpected, which shall speak to us of Calvary and of the Cross, though they little mean it themselves — such voices for instance as his, who, ac- . counting for the human sacrifices of the Gauls, ob- served, that they Were deeply persuaded that only the * Tertullian {De J^nirnd, c. 41 ;) Quod enim k Deo est non tarn extinguitur qu^m obumbratiir. Potest enim obumbrari, quia non est Deus; extingui non potest, quia k Deo est. THE PERFECT SACRIFICE. 229 life of man was a fit redemption for man.* What was this conviction of theirs but the dark side of that truth which the apostle to the Hebrew^s proclaimed, when he said that the blood of bulls and of goats could not take away sin, but that it must be purged aw^ay by better sacrifices than these ?t Nor do I think that it will otherwise than repay us well to follow a little into detail the convictions of the world concerning that which constituted a sacrifice of worth, and trace how every thing here pointed whether, it meant it or not, * Caesar {De B. G., 1. 6, c. 16 :) Pro vita hominis nisi ho- minis vita reddatur, non posse aliter deorum iramortalium numen placari arbitrantur. Cf. Miilier's Dorians^ b. 2, c. 8, § 2. Out of a sense of this arose the extreme difficulty of eradicatinor' human sacrifices in the Roman empire, and the long survival of some of them. Thus Tertullian [Apol. 9 :) Infantes penes Africam Saturno immolabantur palam usque ad proconsulatum Tiberii. Cf. Scorp., c. 7; Minucius Felix, p. 199, Ouzel's Edit.; Pliny, ZT. iV., 1. 30, c. 3, 4; Eusebius, Praep. Evang., 1. 4, c. 17. ■j- Thus there was an obscured truth in those abject and crouching superstitions which Plutarch paints with such a masterly hand in his exquisite little treatise, n^pi AftatSat^iovtaj —a truth which he misses — a recognition, that is, of sin, of a great gulf fixed between the sinner, and the offended power of heaven, which the 5tKjt6at;ttcov, however vainly, was seeking to bridge over. His terror and his trouble had a true ground, and one which would hinder him from accepting as sufficient such attempts to pacify his fears, as those which Plutarch offers him, namely that the gods were kind {ix.EiT.ixf^oi,') There was something else besides this which he was craving to know, before he could dare to believe that they were other than enemies to him. 20 230 LECTURE IV. yea, when it seemed most to point away from Him, to the central figure in the world's spiritual history, to the immaculate Lamb, which taketh away the sins of the world. Thus it is hardly needful to observe, that it lay ever in the deepest convictions of men that an offer- ing, to be acceptable, must be an offering of value, not something which cost the bringer nothing, — that, while all was poor by comparison with Him to whom it was offered, or considered in relation to that for which it was offered, yet must it be the best which the offerer had; — not the lame and the blind, not the scanty gifts of a niggard hand ; — he thus giving token, that if he had aught worthier he would bring it. Therefore must the selected victim be pure of fault and of blemish, or, having such, was unfit for the altar — the sense of this required perfection being as lively in heathen sacrifice as in Jewish. Therefore was the bullock brought which had never yet submitted its neck to the yoke, the horse which had known no rider, or, in Hindoo ritual, no touch even of man ; in other words, that was brought which had not been already used and in part worn out in the service of the world, but which was thus w^hoUy and from the first consecrated to heaven. Hence, too, as the offer- ing must not be a niggard one, the prodigality in sacrifice which startles us at times: the hecatombs of victims, the rivers of oil, the cattle from a thousand hills. Herein, too, lay the explanation of yet direr sacri- fice — as of their sons and daughters in the Moloch- THE PERFECT SACRIFICE. 231 "vi'orship of the Phenicians — the fruit of their body for the sin of their soul; — such offering, for instance, as we read of at Carthage, when, instead of the cheaper substitutes with which they had satisfied thenaselves for long, they sought out, in the mighty peril of the city, the dearest things which they had, the choicest children of the noblest houses, and cast them into the glowing arms of that merciless idol, which their sin- darkened hearts had devised for their god.* Out of this same sense that an offering grew in worth with the worth of that which was offered, sprang the re- joicing among the worshippers of Odin, when the lot of the yearly sacrifice fdl upon no meaner man than the king — the pledge of a future felicity to the nation which was esteemed herein to lie.f To what did all this reaching out after the worthiest, the purest, the choicest, the best, point, even in its dreadfullest per- versions, but to Him who was the fairest of the chil- dren of men, the choicest which the earth had borne, the one among ten thousand, who yet, being such, did by the eternal Spirit offer Himself without spot to God— who being the anointed King of the world, was * Diodorus Siculus, 1. 20, c. 14. Cf. ^ Kin. iii. 27; Euse- bius, Praep. Evang., 1. 4, c. 16. ■f Witsius (De Theol. Gent., p. 683 :) De Septentrionalibus populis refert Dithmarus primo anni mense nonagintanovem sortito filigi solitos qui diis immolarentur, idque durasse usque ad Henrici I. Germaniae regis, tempora. Faustissimum vero id regno litanien existiinatum,*st sbrs regem tetigisset; quani victiinam totius populi multitudo sunima cutn gratulatione et applausu prosecuta sit. 232 LECTURE IV. thus in a condition to make acceptable atonement for all men? Nor less significant was the sense of a more pre- vailing atonement, of an added value which was im- parted to an offering, when one, not thrust on by ne- cessity, not compelled to die, but willingly, offered him- self; the feeling of which was so strong, that if not the reality, yet at least the appearance, of this willing- ness, was often by singular devices sought to be ob- tained.* When, for example, the foremost man of a nation gathered upon his sole devoted head dl the curses which impended on his people, all the anger of the immortal powers,! and with that upon him gave himself to a willing death for all, so turning, it might be, into victory the tide of disastrous battle, what have we here but in its kind a reaching out after Him, the chief and champion of the race of men, whose life no man took from him, for He might have asked of his Father more than twelve legions of angels against his enemies — but who sanctified Himself, freely pour- ing out his soul mito death — and who, not that He might deliver some single people, but all the world, became the piacular expiation of that world, drew upon his own head the penalties which would else * Thus Tertullian, of the parents that offered their children to the Phenician Moloch: {Jpol. 9:) Libentes respondebant, et infantibus blandiebantur, ne lacrimantes immolareniur, Cf. Plutarch, nspt. AEtoftSatjUonaj, c. 13. f Thus Livy, of Decius, {Hist.,\, 9:) Omnes minas peri- culaque ab Deis snperis inferisqiie inse unum vertit, — On this whole subject of men as ^apfmxol, xaOapftata, rtfpt^/jjjuora, artotpojtaiov, see Lomeier, De Lustrat. Vet. Gent., c. 22. THE PERFECT SACRIFICE. 233 have alighted upon all, became a curse for man ; and, when all was at the worst, when all seemed for ever lost, changed by his accepted death the certain defeat into the glorious victory of our race? We may not refuse, brethren, to recognise these re- ferences to the cross of Christ: we shall read the history and mythology of the old world with little profit if we do. Nor need we fear the recognition ; for it is the marvellous, and at the same time most na- tural prerogative of Christianity, that, being the abso- lute truth, it has, or rather itself is, the touchstone to discover all true and all false, detects the truth which is hidden in every lie, finds witness- for itself in that which oftentimes seems, and indeed is, most opposed to itself, is able to recognise in the tares of earth the degenerate wheat of heaven; — in the world's harshest discords, the wreck and ruin of God's fairest harmonies; — and in Satan himself, the lineaments of the fallen angel of God. But besides the witness for the great coming sacri- fice, which was contained in the sacrifices of heathen- ism, how mighty a sense of the cross of Christ, and of its significance, do we meet in other regions of ancient life. What a boding of it, for instance, forms the background of the Greek tragedy. How mysterious is the manner there in which, from some far back transgression, some n;pwrap;^oj a-tri* the curse clings to a family, passes on from generation to generation, an ever-increasing load of transgression ; until at * iEschylus^ Agamemnon^ 1163. 20* 234 LECTURE IV. length the great calamity, the headed-up guilt of all, lights 710^ on the most, but on the least guilty head, on the head of one that by comparison is innocent. What an unconscious symbol this of the curse cleaving to the Adamic race! For as in each lesser circle of that race we most often see the burden of the cross resting with the heaviest weight on the truest heart in that circle, so in the great circle of humanity we behold Him of the truest heart of all, the only unguilty One, bearing on the accursed tree the accumulated curse of the whole Adamic family, which had come down through long ages; and not bearing only, but bearing it away. For as in those solemn and stately works of ancient art to which I alluded, mild breaths of reconciliation seejn to make themselves felt, when once the curse has lighted, the expiation has been made, — not otherwise, and only far more gloriously, does the deep inner connexion between the judgment of the world and the forgiveness of the world appear in that death of Christ, which was at once judgment and forgiveness, in which the world was condemned, and in which, being condemned, the world was also forgiven. But another evidence of the sacrifice of Christ, as that to which the world had been tending, lay in the endeavour of those who, after that sacrifice had been finished, would not accept it, to substitute something else of the same kind in its room. They felt that only so could they stand their ground, could they re- cover or maintain any hold upon the hearts of men. With what monstrous exaggerations the idea and prac- THE PERFECT SACRIFICE. 235 tice of sacrifice re-appeared in the final struggle of Pa- ganism with the Christian faith, is abundantly known to every student of Church history. The apostate Juhan, for instance, of whose life the revival of Pa- gflnism was the ruling passion, ran here into extremes which earned him the ridicule of the more lukewarm' adherents of the old superstition themselves ;* arid he, the same w^ho had trod under foot the cross of Christ, and counted the blood with which he was sanctified a common thing, did yet submit himself to loathsome rites,! seeking in the blood of bulls pro- - fusely poured on him, as in a cleansing bath, that purifying which he had refused to find in the precious blood-sprinkling of the Lamb of God, slain from the foundation of the world. Again, the inner necessity of having somewhere a sacrifice to rest on, the certainty that if men have not the true, they will generate a substitute in its room, was signally proved by the manner in which the doc- trine concerning the mass grew up in the Christian Church itself. No sooner did men's faith in a finished sacrifice, one lying at the ground of every prayer, every act of self-oblation, every acceptable work, grow weak, than the feeling that they must have a sacrifice somewhere, produced, or, so to speak, by instinct de- * See the manner in which the heathen Ammianus Marcel- linus (1.22. c. 12,) speaks of the prodigality of his sacrifices. Vidimarius was the title which was given him at Antioch not apparently by the Christians alone. f Those of the tauroboliad. Prudentius (Pertsteph. 10, 1006 — 1050.) gives a description at large of this revolting rite. 236 LECTURE IV. veloped, a doctrine to answer their needs — turning that Holy Eucharist, which is the ever-present wit- ness in the Church of a sacrifice once completed on the cross, and continually pleaded in heaven, — turning that itself into the sacrifice, and seeking to supply by these poor but continual repetitions, the weakness of their faith in the one priceless offering, upon the ac- ceptance of which, as upon an unchangeable basis, the Church everlastingly reposes. And now, brethren, by way of practical conclusion from all this on which we have been entering to-day — what a witness is there here against that shallow view of the truth which should bless us, that would leave it a bare doctrine, a system of morals, lopping away as superfluous and mystical, as a remnant of Judaism, all which speaks of atonement, of propitiation, of blood-sprinkling, of sacrifice, The contemplation of the benefits of Christ's death under aspects suggested by these words, so far from being this shred of Juda- ism, which a more perfect knowledge must strip off, finds on the contrary as many anticipations every where besides as there. They are as busy about sa- crifice in the outer court of the Gentiles as in the ho- lier place of the Jew; and as little there as here is it a separable accident, the garniture and fringe of some- thing else, but in either case itself constituting the core and middle point of worship, recognised in a thou- sand ways as that which must lie at the ground of all approaches unto God. And these things being so, how can we escape from THE PERFECT SACRIFICE. 237 awning that some of the deepest, the most universal needs of the human heart have not yet been awakened in us, if we have never yet desired to stand under the cross, nor ever claimed our part in the great oblation which was made thereon, as on the holiest altar ever reared upon the earth — needs which that transcendent offering on Calvary was meant for ever and perfectly to satisfy? It is plain, brethren, that we are leading an outside life, playing but with the surfaces of things, never having brought ourselves in contact with inmost realities, that' there never yet has risen upon our souls the awful vision of a holy Gdd, that we have wholly shrunk from looking down into the abysmal deeps of our own corruption, if as yet we have never cried, "Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean ; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow." For when once we have learned aught of this, we then surely feel that not amendment of life, that not tears of sor- row, that not the most perfect baptism of repentance, that not all these together, would of themselves reach Our needs, or remove our stains, or give peace for the past, or confidence for the future; that only in the Lamb slain is there purity, or pardon, or peace. Oh then, brethren, let us hasten there, where we may make that precious blood-sprinkling our own; let us hastea there, lest they rise up against us in the last day — those heathens, who set such a price on their sacrifices, which were at best but shadows of the true ; who made by them such continual acknowledg- ment of guilt which they had contracted, of punish- ment which they deserved, of reconciliation which they 238 . LECTURE IV. • desired ; lest they rise up, condemning us, who shall have counted the blood with which w^e were sanctified a common thing, and brought into the awful presence of the Judge a conscience stained and defiled, which yet might have been purged and for ever perfected by far better sacrifices than theirs. --V LECTURE V. THE r:estorer of paradise. GENESIS V. 29. And he called his name JYoah, saying, This same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which the Lord hath cursed, A WORD or two may be needful on commencing again these lectures, which, after the lapse of some months, I am permitted to resume; I may thus hope to remind such among my present hearers as have heard the earlier discourses, and inform such as have not, what has been their course, and what the road we hitherto have travelled over. I have undertaken, then, to trace in a few leading lines-'tbe-yearnings of the world which was before Christ, or which, though subsequent to Him, has yet lain without the limits of Christendom, and beyond the mighty influences of his word and Spirit, — a world to which He was still therefore a Saviour to come — to trace, I say, the yearnings of this world after its Redeemer, and the presentiments of Him which it cherished. I have sought to show that if there was much in the world,. as in a fallen world there needs must have been, ready to 240 LECTURE V. resist and oppose the coming in of the Truth, prompt to take up arms against it at its appearing, so also, on the other hand, in that it was a world which came first from God, and which had never been abandoned by Him, but which all along He had been in highest wis- dom and highest love preparing for and leading to this glorious consummation, there were in it certain predispositions for the Truth, there was that which was ready to range itself under the banners of that Truth, so soon as once they were openly set up. I have endeavoured, too, to prove that the existence of unconscious prophecies of the truth, resemblances in lower spheres of the spiritual life to all which at last was perfectly manifested in the highest, is only that which we should have expected : so that it is not the presence of these resemblances which need per- plex us, but rather their absence which would have been justly surprising, which would have been indeed most difficult to account for. I take up my subject at this point, and go forward to another branch of it, seeking to show that in ano- ther aspect beside those already contemplated by us, we have in Christ our Lord " the Desire of all na- tions," inasmuch, that is, as we have in Him one who was at perfect understanding with nature, wielded it at his will, declared that He was come to restore it, to bring back the lost Paradise; and did not merely declare this in w^ord, but by first fruits of power exer- cised upon it, by the mighty w^orks that He did, gave manifest tokens that He was come> at once to set it free from the bondage of corruption, and to set free THE RESTORER OF PARADISE. , 241 the race of which He appeared as the Head from the blind tyranny which it exercised upon them — to give to his people something more than the Stoic freedom of opposing an intrepid and obdurate heart to the assaults of fortune, or the accidents of nature. For though that in its place was well, which should enable a man to say, amid a falling world, Impavidum ferient ruincBy yet better still his work, who should so bear up and strengthen and establish the shaken pillars of the universe, that wreck and ruin should find place in it RO more. But why, it may be asked, should this deliverance of nature have been, upon one side, part of the world's expectation? or why, which is in fact the same ques- tion on its other side^ should the giving of this deliver- ance cohere so intimately, as we shall see it does, with Christ's redemptive work, as to be in fact one aspect of that work itself? For this reason — because of the closest connexion in which the disorder from which the redemption was expected, stood related to the sin of man. That disorder was felt truly to be the echo in nature of the deeper discords in man's spiritual ' being. When man sinned, then in the profound and not exaggerated language of our great poet, "All na- ture felt the wound." Man was as the highest note in the scale of creation, and, when he descended, through all nature there followed a corresponding reduction. It became subject to vanity, not willingly, not by an act of its own will, but by reason of another, by reason of him who subjected the same, by reason of man. (Rom. viii. 20.) We behold the fact itself on 21 242 LECTURE V. all sides acknowlerlged, the fact, I mean, of a primal perfection, of a present disorder. Of the sense of primal perfection we have singular witness in the lan- guage, (and there is no such witness as the unconscious ( one which language supplies,) of two the most highly cultivated nations of the ancient world, whom all the present confusions of nature could not hinder from using words signifying order and elegance* to designate the world which they beheld around them; — for so to • them did this grace and beauty gleam through its present disorders, so instinctively did they feel these to belong to the true idea of the universe, grievously as that was now defaced and marred^f While with all this, on the other hand, its present disorders ap- peared so great, its discords so harsh, that the Epicu- rean poet found, as he thought, warrant and ground enough in these for his atheist conclusion, that no hand of Eternal Wisdom presided at its planning, that no final causes could be traced throughout it, but that all was the work of a blind chance. J That conclusion of his was indeed most false, yet this much was true, * Kotf^uoj and mundus, Pliny {H. iV!, 1. 2, c. 3:) Quem xosfiov Graeci, nomine ornamenti appellaverunt, eura nos a per- fecta absolutaque elegantia mundam. Pythagoras is said to have been the first who applied the word xoisfioi to the material universe — a word which was in its way almost as great an ac- quisition for natural philosophy, as was Plato's I8ea for intel- lectual and spiritual. t Compare the De Naturd Deorum, b. 2. ij: Lucretius: Nequicquam nobis divinitus esse paratam Naturam rerura, tantd stat prxdita culpd. THE RESTORER OF PARADISE. 243 that Paradise had disappeared from the earth ; and man, the appointed prince of creation, did stand among the rebel powers of nature; which had cast off his yoke, at the moment when he cast off the yoke of his superior Lord, practising upon him, by a just judgment, the disobedience and the contumacy which it had learned from him; and which did now, with its thorns and its briers, its wastes and its wilder- nesses, its earthquakes and its storms, present him too , faithful a reflex of the sin and evil, the desolation and barrenness of his own heart. Yet nevertheless, though Paradise was gone, he kept in his soul the memory of that which once had been, and with the memory the hope and the confi- dence that it would yet be again — that perhaps, though his eyes could see it nowhere, it yet had not wholly vanished from the earth. If there bloomed no Para- dise in the present, at least there lay one before him and behind. If it lay not near him, yet in the dis- tance, — in the happy Iran, — among the remote Hyper- boreans,* — in the far land of the blameless Ethiopians. He felt, indeed, that he was himself weak to win it back, but he could not resign the trust that a cham- pion would raise, and accomplish for him that which he was unequal to accomplish for himself. Nor was it only when the son of Lamech was born that men said in a joyful expectation, " This same shall comfort us because of the ground which the Lord hath cursed.'' Of many more the same hope was fondly conceived. * See Miiller's Dorians^ b. 2, c. 4. 244 LECTURE y. The world could hardly picture to itself any one of its leading spirits, of the great benefactors of the past, the mighty deliverers in the future, without thinking of the curse upon the earth as more or less lightened in his time and by his aid. For it truly understood that however the resistance which we find in nature, a resistance so stubborn that only with long labour and toil we make it subject to our will, may be part of the needful discipline of the present time — may be, though good in itself, yet good for our present condition, and something which we could not be with- out — still that release from all this, from this resist- ance and contradiction of the outward world, is a portion of the blessedness in store, not indeed so much for its own sake, as because it will go hand in hand with, and be the outward expression of, another and greater healing and deliverance in the inner do- main of men's spirits. This yearning after a lost paradise, this belief that it should some day or other be restored, we find exist- ing every where, and, as was to be expected, in the /i "worthier religions the most vividly. Thus it comes out with a remarkable strength and distinctness in that which has so many noble elements in it, which is in many respects so remarkably free from the more debasing admixtures of most other worships of hea- thendom — I mean the religion of the ancient Persians. Through that all, there runs the liveliest expectation of a time when every poison and poisonous weed should be expelled from the earth, when there should be no more ravening beast, nor fiery simoon, when THE RESTORER OF PARADISE. 245 streams should break forth in every desert, when the bodies of men should cast no shadows, when they , should need no food to sustain their life, when there should be no more poverty, nor sickness, nor old age, nor death. ' And, what is most remarkable, and makes these expectations to belong to our argument is, that not in Jewish prophecy alone were these hopes, and the ful- filment of these hopes, linked with, and consequent upon, the coming of a righteous king, one of whom, righteousness should be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins, who should reprove with equity for the meek of the earth, (Isai. xi. 4, 5;) but in all the anticipations upon all sides of these blessings to men, they were thus connected with the expectation of a king reigning in righteousness. In his time, and because of his presence, these blessings should accrue : he should be himself the middle point of blessing, from which all should flow out. For there was a just sense in men, which hindered them from ever looking for, or conceiving of, any blessings apart from a person with whom they were linked, and from whom they were diffused. Even in the Pollio of the great Latin poet, however little interpreters are at one concerning the wondrous child, the kindler of such joyful expectations, however unsatisfying the common explanations must be confessed to be, yet this much is certain, that the poet could not conceive or dream of a mere natural golden age. It must centre in and unfold itself from a living person : it must stand in a real relation to his appearing, being the outcoming 21* 246 LECTURE V. and reflection of his righteousness. The world's his- tory can have no sentimental and idyllic, it must needs have an epic and heroic, close. But, ij: may be asked, Are we justified in looking at this expectation as the expectation of something which is to be indeed made ours in Him that is true ? All will, I think, allow that the prospect of a restored paradise, — in other words, of a world lightened from its curse, does belong to the very essence of our Christian hope — that there was a truth in the ancient Chiliasra, which all its sensual exaggerations should not induce us to slight or to put aside in so far, that is, as it was a protest against the dishonour which would have been put upon a part of God's creation, or rather upon the completeness of the redemption of that part, if it had been regarded as so utterly and irrecoverably spoiled, that now it could only be destroyed, and not renewed. Assuredly, the hope of this recovery forms part of the anticipation of prophets. The waste places of the world, those outward signs of sin, impressed visibly on nature, shall disappear; " the wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad." What glory the world yet keeps shall be enhanced and infinitely raultiplied ; " The light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days, in the day that the Lord bindeth up the breach of his people, and healeth the stroke of their wound."* (Isai. xxx. 26.) * For the way in which the Jewish commentators under- THE RESTORER OF PARADISE. 247 All the discords which have followed hard upon the fall shall be hushed to peace ; " The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid." (Isai. xi. 10.) And apostles take up the strain: they too declare how " the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now ;" how " the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God." (Rom. viii. 19.) They see, in ecstatic vision, not merely a ne w heaven, but a new earth, and One sitting upon his throne who says, *' Behold, I make all things new." (Rev. xxi. 5.) And we have, not lying thus on the surface of Scripture, other obscurer yet not less significant indi- cations of the intimate connexion between the restora- tion of man and the restoration of the outward world, — as, for instance, in the use of the same word in the New Testament to signify the one and the other. There is a regeneration of man, but the same word (jifx-kiyyiviGia,) is most significantly applied to nature also, and expresses that great and transcendent change which for it also is in store. (Matt. xix. 28.) There is for it also a new birth, for so much this word thus applied tells us, no less than for man, — a casting off of its old and wrinkled skin, — a resurrection morn, when it too shall put on its Easter garments ; when, as some foster-nurse, it shall share in the glory of the stood such passages as these, see Schoettgen, Hor. Heb.^v.^, pp. 63, 171 ; and Eisenmenger's Enldeckt Judenthum, v. 2, p. 826. 248 LECTURE V. royal child whom it has reared ; and who, at length, ascending the throne of his kingdom, is mindful of her in whose lap in time past he has been nurtured.* Man's regeneration is indeed a present one, and na- ture's, in the main, a future; yet are they but work- ings, in narrower and wider spheres, of the same almighty power, and so may thus justly be called by the same name. Nor by word alone, but also by pregnant symbol, it was declared that this redemption was a part of that work which the Son of man came to effect. For I cannot doubt that there was a symbolic pointing at what had been lost, and what was to be won back, in the fact of the temptation of our blessed Lord finding place in the wilderness. The garden and the wilder- ness are thus set forth to us as the two opposite poles. By sin the first Adam lost the garden, which hence- forward disappeared from the earth, so that the very site of it has since been vainly sought; and from that day forth the wilderness was man's appointed home. Christ, therefore, the second Adam, taking up the con- flict exactly at the point where the first Adam had left it, and inheriting, so to speak, all the consequences of his defeat, did, in the wnlderness, do battle w^th the foe, and triumphing in righteousness, won back the garden for man — which, though we see it not yet, will in due time unfold itself from Him and as one of * Chrysostom : Ka^aytsp yap r't^jjvjy, 7ta.ihiov fpE^orfra J8acf^X^xdl', BTtl trjs ^PXV^ ixslvov 'ytvo/xsvov ttji rtatpixr^?, xai (wtri ovmrtoXavf t Twv dyaQwi', ovVw x(d ij xtioi^. THE RESTORER OF PARADISg. 249 the fruits of his victory ; for the centre being won, the circumference will be won also. We recognise a slight hint of the meaning that lay in making the wilderness the scene of this great conflict, in that which one evangelist alone records, and which might at first sight seem but as a stroke added to enhance the desolate savageness of his abode: " He was with the wild beasts." (Mark i. 13.) But surely it means that in Him, the ideal man, the paradise prerogatives were given back; the fear of Him and the dread of Him w^ere over all the beasts of the field : " He was with them," and they harmed him not, but did rather own Him as their rightful Lord. Nor may we confine to that single act of our Lord's life, the tokens which He gave that He should be this deliverer of nature ; nor may we say that the glory of a redeemed nature is a glory which as yet altogether waits to be revealed. Rather is it already and most truly begun. In his miracles we see the germs and beginnings of its liberation. In them na- ture is no longer stiff but fluent: its laws, so stubborn to others, become elastic in his hands: before Him each of its mountains becomes a plain : it listens for, and hears, and obeys the lightest intimation of his will. That all this had need so to be in the presence of one claiming to be all which He claimed, that it all stood in vital and intimate connexion w'ith his work, was most truly felt by a world which evermore adorned its champions with like powers, which ever- more conceived of them as workers of wonders, as 250 LECTURE V. bringers back, in like manner, of tbe lost harmonies of creation, and conceived of nature as plastic in their hands and obedient to their will. It was a true in- stinct, however mistaken in the persons to whom the wondrous works were ascribed, out of which the world concluded that he whp professed to deliver his fellows, must not be bound upon any side with the same heavy yoke as they were — that the very idea of a champion of mankind was that of one in whom should be found again all the lost prerogatives of every man. And when we thus say that the miracles which Christ wrought were these signs and tokens of a redemption, let us not pause here, nor contemplate them as insulated facts, once and once only having been, but rather as facts pregnant w^ith ulterior conse- quences, as the earliest steps of a series, as first fruits of a gracious power which did not stop with them, but has ever since continued to unfold itself more and more. What Christ once, and in them, WTOught in intensive power, he works evermore in extensive. Once or twice He multiplied the bread, but evermore in Christian lands, famine is become a stranger, a more startling, because a more unusual, thing — the culture of the earth proceeding with surer success and with a larger return. A few times he healed the sick, but in the reverence for man's body which his pospel teaches, in the sympathy for all forms of suffering which flow^s out of it, in the sure advance of all worthier science which it implies and ensures, in and by aid of all this, these miraculous cures unfold them- THE RESTORER OF PARADISE. 2-51 sfelves into the whole art of Christian medicine, into all the alleviations and temovements of pain and disease, which are so rare in other, and so frequent in Christian lands. Once he quelled the storm; but in the clear dominion of man's spirit over the material universe which Christianity gives, in the calm courage which it inspires, a lordship over the winds and waves : and over all the blind uproar of nature, is secured, / which only can again be lost with the loss of all the / spiritual gifts with which he has endued his people. Already Paul was de facto admiral in that great tem- pest upon the Adrian sea. Thus, then, brethren, we see that the world's ex- pectation upon this side also has an answering fact. There is One who does truly give w^hat the hearts of men have desired. Their longing after a redeemed creation was no delusive dream, however the ways in which they realized that longing, and gave it an out- ward shape, were premature and vain. And here you will bear with me, even though I repeat an admonition once made already, but the importance of which will abundantly justify its repetition. Let us then for our- selves take care that we view aright these askings after the true, and understand what they mean : let us see that they be not, by the fraud of men, used against us, to undermine, or, at least, to embarrass, the faith which they ought to help to establish. We have spoken already of the way in which they might be so used. The slight upon the miracles of Scripture, and all other God's mighty gifts to the world by his Son, through the adducing of other works, seemingly of a 252 LECTURE V. like kind, other similar pretensions made by, or on behalf of, others, — the mingling, and so losing sight of the divine facts amid a multitude of phenomena apparently similar, — this opposition to the truth has been often attempted, but is probably now working itself out into a more consistent theory, and one more conscious of itself, and what it means, and what advantages it possesses, than ever in times past it has done. The evading of the stress of Christ's works by the reply, that such have been the accompaniment of every heroic personage, glories and ornaments which the imagination of his fellows has inevitably lent him, the halo with which it has clothed him, — for instance, that it has evermore been presumed that the outer world will obey him, no reluctant slave to his material force, but a ready servant to his spiritual will; — this manner of dealing with the marvellous works of Christ, is likely to find great favour in our time. Nor is it hard to see the reason. It falls in remarkably with the ten- dencies of our age. It retains, and is consistent with a certain measure of respect toward the records of revelation. For it does not presume those parts of them which affirm supernatural facts to be a fraud or forgery, nor yet to be the record of deceptions and sleights of hand, but only that the men to whom we owe these accounts lay under the same laws, were subject to the same optical illusions in the spiritual world as all their fellows, as belong to the very essence of man's nature: it fared with them but as with others, that the mighty desire became father to the belief. THE RESTORER OF PARADISt. 253 This theory offers a way of dealing with a great mul- titude of statements presented as historic, which men are unwilling to brand outright as falsehoods, and yet as little willing to accept as truths. It offers a middle course, decently respectful to Christianity, and at the same time effectually escaping from its authority : and presenting, as it seems to do, a calm and philosophical explanation, both for its more perplexing phenomena, and also for very much beyond it, it will be strange if, in our age, which rejoices so much in large and in- clusive points of view, it does not find a ready and a wide acceptance. But in truth, brethren, this universal imagination, these consenting expectations upon all sides, in so' many thousands and thousands of hearts, these, if we believe in a divine origin and destination of man, if we believe that this man or that may be deceived, but that all men cannot — since whatever there may be of false at the surface, the foundations of his being are laid in the truth, being laid in God — if we believe that this or that generation may be dream- ing fantastic and merely feverish dreams, which have no counterparts whatever in the actual world of realities, but not all generations — if there is that in us which, prior to all argument, solemnly binds us to believe that no such cruel falsehood would be played off upon man as a great longing laid deep/ in his heart, without a corresponding object — then to us believing so, these wide-spread, or say rather these universal expectations,will themselves give tes/ timony to a truth corresponding to them. We shall 22 254 LECTURE V. not indeed look for a truth answering to them in all their accidents, for of these many will be local, temporary, varying : and the truth, when it comes to pass, must more or less depart and differ from that form in which it clothed itself to them who waited for it. So of necessity it must be; for that form per- force was more or less injuriously affected, distorted, and obscured by that sinful element, which in the mind of each would mingle with, and in part debase and degrade it. But there will be a testimony in these consenting expectations for that which lies at the root of, and after the merely accidental is stripped off, remains common to, and so constitutes the essence of, them all. - And when we are deeply convinced of this, then in all those in whom the world has greatly hoped — workers, as it has been thought, of wondrous works — bringers back of a golden age^— utterers, as has been fondly deemed, of the forgotten spell of power — graspers anew of the sceptre over nature which had fallen from the hand of every one beside — readers backward of the primal curse — in the mighty acts attributed to each one of these, we shall trace proofs of the exceeding fitness which there was, that He who indeed came in the fulness of the time, should come furnished with signs and wonders and mighty works, so that even the winds and the sea obeyed Him, and the bread multiplied in his hands, and the wild beasts knew him for their lord, and in the desert Paradise bloomed anew at his presence. In legend and in tale utterly worthless as history we shall yet read pro- THE RESTORER OF PARADISE. 255 phetic intimations, which indeed understood not them- selves, of Him who, in the days of his flesh, by first- fruits of power, declared Himself the promised Seed of the woman who should comfort us for the earth which God had cursed, and at length bring about its perfect redemption from that curse, making it, thus redeemed, a fit dwelling-place for his redeemed people. LECTURE VI. , THE REDEEMER FROM SIN. • ROMANS VII. 21, 23. ' Ifind then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man : but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, \ and bringing me into captivity to the laxo of sin which is in my members. We were occupied, when last we met together, with the world's expectation of one who should deliver all outward nature from its curse, of one in whom the Adamic prerogatives should re-appear. To-day I shall be led, as by a natural transition, to speak of a yet nearer deliverance, and one which it imported to man yet more that he should win, or that another should win for him — a harmony which he demanded with a Ayet more earnest longing than this harmony of nature With itself, or of nature with him — an inner harmony, a deliverance from his own evil, from that in himself which was threatening his true being with destruction, from the lusts which embraced his soul, but while they embraced, strangled and destroyed. For sin has never reigned so undisputed a lord in his heart, but that there were voices there protesting against its lordship. THE REDEEMER FROM SIN. 2-57 His will was enslaved ; but he knew that it was en- slaved, that freedom was its birthright ; and that bond- age, however it might be its miserable necessity now, yet was not its true condition from the first. It was the sense of this, of such an inner contra- diction in his life, which made one to exclaim that he felt as if two souls were lodged within him;* and another to set forth the soul of man as a chariot, which two horses, one white and one black, were drawing — fso did the wondrous fact present itself to him, of the flesh lusting against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh, so had he learned that if there is that in every man which is drawing him up to God and to the finding of his true freedom in God, there is also that which would fain drag him downward, till he utterly lose himself and his own true life in the mire of sensual and worldly lusts, till the divine in him be wholly obscured, and the bestial predominant altogether.! It was the sense of this, which made the image of the two ways, a downward and an upward- one easy and strewn with flowers, but a way of death ; * Xenophon, Cyropxd., 1. 6, c. 1, § 41. Cf. Seneca [Ep. 52 :) Quid est hoc, Lucili, quod nos alio tendentes alio trahit eteo unde recedere cupimus, impellit] quid colluctatur cum animo nostro, nee permittit nobis quidquam serael velle] ■\ Plato, Phaedrus, c. 25. j^ This sense of the latent beast, or the more latent beasts than one, in every man, which may be fed and pampered, and roused to fiercest activity, while the true man in him perishes with hunger, supplies the groundwork of that famous and of- ten imitated passage in Plato, Rep.y 1. 9, e. 12. 22* 258 LECTURE VI. one hard and steep and sharp set with thorns, but a way of life, as familiar to heathen moralists* as to us who hear of the broad and the narrow way, the wide and the straight gate, from the lips of the Lord himself. And thus the problem which each nobler system proposed to itself was the delivering from this evil, the bringing of a harmony into the inner life — its end to make man a king, so that he should have do- minion over himself, and over all of his nature which was not truly himself — that which was appointed to rule in him, ruling, and that which was appointed to serve, serving — the- charioteer charioting, and not dragged in the dust at the heels of his horses. The promise which it held out of giving this, was that which to every more earnest spirit each system had of attractive, and only as it promised this, had it an attraction for them. They only felt drawn to it, asit undertook to give them this liberty, and harmoniously to re-adjust the disturbed relations of their inward life. I know that when we undertake to speak of these things, and would fain show in how wonderful a de- * Hesiod, Op. 289—292; cebes, Tab., c. 12; Xenophon, Memorab., 1. 2, c. 1, § 21 seq.; in regard to which last passage there is a very interesting discussion in Buttmann's admirable elucidation of the my thus of Herakles. (^Mythol., v. 1, p. 252.) He there shows that, according to all likelihood, the " temptation" of Herakles belonged to the original legend, and was not the mere poetical invention of Prodicus. Lac- tantius (Inst. Div., 1. 6, c. 3) notes how heathen poet and philosopher had already used this image of the two ways. THE REDEEMER FROM SIN. 259 gree the ancient world was engaged with the same moral and spiritual problems as are engaging ourselves, there is a caution which we miust take home to our- selves, if we would not trace entirely delusive resem- blances, and be led away by merely accidental like- nesses in expression, which yet point to no real likeness at the root; this caution, I mean — that since there are points of apparent contact in almost all systems, it follows that before we can find any significance in these, or conclude one because of them to stand in any real affinity to another, we must strictly ask our- selves, how deep these resemblances go, whether they lie merely on the surface, or reach down to the cen- tral heart of the matter, to that which determines the nature of each ; whether we have been caught by words and phrases which have a similar sound, but which, looked into more nearly, will be found to con- ceal under language which sounds nearly the same, statements which are really and essentially most diverse. This mistake no doubt has often been made ; phrases have been snatched at and claimed as ours, as antici- pating and bearing witness to Christian truths, without w^aiting to inquire what place they really hold in the complex of the system from which they are taken. Thus a Latin Father* has spoken of Seneca as "one of us" on the score of certain showy maxims which sound, at first hearing, and till they are adjusted into their place, like great Christian truths; and this, though perhaps there could not have been two schemes * Jerome {Adv. Jovin.^ 1. 1, in fine :) Noster Seneca. 260 LECTURE VI. more opposite at the beart to one another than that Stoic, which in its pride would teach us to seek all in ourselves, and the Christian, which bids us with an humbler yet truer wisdom to seek all out of ourselves and in God. But at the same time, and owning our liability to be thus deceived, w^e must yet keep far from that other course, which, shunning the faults and exaggera- tions of this, refuses to see stirring at all in the hea- , then world the same riddles of life and of death which yare perplexing ourselves. Into this extreme they run, \vho will give any explanation rather than a moral one, and the more trivial the better, to the legend and the tale of antiquity, obstinately refusing to hear in /the most earnest voices which reach them from the past cries after the same deliverance for w^hich we yearn. The tendency to this is in truth at its root antichristian; for it grows, whether it owns it or not, out of a conviction that all wnth which Christianity deals is in fact accidental, and does not belong to the \ essential stuff of humanity — that this revelation of which we boast, has no claim to be considered as an answer to the deepest and most universal needs of men — that echoes of it therefore are nowhere to be listened for, or being caught, are in no wise to be ac- counted more than accidental reverberations of the air. Keeping then that caution in view, but as a caution only, and resisting, as we are bound to do, the endea- vour to rob the whole heathen world, its philosophy and mytholonry alike, of all moral significance for us, lilt!. REDEEMER FROM SIN. 261 on the score that significance has sometimes been found where truly there was none, we may boldly say that the highest philosophy of the old world did con- cern itself with a redemption — not of course with a Redeemer, for of such it knew not: but it did avow- edly set before itself as its aim and purpose the help- ing of souls to a birth out of a world of shows and appearances into the world of realities, out of a world of falsehood into one of truth, turning them from darkness to light, from the contemplation of shadows to the contemplation of substance.* That favourite saying of Socrates that he exercised still the craft of his mother, that his task and work, his mission in the world,' was such a helping of souls to the birth, by the helping to a birth the conceptions which were struggling there,t this rested on no other thought, — was in its kind and however remotely a prelude to far mightier truth, the earthly anticipation of a heavenly word, of his word who said, " Ye must be born again." It pointed, although at an infinite distance, to the possibility of a birth into a kingdom, not merely of reality as opposed to semblance, but of holiness as op- posed to sin. I * The great passage in the Republic of Plato, 1. 7, c. 1, 2^ will at once suggest itself to many. f Plato's ThecBietus, c. 6. Stallbaum's edit., p. 63. See Van Heusde's Initia Philosophise PlatonictB^ v. 2, p. 52 seq. X And so, too, there are counterparts, weak and pale ones they must needs be, of the Christian idea of conversion, which find place in the same philosophy. How remarkable are the very terms, fXEtaatpo^ri aTto fwy (Jxtwv artt to ^w5 (^Jiep, 1. 7, c. 1 3,) / 262 LECTURE VI. What again is " Know thyself," that great saying of the' heathen philosophy, in which, when it turned from being merely physical, and a speculation about natural appearances, the sun the moon and the stars, to the making of man and man's being the region in which it moved, the riddles of humanity, the riddles which it sought to solve* — what was that " Know thyself," that great word in which it embodied and expressed so well its own character and aim, and all that it proposed to effect, but a preparation afar off for a higher word, the " Repent ye," of the Gospel? Since let that precept only be faithfully carried out, and in what else could it issue but repentance? or at least in what else but in an earnest longing after this great change of heart and life? For out of this self- knowledge nothing else but self-loathing could grow — so that men being once come, as they presently must, to a consciousness of their error and their depar- ture from goodness and truth, should hate themselves, and flee from themselves to whatever higher guide was offered them ; to the end that they might become different men, and hot remain, the same which before they were.f What could any man behold himself, if Ttepicfpo^rj, <^vxtji TtspiOLyuyrj, {Rep. 1. 7, c. 6.) with which we may compare the eTtiatpe^soOai of the New Testament^ 2 Cor. iii. 16; 1 Thess. i. 9; Acts xviii. 18. * Cicero, Tusc. Qu(Bst., 1. 5, c. 4. I See the affecting words, which Plato {Synops., c. 32,) puts into the mouth of Alcibiades, concerning the mysterious and magical power of the truth, even as partially embodied in the words and person of a Socrates, to convince of sin; un- THE REDEEMER FROM SIN. 263 only he beheld himself aright, but, to use the wonder- ful comparison of Plato,* as that sea-god, in whom the pristine form was now scarcely to be recognised, so were some limbs of his body broken off, and some marred and battered by the violence of the waves, while to the rest shells and stones and sea-weed had clung and ^vergrown them, till he bore a resemblance rather to some monster than . to that which by nature he was? What was man but such a wreck of his nobler self, what but such a monster could he show in his own eyes, if only he could be prevailed to fix those eyes steadfastly upon himself? And when men, thus learning their fall, and how great it was, learned also to long for their restoration, very interesting and instructive is it to observe how Christ realized for yearning souls not only the very til, as the young man owned, it seemed to him that it were far better not to live than to live the man he w2lS. (jZd'ts /tot * De Rep.f 1. 10, c. 11 : 'Qcirisp ol ifbv ^aTMTffvov VXcwxov opwv- feS, ovx w STfi paStcof av'tov iSoisv tfriv ap;^cuai' ^uortv, vrib tov "to, •fs rtaTiottt 'tov (Jcoju.aT'oj ju.£p»y T'a fisv sxxexTMddaCj I'a 8s awjfitfpi'^- 6av xcu Tidvtco^ T^^Xta^rjadat vrtb tuiv xvi^d-fcov, a7,Xa 8h TtpodTts^v- xivai> offtpio' ts xai ^uxt-a xai Ttti'paj, wtf-r's 7t(wtl fiaM^v fijypt'w sex— XEvai rj oloi rjy if>\)6so. ovVw xai I'jjv '^vx^jv J^ftftj ^fw/tf ^a Bcaxsvfisvtjv vTtb [ivpiiovxaxuiv. This Glaucus, as the Socialist tells us, dis- covered the fountain of immortality, of which he drank; but not being able to show it to others, was by them hurled into the deep of the sea. From time to time, the fishermen catch sight of him, or hear him bewailing his immortality. The way in which this mythus is used by Plato, is a testimony for the profound meaning which he found in it. 264 LECTURE VI. thing "which they asked for, hut that in the very forms under which they had asked it; most instructive to observe how the very language of Scripture, in which it sets forth the gifts which a Saviour brings, was a language which more or less had been used already to set forth the blessings which men wanted, or which from others they had most imperfectly obtained — the Gospel of Christ falHng in not only with the wants of souls, but with the very language in which those wants had found utterance. Thus there had continually spoken out in men, a sense of that which they needed to be done for them, as a healing, as a binding up of hurts, a stanching of wounds. The art of the physician did but image forth a higher cure and care, which should concern itself not with the bodies, but with the souls, of men. They were but the branches of one and the same dis- cipline, so much so, that the same god who was con- ceived master in one, the soother of passions, was master also in the other, the healer of diseases. It was conceived of sins as of stripes and wounds, which would leave their livid marks, their enduring scars, on the miserable souls which had committed them, and which carried these evidences of their guilt, visibly impressed on them for ever, into that dark world, and before those awful judgment-seats, whither after death they were bound.* * Plato, GorgiaSi c. 80, Stallbaum's edit. p. 314. Tacitus (^Annal, 6) has a fierce delight in applying these words to Ti- berius. THE REDEEMER FROM SIN. 265 How deep the corresponding image of Christ's work as a work of healing, reaches in Scripture, I need not remind you. His ministry of grace had been set forth in language borrowed from this art, by pro- phets who went before; He should be anointed to heal the broken-hearted, to bind up the bruised ; and when he began that ministry. He claimed these pro- phecies for Himself, laying his finger on the most sig- nal among them, and saying, " This day is this Scrip- ture fulfilled in your ears." (Luke iv. 21.) And then, too, we shall all remember how in another place He spake of sinners as being sick, and Himself as their physician, (Matt. ix. 12 ;) and by the good Samari- tan, it has been often thought more than likely, that He shadowed forth Himself, the despised of his own people, and yet the true binder up of the bleeding hurts of humanity. But what need of more proof, when we use the very word health* as equivalent for salvation. That fearful saying of the heathen sage remains most true, that every sin is a wound, that it leaves behind it its scar, invisible now, — for it i^ a scar not on the body, but the soul, — which will yet be only too plainly visible in the day of the revelation of all things. Yet He so heals them whom He takes in hand. He makes so perfect a cure, that not even the scars of their hurts shall remain ; " by whose stripes * Thus Plato {De Rep., 1. 4,©. 18, Stallbaum's edit. p. 324:) Apft'97 (lev apa w$ eoixsVf vyleid ife tvi w elt^ xai xaX^oj xcU evs^la •^X^Si ^cuctaSE 060^ ff xai> aloxos xai aa&ipHa. 23 -^■.■:. 266 LECTURE VI. ye are healed." He only waited till there was an earnest desire awakened in men that they naight find themselves in an hospital of souls — till these desires came to a head, — till it was felt that all which was offered elsewhere reached not to an effectual binding up of hurts, was but a healing of them slightly, pre- sently to break out anew, or a covering of them over with purple and with gold, leaving them the while to fester unhindered beneath. He only waited till it was owned that a divine Physician, and none other, could take the great sufferer in hand, and then straightway He stood by the sufferer's side, and proffered him all that he had asked for, but had now despaired of find- ing, even help and healing, and these in the very forms under which he had asked them.* Nor was it otherwise with the idea oi freedom — an 'idea which lies so close to the very heart and centre of the Gospel, that its benefits and blessings are per- haps oftener set forth by a word borrowed from this circle of images than by any other, oftener described as a redemption or a purchase out of slavery, and Christ as a Redeemer or purchaser, and thus a setter free, than by any other language. It is true that we have come to use these words wdth so little ear- nestness, have taken them so much in vain, we have so lightly passed them backward and forward * Augustine (Serm. 87, c. 10:) Jacet toto orbe terrarum ab oriente usque in occidentem grandis aegrotus. Ad sanandum grandem segrotum descendit omnipotens medicus. Humili- avit se usque ad mortalem carnem^ tamquam usque ad lectura aegrotantifif. THE REDEEMER FROM SIN. 267 I from hand to hand, that the sharpness and distinct- ness of their first outline has been for us almost lost and worn away, so that they scarcely, or only now and then, with any vividness, bring to our minds the truths which they affirm — the awful truth of that slavery out of which we were delivered, the glorious truth of that liberty into which we have been brought. But still these words, though we may forget it, do evermore proclaim this ; and they are words by which oftener perhaps than by any other, the Holy Spirit in the Scripture declares the benefits whereof Christ has made us partakers. And being this Redeemer or setter free. He was in this regard also " the Desire of all nations." For He, when He said " Whosoever committeth sin, is the servant of sin," (John viii. 34,) when his apostle cha- racterized himself in his natural state as a slave " sold under sin," (Rom. vii. 14 ;) when another of his apos- tles spoke of evil men as " servants of corruption," (2 Pet. ii. 19,) He and they, using this language, were but affirming the same which had been found out and felt by every sinner that ever lived, of which the confession had been wrung out, too, from the lips of thousands. When, too, he offered freedom, a vic-y^ tory over all which was bringing into bondage, an overcoming of the world, as the issue of obedience unto Him, He was but oifering that, which in one shape or another, each guide and teacher of his fel- lows had offered before, — with indeed the mighty dif- ference, that He could make good his offer, and they not. I need not remind you with what frequency we 263 LECTURE vr. meet, sometimes almost to satiety, declarations of this kind, — of wisdom being the only freedom, — the wise man, the only free man, the only king, — of the soul of the sinner as a tyrant-ridden city,* — of lusts as evil mistresses which enslave the soul and bring it into bondage; how the promise of liberty is on the lips of each who would gather disciples round him. All this is strewn too thickly over the pages of heathen litera- ture to need any proof in particular. And meeting these statements thus frequently and thus earnestly expressed as w'e often do meet them there, we must see how they bear testimony that men continually en- visaged the highest benefits which their souls could attain, under the aspect of freedom, of redemption — that the attaining of this freedom was the object of their lives and hopes, however little they could make it their own, however they discovered and were meant to discover, through their fruitless struggles and toils, that only when the Son made them free, they could be free indeed. Again, a pointing at the crowning gift which was .at length given unto the world in Him, may be traced in the idea of music which was so frequently and so fondly used as the best outward expression of inner .life-harmony. This indeed was felt to have so singular and profound a fitness, that a term borrowed from this art, was, we may say, formally adopted as the aptest for setting forth that whole discipline which occupied itself with the right composure of the higher * Plato,, /?«;>., 1. 9, c. 5. THE REDEEMER FROM SIN. 269 powers, with the bringing into one concent the three- fold nature of man ; — he in whom this language comes most prominently forward, finding no worthier terms in which to describe that wisdorii with which he was enamoured, than as the fairest and mightiest of the harmonies;* while sin, on the contrary, presented it- self to him and to many more, as a deep inner dis- harmony, as a discord which had forced itself into the innermost centre of man's life, and only through the expulsion of which he could again make it what it ought to be, rhythmic, numerous, and harmonious. All these thoughts, which, though first expressed by one or two, yet found echoes in the bosoms of all, how did they in their weakness to realize themselves, in the fact that discords ever made themselves too plainly felt in the lives, not of the taught only, but of the teachers as well — how did they ask for One, the mighty master of all spiritual melodies : whose own life, free from one jarring note, should make perfect music in the ears of God; and not this alone, but who should attune once more that marvellous instrument which had lain silent so long, or from which discords only had proceeded, even the soul of man, and draw" from it again sounds which should be sweet even in the ears accustomed to the symphonies of heaven. Surely all their language, though they knew it not, pointed to such a mighty master of heavenly harmo- nies as this. For if it be true of Him, that as He * Plato {De Legg.j 1. 3:) Ka^t^rj^i' xcu fisyicfifijv tMv tfV|U^«- WUiV. 23* 270 LECTURE VI. (■■ /b \,, emptied the golden seats of Olympus, and swept their long line of heroes and derai-gods and gods into the darkness and corruption of the tomb, He gathered from each idol as it fell its pretended majesty and do- minion and power, claiming all rightfully for his own, ' and weaving all the scattered rays of light into one (crown of glory for his own head; then of none of these could this be more truly spoken than of him whom men feigned to be the god of harmony, to have potency thereby over the spirits of men, with power to exalt, to purify, and to soothe, whose music acted as a charm to tranquillize the passions and attune the spirit to a peace with itself, and with all which was around it.* For Christian peace, the peace which Christ gives, the peace which He sheds abroad in the heart, is it aught else than such a glorified harmony — -the expelling from man's life of all that was causing disturbance there, all that was hindering him from chiming in with the music of heaven, all that would have made him a jarring and a dissonant note, left out from the great dance and minstrelsy of the spheres, in which mingle the consenting songs of redeemed men and elect angels ?t ^""^ * Miiller's Dorians, b. 2, c. 8, § 11. f It is remarkable^nough that although Christian artshrunk, and, so long as there was a heathenism rampant round it, Tightly shrunk, from any large use of symbols borrowed from heathen mythology, yet pictures of Christ as Orpheus taming the wild beasts with his lyre, are probably as old as the third century. {Chrisll. Kunst-Symholik^ p. 134, and Piper's My- thologteder Christl. Kunst, p. 121.) Compare the opening of THE REDEEMER FROM SIN. 271 Thus (lid the Son of God at his coming in the flesh, take up the unfulfilled promises of all human systems. For they were unfulfilled; those systems had wrought no deliverance worthy of the name in the earth. How scanty was the number of those whom they would even undertake to save, — a few highly favoured or greatly gifted spirits of the world — not ^the poor, the ignorant, the weak; in this how different from that Gospel which is preached to the poor, and whose tidings are good because they are these, — that the Lord hath founded Zion, and the poor of his 1 people shall put their trust therein! But theirs was essentially an aristocratic salvation,^ which should help a few, setting them apart from their fellows, on pinnacles from whence they were in danger of look- ^ing down far more with gratulation at their own deliverance, than with any inward and bleeding com- passion for the multitudes which were toiling and vainly seeking for a path below. And indeed often it was not a salvation at all, even in the very lowest sense of that word; how often was it Satan casting out Satan — one form of evil expelling another, men finding food for pride and vain-glory in the very ad- vances in wisdom and self-restraint which they had made t— and thus those very victories which they had the later Clement's Cohort, ad Gentes, and Eusebins, De Laud. Constantini, c. 14, p. 760, ed. Reading. * See Origen's admirable words in his reply to Celsus {Con. Cels., 1. 7, c. 59, 60,) showing how at the best the philo- sophers were tafpoc oUycoj/, but Christ the tafpoj rtoT.^v. I The well-known passage of Cicero {De Nat. Deor. 1. 3j c. 272 LECTURE VI. jwon over fleshly sins, helping to make them slaves of spiritual wickednesses — of the seven worse spirits which take possession of the house, empty and 3wept and garnished ; from which the one spirit of sensual lust has gone out, but which has not been occupied by any nobler guest. And if, brethren, even our struggles, after an in- ward conformity to a higher rule, are what they are — if with all the helps at our command, we yet win (no step without an effort, if oftentimes our premature nymns of victory over this sin or that are changed into confessions of a shameful defeat, and we, who went forth with victorious garlands too early wreathed about our brows, have to come home and put ashes upon our heads, how must it have been with them? how continually must it have been a seeing of the better only with a greater guilt to choose the worse ! Surely the confession of the Jewish Pharisee that was zealous for the law and for righteousness must have been the confession of unnumbered souls in all the world, wrung out from a deep heart-agony, from the sense of defeats repeating themselves with a sad uni- 36) has been often quoted. Men justly thank the Gods for the external commodities which they enjoy; but, he proceeds Virtutem nemo unquam acceptam Deo retulit. Nirairum recte, propter virtutem enim jure laudamur, et in virtute recte glori- amur. Quod non contingeret, si id donum k Deo, non a nobis haberemus.. .iVam quis, quod vir bonus esset, grattas Diis egit unquam? At quod dives, quod honoratus, quod incolumis. Jovemque Optimum Maximum ob eas res appellant, non quod nos justos, temperantes, sapientes efficiat, sed quod salvos, in- columes, opulentos, copiosos. THE REDEEMER FROM SIN. 273 formity, of ever deeper entanglement in the defilements of the flesh and of the world — " That which I do, I allow not; for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I....1 delight in the law of God after the inward man ; but I see another law in my mem- bers, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" Such voices, no doubt, did make themselves heard,. For indeed we shall not err, if contemplating the times which went before the Incarnation, we affirm that there had been two cries which had long been going up into the ears of the Lord of Hosts — two cries, although one was far more distinct and articulate than the other. There was the voice of appointed prophets and seers, watchers on the mountains of Israel, waiting for a Sun of Righteousness, who, as they surely knew, should in his time scatter the world's gloom, and shed healing from his wings. There was their voice, who, knowing this, would yet out of a mighty sense of the present evil around them and within them, have fain hastened the time, — psalmist and prophet who exclaimed, " Oh that the salvation w^ere given unto Israel out of Zion!" "Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens and come down!" But there was another, a more confused cry, of multitudi- nous tones : it oftentimes knew not what its own ac- cents meant ; it was often rather a groan within the bosom of humanity, which asked not, and thought not of a listener, than a voice sent up unto heaven. It 274 LECTURE VI. \^s a cry which only infinite wisdom and infinite love would have interpreted into that cry for heavenly help, which indeed at the heart it was ; a cry needing infi- nite love to pardon all in it which made it rather a cry against God, than to Him. But that love it found. He w^ho said long before, "I have seen, I have seen the affliction of my people," saw also the affliction of a world hopelessly out of the way, translated its con- fused voices into an appeal unto Himself, and sent forth his Son to be the Saviour of the lost. And then, what not alone the Law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, but what all wisdom had been equally impotent to effect, for it un- derlay the same weakness, He did ; what they could not give, he gave. For here we come back again to a point which I have pressed already, but which yet is so important, that I shall make no apology for pressing it once more, which is this, — that the prero- gative of our Christian faith, the secret of its strength, is, that all which it has, and all which it offers, is laid up in a person. This is what has made it strong, while so much else has proved weak, that it has a Christ as its middle point — that it is not a circum- ference without a centre, — that it has not merely a deliverance, but a Deliverer, — not a redemption only, but a Redeemer as well. This is what makes it fit for wayfaring men ; this is what makes it sun-light, and all else compared with it but as moon-light, — fair it may be, but cold and ineffectual; while here the light and the life are one ; the Light is also the Life of men. Oh how great the difference between sub- THE REDEEMER FROM SIN. 275 mitting ourselves to a complex of rules, and casting ourselves upon a beating heart ; between accepting a system, and cleaving to a person. And how tenfold blessed the advantages of the last, if that person is such a One that there shall be nothing servile in the entire resignation of ourselves to be taught of Him, for He is the absolute Truths-nothing unmanly in the yielding of our whole being to be wholly moulded by Him, for that he is not merely the highest which hu- manity has reached, but the highest which it can reach — its intended and ideal perfection, at once its perfect image and superior Lord. They felt this, that help must lie in a person, that only round a person souls would cluster, — thosa who, when they would fain make a final stand for the old beliefs of the world, and prove if these could not even now be quickened to dispute the world with the youth- ful Christian Church ; — they felt, I say, this, who set about marshalling, not merely rival doctrines to the Christian, but rival benefactors to Christ. If He went about Judaea doing good, they also would point to sages of their own, who travelled on like errands to the furthest East. This is, no doubt, the meaning of that half-fabulous life of Apollonius, which just as Christianity was rising into notice and evident signifi- cance, made its appearance; — this the explanation of that revived interest in Pythagoras, which then found place. The votaries of the old religions felt that in this respect they must not come short of that which they would oppose ; and rightly — however weak and 276 LECTURE VI. flitting and unreal the phantoms which they conjured up to t leir help. For, brethren, had we a system only, it would leave us just as weak as other systems have left their vo- taries. We should have to confess that we found in ours, as they in theirs, no adequate strength — that not merely now and then, and at ever rarer intervals, we were worsted in our conflict with the sin of our own hearts, but evermore. Our blessedness, and let //«^ us not miss that blessedness, is, that our treasures are treasured in a person, and are therefore inexhaustible — in one who requires nothing but what first He gives — who is not for one generation a present teacher and a living Lord, and then for all succeeding a past and a dead one, but who is present and living for all — as truly for us in this latter day, as for them who went up and down with him in the days of his flesh. Our ^strength and our blessedness is, that what we have to i know is " the truth as it is in Jesus;" that what we have to learn is to "learn Christ ;" that what we have to put on, is to " put on the Lord Jesus Christ" and the righteousness which is by Him. ) LECTURE VII. •s * THE FOUNDER OF A KINGDOM. HEBREWS XI. 10. A city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is Ood, We have seen the manner in which He who was "the Desire of all nations," met and satisfied the yearnings of men for an inward peacemaker, for one who, by the mighty magic of his word arid Spirit, should change the tumult of man's soul into a great calm; who should heal the hurts which each man was conscious that he had inflicted upon himself; who should set each man free from the bondage to those lords many, his own lusts and inordinate affections, under whose cruel tyranny he had come. But besides these longings for harmony and health and freedom in the region of his own inner life, there are other longings and other desires which crave satisfaction. For each, besides being simply a man, is also a man among men : besides the sinful element which so perplexes his own inner life, in the relation of one part of it to the other, of the higher to the lower, which so threatens his true life with destruction, not from foreign, but from intes- tine, enemies — the same sinful element acting out- wardly in himself, and in every other man, disturbs 24 278 LECTURE VII. and perplexes his relation to them, and theirs to him. That which remains in himself, unsubdued, of evil, that which exists of the same in every other man, brings about a collision between two selfishnesses. "From whence" — in the wonderfully simple, yet pro- found language of Scripture, language applicable to the pettiest village brawl, and to the mightiest conflict that has ranged one half of the world against the other — "from w^hence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even . of the lusts that war in your members?" (Jam. iv. 1.) At once the question has presented itself to every thoughtful man, — it eminently did so to the great spirits of antiquity, — -Is the warfare of these encoun- tering selfishnesses the necessary, the only condition of society ? Is it our wnsdom to acquiesce in it, satisfied if this evil will allow itself to be kept within certain bounds — to be so far restrained, that a society, a living together of men for social conveniences unattainable in their isolated state, becomes possible? And is society such a fellowship of men that have holden back, by mutual consent, so much of their selfishness and evil, as would render habitation within the same walls or in the same neighbourhood impossible, and would thus defeat them of the gains which they de- sired by this combination to attain? There have never been wanting, — there were not wanting of old, — those who dared to avow this wolfish theory of society for their own — that is, as a theory: for no community of men has ever subsisted upon it ; no sooner have they attempted to put it in practice. THE FOUNDER OF A KINGDOM. 279 than, biting and devouring, they have presently been utterly consumed one of another. And they who even avowed it as a theory were few — a profligate sophist of the old or the new world, a Thrasymachus* or a Mandeville;t the exceptions and not the rule. For rather it was truly seen that the fellowship of man with man, so far from being an artificial product of his wants, something added on to his true humanity, that lay circular and complete in himself already, — ^^ something therefore which he might have foregone without any necessary imperfection, — is that rather which constitutes the very humanity itself — animals herding, men only living, together. It was seen that this fellowship is the sphere in which alone his true life, that which belongs to him as man, can unfold itself — Jin which alone he can reach, it is little to say, the perfection of his being, but without which he cannot be conceived otherwise than as a monster, such a monster as the world never saw. It was truly per- ceived of that other condition of absolute isolation, that, so far from being the state of nature, it is rather a state so unnatural that no man has ever perfectly reached it — the most absolute savage not having be- come an isolated unit, not having been able to strip himself bare of all moral relations — being at most able to act as though he had not, but never able to cease * Plato's Republic. f Fahle of the Bees. X As is remarkably witnessed in the words, civilized, civi- lization. The civilized man, as contra-distinguished from the savage or utterly degenerate man, is essentially the civis, belongs to a civilas. 280 LECTURE VII. from having, these. And they understood therefore that not this tamed selfishness was the idea in which the state consisted, and on which it reposed, but that there was another to which every state and fellowship of men, as it deserved the name, as it would be any thing better than a pirate's deck or a robber's den, must be a nearer or more remote approximation : a condition in which men were holden together by in- visible ties, — by sanctions which not the flesh, but the spirit owned to be binding, — by common rites, — by sanctities which men dared not neglect, — *by a god Terminus keeping the boundaries of fields, — by a dread of vengeance, not as the mere human recoil of outrage on the wrong doer, but as being itself divine, — a con- dition in which men have felt that they were one people, not so much in their common interests and common aims, or even in their common history and descent and language, as in the one tutelar Deity that overlooked their city, and to whom they had confided its keeping. If it was so — if there was this sense existing in the hearts, showing itself in the acts, of men, that the re- lations between man and man rest on something out of sight, are spiritual relations, not those of force, or fraud, or convenience — that men do not huddle toge- ther as cattle, to keep themselves warm, nor band together as wild beasts, that they may hunt in com- pany ; that law is not a result of so much self-will which each man might have kept, yet for certain ad- * Sophocles, Antigone, 450 — 4C0. THE FOUNDER OF A KINGDOM. 281 varitageous considerations throws into a common stock, but that rather there is a law of laws, anterior to, and constituting the ground of, each positive enactment—- i if men had any sense of this divine order, which they did not themselves constitute, but into which they entered ; which to accept was good, which to deny and fight against was evil, — if they did thus believe in a kingdom of righteousness and truth, and that we were ordained for that, (in the words of the father of Roman philosophy, Nos ad justitiam esse natos,) — if there was any true feeling that those lusts and desires, so far from being the ground of the state^ the cement which held it together, were rather the element of de- cay which was ever threatening its dissolution, and were to be denied as the violations of the humanity, not recognised as its essentials; then we have impli- citly here the acknowledgment of, and the yearning after, the kingdom of God.* They who believed this, * Thus Cicero (Z)e Legg., 1. 1, c. 7:) Universus hie mun- dus una civitas communis Deorum atque hominum existimanda. Cf. De Fin., 1. 5, c. 23, and the glorious passage in Juvenal (Sat. 15, 131 — 158,) one of the noblest in antiquity on the feN lowship of men with one another, as resting on their divine original. I may be excused for quoting a few lines: Separat hoc nos A grege mutorum, atque ideo venerabile soli Sortiti ingenium, divinorumque capaces, Atque exercendis capiendisque artibus apti Sensum k coelesti demissum traximus arce, Cujus egent prona et terram spectantia. Mundi Principio indulsit communis conditor illis Tantiim animas, nobis animum quoque; mutuus ut noa 24* 282 LECTURE VII. believed in " the city which hath foundations," in that only one which can have everlasting foundations, for it is the only one whose foundations are laid in perfect righteousness and perfect truth — the city "whose builder and maker is God," which Abraham looked for, and because he looked for, would take no portion in the cities of confusion round him, but dwelling in tents witnessed against them, and declared plainly that he sought a country — the city of which we already are made free, and which it was given to the latest seer of the New Covenant, ere the book was sealed, to behold in the spirit coming down from heaven in its final glory. (Rev. xxi. 2.) And can we say that there were not such thoughts and expectations stirring in the hearts of men — that the idea of a perfect state, as well as of a perfect man, had not risen up before the eyes of them, the men of desire, the souls to which any spirit of higher divination was imparted ? Were not the latest specu- lations of the wisest sage, those to which he fitly came after he had accomplished each other task, concerning this very thing ? Nor needs it to press that derivation Affectus petere auxilium, et pra3Stare juberet, Disperses trahere in populum, migrare vetusto De nemore, et proavis habitatas linquere silvas; jEdifieare domoSj laribus conjungere nostris Tectum aliudj tutos vicino limine somnos Ut collata daret fiducia* protegere armis Lapsum, aut ingenti nulantem vulnere civem ; Communi dare signa tuba, defendier iisdem Turribus, atque una portarum clave teneri. THE FOUNDER OF A KINGDOM. 283 of religion which would make it the band and bond, which binding men to God, binds them also to one another ; for it is a derivation at the least question- able ;* and the fact, to which such an etymology- would give only an additional proof, is unquestionable without it — I mean, that the invisible ties w^ere those ; in which every state was acknowledged to consist, so / * Nitzsch (Theol. Stud. u. Krit. v. 1, p. 632) seeks elabo- rately to prove that, according to the genius of the Latin lan- guage, the. only possible derivation oi religio is Cicero's (De Nat. Deor.^ 1. 2, c, 28:) Qui omnia, quas ad cultum Deorum pertinerent, diligenter retractarent et tanquam relegerent, sunt dicti religiosi. ex relegendo. It will thus have for its first meaning, the conscientious anxiety and accuracy in the per- formances of the divine offices. The passage which best ex- plains how the word obtains a wider meaning is this from Ar- nobiua {Adv. Gen. 1. 4, c. 30 :) Non enim qui solicite relegit et immaculatas hostias caedit . . . numina consentiendus est colere, aut officia solus religioms implore. This etymology was called in question by Lactantius, who derives the word not from relegere, but religare, to which derivation allusion is made in the text. He says {Inst. Biv., 1. 4, c. 24 :) Hoc vinculo pietatis obstricti Deo et religati sumus, unde ipsa re- ligio nomenaccepit; et non ut Cicero interpretatus est, a rele- gendo. He has Lucretius on his side, to whose words he alludes : arctis Relligionum animos nodis exsolvere pergo. Augustine, too, who at first had consented to Cicero's etymo- logy, inclines at a later period fEetract., 1. 1, c. 13) in favour of the other, Freund (Lat. Worterbuch, s. v.) without ex- • pressing himself at all so strongly as Nitzsch has done in regard of the absolute inadmissibility of the other derivation, yet accepts as certainly preferable the Ciceronian. 284 ^ LECTURE VII. that with their weakening it must grow w^eak, with their perishing it must perish ; while to strengthen and to multiply these, was justly regarded as the no- blest mission of its noblest sons. What if here too heathendom had but the negative preparation, and Judaism the positive? what if the Jew could point to a state which did realize, though through his own sin most inadequately, this kingdom in its unripe and early beginnings, and if he was upheld by the sure word of prophecy, that one day the King of this king- dom should be revealed, and should reign in righte- ousness ; while for the heathen they were for the most part dreams to which he could impart no reality, realities which tarried infinitely farther behind the idea w^hich they professed to embod}^ — this w^as only according to the distribution, in God's manifold wis- dom, of their several parts to Jew and Gentile, in the preparation for Christ's coming; to the one being already given the stamina and rudiments of that which afterwards should unfold itself more fully, to the other being given little more than the expectation and the want — yet both so conspiring to prepare the way for his appearing. This want and this expectation Christ came to satisfy ; for He came not merely to awaken a religious sentiment in the minds and hearts of his disciples, or to declare to them certain doctrines of which before they were ignorant; but to found a kingdom, as He - Himself declared from the first ; as St. John, the herald of His coming, had declared before Him; "The kingdom of God is at hand;" "The kingdom of God THE FOUNDER OF A KINGDOM. 285 is among you." For this term, "kingdom of God," we must not impoverish as though it were merely a convenient abstraction to express the sum total of the religious sentiments, opinions, feelings, actions of his disciples. But this kingdom, as it is a kingdom, points to a visible fellowship, and the embodiment therein of a number of persons, constituting an organic whole, owning a single head. And as it is a kingdom of God, it declares God to be its author and its founder ; it de- clares itself to be lifted above the caprice of men, neither having been made, nor yet being to be marred, by them ; which they indeed may deny, but which cannot deny itself, nor by their denial be annulled. The practical Roman saw as much as the natural . man could see of this in a moment — that the question at issue between Christ and the world was not a question of one notion and another, but of one king- dom and another ; and seeing, he came at once to the point, "Art Thou a king then?" And that empire which tolerated all other religions, would have tole- rated the Christian, instead of engaging in a death- struggle with it, to strangle or be strangled by it, but that it instinctively felt that this, however its first seat and home might seem to be in the hearts of men, yet could not remain there, but would demand an out- ward expression for itself — must go forth into the world, and conquer a dominion of its own — a do- minion which would leave no room in the world for another fabric of force and fraud ; for it was his do- minion who, sitting on his throne, should scatter away all evil with his eyes ; who had said in a thousand 286 LECTURE VII. ways, "All the horns of the ungodly will I break, but the horns of the righteous shall be exalted." It is quite true that this kingdom, in the men who at any time compose it, may misunderstand and mis- take itself, even as it has often done. There are times when it caricatures itself into a popedom, when knowing rightly that it ought to have a real and out- ward existence, yet it will not believe that it has this, or is a kingdom at all, unless it can outdo the king- doms of the world on their own ground, and in their own fashion ; unless it can be a kingdom like unto them, and greater than they in their kind of power and magnificence and glory. It is quite true that times arrive when it cannot believe in its own one- I ness, unless it can see that oneness represented to it in a visible Head. Yet this only proves that times may arrive, when, through the sin of its members, its consciousness of itself as God's Church grows weak, when it has only too much lost hold of the great truths on which it was founded, and which it was intended to proclaim ; and having done so, does, by an inevitable necessity, act over again the unfaithful request of the children of Israel, when they desired a king to go forth with their armies, as one went forth with the armies of the nations, and would not believe, unless they could thus see him there, that " the shout of a King was among them." (1 Sam. viii.) And the reaction from this error must not make us to count that this kingdom can only be spiritual when it ceases to be real, when retiring into the hearts of men, and dwelling there apart, it claims no more the world for THE FOUNDER OF A KINGDOM. 287 its possession, and each region and province of man's actual life for its own. But to return. This kingdom, as it was a consum- mation of all that men had ever hoped in the way of a kingdom of righteousness, as it was a protest and witness against the evil into which each kingdom of the world, each fairest polity of man's founding, was ever presently degenerating, was not all. Christ came to give more than this ; to give not merely a Idngdom of truth for some men, but for every man ; to found a fellowship which should be for men as men, which should leave out none, which should call no man com- mon or unclean. This indeed was new, not merely in fact, but even in theory ; for it had hardly risen over the horizon of their minds who stood in wisdom and in goodness upon the mountain-summits of the world. The Greek ever left out the barbarian, the freeman, the slave, the philosopher, the simple. The highest culture of some was ever built upon the sacrifice of others; they were pitilessly used up in the process. So far from men themselves producing the thought of a universal spiritual fellowship, even after it was given, they were long in making it their own. Thus Celsus mocks at the madness of the Gospel, (for so to him it showed,) — adduces as enough to convince its author of a shallow impracticable enthusiasm, that he should have proposed such a dream as this, that Greeks, and Barbarians, and Lybians, and all men to the ends of the earth, should be united in the reception of one and the same doctrine. Nor can we greatly wonder : the sense of diversity 288 LECTURE VII. was so strong, that which was differencing men was so mighty, the intellectual superiority of the Greek over the Barbarian was so immense, that we cannot be so much surprised to find one thus mocking at the scheme for bringing all men into one, as the shallow dream of an enthusiast's brain. Such it must have seemed to him, who had not insight enough to perceive that the real ground of separation between men lay, not in natural distinctions of race, of customs, of language, but in different objects of worship, in the gods many of polytheism. These were what kept men apart, and rendered their union and communion impossible. They were not at one in the highest matter of their lives: how should they be in the lower? And if this was the ground of division, then the walls of partition might yet be thrown down, would indeed fall away of their own selves, when once there was revealed to faith one God and Father of all, — one Christ, a common object of love and adoration yb?- all, in whom the affections of all might centre, — one Spirit, effectually working in all. Then indeed the Babel mischief, the confusion of spirits, whereof the confusion of tongues was only the outward sign, would cease ; even as for one pro- phetic moment on the day of Pentecost, in the gift of tongues, it had ceased,* in sign that the Church * Grotius: Poena linguarum dispersit homines (Gen. xi.,) donum linguarum disperses in unum populura recollegit. In the Persian religion there was the expectation of a day coming when with the abolition of all evil, £i/a jSt'oi; xat jUtav Tio'Kt'rHa.v dvQpwTtcov ixaxaplMv xal ojiiioy>.w(j(J«»' drtaufcoi/ ysv^odai, (Plutarch, De Is, et Osir., c. 47.) THE FOUNDER OF A KINGDOM. 289 which that day was founded was for all nations and tongues and tribes. The distinctions between men were indeed infinite, reaching far down into the deeps of their being, yet not to that being's centre ; and in the regeneration, in that mighty act of God's, which does not obliterate distinctions, but reconciles them in a higher unity, they might all, so far as they were elements of separation, be annulled. When to all alike it was permitted to say, " We are Christ's, and Christ is God's," then the secret of a fellowship was imparted, which should include all nations, in which there should be neither wise nor simple, Greek nor barbarian, bond nor free, but Christ should be all in all. Of all this the world had, beforehand, scarcely the faintest intimations — the poorest parodies. Yet such parodies perchance there were ; and we may be allowed to trace dim indistinct yearnings even for this, for the breaking down of the middle wall of partition, for the making of twain one new man. Thus there were already in the centuries anterior to our Lord meeting- places for the Greek and Jew. Remarkable in this respect was the existence of such a city as Alexandria, where the Jew and Greek met, and sought to ex- change to mutual profit the most precious commo- dities each of his own intellectual and spiritual land, the Jew making himself acquainted with Greek cul- ture, the Old Testament Scriptures becoming acces- sible to Greek readers. Yet still these meetings were intellectual only : no true blending did or could have followed from them. It is the fire of charity which 25 290 LECTURE VII. must melt, ere there can be any real moulding into one. In vain had the whole East and West jostled violently together ; they had hardly mingled any more for this. A certain surface civilization had ensued, which was common to both; but hearts waited for more prevailing bands than those which even an Alex- ander could weave, ere they would knit themselves together in one. And as far as any practical realiza- tion of the hopes which at any time the world cherished from this it now was further off than ever. The iron kingdom, the fourth beast, dreadful and terrible and strong exceedingly, had broken all other, and was stamping the residue under its feet ; until it seemed now as if brutal force was all that remained, or that had a meaning any more, and as if the world only could be prevented from falling into pieces by those links and bands of iron, w^hich were forged around it. But how hateful such a world was to live in, how intense a loathing it inspired in each nobler spirit, the works of Tacitus seemed preserved to us especially to tell. For surely this is the key-note of them, the pre- dominant thought, — this indignation and scorn, which all words, even his own, seem weak to him to utter, at the sight of the high places of the earth, the seats of blessing, the thrones of beneficent power, occupied by the meanest and basest of their kind, — till we feel, as we read, this conviction to have been branded as with burning iron on his soul, that it were better ten thousand times not to be, than to witness the things which he has witnessed, and to bear the things which THE FOUNDER OF A KINGDOM. 291 he has borne.* Nor on his soul only was the convic- tion branded, but on those, we cannot doubt, of mul- titudes besides, whose more dumb agony found only^ its adequate expression in his words. / But these failures, these shipwrecks of the world's /hopes, these issues of things so different from the pro- mise with which they started, this agony, this despair, \ they were not for nothing. They were part of that /severe discipline of love to which the world was being ! submitted : they helped to constitute that fulness of time in which the Son of God should come, and coming, find acceptance. Not till the world's pride and self-confidence were thoroughly broken, would it have been prepared to humble itself under his cross, would it have accepted that cross for the standard round which it rallied. For the breaking of this pride two great experiments had been going forward at the same time, had run through, as they gave a moral meaning to, all the anterior history of the w^orld — experiments which needed both to be thoroughly and fairly tried. Of the Jewish it concerns us not here to speak at large: it was this, if righteousness could come by the law ; if there was a law which could give life — an external rule of conduct, even though of divine appointment, which could sanctify and save — if there was not a weakness and falseness in man, which would defeat and frustrate it all. This was most needful, and only through the process of this could a Siaul ever have been transformed into a Paul. * Agricola, c. 2, 3, 45. 292 LECTURE VII. But the other, which may not seem to us so direct- ly of God's ordaining, yet was so indeed : for it was of its very essence that He should not mingle in it so far, should seem to have less to do with it ; — that those to whom it was given to try it out should walk in their own ways, and be left to their own resources. The experiment was this, whether man could unfold his own well-being out of himself — whether art or philo- sophy or institutions could give it to him ; whether in any of these he could truly find himself and the good for which he was made. And of this experiment we cannot say that it was unfairly tried, or imperfectly \ worked out. All which was required for its success was there, and had been given in largest measure. God had raised up men of the most glorious gifts, of the mightiest strength of will ; and surely had deliver- ance lain in aught which man could unfold, by his own strength, out of his own being, the world had been indeed redeemed, and had found the fountain of salva- tion in itself. But fair and flattering, full of the promise of suc- cess, as the results showed oftentimes for a while, there was ever a worm at the root of this glory of the world. The moment of highest perfection was ever- more the moment of commencing decay. How deeply tragic, though in different ways, the histories of the Greek and Roman world ! how had the paths of glory led one and the other, though by diverse ways, to the grave of all their moral and spiritual independence; the intellectual conquests of the one and the worldly triumphs of the other, however diverse, yet having THE FOUNDER OF A KINGDOM. 293 agreed in this, that they alike left the victors enslaved, degraded, and debased — the Greek a scorn to the Roman, * and the Roman to himself. And now the fresh creative energy of an earlier time had all de- parted and disappeared: and that springing hope, which contemplated its objects, if not as attained, yet at least as attainable, was no more. The world had outlived itself and its attractions — fsaddest of all, had outlived even its hopes; the very springs of those hopes seemed to be dried up for ever. Yet was not this all without its purpose and its blessing. It was something to be shut in to the one remedy, all other devices having failed, — to have come thus to the husks ; for this alone would have sent back the prodigal of heathenism to claim anew his share in the rich pro- vision of his father's house. This was the emptiness, of which Christ's coming should be the answering ful- ness. In all this agony, this mighty yearning oT souls, '^ the gates of the world were being made high and lifted up, that the King of Glory might come in. Only in such an utter despair, in such a sense of de- crepitude, of death already begun, would the world have welcomed aright the Prince of Life, who came to make all things young, and out of the wreck and fragments of an old and decaying world, to build up a fairer and a new. *" See such passages as Cicero Pro Flacco^ c. 4; Juvenal^ ^a^3, 58— 113- 10, 174. f Augustine: Mundus tanta rerum labe contritus, ut etiam speciem seductionis amiserit, 25* 294 LECTURE VII. And such he built up indeed. "They went astray in the wilderness out of the way, and found no city to dwell in: hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them. So they cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress. He led them forth by the right way, that they might go to a city of habitation." And this city of habitation, this kingdom, was all which they had asked for, or could ask. It was a free fellowship, the constraining bands of it being bands of love and not of force; and He that founded it fulfilling the idea of the true spiritual conqueror of men, who should subdue all hearts not by force or by flattery, but by the mighty magic of love — as some of old had been reaching out after this, when they dreamed of Osiris, that he went forth to conquer the world not with chariots and with horses, but with music ; for so had they felt that the power which truly wins must be a spiritual one, an appeal to the latent harmonies in every man — that in a king- dom of heaven law must be swallowed up in love, — not repealed, but glorified and transfigured, its hard outline scarcely visible any more in the blaze of light with which it is surrounded. It was a large fellowship — larger than the largest which the heart of man had conceived ; for it should leave out none, it should trample upon none : He that was its Head should "be favourable to the simple and needy, and preserve the souls of the poor." Nay, it should be larger than this, for it should embrace hea- ven and earth. That whereof the great Italian sage THE FOUNDER OF A KINGDOM. 295 had caught a glimpse, that (piXiu^'^ that amity or re- conciliation of all things, whether they be things in heaven or things on earth, had found its fulfilment. Henceforward heaven and earth, angels and men, con- stituted one kingdom, "his body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all." It was a righteous fellowship. If aught of un- righteousness was within it, it was there only as a contradiction to the law of that kingdom, and pre- sently to be separated off; even as all of unrighteous that was against it was in due time to be taken out of the way ; for it in its weakness was yet stronger than the strongest. It was only weak as the staff of Moses was weak; which being one, and an instrument of peace, did yet break in shivers all weapons of war, the ten thousand spears of Pharaoh and his armies. And being this righteous kingdom it was also an . eternal kingdom, having in it no seeds of decay, a kingdom not to be moved, which should endure as long as the sun and moon endureth, of the increase of which there should be no end. C To this city, brethren, ye are come — the city of ^ which such glorious things are spoken, the city of our God. Not only prophet and king of Israel, but sage and seer of every land, have desired to see the things which we see, and have not seen them — so truly are * Porphyrias {De Vita Pythag. .•) ^CKitw (xaffSstlf ) Tidvtcav rtpoj artavtajj tt-tt ®smv rtpoj avdpo)7iovi — ftr'f doyixdtcov 7tp6^ dx- 'Kri'ka. — sitB dvBpuiTioiv ytpoj a7i7i»^>,ovj. See Baur's *9poUonius von Tyana und Christus, p. 194. 290 LECTURE VII. they the best things which man can conceive, or God can give. And what do they require of us but a walk corresponding? Citizens of no mean city, whose citizenship is in heaven, we must not show ourselves unworthy of so high an honour. It is the very aggra- vation of the sinner's sin that he deals frowardly in the land of uprightness ; and because he does so it is declared that he shall not see the majesty of the Lord. (Isai. xxvi. 10.) We baptized men are in this "land of uprightness," in this kingdom of the truth. For it is not that we shall come, but in the sure word of Scripture, w^e are come to Mount Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to all the glorious company which is there. And surely the apostle's argument which he drew from this ought to stand strong for us, his exhorta" tion to find place in our hearts; "Wherefore we re- ceiving a kingdom which cannot be moved, let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear." (Heb. xii. 28.) LECTURE VIII. CONCLUDING LECTURE. 1 THESSALONIANS V. 21. Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. It needs not, I trust, to remind you, brethren, that in these lectures which are now concluding, w^e have been engaged in the seeking to discern the prophecy of Christianity, which has run through all history. I have traced in them, so far as under the conditions and limitations of such discourses I might, the man- ner in which the old world was in many ways blindly struggling to be that better thing which yet it never could truly be, except by the free grace and gift of God, — to come to that new birth, which yet it could not reach, until power for this mighty change was given it from on high. We have asked ourselves whether we could not discern an evident tending of men's thoughts and feelings and desires in one direc- tion, and that direction the cross of Christ, a great spiritual under-current, which has been strongly and constantly setting that way ; so that his bringing forth of his kingdom into open manifestation, if in one sense a beginning, was in another, and in as true a sense, a crowning end. 298 LECTURE VIII. And it has cohered intimately with the purpose of these lectures, which, according to the purpose of their founder, should assume more or less of a defen- sive character, to urge the apology for our Christian faith which is here. It has been to me an argument for the truth and dignity of his mission who was its author, to find that in Him all fulness dwelt, all lines concentred, all hopes of the world were accomplished. For surely the King of Glory shows to us more glo- rious yet, when we are able to contemplate Him not merely as the Prophet and Priest and King of the Co- venant, but as the satisfier of vaguer, though not less real, aspirations, of more undefined longings, of more wide-spread hopes — when looking at Hirrii we take note, with the inspired seer, that on his head are many crowns, — and, looking at his doctrine, that not Israel only, but the isles also had waited for his law. This my subject I have now brought to a close ; or at least I dare not, at this latest moment, open it upon another side. I may perhaps more profitably dedicate the present opportunity to the considering of some ways in which our recognition of the intimate relation between all that has gone before and all that now is, between the hopes of the past and the fulfilments of the present, may practically and usefully influence our study of antiquity. For indeed a Christian view of the ancient world, which shall neither despise it, be- ' i cause it is not what it could not be, itself Christian, 1 \ because its grains of finer gold, of purer ore, are ' mixed with so much impure and debasing ; nor yet on the other hand to glorify it, as though its imperfect '^^^ THB CONCLUDING LECTURqi U Wl V B51 S LT 7 anticipations of the truth were as gooaN;^^^^WJ<^^\V superfluous, the manifestation of the perfeCTlmage iaf-^r^ God in his Son, or its faint streaks of light were as truly an illumination as the day-spring from on high ; this true it is most profitable for us that we should win. It may preserve us from extremes and exagge- rations on either hand, into which we are in danger of - running. It may preserve us, too, from a listless, careless, unfruitful study of that which, unless we ne- glect the plain duties that lie before us, must form one of the chief occupations of several, the most precious and least recoverable years of our lives, — years in which our minds are to be built up, if built up at all; in which, more than in any other, our characters are being moulded, aijd are receiving that impress which they shall bear to the end. The exaggerations to which I allude are twofold. There is that, first, against which one is almost un- willing to say a word, springing as it so often does, out of a state of mind in which there is so much that is admirable, — giving witness for a moral earnestness, without which men would have been scarcely tempted to it ; I mean the exaggeration of those, who in a deep devotion to the truth, as it is a truth in Christ Jesus, count themselves bound by their allegiance to Him, by his Name which they bear, his doctrine which they have learned, his Spirit which they have received, to take up a hostile attitude to, every thing, not dis- tinctly and avowedly Christian, as though any other bearing were a treason to his cause — a betrayal of his exclusive right to the authorship of all the good which 300 LECTURE VIII. is in the world. In this temper we may dwell only on the guilt and misery and defilements, the wounds and bruises and hurts, of the heathen world ; or if aught better is brought under our eye, we may look askant and suspiciously upon it, as though all recog- nition of it were disparagement of something better. And so we may come to regard the fairest deeds of unbaptized men as only more showy sins. We may have a short but decisive formula with which to dis- miss them: we may say. These deeds were' not of faith, and therefore they could not please God. , The men that wrought them knew not Christ, and there- fore their work was worthless — hay, straw, and stub- ble, to be utterly burned up in the day of the trial of every man's work. Yet is it in truth a violation of the law of con- science, to use so sweeping a language as this. Our allegiance to Christ as the one fountain of light and l.fe, demands that we affirm none to be good but Him — no goodness but that which has proceeded from Him : but it does not demand that we deny goodness, because of the place where we find it — because we find it, a garden-tree in the wilderness; but rather that we claim it for Him, who was its true source and author, anl whom it would its ' f have gladly owned as such, if, belonging to a happier time, it could have known Him. We do not make much of a light of nature, when we allow a righteousness in those, to whom in the days of their flesh the Gospel had not come ; we only affirm that the Word, though He had not yet dwelt among us, yet being the light which. CONCLUDING LECTURE. 301 lighteth every man that cometh into the world, had hghted them. Some gUmpses of his beams gilded their countenances, and gave to them whatever bright- ness they wore; and in recognising this brightness, whatsoever it was, we are giving honour to Him, and not to them; glorifying the grace of God, and not the powers of man. I can well understand how in the earnestness and exclusiveness of a first love to Christ, and to that word of Holy Scripture which directly testifies of Him, all teaching of all other books, in which is no explicit mention of his name, should appear valueless to us; and all else taste flat and dull, because we taste not there the sweetness of that One Name which is sweeter than all. Yet were it good for us to see that, without going back one jot from this entire de- votedness to the Lord of our life, which every where looks for Him, and finds every thing savourless with- out him — a devotedness too precious to be foregone, and for which no other gains would compensate — that without, I say, going back from this, we might yet enlarge the sphere of our Christian sympathies, and take a wider range of objects within it. To this end let us learn to cultivate a finer spiritual ear, and one which shall be more quick to catch the fainter echoes and whispers of his name, which are borne to us from other fields than those of Scripture; ht us learn to look for Him even where they thought not and could not have thought directly of Him, whose pages we may hold in our hand. Let us aim to take keener note of the manner in which all things pointed to Him, 26 / 802 LECTURE VIII. all things were asking for Him — the world passing judgment on itself,* and out of its own lips at once condemning itself and demanding its Redeemer,! demanding him in frequent acknowledgments of the vanity of all things, in confessions of its own incurable evils,! in voices of deepest sadness and despair, — as theirs who by word or solemn rite declared plainly that it was better for man never to have been born than to live; or, if he lived, that then the gods had no better boon for him than an early death — § and * Cicero (Tusc. Quasst.yl. 2, p. 22:) In quo viro erit per- fecta sapientia, {jguem adhuc nos quidem videmus neminem: sed philosophorum sententiis, qualis futurus Bit, si modd ali- quandofuerit, exponitur,) is igitur, &c. Compare Theognis, 615, OvSs'va TtafiTiri^r^v a/ya9bv xal fiBtpiov av8pa tov vvv dv6pu>7ioiv ^i%ioi xadopq^. — Even supposing a man were to reach the high- est goodness, this could only be, as was confessed, through a long process of anterior mistake and error : he must be as a diamond which is polished in its own dust. Seneca (JDe Cle- ment, 1. 1, c. 6:) Etiam si quis tarn bene purgavit animum, ut nihil obturbare eum amplius possit aut fallere, ad innocentiam tamen peccando pervenit. j- Seneca {Ep. 52:) Nemo per se satis valet ut emergat : oportet manum aliquis porrtgat,- aliquis educat. :J: Thucydides, 1. 3. c. 45; Seneca, Be Ird, 1. 2, c. 8. § Compare the remarkable fragment of Euripides, quoted in the original by Clemens of Alexandria (Strom. ^ 1. 3, c. 3,) and in a Latin translation by Cicero, (Tusc. Disp., 1, 1, c. 48.) 'ESec yap r^fid^y CvTJMyov Ttoiov^vovs, Tov ^vvT'a Oprjvslv, slg otf' £p;^£'r'ae. xaxd' Toy 6' av Oavovfa xai Tiovcov rtiTiavfitvov XaU'poj/T'aj, (v^t^fiovvtai ixTii/XTtsiv Sofjuov. Compare Herodotus, 1. 5, c. 4; Pliny, H. N., 1. 7, c. 1 and > ^ff^ CONCLUDING LECTURE. 303 this not in the Christian sense of death as a passage into life, hut only as the harhour from the world's wo, the anodyne of the world's pains. Let us take note, too, of the manner in which the language of philosopher and of poet seems often marvellously overruled to have a deeper significance, . to bear the burden of a larger and completer thought, than it is possible that they who uttered it could have had in their mind, or could have attached to their words. As for instance, when it is said^ that the highest righteousness must be approved in extremest ^ trial, that if we would know certainly whether one be indeed a lover of the good, he must be set in those conditions, in which to abide by the good shall bring upon him every outward calamity, shame and loss and scorn and torture and death, all which he might have avoided would he ever so little have gone back from that good; the righteousness which he chooses must be stripped utterly bare of every ornament, yea, must seem to the world as the extremest unrighteous- ness, and then only it will be seen whether he loves it for its own sake — to us Christians shall not this pos- sible case at once present itself as an actual one? c. 41. Si verum faoere judicium volumus, ac repndiata omni fortunse ambitione decernerej morlalium nemo estfelix ,• Pindar, Pyth., 8, 131. * By Plato {De Repub. 1. 2, c. 4, 5.) I have not seen it noted hovv^ the reverse of the picture, the perfectly unrighteous man, whom Plato draws, is almost as remarkable a prophecy in its kind, of Antichrist, and of the deceitful glory which will surround him. 304 LECTURE VIII. Shall we not catch here, as many indeed have caught,* a prophetic word about the cross, and about Him who even in this way was proved, by ignominy and scorn and suffering and death, whether He would love the good and hate the evil; and who did by a distinct act of his will choose for his portion that righteous- ness to which all these were linked, and which could only lead Him by roughest paths to the shamefullest and bitterest end? Or when another expresses his conviction that a sacred Spirit dwells with man, yea, not loith him only but in him, a Spirit which is not his own, however freely it converses with him, a Spirit which treats him as he treats it,t shall we re- fuse to acknowledge here a word which was reaching out after that Spirit, the Spirit of the Father and the Son, which, dwelling in God, does also dwell in sanc- tified souls ; which, if we grieve, will grieve us, which, if we continue to provoke, will utterly forsake us? And in many such ways as these we may disentangle * Grotius {De Verit. Bel. Christ., 1. 4, c. 12:) Et vero laetius esse honestum, quoties magno sibi constat sapientissi- mi ipsorum dixere. Plato, De Republica 11 quasi prcescius, ait, ut vere Justus exhibeatur, opus esse ut virtus ejus omnibus ornamentis spolietur, ita ut ille habeatur ab aliis pro scelesto, illudatur, suspendatur denique. Et certe summae patientiae exemplum ut exstaret, aliter obtineri non poterat. t Seneca {Epist.Al :) Sacer intra nos spiritus sedet, malo- rum bonorumque nostrorum observator et custos; hie prout k nobis tractatus est, ita nos ipse tractat...Quemadmodum radii solis contingunt quidem terram, sed ibi sunt unde mittuntur, sic animus magnus et sacer, et in hoc demissus ut propius di- vina nossemus, conversatur quidera nobiscum, sed hajret ori- gini suae. CONCLUDING LECTURE. 30'J the sfoklen threads of a finer woof than its own, which were running through the whole tissue which the ancient world was weaving for itself; we may de- lightedly observe how the cross of Christ was as an invisible magnet, drawing hearts to itself by a mighty, though secret, attraction, in ages long before it was openly lifted up, an ensign for the nations. ~ Let us remember too how little the world could have done without these preparations which sometimes we are tempted to despise. Difficult as was the world's reception of the word, and its transition to the faith, of Christ, how much more difficult would it have been if the way had not been thus prepared. What ano- ther thing would it have been, if the word about the Son of God, where it first was delivered, besides strengthening and purifying and enlarging, had needed also to create, the very foundations of religious belief and ethical science on which it rested ; if it had been needful for it to be not merely the seed, but the soil, — having first to form the very ground in which it should itself afterwards find room and depth to ger- minate. If instead of finding a language ready at hand which'it could appropriate, and needed only thus to res- cue for itself,* if, instead of this, all nobler words and * Thus not merely the more obvious, but the more recondite riles of heathenism, have been made to set forth far better things than themselves. For example, the mysteries yield the substratum of language and imagery and allusion to each word of the following noble passage, in which Clement (Co^ hort. ad Gent., c. 12,) is exhorting the Gentiles to become ^vcstOA of Christ: 'Q nav d^/tcuf wJ a\ii6u( /u-va-rnfiaiv' m e»rog axti- 26* o 06 LECTURE VIII. signs, all which spoke of worship, of religion, of sanc- tity, of initiation, of atonement, of piety, had been ab- sent from it, how different the case would have been. And with the absence of the t kings, there would also have been inevitably the absence of the words which are their correlatives; since language is no more than thought and feeling permanently fixing and embody- ing themselves ; it is but as the pillars of Hercules, to mark how far the conquests of spirit have advanced. No one can have thoughtfully perused the modern records of missionary labour among savage tribes, and the almost insurmountable hinderances opposed to the reception of the Gospel by languages, if they deserve the name, stripped of each nobler and deeper element, — languages in which is no speculation, no distinction, no hoarded thought, no embodied morality, no uncon- scious wisdom, — no terms, in short, but for the barest needs or the vilest doings* of the animal man, without pxTov, Sa^ovt^ovfxati rove ovpavovc xctt tov 0£Ov BVonreva-ac cLyto? yiVOfx.aiy fAVov/uiVog' tEpoyavrstcTe oKupto?, xai rov /ivTrrjv j^£ia fj^j xafl' jjiwaf d XOA I'ov avfoiJ iiiS't il'Kri^hv owjwai'oj, xai fisye&sc yvwcJfcoj, xcxi arto- Ssi^it xuptco'T'spaj xai &sia dvvdixec '• ^foStSaxT'oc yap j^jUf tj {Strom,, 1. Ij c. 20.) That other was the wild olive which had need, ere it bore any nobler fruit, of insertion upon the good {Strom., 1. 6, c. 15;) words which may suggest a comparison with that most eloquent passage at the end of the first book of Theodoret, De Graec. Affect. Curat. And those remarkable words have been often quoted in which Clement likens here- tics and founders of human systems to the rabble rout that tore the body of Pentheus limb from limb: so they tore the truth, and then each boasted of the fragment in his hands as though it were the whole (sxaaTfrj ortsp eJ^axsv, wj rtaGm avx^v trjv dx^flftav.) * Otherwise called Be Philosophid. It has been lost, all but a few unimportant fragments. The subject was the su- periority of philosophy to eloquence. \ 310 LECTURE VIII. (lay he should be privileged to enter ; and did at once hand him over to the searching of the Scriptures, though as yet his eyes were holden, and he found not in them till a later day their hid treasures of wisdom and of knowledge.* But I spoke of exaggerations on either side into which we were liable to fall. To take the very oppo- * Conf., 1. 3, c. 4: Usitato jam discendi ordine perveneram in librum quemdam cujusdam Ciceronis, cujus linguam fei4 omnes mirantur, pectus non ita. Sed liber ille ipsius exhor- tationem continet ad philosophianij et vocatur Hortensius. llle vero liber mutavit affectum meum,...et vota ac desideria mea fecit alia. Viluit mihi repente omnis vana spes, et im- mortalitatem sapientiae concupiscebam asstu cordis incredibili. He has very interesting acknowledgments {Conf., 1. 7, c. 9, 20, 21) of the effect which the Platonist books exerted upon him at the great crisis of his life that went before his conver- sion, — what he found in them, and what he did not find, — where they helped, and where rather they hindered him ; con- cluding with this declaration of the things which he had looked for there in vain : Hoc illae litterae non habent, Lacrymas Con- fessionis, Sacrificium tuum, Spiritum contribulatum. Cor con- tritum et humiliatum, Populi salutem, Sponsam, Civitatem, Arrham Spiritus Sancti, Poculum pretii nostri. Nemo ibi cantat: Nonne Deo subdita erit anima mea] ah ipso enim sa- lutare meum: etenim ipse Deus meus, et salutaris raeus, sus- ceptor meus, non movebor ampliiis. Nemo ibi audit vocan- tem: Venite ad me qui laboratis ...Et aliud est de silvestri cacumine videre patriam pacis, ei iter ad eam non invenire, et frustra conari per invia, circiira obsidentibus et insidiantibus fugitivis desertoribus cum principe suo leone et dracone: et aliud tenere viam illuc ducentem, cura ccelestis imperatoris munitam, ubi non latrocinantur qui ccelestem militiamdeseru- erunt; vitant enim eam sicut supplicium. CONCLUDING LECTURE. 311 • site extreme to this of painting the old world to our- selves in lines and colours of unredeemed blackness, we may dwell exclusively on the fairer side which it presents, shutting wilfully our eyes to each darker and more revolting spectacle which it displays. We may find in its art and its literature that which gratifies our taste, and out of a lack of any deeper moral wants, we may come to say with the poet, " Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty," and where we find beauty and propor- tion and harmony, may be ready to pardon the absence of every thing beside; just as those Italian literati at the revival of learning, who preferred calling them- selves brethren in Plato to brethren in Christ, to whom the groves of Academus were far more than the waters of Siloam, and the cultivation of taste than the pro- motion of holiness — men who so mourned over the vacant thrones of Olympus, that to them a heaven opened, with angels ascending and descending upon the Son of man, seemed but an insufficient compensa- tion. •But such a nearer acquaintance with the world which was before and out of Christ, as these studies faithfully pursued must give us, will teach us that if there are sides on which heathen mythology stands related to, and has the recollection and intimation of, something higher than itself, there are also other sides upon which it Hes under the influence of man's cor- ruption, is itself the outgrowth of his foolish sin-dark- ened heart, with the impurities of its origin cleaving to it, — does itself help distinctly to mark his down- ward progress toward idolatry, and toward the losing 312 LECTURE VIII. of the Creator in the creature, — is often only the strangely distorted resemblance, never more than the faint prophecy, of the coming truth. And if so, we shall feel that to hnger with that is ridiculous, whose only worth is that it hands on to something better than itself, and is capable of being translated into a nobler language than its own. So too we shall feel that if the ancient philosophy had glorious ethical precepts, yet were they but adumbrations of the truth, since they wanted, for the most part, that body and substance which action alone could give them ; as is plain from unnumbered confessions and complaints on all sides heard, that the world's physicians had not healed themselves, much less their patients; as is plainer still in the colossal character which sin had rassumed* at the time of Christ's appearing, till it \ sat as it were incarnate in the person of a Tiberius on ^he throne of the world.f In all this we shall behold * In its two great aspects of lust and cruelty: the passages in proof of the first may remain unquoted; but what a picture of the lastj this account of the gladiatorial games and of the manner in which they had grown ever bloodier, presents! (Seneca, Ep, 7:) Quidquid ante pugnatum est, misericordia fuit: nunc omissis nugis, mera homicidia sunt...Plagis agun- tur in vulnera, et mutuos ictus nudis et obviis pectoribus ex- cipiunt. Intermissum est spectaculum? interim jugulantur homines, ne nihil agatur. f With only slight exaggeration Seneca compares the aspect of the world in which he was living to that of a city taken by storm (i)e Bene/., 1. 7, c. 27 :) Si tibi vitae nostras vera imago succurret, videberis tibi videre captse cummaxime civitatis faciem, in qua omisso pudoris rectique respectu vires in con- CONCLUDING LECTURE. 313 how feeble all the barriers which the world's wisdom could raise up, to stay the overflowings of the world's ungodliness and evil.* But to imagine yet a third position; we may read these books, not indeed setting them up in our af- fections against the truths which ought to be dearest to us, nor on the other hand slighting them, because not themselves Christian; but failing altogether to trace in them any relation at all to the great facts of silio suntj velut signo ad permiscenda omnia dato. Non igni non ferro abstinetur : soluta legibus scelera sunt, nee religio quidem, quee inter arma hostilia supplices texit, ullum impe- dimentum est ruentium in praedam. Hie ex privato, hie ex publico, hie ex profano, hie saero rapit : hie effringit, hie tran- silit: hie non contentus angusto itinere, ipsa quibus areetur evertit, et in luerum ruina venit. Hie sine cajde populatur: hie spolia cruenta manu gestat : nemo non fert aliquid ex al- tero. Compare his 95th Epistle. * Thus the atrocity of the gladiatorial shows was by heathen moralists abundantly felt and understood. Cicero indeed makes but a feeble protest against them (Tusc QucBst., 1. 2, c. 17 :) Crudele gladiatorum spectaeulum et inhumanum non- nullis videri solet; et baud scio an ita sit, ut nunc fit. But Seneca more distinctly (Ep. 95:) Homo, sacra res, homo jam per lusum et jocum occiditur, et quem erudiri ad inferenda aceipiendaque vulnera nefas erat, is jam nudus inermisque producitur* satisque spectaculi in homine, mors est. Cf. Ep. 7. And Lueian, in a collection of the notable sayings of Demonax, a cynic philosopher of the second century, tells of him, that once when the Athenians were planning a spectacle of the kind, he told them that they must overthrow the altar of Pity, before they proceeded further in this matter. Yet with all this it remained for an unlettere'd Christian monk to put a stop to these bloody shows. 27 314 LECTURE VIII. the spiritual life of man. We may read them, forget- ting that the meaning of books is to make us under- stand something else besides books, that we miss their significance to us, when they have their end in them- selves, when they do not hand us on to life and to action ; when they explain to us no mysteries of our being, help us in no struggles of our souls, make clear to us no dealings of our God. v There was a time in our lives, — yet a. time which we who are here present should now have left behind us, — when this might have been natural enough, when it would have been premature to begin to meditate on the moral problems which these works present, or to do more than first to master their diiBculties, and those overcome, to walk up and down admiring and enjoying the strange and wondrous world into which they had helped to introduce us. But the time is gone by, when that alone was our task. \ further duties are ours — to study that classical antiquity in the light which our Christian faith and experience throw back upon it, with an open eye for its moral good and for its moral evil, with an entire confidence that in Christ and in his Gospel is given to us the touchstone which shall enable us to recognise — the sharp and dividing sword which shall enable us uner- ringly to separate between — the evil and the good, the false and the true. \;> Let us feel that not by some strange inconsistency, some traditional usage which we will not abandon, but cannot defend, it has come to pass that a litera- ture and philosophy, not Christian but heathen, hold CONCLUDING LECTURE. 315 the place which they do among us, members of the Church of Christ — are at this day contemplated, as they, have been contemplated in time past, by each wiser and more thoughtful man, as an indispensable organ for all higher education, necessary instruments for the cultivating of the complete humanity.*' Let us feel that this only could have been, inasmuch as they stand in some real and intimate relation to the innermost fact of our lives, to our Christian hope — a relation of defect it will often be, yet a relation not * The intimate connexion between the Reformation and the revival of classical learning, with the zeal and success of the Reformers in promoting this last, all will remember — Melanc- thon's especially, to whom beside other titles of honour, this of Praeceptor Germanniae was added. There is a very inte- resting letter of Luther's, in which thanking a friend, who had sent him a Latin Poem which he had composed, and had at the same time expressed his fears that the cause of Clas- sical literature would suffer from men's zeal about Theology, Luther replies that it should not so with his consent : Ego persuasus sum, sine literarum peritia prorsus stare non posse sinceram theologiam, sicut hactenus ruentibus et jacentibus Uteris miserrime et cecidit et jacuit. Quin video nunquam fuisse insignem factara verbi Dei revelationem, nisi primo, velut praecursoribus bapiistis, viara pararit surgentibus et florentibus Unguis et Uteris. Plane nihil minus vellem fieri aut committi in juventute, qu^m ut poesin et rhetoricen omit- tant. In ea certe vota sum ut qukm plurimi sint et poetse et rhetores, quod his studiis videam, sicut nee aliis modis fieri potest, mire aptos fieri homines ad sacra lam capessenda, quJtm dextre et feliciter tractanda...Quare et te oro ut et meo (si quid valet) precatu agas apud vestram juventutem, ut strenue et poetentur et rhetoricentur. (Luther's Briefe, v. 2, p. 313. De Wette's edit.) 316 LECTURE VIII. f the less, which should not be overlooked or denied. And these things being so, let us understand that we • fall below our position, we fall short of the purpose with which these books were placed in our hands, when we fail to regard them in such a light as this. And in this light to look at them will not mar nor hinder that free spontaneous joy in them which in earlier times may have been ours. We may keep that earlier delight, and yet, keeping it, may pass on to a deeper and more meditative emotion. For indeed with what livelier interest shall we occupy ourselves with > this classical antiquity, when we feel that it is not disconnected with the highest things of our life, the most solemn questions which can employ us as bap- tized men. How many will be the thoughts and emotions, and all of them purifying and ennobling, which these studies in this spirit pursued, will awaken and cherish within us ! Thus surely a divine compassion will often- times stir in our hearts, as with an ear made open by love, we drink in the voices of the world's deep dis- quietude, its confessions of an intolerable burden,* its * In none perhaps so frequent and distinct as in Lucretius. There is a very interesting lecture in Keble's PrcRlediones, on the witness for and craving after that which Christianity only can give, that is to be found by those who know how to look for it, in the reputedly atheistic work of the great Roman Poet. He dwells on the many passages in which he expresses his - deep dissatisfaction with life, and with all which life could offer — a dissatisfaction which yet was not, like that of so many on the score of the fleeting nature of life's pleasures and the CONCLUDING LECTURE. 317 acknowledgments that if there be nothing prouder, so also there is nothing more miserable, than man.* And these we shall not go far without meeting: for however the prevailing tone of that heathen world may be lightsome and gay, a summons to enjoy the present, to pluck the roses of life ere they wither, yet if only we listen aright, we may detect that in its . laughter there is heaviness; and oftentimes that laugh- ter is followed by a sigh drawn from deeps of the heart far deeper than those where its smiles were little of them which a man in his brief space could enjoy — but had its rise rather in a sense that these very pleasures, even in fullest measure, did never truly satisfy or fill the soul {Pr (Elect. 25:) Campms hie ferme nobilium est poetarum, ut naenias canat ac querimonias de vitae flore fragili ac caduco. Habet autem Lucretius noster illud, ni fallor, proprium ac modo non singulare, quod non tam breves et augustos incuset aevi in terris agendi limites, qukm ipsum vitae hujus statum, vel optimae actae : significet, rem earn unicnique hominum et fuisse, et fore semper, molestissimo omnium oneri. This is but one of the many memorable passages of the kind, 3. 1016: Deinde animi ingratam naturam pascere semper, Atque explere bonis rebus, satiareque nunquaniy Quad faciunt nobis annorum tempora, circum Cum redeunt, fceetusque ferunt, variosque labores, Nee iamen explemur vital fructibus unquam ; Hoc, ut opinor, id est aevo florente puellas Quod memorant, laticem pertusum congerere in vas, Quod tamen expleri nulls, ratione potestur. Compare 3. 1066—1097. * Pliny {H. N,, 1. 2, c. 5 :) Nee miserius quidquam homine, nee superbius. 27* 813 LECTURE VIII. born.* / Surely we shall find in these cries of a con- stant unrest, a thousand confirmations of his word, who, heathen as he was, yet likened man in his sepa- ration from God, to a child torn from its mother's arms, and which nowhere could be well, till it was given back to those arms once more.f Again, as we acquaint ourselves with the lamenta- tions of mourners for their dead, lamentations so deep and so despairing, as to explain to us all the meaning of that sorrowing without hope, which by the apostle is attributed to the heathen ;J as we hear too the * Compare Herodotus, 1. 7, c. 46; Iliad^ 17. 446; Odyss., 18. 129; Lucretius, 5. 222; Moschus, Idt/IL, 3. 106; Sopho- cles, (Edipus Col, 1225 ; Virgil, Georg., 3. 66. There is a striking collection of passages in which the vanity, the sor- row, the burden of lifCj are acknowledged, in Plutarch's Con- sol, ad Apollon. f Dio Chrysostom, Orat. 12, p. 405, ed. Reiske, X How affecting a picture does Augustine give of what his feelings were, when, in the time during which he was still moving in the element of heathen life, the friend of his soul was taken from him {Conf., 1. 4, c. 4:) Quo dolore contene- bratum est cor meum; et quidquid aspiciebam, mors erat. Et erat mihi patria supplicium, et paternadomus mira infelicitas: et quidquid cum illo communicaveram, sine illo in cruciatum immanem verterat. Expeiebant eum undique oculi mei, et non dabaturmihi; et oderam omnia, quia non haberent eum, nee mihi jam dicere poterant : Ecce veniet, sicut cvim viverit quando absens erat. Factus eram ipse mihi magna quasstio, et interrogabam animam meam, quare tristis esset, et quare conturbaret me valde ; et nihil noverat respondere mihi. Et si dicebarn : Spera in Deum, juste non obtemperabat ; quia rerior erat et melior homo quern carissimum amiserat, quiim CONCLUDING LECTURE. 319 wretched consolations of miserable comforters, the slight palliations of sharpest sorrows, which were all that, with all their kindness, they could suggest, we shall know how to prize the oil and wine, the strong consolations which are stored in the Gospel for each bruised and smitten heart. Or a compassion profounder yet will stir within us, as the voices reach us, which proclaim that the very citadel of hope was lost, voices of an utter uncertainty about all things, and these coming from some of the earth's noblest spirits, who asked of themselves, and could give no satisfying answer to their own question, whether there was indeed a God governing in right- eousness,* or whether all was not given over to the blindest chance — whether they who did his will were a care to Him; whether they survived the grave, and if there were indeed any future and happy seats re- served for the names of the just. And even that of impure which we shall encounter, as we must encounter it, there, proving, as it often has done, fuel of dark fires in unholy hearts, setting phantasma in quod separare jubebatur. Solus fletus erat dul- cis mihi, et successerat amico meo in deliciis animi mei. * The leader will remember the way in which the De Naturd Deorum concludes, and the entire indecision in which all is left. Pliny (H. N., 1. 2, c. 5) is more explicit yet in his open confession of an utter skepticism in any moral government of the world : Irridendum vero agere curam rerum humanarum illud quidquid est summum. Anne tam tristi multiplicique ministerio non pollui credamus dubitemusve? Cf. Lucian's Jupiter Tragaedus, c. 17. 320 LECTURE VIII. them as with sparks of hell in a blaze, it shall not be to us, who go not to seek it, who unwillingly encoun- ter it, thi^ incentive and provocative to evil. Rather shall this impure itself conspire to the same ends with all else which there we meet. It shall make us feel, in its light we shall more plainly see, what hideous sores there were to be healed, how deep a corruption to be subdued, when men could thus glory in their shame, and some comparatively pure in their lives, felt that in their works it was not merely so permitted, but so expected, that they should write.* And in- truding, as often that unholy does, among the fairest creatures of genius, rising up like a plague-spot upon their foreheads, who were among the most gifted of their age and nation, it shall teach us a solemn lesson, even this — how much of moral insensibility may co- exist with highest capacities of intellect — how little the sense of beauty by itself avails to preserve purity » of heart, — how needful it is that hearts should be in \ better guardianship than this — how the highest of this / earth's yields us no security against the lowest ; it shall teach us that if there are pinnacles of heaven above every man, and that in him which prompts him to ascend them, so also are there abysses of sensuality yawning beneath his feet, and that in him which tempts him to engulf himself in these.f * See the elder Pliny, Epist., 1. 4, ep. 14; 1. 5, ep. 3. j- 1 borrow these remarkable words from the answer of one, whose position gave him full right to speak, to the proposal for publishing an expurgated edition of the Classics for the use of schools. Rather, he says, he would have the works as CONCLUDING LECTURE. 821 Nor will this be all ; there will mingle in these stu- dies thoughts and feelings of a liveliest thankfulness to God, as amid the great shipwreck of the Gentile world, we recognise the planks by which one and the authors wrote them; and encountering with his pupils any of those passages which, in such an edition, would have been omitted, he would make them the occasion of some such com- ment as the following: "This lesson they teach you, that re- finement of intellect will not purify the heart; that great mental endowments may co-exist with great moral insensi- bility; that vigour of understanding and delicacy of taste will not reform the world. You see that these have been tried and found wanting. Something more is needed. You may conclude also that the depravity of an age and country was / great, in which those who were the most distinguished by / their intellectual endowments and literary culture, thought I themselves not only licensed, but expected thus to write. It = follows that you have in these passages an evidence of the divine power and purity of that influence which did what all the wisdom of the world could never do. It is Christianity, and it alone, which has really expurgated the literature, not only of Greece and Rome, but of the civilized world. These passages are the trophies of the triumphs of Christianity. They show us, as in triumphal procession, what fearful enemies it has conquered. Without them you might have asked what social good has the Gospel done*? "What moral blessings have we derived from it ? These passages forbid, they answer^ those questions. They remind you from what, and into what • you have been delivered, and by Whom. Therefore, had we expunged them, we should have diminished the strength and glory of that very cause which we desire to serve. Being what they are, I fear not that you should pervert them to an improper use. God forbid that you should dwell on them with any other feelings than those of sorrow mingled with 322 LECTURE VIII. another attained as we trust safely, and through the mercy of a Saviour whom as yet he did not know, to the shore of everlasting life — thankfulness ipingled, it may oftentimes be, with something of a wholesome shame to ourselves, as we contemplate the faithful- ness and fealty to the good and true, which even in the world's darkest hour have been shown by them, whose knowledge was so little, and whose advantages so few, as compared with our own. And perhaps it shall seem to us then, as if that Star in the natural heavens which guided those Eastern Sages from their distant home, was but the symbol of many a star which twinkled in the world's mystical night, — but which yet, being faithfully followed, availed to lead humble and devout hearts from far off regions of su- perstition and error, till they knelt beside the cradle of the Babe of Bethlehem, and saw all their weary wanderings repaid in a moment, and all their desires finding a perfect fulfilment in Him. thankfulness. Horace, had he lived when you do, would have been a Christian, and had he been a Christian, he would not have written thus; but if you who are Christians, love to read, what he, had he been one, would have loathed to write, yon, who ought to Christianize him, heathenize yourselves." THE END. « t- # ^p^'t 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. RENEWALS ONLY — TEL. 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