JL -/ , ; 3.0 WTTWDiUWH THE HULSEAN LECTURES FOR M.DCCC.XLV AND M.DCCC.XLVI. BY RICHARD CHENETIX TRENCH, M.A., VICAR OF ITCHEN-STOKE, HANTS; PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY, KING'S COLLEGE, LONDON; EXAMINING CHAPLAIN TO THE LORD BISHOP OF OXFORD J AND LATE HULSEAN LECTURER. SECOND EDITION, REVISED. CAMBRIDGE : MACMILLAN, BARCLAY, AND MACMILLAN. LONDON: JOHN W. PARKER. 1847. Camfcrfoge : U rtnlett at tfie nl&erstts IPress. ADVERTISEMENT. I HAVE not felt myself at liberty to make more than a few verbal alterations, or here and there to recast a sentence, or add a clause, in these Lec- tures, on the occasion of their second appearance. I have inserted indeed a few brief passages, which originally belonging to the Discourses, had been omitted in the delivery, and have to the Second Series appended a considerable number of Notes in confirmation or illustration of statements made in the text. These having been asked for in more quarters than one, I trust may not be found unac- ceptable to some readers. ITCHEN-STOKE, Nov. 1.9, 1847. 2067986 SUBSTANCE OF CERTAIN CLAUSES IN THE WILL OF THE REV. J. HULSE, M.A. (Dated July 21, 1777.) HE founds a Lectureship in the University of Cam- bridge. The Lecturer to be a " Clergyman in the Univer- sity of Cambridge, of the degree of Master of Arts, and under the age of forty years." He is to be elected annually, " on Christmas- Day, or within seven days after, by the Vice-Chancellor for the time being, and by the Master of Trinity College, and the Master of St John's College, or any two of them." In case the Master of Trinity or the Master of St John's be the Vice-Chancellor , the Greek Professor is to be the third Trustee. The duty of the said Lecturer is, by the Will, " to preach twenty Sermons in the whole year," at " St Mary Great Church in Cambridge ; " but the number having been found inconvenient, application was made to the Court of Chancery for leave to reduce it, and eight Sermons only are now required. These are to be printed at the Preacher's expense, within twelve months after the delivery of the last Sermon. The subject of the Lectures is to be " the Evidence for Revealed Religion; the Truth and Excellence of Christianity ; Prophecies and Miracles ; direct or collateral proofs of the Christian Religion, especially the collateral arguments ; the more difficult texts, or obscure parts of the Holy Scriptures;" or any one or more of these topics, at the discretion of the Preacher. CONTENTS FOR THE YEAR 1845. LECTURE I. INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. PSALM CXIX. 18. PAGE Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law 1 LECTURE II. THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE. EPHESIANS I. 9, 10. Having made known unto us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure, which he hath purposed 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 19 LECTURE III. THE MAN1FOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE. MATTHEW XIV. 20. They did all eat, and were filled 37 LECTURE IV. THE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE. HEBREWS I. 1, 2. 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 57 vui CONTENTS. LECTURE V. THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. JOHN XII. 6. PAGE These things understood not his disciples at the first; but when Jesus was glorified, then remembered they that these things were written of him 74 LECTURE VI. THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE. ISAIAH XII. 3. With joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation . 90 LECTURE VII. THE FRUITFULNESS OF SCRIPTURE. EZEKIEL XLVII. 9. And it shall come to pass, that every thing that liveth, which moveth, whithersoever the rivers shall come, shall live 107 LECTURE VIII. THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. REVELATION VI. 2. Conquering and to conquer 123 CONTENTS FOR THE YEAR 1846. LECTURE I. INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. HAGGAI II. 7- PAGE The Desire of all nations shall come 143 LECTURE II. THE VANQUISHER OF HADES. MARK XVI. 3. Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre? 162 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 Lycaonia, The gods are come down to us in the likeness of men 179 LECTURE IV. THE PERFECT SACRIFICE. MICAH VI. 6, 7. Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself 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 firstborn for my trans- gression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soulf ... 195 T. H. L. b x CONTENTS. LECTURE V. THE RESTORER OF PARADISE. GENESIS V. 29. PAGE And he called his name Noah, saying, This same shall com- fort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which the Lord hath cursed 212 LECTURE VI. THE REDEEMER FROM SIN. ROMANS VII. 21, 23. I find 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 law of sin which is in my members . . . 227 LECTURE VII. THE FOUNDER OF A KINGDOM. HEBREWS XI. 10. A city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God. 246 LECTURE VIII. CONCLUDING LECTURE. 1 THESSALONIANS V. 21. Prove all things ; hold fast that which is good 264 THE FITNESS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE FOR UNFOLDING THE SPIRITUAL LIFE OF MEN BEING THE HULSEAN LECTURES FOR THE YEAR M.DCCC.XLV. LECTURE I. INTRODUCTORY LECTURE, PSALM CXIX, 18. Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law. IT was with a true insight into the sad yet needful con- ditions of the Truth militant in a world of error, that he who has of such just title given his name to these Lectures, which I am now permitted to deliver in this place, devoted so largely of his temporal means to the securing among us a succession of discourses, having more or less nearly to do with the establishing and vindicating of that Truth against all gainsayers and opposers. For such apologies of our holy Faith as he desired by this and other kindred foundations of which he was the author, to promote and set for- ward, are deeply grounded in the very nature of that Faith itself and this, whether they be defensive or aggressive, whether they be of the Truth clearing itself from unjust aspersions, or carrying the war, as it must often do, into the quarters of error, and prov- ing itself not merely to be true, but to be Truth abso- lute, to the exclusion of all rival claims. We know, as a matter of history, that Christian literature did begin, as far back as we can trace it, with works of this character; they are among the earliest which have reached us ; probably among the earliest which existed. Nor do they belong merely to the first ages of the Church's being, however in them they may T. H. L. 1 2 LECTURE I. [1845. naturally have had a special importance. The Truth, like Him who gave it, will always be a sign which shall be spoken against. The forms of the enmity may change ; the coarser and more brutal accusations of one age may give place to subtler charges of another ; but so long as an ungodly world exists, the enmity itself will remain, and will find utterance. The Truth, therefore, must ever be succinct, and prompt to give an answer for itself; and this it does the more readily, as knowing that not man's glory, but God's glory, is at hazard, when it is assailed ; as being in- finitely removed from that pride which might tempt to the keeping silence, because it knows that the accusations made against it are unjust ; being rather full of that humility and love, which make it willingly condescend to the most wayward, if haply it may win them to the service of its King. And this is not all : the Truth cannot pause when it has thus refuted and thrown back the things that it knew not, which yet were laid to its charge. In its very nature it is aggressive also. How should it not be so ? how should it not make war on the strong- holds of falsehood and error, when its very task in the world is to deliver them that were prisoners there ? how should it not seek to gather men under its ban- ner, being moved, as it ever is, with an inward bleeding compassion for all them that are aliens from the faith of Christ, as knowing that every man, till he has found himself in Him, is estranged from the true home of his spirit, the right centre of his being ? How should it not press its treasures upon each, com- mend its medicines to all, when they are medicines for every man's hurt, treasures which would make INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 3 every man rich? when it knows that it has the reality, of which every lie is the counterfeit ; that when men are the fiercest set against it, then are they the most madly at strife with their own blessedness ? But this, it might be said, would sufficiently ex- plain the uses of Christian apology before a world which resists, or puts by, the Faith ; it would explain why the Truth should count itself happy to stand, as it did once in the person of Paul, before Festus and Agrippa, and in presence of Gentile and Jew, to make answer for itself. But, allowing this, what means it when before a congregation of faithful men, when at one of the great centres of Christian light and knowledge in our own land, a preacher under- takes, and that at large and from year to year, the handling some point of the evidences of our Religion? Might not this seem at first as superfluous a form, as when, upon a day of coronation, a champion rides forth, and with none but loyal hearts beating in unison with the multitudinous voices which have hailed his king and theirs, flings down his glove, and challenges any that will gainsay the monarch's right to the crown which hast just been set upon his brows ? Our task might indeed be superfluous as this, were its only purpose to convince opposers. There is, blessed be God, a foregone conclusion in the minds of the faith- ful, drawn from all which they have known themselves of the life and power of the Truth, which suffers them not for an instant to regard it as something yet in debate, and still to be proved ; since it has already approved itself in power and blessing unto them. And yet even for them a work of Christian apo- logy may be so constructed as to have its worth and 12 4 LECTURE I. [1845. meaning. If it widen the basis on which their Faith reposes, if it help them to take count of and use treasures, which before they had, but which they knew not before save in part ; if it cause them to pass from belief to insight ; if it bring out for them the perfect proportions of the Truth, its singular adaptations to the pre-established harmonies of the world, as they had not perceived these before ; if it furnish them with a clue for guiding some perplexed and wander- ing brother from his dreary labyrinth of doubt and error, if in any of these ways it effectually serve, surely it has not been in vain. Such uses we acknow- ledge in Evidences of our Faith, when we constitute them a part of our discipline in this University ; which assuredly we do, not as presuming that we have to deal with any who are yet aliens from that Faith, who have yet need to be brought to the acknowledging of the truth as it is in Jesus ; but rather as desiring to put them who already have drawn in their faith, and that from better sources, from the lips of their mothers, from the catechisms of their childhood, from among the sanctities of their home, in possession of the sci- entific grounds of that belief, which already, by a better and more immediate tenure, is theirs. Nor may we leave wholly out of sight that in a time like our own, of great spiritual agitations, at a place like this, of signal intellectual activity, where oftentimes the low mutterings of distant controversies, scarcely heard elsewhere, are distinctly audible, there can hardly fail to be some perplexed with difficulties, harassed, it may be, with doubts which they do not welcome, but would give worlds to be rid of for ever doubts which, perhaps, the very preciousness of the INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 5 Truth in their sight alone magnifies into importance; for they feel that they are going to hang upon that Truth all that is dear to them for life and for eter- nity ; that it must be to them as their spirits' bride ; and therefore they cannot endure upon it the faintest breath of suspicion. I say, brethren, that we may not leave wholly out of mind that one and another in such perplexity of spirit may be among us here. Happy above measure he, who has "a mouth and wis- dom" given him to meet the necessities of such an one among his brethren ; who shall help to bring him into the secure haven of belief, into the confession that in Christ Jesus are indeed laid up " all," and those infinite, " treasures of wisdom and knowledge." But if discourses of the kind which I am com- mencing to-day, are indeed to be of profit to any, there appear to be one or two preliminary conditions in the choice of a subject, most needful to be ob- served; which failing to observe, we shall, of sure con- sequence, fall wholly short of those ends of usefulness which we desire. And first, a work of Christian defence will be marred, if the subject which we select be one upon which none of the great and decisive issues of the mighty conflict between Truth and error depend ; as when in jousts and tournaments a knight touches the shield of some feeble adversary, passing by and leaving the stronger and more accomplished unchal- lenged. For thus it is with us, when we go off upon some minor point, which, even were it plainly won, would leave us in no essential degree the better, nor an adversary the worse ; which he might yield without 6 LECTURE I. [1845 being dislodged from his strongholds of unbelief, with- out even feeling them less tenable than before. Or again, it will be to little profit that we deal with hinderances to men's belief, which once indeed were real and urgent, but of which the urgency and reality have long since departed; if we take our stand in some part of the battle-field from which the great turmoil of the conflict has now ebbed and shifted away; or conjure up phantom forms of opposition, which once indeed were living and strong, but now survive only in the tradition of books, and at this day practically weaken no man's faith, disturb no man's inner peace. This, too, were a fatal error, to have failed to take note of that great stream of tendency, which has borne us amid other shoals, and near other rocks, from those among which our forefathers steered with manful hearts the bark of their faith, and of God's great mercy made not shipwTeck of that faith amidst them all. Or, once more, Christian apology fails in its lofti- est aim, when it addresses not the whole man, but the man only upon one side, and that not the highest, of his being ; when it addresses not the conscience, the affections, the will, but the understanding faculties alone. How often do we meet in books of Christian evidence the attempt made to substitute a logical or mathematical proof of our most holy Faith for a moral one ; to ascend to that proof by steps which can no more be denied than the successive steps of a problem in geometry, and so to drive an adversary into a corner from whence there shall be no escape. But there is always an escape for those that in heart and will are alienated from the truth. At some stage INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. . 7 or other of the process they will successfully break away, or even if they are brought to the end, they remain not with us long. And we may thank God that it is 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 rejected 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 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. Eevelation, 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 8 LECTURE I. [1845. 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 fitness of Holy Scripture for unfolding the spiritual life of men, and finding in its adaptations for this a proof of its divine origin, I shall not fail in these primary 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 as every other work of men's hands. And these are many ; since for one direct assault on Christianity as a delivered fact, there are twenty on the records of Christianity, 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 believes, whom not any one passage alone, but the collective sum of the Scriptures has delivered to us, be not the highest conceivable revelation of the In- visible God, and his Incarnation the necessary out- coming of the perfections of the Godhead, will yet hover on the outskirts of the conflict, and set himself INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 9 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 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 warfare may be, it is no doubt a true instinct of hate which makes them hope to dis- cover 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 struggle 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 Celsuses, 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 ought of what is going forward among a peo- ple, who not in blood only, but in much besides, are 10 LECTURE I. [1845. most akin to us of all the nations of Europe, will deny that even now God's Word is tried to the utter- most ; 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 them- selves to a quiet end ? 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 them- selves that they are of God, even the witness of power, this is our high argument. And to it perhaps there will be no fitter intro- duction than a few general remarks on the connexion in which a book may stand to the intellectual and spiritual life of men. And would we appreciate the importance of a book received as absolute law, for the mental and moral culture of those who in such wise receive it, the influences which it will exert in moulding them, if only that book contain any ele- ments of truth ; let us consider for an instant what the Koran has been and is to the whole Mohamme- dan 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 everything else would have tended to separate ; how it has stamped on them the features of a common INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 11 life, and set them, however immeasurably below the Christian nations, yet well nigh as greatly above all other nations of the world ; let us consider this, and then what the book is that has wrought these mighty effects the many elements of fraud and folly which are mixed up with, and which weaken, the truth which 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 affected the whole institutions of the world in which we live ; how they have given to those who have sedu- lously occupied themselves in their study and drunk in their spirit, a culture and tone of mind recogniz- ably 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 12 LECTURE I. [1845. 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 word should possess such influence as that which we attribute to this ; difficult to set a dispen- 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 we 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 ought 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 distinct- ness, undergo essential though insensible modifica- INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 13 tions. Apart from all desire to vitiate the committed word, yet, little by little, the subjective condition of those to whom it is entrusted, through whom it passes, will infallibly make itself felt ; and in such treache- 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 continue 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 14 LECTURE I. [1845. midst of it, a Christian Church without any actual writings of its new Covenant could have existed, is 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 sub- sistence. This then, brethren, will be the aim of these lec- tures which I am allowed 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 INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 15 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 full- est and freest enjoyment. It is far from being thus ; for as a man may live in an house without being an architect, 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. But while this is true, it remains true also that 16 LECTURE I. [1845. " 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 appointed 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 to a fuller recognition of those treasures of wisdom and knowledge which are or may be, day by day, in our hands. May we be reminded of the high INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 17 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 dignity and honour. May we in a troubled time be helped to feel something of the grandeur of the Scripture, 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 concluding with words far better than my own,) that " for more than a thousand years the Bible col- lectively taken has gone hand in hand with civiliza- tion, science, law, in short, with the moral and intellectual cultivation of the species, always support- ing, and often leading the way ? Its very presence as a believed book, has rendered the nations emphati- cally a chosen race, and this too in exact proportion as it is more or less generally studied. Of those nations which in the highest degree enjoy its influ- ences, it is not too much to affirm that the differences, public and private, physical, moral and intellectual, are only less than what might be expected from a diversity in species. Good and holy men, and the best and wisest of mankind, the kingly spirits of his- tory enthroned in the hearts of mighty nations, have borne witness to its influences, have declared it to be beyond compare the most perfect instrument, 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 T. H. L. 2 18 LECTURE I. [1845. himself, to leave behind and lose his dividual phan- tom self, in order to find his true self in that distinct- ness 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 II. THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE. EPHESIANS I. 9, 10. Having made known unto us the mystery of his will, accord- ing to his good pleasure, which he hath purposed in him- self; 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 beginning. 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 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 surface of their minds that apprehend it, but rather 22 20 LECTURE II. [1845. one which shall reach far down to the dark founda- tions 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 shew 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. 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 THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE. 21 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 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 22 LECTURE II. [1845. 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 recognize 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 sundered 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 shew 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 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 recognized these relations, this fellow- ship, as the great undoubted fact with which God THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE. 23 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 recognize 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 sub- stitute 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 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 * Compare the remarkable words of Felix the Manicheean, and the fault which he finds with it on this very ground (Augustine, Acta c. Felice Manichceo, 1. 1, c. 9) : Et quia venit Manicheeus et per suam prsedicationem 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 : docuit nos de cursu solis et lunae ; quia hoc in Paulo non audivimus, nee in caeterorum apostolorum scripturis, hoc credimus, quia ipse est Paraclitus. 24 LECTURE II. [1845. 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 creation, 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 recognize 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 nature is to serve him, and not he to acquiesce in nature, that the Bible everywhere speaks rather of a God of men than a Creator of the universe. We accept 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 everywhere 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 sub- ordination ; " 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 Scripture is one, that it is throughout the history of man as distinct from nature, as immeasurably above THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE. 25 nature that it is throughout ethical, and does never, as so many of the mythic accounts of heathen reli- gions, resolve 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, leaving almost unnoticed the mighty empires 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 abridgement of lives and incidents now written with such a special ininute- 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 26 LECTURE II. [1845. darkness, or if a glimpse of light fall upon them for a 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 effected : and each man who at all realized the com- ing 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 mil- 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 find 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 tliat we should recognize as the stream, though it were the slenderest thread, in which an onward movement and current might be discerned ; THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE. 27 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 little 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 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 towards 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 hunters 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 right- eousness," 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 28 LECTURE II. [1845. Israel, had not been, of itself, sufficient to exalt and consecrate its history into a Scripture. These such an 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 after light, 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, according to the idea from which we started, is the history 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 assurances of a restored. The noblest efforts of heathenism were seekings after these rela- tions with God, if haply man might connect himself anew with an higher world, from which he had cut himself loose. But here man does not appear as seeking God, and therefore at best only dimly and uncertainly apprehending him ; but rather God ap- pears 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 him, and has said to him, " Seek my face," and in that saying has pledged Himself 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 mytho- THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE. 29 logy ; 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 utter- ances of his want, cries of his need, confessions of his loss, sharing too, as they must ever, in the imperfec- tions of which they testify, therefore they can find no place in a Bible. For that is in no way a record of man's various attempts to cure himself of the deep wound of his soul ; it is no history of the experiments 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 phi- losophy might indeed be a preparation for Christian- ity heathen mythology, upon its better side, an unconscious 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 it 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 30 LECTURE II. [1845. 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 immediate 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 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 ought 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 relations, through the life and death and resurrec- tion of Him in whom God and man were perfectly atoned. So long as there was anything 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 grow- ing, expanding Book. But when all is given, when God, who at divers times spake to the world by THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE. 31 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 shewn in prophetic vision how this latest and highest which now has been given to man, shall unfold itself into the glory and blessedness of a per- fected 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 disappeared from the earth since the third chap- ter of Genesis, reappears again in visible manifesta- tion, in the latest chapters of the Revelation. The tree of life, whereof there were but faint remini- scences in all the intermediate 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 garden, 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 blessedness in the state of a first innocence would have been ; but the city, costlier indeed, more stately, more glorious, but, at the same time, the result of toil, of labour, of pains reared into a nobler and more abiding habita- 32 LECTURE II. [1845. tion, 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 way, that this idea, which we plainly trace and recognize, of Scripture as a whole, this its architect- onic character, cannot be without its weight in help- ing to determine the Canonical place and worth of the Apocalypse, 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 imperfect without it, that a winding up with the Epistles would have been no true winding up ; for in them the Church appears as still warring and strug- gling, still compast 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 con- quered inheritance. And again, this oneness of Holy Scripture, when we feel it, is a sufficient, even as it is a complete, answer to a very favourite topic of Romish contro- THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE. 33 versialists. 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 fourth) because heresies had risen up which needed to be checked epistles owing their origin to causes equally fortuitous one, because temporary disorders had manifested themselves at Corinth, another, because an Apostle, having promised to visit a city, from some unexpected cause was hindered a third, to secure the favourable reception of a fugi- tive slave by his master that of the New Testament at least, the chiefest part is thus made up of occa- sional documents called forth by emergent needs. And the purpose of this slight on Scripture is evident, tbe conclusion near at hand which is this, How little likely it is that a book so formed, so growing, should contain an absolute 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 recognize not merely the marks and signs of an 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 without, but as unfolded from within, and in obe- dience to an inner law, then we shall feel that, how- ever accidental may appear the circumstances of its growth, yet this accident which seemed to accom- pany its production, 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 34 LECTURE II. [1845. 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. 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 something there which they did not find, with their disappointments 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 contra- dicted its fundamental idea, would have been a dis- cord 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 evi- dently 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 Wis- dom 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 conclusion strange ; for unless they bring to it a moral need, unless that moral need be to them the THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE. 35 interpreter of every part, and gather all that is ap- parently abnormal in it under an higher and recon- ciling law, the Book, in its deepest meaning and worth, will remain 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 convic- tion which will rise out of this, that all which bears on the circumstances of this recovering and regather- ing 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 altogether, nothing but that the history of the restoring the defaced image of God, the re-con- stitution 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 connexion 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 into a single sheaf, to feel that, however manifold and apparently disconnected they are, there is yet a bond that binds them into one. 32 36 LECTURE II. Our hearts, we want a central point for them, as it were a heart within the heart, and we oftentimes seek this in vain. Oh, what a cry has gone up from thousands 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 har- monies? 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 purpose 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. LECTURE III. THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE. MATTHEW XIV. 20. They did all eat, and were fitted. 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 pre- sent to bring out before you how this Book, which is one, is also manifold ; a fact which we may not be so ready to recognize 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 volume, but as being truly one, while it testifies in every part of one and the same Lord, while it is everywhere 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 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. 38 LECTURE III. [1845. Yet, on the other hand, there are other truths which, if we mean to enter into full possession of our treasures, 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 CEdipus, we have the man of Uz ; nor epos, though for " the tale of Troy divine," ours is the story of the New Jerusalem, "com- ing down out of heaven as a bride adorned for her husband." And it will be my desire to shew how this also was needful, if it was 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 THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 39 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 relations of likeness and difference in which various parts of Scripture stand to one another ; to shew 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 which 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 an 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 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 40 LECTURE III. [1845. spare ; all have been nourished, all have been quick- ened ; 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 that word of Origen's, rather a four-sided Gospel* than four Gospels, even as out of the same instinctive 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, we can trace, I think, a peculiar vocation in each of the Evan- gelists for catching some distinct rays of the glory of * EvayyeXiov -re-rpdyiovov. Thus too Augustine (In Ev. Joh., Tract. 26) : Quatuor Evangelia, vel potius quatuor libri unius EvangeliL THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 41 Christ, which the others would not catch, and for re- flecting them to the world so that the terms, Gospel according to St. Matthew, according to St. Mark, and so on, are singularly happy, and imply much more than we, for whom the words are little more than a technical 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 pourtrayed is his Christ : under this aspect 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. 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 Avhich 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 firet. 42 LECTURE III. [1845. But the second Gospel, written, as all Church tra- dition testifies, under the influence of St. Peter and at Rome, bear 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 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 promises 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 THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 43 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 shewed 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 their adequate satisfaction a Gospel which should link itself 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 em- blem * 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 * Thus the Christian poet : poelum transit, veri rotam Soils ibi vidit, totam Mentis figens aciem : Speculator spiritalis Quasi Seraphim sub alls Dei videt faciem. Volat avis sine meta Quo nee vates, nee prbpheta Evolavit altius : Tam implenda quam impleta Nunquam vidit tot secreta Purus homo purius. 44 LECTURE III. [1845. speak, the mystical relations of the faithful with their Lord, as none other before him had done'"". 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 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 wanting, 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- quate substitutes. But what then ? This is not a weak point with 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 an hostile criticism, an early Father of the Church had expressed this very distinction in words which in sound perhaps are almost overbold, styling the first three Gospels, evayyeXta crit)/u.a.TiKct, and the fourth an tvayyeXiov ov. Yet it is needless to observe, that herein * See Origen's interesting discussion (Comm. in. Joan., Tom. i.) on the relation of the Gospels to the other Scriptures, and their relation within themselves, one to another. On this latter subject he expresses himself thus : ToX^tjTe'oi/ TOIVW el-jrelv aTrapxrjv M" Trav fie evayyeXiwv dtrap^v TO Kara 'Itodvvijv. THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 45 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 regions of the spiritual life ? To take an example which must be familiar to every scholar, how dif- ferent the Socrates of Xenophon, and the Socrates of Plato. Yet shall we therefore leap to the con- clusion, that if the one has painted the master truly, then the other has pourtrayed him falsely ? Such a conclusion may lie upon the surface ; it might ap- pear to us an easy solution of the difficulty ; yet were it a very different solution from that to which all the profoundest enquirers 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 common 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 concern- ing 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 46 LECTURE III. [1845. more was this to be looked for from Him, who was the King of Truth, who was to feed and enrich not some, but all ; and this, not in some small and scanty mea- sure, but who was to satisfy all in all ages with good- ness and truth ? How inevitable was it that He, the Sun of the spiritual 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 did, under the direct teaching of God's Spirit, undertake 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, which 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 * Allusions to it are frequent in the early hymnologists. Thus, one of them in an hymn, De SS. Evangelistic : Paradisus his rigatur, Horum rivo ebretatis Viret, floret, faecundatur, Sitis crescat caritatis, His abundat, his lastatur Ut de fonte Deitatis Quatuor fluminibus. Satiemur plenius. Fons est Christus, hi sunt rivi, | Horum trahat nos doctrina Fons est altus, hi proclivi, Vitiorum de sentina, Ut saporem fontis vivi Sicque ducat ad divina Ministrent fidelibus. Ab imo superius. Another too in an hymn, De S. Joanne Evangeltetd : Inter illos primitives Toti mundo propinare Veros veri fontis rivos Nectar illud salutare Joannes exiliit, Quod de throno prodiit. THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 47 four living creatures of Ezekiel's vision, of whom each with a different countenance looked a different way, and yet all of them together upheld the throne and chariot of God, and ever moved as being informed by one and the selfsame 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*. And as we have a Gospel which stands thus four- square, with a side facing each side of the spiritual * The first that we know of who connected these with the four Evangelists was Irenaeus. He says (Cora. Hter., 1. 3, c. 2 8,) TeTpdfiopQa yap -ra a, Te-rpd^op^ou /cat TO evajye\iov f and draws Out at length the fitness of each to represent each ; on which see Suicer's Thes., s. v. euayyeXi /3ot/0eis t-rrayiayi) ' oir\ov ev FaXju6s yap Kal e/c XiO/vijs KapSias SaKpvov eKKaXeiTai. ^aX/xos TO T(OV dyye\tav epyov,To ovpdviovrro\LTevfj.a, TO TrvevfiaTiKov dv/nt- ap.a, K. T. X. 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 annunciat, correptio castigat, moralitas suadet : in libro Psalmorum profectus est omnium, et medicina quaedam salutis humanae. Quicunque legerit, habet quo propriae vulnera passionis special! possit curare remedio. ..Quantum laboratur in Ecclesia ut fiat silentium, cum lectiones leguntur ! Si unus loquatur, obstrepunt uni- versi: cum psalmus legitur, ipse sibi est effector silentii. Omnes loquuntur, et nullus obstrepit. Psalmum reges sine potestatis super- cilio resultant. In hoc se ministerio David gaudebat videri. Psalmus cantatur ab imperatoribus, jubilatur a populis. Certant clamare sin- guli quod omnibus proficit. Domi psalmus canitur, foris recensetur. Sine labore percipitur, cum voluptate servatur: psalmus dissidentes copulat, discordes sociat, offensos reconciliat...Certat in Psalmo doc- trina cum gratia simul. Cantatur ad delectationem, disci tur ad erudi- tionem. Nam violentiora prsecepta non permanent : quod autem cum suavitate perceperis, id infusum semel prsecordiis, non consuevit 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 conversion : Quas tibi, Deus meus, voces dedi cum legerem psalmos David...et quomodo in te inflammabar ex eis, et accendebar eos recitare si possem toto orbe terrarum adversum typhum human! generis... Quam vehementi et acri dolore indignabar Manichaeis, et miserabar 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, speaking of the manner in which, by the troubles of the civil wars, he was de- prived of his books and his retirements, and how in his deprivation he found 54 LECTURE III. 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 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 found comfort here, thus goes on : " Indeed, when I came to look upon the Psalter with a nearer observation, and an eye diligent to espy any advantages and remedies there deposited...! found so many admirable promises, so rare variety of the expressions of the mercies of God, so many consolatory hymns, the commemoration of so many deliver- ances from dangers and deaths and enemies, so many miracles of mercy and salvation, that I began to be so confident as to believe there 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, ' If sin ' and misery ' did abound, then did grace superabound ;' and as we believe of the passion 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 THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 55 cries, as those of each other regenerate man. Such a rule, such a standard we have here ; man is speak- ing unto God; that which came from heaven is return- ing 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 mountain-tops of man's spirit are smoking, but smoking because 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 Scripture 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 evermore. 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 delights 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, seeing 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 honeycomb." We are sick, and these are medicines no less than 56 LECTURE III. [1845 food ; and for us that word must stand fast, Non cor- rigat ceger medicamenta sua. Let us thus bear ourselves towards Holy Scripture, and then presently, in that which seemed a stranger face we shall recognize 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 plenteous- ness. LECTURE IV. THE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE HEBREWS I. 1, 2. God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spaJce in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoJcen unto us by Ms 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 subject, and in knowing no other subject, 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 progressive unfolding of God's plan in Scripture, may well afford matter for another discourse, and will sup- ply our theme for this day. Nor shall I 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 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 58 LECTURE IV. [1845. 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 Blower 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 ought 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 pro- gress. Does a nearer examination of Holy Scripture bear out this our expectation ? Does it speak of itself as a progressive revelation of the Name of God ? And if so, 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 THE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE. 59 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 affirms itself to be. Who, for instance, can help feeling that in the three memorable epochs by which it marks the greatest un- unfoldings 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 gathered into a Church and constituted for the while the repre- sentative of all ; and that we have this with marvellous correspondencies of these epochs to similar periods in the lives which we ourselves are living ? In Abraham and the Church of the patriarchal 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 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 patri- archs walked before God, in the beauty and the sim- plicity of a childlike 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 60 LECTURE IV. [1845. 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 back ground by the lawgiver ; God appears the giver of a " fiery law : " and the race having outgrown its childlike estate, with all the blessed privileges 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 com- mandment 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 an holy law could alone bring it out ; for thus only was it in the way of 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 righteousness ; since without this that love itself had shewn 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 consuming fire for all impurity 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 ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE. 61 the sake of which it passed through those lower stages. The consciousness of the filial relation has again re- vived in its full strength, and the suspended privileges are restored. "Abba, Father!" is once more on the lips of the Church, only with deeper accents and a fuller sense than at that earlier day of all v\hich in these words is included. The sense of God's love which belonged to its childhood, of God's righteous- ness which predominated in its youth, are reconciled ; 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 a one who can trace in himself the same process and pro- gress as we have been following here ? First was our childhood, corresponding to Abraham's state the undeveloped, yet true affiance on an 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 62 LECTURE IV. [1845. 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 an 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 which 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 which cannot remain unavenged or unre- drest. But dreadful as this law is, terrible and threat- ening shape as it rises over the soul, does not 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 inherit- ance, 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 THE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE. 63 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 faith 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 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 particular 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 certain 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. 64 LECTURE IV. [1845. And this sequence is that maintained in the Bible ; for what is the early history of the Bible, but pre- dominantly the history of the Family ? of the blessing which awaits reverence for the family order, of the sure curse which avenges its violation. On the one side, we have the men who were true to this divine institute; who, amid many weaknesses, recognized 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 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 nations 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 ; shewing 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 distracted, THE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE. 65 externally enslaved forfeiting those very outward gifts for the sake of which it had turned its back upon the Giver righteousness and truth and justice perish- ing 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 which 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 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 T. H. L. 5 66 LECTURE IV. [1845. 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 shews 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- 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 miracles properly so called, the miracula potential, 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 development, according to which there is nothing sudden, nothing abrupt or unprepared in his counsels, all whose works were known to Him from the begin- ning. It is part of this law that there should ever be prefigurations 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 THE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE. 67 prepared, 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 ordered that each one of the mighty acts of our Lord's life should not stand wholly apart, and without analogy 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 compared with the glory that excelleth ; yet sketches and out- lines 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 52 68 LECTURE IV. [1846. chariot to bear him up, did in the far sublimer calm- ness of his own indwelling power arise from the earth, and with his human body pass into the heavenly places*. And once more, in the dividing of the Spirit which Moses had, upon the seventy elders of Israel, so that they all did prophesy, we recognize an 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 a lower 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 Scripture thus adduced very likely are those in which prophecy 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. * Gregory the Great (Horn, in Evang.) : Elias in curru legitur ascendisse, ut videlicet aperte demonstraretur, quia homo purus adju- torio indigebat alieno. Per angelos quippe facta et ostensa sunt adju- menta ; quia nee in crelum quidem aerium per se ascendere poterat quern naturae suae infirmitas gravabat. Redemtor autem noster non curru, non angelis sublevatus legitur, quia is qui fecerat omnia, nimi- rum super omnia sua virtute ferebatur. THE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE. 65 Rather the subtle threads of prophecy are woven through every part of the woof and texture, not separable from thence without rending and destroy- ing 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 appoint- ment, which meant thus to supply evidences ready to hand for the truth of Revelation, in the curious tallying of the Old with the New, in 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 such utterances, being the very Spirit of Truth, gave 70 LECTURE IV. [1845. 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 recognizing his glory, of whom all that went before was but the shadow and the symbol. In all this was a prelude to prepare the spiritual ear for the full burst of a later, and but for that, an overwhelming harmony ; a purpling of the east, which might tell in what quarter the Sun of Righteousness would appear, and whither the straining eyes must turn, that would catch the first brightness of his rising. THE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE. 71 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 everywhere 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 aspect to-clay, 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 gradual 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 contemplated as this Book 72 LECTURE IV. [1845. 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 "little children," then as " young men," and then as "fathers." 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 consciousness 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 which 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 shews 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 up to their full stature as men. Often in that evil pride which makes us rather to follow after that which will 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 we 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, THE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE. 73 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 which God is met. Wel- coming and fulfilling the lowliest duties which meet us there, we shall often be surprized 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 shewed 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 ; but when Jesus was glorified, then remembered they, that these were written of him. THE subject of the Lectures which I am now permitted to resume, is the fitness of Holy Scripture for unfold- ing 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 earlier discourses, so little have I a right to expect that those who did, should vividly retain them in their memories, that I shall just mention at this resumption of the course the point at which I have arrived, not attempt- ing to retrace even with hastiest steps, but indicating 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 belong- ing 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 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 THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 75 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 shew how Scripture is fitted to be the Book of our education, the furthererof our spiritual growth, through itself being the history of the progressive education of our race into the fulness of the knowledge of God. An ample task remains for us still : this day's portion of that task will consist in an attempt, it must be indeed a most imperfect one, to shew how this treasure of divine Truth, once given, has only gradually revealed itself; how the history of the Church, the difficulties, the trials, the struggles, the temptations in which it has been involved, have inter- preted 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 sympathetic ink, invisible for a season, yet ready to flash out in lines and characters of light, whenever the appointed 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, and this, until the forty years of their sojourn in the wilderness had expired. Or, to use another comparison which may help to illustrate our meaning, Holy Scripture thus progressively unfolding what it contains, might be likened fitly to some magnificent landscape on which the sun is gradually rising, and 76 LECTURE V. [1845. ever as it rises, is bringing out one headland into light and prominence, and then another; anon kin- dling the glory-smitten summit of some far mountain, and presently 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 prospect stands out in the clearness and splen- dour of the brightest noon. And we can discern, I think, in some measure, causes which in the wisdom and providence of God worked together to constitute Scripture as this glorious 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 slowly 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 so speak, a rapid rehearsal of the great drama of God's providence 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 comprest and brought into narrowest compass, and so to speak, all foreshortened, and, as a picture of the future, wanting in perspective and in distance. But this glimpse once vouchsafed to us of all, the wondrous THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 77 picture dislimns and dissolves again ; that aera in which were all other aeras wrapped up, closes, and the period of gradual development begins ; but yet not this, be- fore 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 Jewish 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 shewn ; not till many Antichrists had re- hearsed 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 ; inas- much as that age, that fruitful 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 rudi- ments of all other times within its bosom. It is this fact, that the Holy Scripture contains 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 78 LECTURE V. [1845. 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. Now doubtless there is a true idea of Scriptural developments, which has always been recognized, 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- * Thus Augustine (Enarr. in Ps. Liv. 22.) : Multa enim latebant in Scripturis, et quum praecisi essent haeretici, quaestionibus agitaverunt Ecclesiam Dei ; aperta sunt quae latebant, et intellecta est voluntas Dei....Numquid enim perfecte de Trinitate tractatum est antequam oblatrarent Ariani ? numquid perfecte de poenitentibus tractatum est antequam obsisterent Novatiani ? Sic non perfecte de baptismate tractatum est antequam contradicerent foris positi rebaptizatores. Cf. Enarr. in Ps. Lxvii. 31 ; and Confess., 1. 7, c. 19. Improbatio haereti- corum facit eminere quid Ecclesia sentiat, et quid habeat sana doctrina. THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE.. 79 covers what in Holy Scripture is given her ; but it is not this, that she unfolds by an independent power anything further therefrom. She has always possessed what she now possesses of doctrine and truth, only not always with the same distinctness of consciousness. 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, compelled thereto by the provocation of enemies, or induced 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 complement 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 become 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 an 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 clown 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 80 LECTURE V. [1845. of their properties of his divine will and his human, all this the earliest had, yea and enjoyed, not hav- ing arrived at it by analytic process, not able perhaps, as not needing, to lay it out with dialectic accuracy, but in total impression, in synthetic unity. She pos- sessed 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 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 accurately guarded statements of the old. But the essential 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 THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 81 mind of an inverted pyramid, so small the founda- tion, 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 capable 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 altogether different from that which some of late have put for- 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 recognizes 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 T. H. L. 6 82 LECTURE V. [1845. 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 entered 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 became to the faithful all which they were in- tended 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 innermost heart of them, the deepest signifi- cance was not seen. For they were the needs of souls, the mighty anguish of men's spirits, which were the true interpreters of these portions of God's Word. When that vast and gorgeous fabric, the Papal Chris- tendom 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 realization, or an impious caricature, of the promised kingdom 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, my- self and no other, one by myself, with my own burden, THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 83 my own sin, the inalienable 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 fellowship 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 shew me how my own personal relations to God, 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 occu- pied with setting forth a personal Deliverer from this personal sense of guilt and condemnation ? And not anything else but this mighty agony of souls would have supplied the key of knowledge to the Epistles of St. Paul, which had remained otherwise to the faithful as written in a strange language, to be admired at a distance, but dealing with 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 thirsted the most. Thus at the Keformation 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 re- lations were perfect, that by one oblation Christ had perfected for ever them that were sanctified, that nothing might come between God and the cleansed 62 84 LECTURE V. [1845. 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 Scripture which were occupied with declar- ing the perfectness of these relations, were those most sedulously and most earnestly handled ; bright beams of light flashed out from them, at once enlightening and gladdening and kindling, as there had never done until now. But in our own day, as we see in that country where alone a speculative philosophy, with which theo- logy has to put itself in relation, exists, the controversy 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 constitution in the Son ? but whether there is such a constitution at all? it is not what follows on the relations which the In- carnate Word established between God and men, but whether there have been any such relations 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 combatants 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 ; criticises the record, or the fact recorded ; the record, that it is a loose and accidental aggregation of floating ma- terials, of insecure traditions, which crumbles to pieces THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 85 at any accurate handling or the fact recorded, that a man who was God, and God who was man, is in- conceivable, and carries its own contradiction on its front. And as the Gospels are the point mainly assailed, so are they the citadel in which they must make them- 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 perfectness 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 pre- sided at their construction, and do continually reveal themselves to the deeper enquirer, 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 accepting 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 86 LECTURE V. [1845. shewn 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 drama is hastening with ever briefer pauses to its catastrophe, then, in one unlocked for way or an- other, the veil will be lifted up from this wondrous Book, and it will 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 deliverance 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 past 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 faith- fully girded itself to that. Let us not then, under shew of humility, flatter our indolence, and say that THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 87 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 handed clown, 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 lips 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 3 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 88 LECTURE V. [1845. 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 we might have made that treasure our own ; so reconciling, so evidently fitted would it have shewn 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 enriched them. But this will not prove so indeed; for it is a just law of our being, one of the righteous compensations of toil, that what a man wins by his labour, be it inward truth, or only some outward sup- pliance of his need, is ever far more really his own, makes him far more truly rich, than ought 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 an 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. But also with a just confidence in that blessed Spirit, who is ever with His Church, who is ever lead- THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 89 ing 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 work which our God would have done by us in this the day of our toil. LECTURE VI. THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE. 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 be- fore 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 know- ledge of all the riches which in that Word were their own. It were a worthy 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 inexhaustible also, should be quarries in which he may always dig, yet which he never can dig out, a world of wisdom in which the most zealous and suc- cessful searcher shall ever be the readiest to acknow- ledge 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 cultivat- ing of humanity, for the developing, by the ministry of the Church, through the teaching of the Spirit, the higher life of every man in the world. It belongs to THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE. 91 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 worked 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 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 an whole ; this the wealth which there is stored for each one of the faithful in particu- 92 LECTURE VI. [1845. lar, and which all, given to him in his Baptism, he yet only little by little can make his own, appropriating 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 no te, is one which by shallow or malignant objectors has been often turned into a charge against it, I man the absence of a systematic arrangement ; for such is the shape which the complaint generally assumes. But this complaint of the want 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 deAv 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 an help to the weakness of his faculties, is the artificial arrangement by which he brings within his limited ken that which in no other way he would be able to grasp as an 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 needful; but most needful also that Scrip- ture should not be such a book. The dearest interests of all, of wise men equally as of women and children, demand this. THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE. 93 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 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 * Strauss. Compare his Leben Jesu with his Christliche Glau- benslehre. 94 LECTURE VI. [1845. adorned this University, and is yet numbered among the honoured band of the Cambridge Platonists, when speaking of the delightful exercise of the highest faculties 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 everywhere 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 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 an higher method, of this constitution of Scripture as a Book which no man should ever search * Henry More, in his Mystery of Godliness, B. i., c. 2. Another in our own day has expressed himself in like manner : " Scripture 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." THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE. 95 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 lives. 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 Theologies, 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 w,hich 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 lov- ing and studious eye. Beheld in some new combination, in some new grouping with those by whom they are surrounded, they will 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 person ? And our blessedness is, that Christ does not declare 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 96 LECTURE VI. [1845. in its tenure of a doctrine, or, at least, only mediately and in a secondary sense upon this. But another reason why 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 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, before, 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* Fuller. " The same man at several times may in his apprehen- sion prefer several Scriptures as best, formerly most affected with one place, for the present more delighted with another ; and afterwards THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE. 97 Another provision which in it is made for awaken- ing attention, and for summoning men to penetrate more deeply into its meaning, is to be found in its apparent, 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 as to his person. For that Word goes on its way, not obviating every possible misconception, not giving anxious pains to shew 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 enquirer, 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 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 perhaps 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." T. H. L. 7 98 LECTURE VI. [1845. strength of its statements had evaporated, not caring even though its truths should seem to jostle one an- other. Enough that they do not do so indeed. It is content to leave them to the Spirit to adjust and re- concile, and to shew how the rights of each are com- patible with the rights of the other and not compatible 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 we have the divers statements of St. Paul and St. James divers, but not diverse each, in the words of St. Chrysostom, declar- ing the same truth, &a0o/ows, but not evavriw 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 signifi- cance of temptation, should we have been set to think about it so effectually, by any other process ? 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 seef, 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 incommunicable even unto them. If indeed these difficulties had been artificially contrived, if they had been puzzles and perplexities * Compare Gen. xxii. 1, with Jam. i. 13. t Compare Matt. v. 8, with 1 Tim. vi. 16. THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE. 99 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. Rather is it here as in the kingdom of nature. How often does nature seem to contradict herself, so beckoning us onward to deeper investigations, till we shall 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 in- finite : 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 care- less 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 smallest details in this again like nature, which shews more wonderful, 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 of this widest wealth 72 100 LECTURE VI. [1845. 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 pro- foundest 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 nothing 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 alto- gether 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 * Augustine (Enarr. in Ps. ciii.) making spiritual application 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, uterque inde bibit, sed quisque in sitim suam Non dicit aqua, Lepori sufficio et repellit onagrum ; neque hoc dicit, Onager accedat, lepus si accesserit, rapietur. Tarn fideliter et temperate fluit, ut sic onagrum satiet ne leporem terreat. Sonat strepitus vocis Tullianae, Cicero legitur, aliquis liber est, dialogus ejus est, sive ipsius sive Platonis, seu cujuscumque talium : audiunt imperiti, infirmi minoris cordis, quis audet illuc aspirare ? Strepitus aquae et forte turbatae, ccrte tamen tarn rapaciter fluentis, ut animal timidum non audeat accedere et bibere. Cui sonuit, In principio fecit Deus coelum et terrain, et non ausus est bibere ? Cui sonat Psalmus, et dicat, Multum est ad me ? THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE. 101 destinies, of our own lives, become clear ! Even the sceptic Bayle was compelled to call them an abridge- ment of all human history ; and such they are, setting us as they do at the very centre of the moral oscilla- tion of the world. These examples of that, whereof hundreds might be adduced, must suffice. Nor is it only what Scripture says, but its very silence which is instructive for us. It was said by one wise 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 informs us*." For example of this, how full of meaning 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 snatch- ing 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 stunted and premature harvest, which should have been the season of patient * Boyle (Style of Holy Scripture) : " 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." 102 LECTURE VI. [1845. sowing, of an earnest culture 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 me as one of thy hired ser- vants," 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 an hired servant, this wish to be kept at a certain dis- tance, 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 meditated, 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 con- sists 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 reclaiming of every blessing, which the sinner had lost, but which God is waiting and willing to restore. Many other of the apparent accidents of Scripture, on what deep grounds do they rest ! Thus, for example, in the history of Pharaoh's trial, that God should ten times be said to have hardened his heart, and he ten * Compare in Luke xv. ver. 19 and 21. THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE. 103 times to have hardened his own, or to have had it hardened, without any reference to other than himself. 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 lan- guage 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 impugn this exactly equal distribution of either language is surely most remarkable. The great, however mysteri- ous, fact of the freedom of man's will going hand in hand with the sovereignty of God is not put in ques- tion 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 importance 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 auctor is yet the dispositor malorum determines that the evil of the sinner shall break 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 legend, 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, 104 LECTURE VI. [1845. 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 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 advances ; 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 exponent of the inner, a garment of mysterious texture which his * Or as one said in the middle ages : Tota sacra Scriptura loqui- tur nobis tanquam balbutiendo, sicut mater balbutiens cum filio suo parvulo, qui aliter non potest intelligere verba ejus. THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE. 105 creative thoughts have woven for themselves. But for this very reason, we come back again and again to these divinely chosen similitudes with fresh interest, with new delight, being continually rewarded with glimpses, unperceived before, of the strange and mani- fold 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 enquiries. As one said of old, Habet Scriptura Sacra haustus primos, habet secundos, habet tertios. 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 living relation with the things which he reads, who consults the oracle, but 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 an 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 in- expressible 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 further he 106 LECTURE VI. [1845. advances, the more will be aware that what lies before 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. LECTURE VII. THE FRUITFULNESS OF SCRIPTURE. EZEKIEL XL VII. 9. And 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 is has shewn 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, everything 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 endeavoured to prove that it was fitted for being, that which we might be- forehand 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 little profit to have shewn how the Scripture ought to have been all this, how it was fitted for being all this, unless it could be shewn also that it had been ; unless we could point to the world's history in evidence that it had done that, which we say it was adapted for doing. " The blind see, the lepers are cleansed, the dead are raised ;" it was to these mighty works that Christ 108 LECTURE VII. [1845. 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 ought which comes claim- ing to be from God, is its power the power which it is able to put forth for blessing and for healing. If the Scriptures manifested no such power, all other evidence for their divine origin, however convincing we might think it ought to be, yet practically would fail to convince. Men will not live on the report that ought is great or true, unless they so see it and so find it themselves. But if they do, no assertion on the part of others that it is small, will prevail 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 Christendom ; and it was with good reason, and out of a true feeling of this, that Origen and other early apologists 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 men ? what significance had they for the world's after development? what have they bequeathed to shew 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 FRUITFTJLNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 109 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 Scriptures ; and which sometimes even in our day are brought forward in the hope of confounding the Canonical in a common discredit with them. We in the same way may 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 come 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 recognize 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 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 110 LECTURE VH. [1845. is at least as remarkable in this respect, that while 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 heretical sects, never extricating themselves from those narrow 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 remained 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 which has made the Canonical Gospels potent, 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 decision was the spiritual instinct of the Church recognizing 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 THE FRUITFULNESS OF SCRIPTURE. Ill not her decision which had any thing to do with making these to be chaff and those wheat. It is the task which I propose to myself to-day, to consider a few aspects under which the Scriptures have thus shewn 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 ought 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 past by, I will seek to present to you one or two reflections, 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, where at first sight one would least have expected it, where we should have been tempted for many reasons 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 despair, for ex- ample, a lover of art, one who at Athens or at Rome fondly had dwelt among the beautiful creations of poet and of painter, would have contemplated the rise of the new religion, and the authority which its doc- 112 LECTURE VII. [1845. trines 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 delighted. He might have been ready perhaps to acknowledge that our human life under this new teaching would 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 mislike of the rising Faith of his alienation from it, as of that of many other hea- thens 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 forms of the old religion, and, if that perished, inevitably doomed to perish with it : and so they resisted while they could ; and when they could resist no longer, they sat down and made pas- sionate lamentation at the grave of the old world, which all their lamentations could not call back to life ; instead of rejoicing at the birth and by the cradle of the new, with 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 THE FRUITFTJLNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 113 on this account visited him. His exaggerations were only those into which a man of strong moral earnest- ness 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 exclusive homage to the old idolatries, so deeply polluted, for the most part, were they, so far sunken with a sunken moral world, that the Christian neophyte, 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, 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 T. H. L. 8 114 LECTURE VII. [1845. 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 fiair 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, 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 men ; 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 scepticism, 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, THE FRUITFULNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 115 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 ought 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. Bather, the Spirit, the Word, and the Church are the three mighty factors which 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 enlight- 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, therefore, 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 82 116 LECTURE VII. [1845. mainly traceable, to note the part which this Scripture has borne in bringing about that new creation, wherein the old things of the world have past 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 background, the brightness and glory of the new ; without denying to that old world what it had of noble and true, or calling, as some have done, its virtues merely shewy 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 everything be- sides ; everything 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 feel, a new, inasmuch as it is an infinitely 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 everywhere given to us graces for virtues, and martyrs for heroes ; it has so reversed THE FRUITFULNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 117 men's estimate of greatness, that a wreath of thorns is felt to be a far worthier ornament for a brow than a diadem of jewels a Christ upon his cross to be a spectacle more glorious far than a Caesar on his throne. From that Word too we have derived such a sense of the duties of relation, of the debt of love which 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 tumultous 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 an higher life, which lay in that people's bosom, and yet but for this 118 LECTURE VII. [1845. never could have come tq 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 out of the sphere of the divine attraction, further and further 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 greybeard 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 THE FRUITFULNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 119 him more and more the glory of meekness, of over- coming evil with good, of serving others in love, instead 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 an 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 far islands of the Pacific, we have proof that this Word is yet mighty through God for casting down the strongholds of Satan and of sin. Nor needs it to look thus far abroad to be re- minded of what 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 all in those pages which speaks more directly to himself, they are eloquent to him with a thousand stirring recollections. For at every step which he advances, he recognizes that which has been the mo- tive of some mighty and long drawn conflict, in which the keenest and brightest intellects, the kingliest spirits, the Bernards and the Abelards of their day, 120 LECTURE VII. [1845. were engaged. Here,' there, and everywhere, be it that he wanders among the extinguished volcanoes of controversies 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 recognize 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 then 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 all kinds which have accumulated round such other books as are signal monuments of human intellect and power; THE FRUITFULNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 121 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 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 ; shewing themselves seeds of life, leaven 122 LECTURE VII. 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 everywhere, 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 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 ? LECTURE VIII. THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. REVELATION VI. 2. Conquering and to conquer. AN earlier lecture in this present course was dedicated to the manner in which Holy Scripture had, little by little, laid bare its treasures to the Church; and in my very latest I had occasion to speak of the victories which the Truth had won and was winning still the way in which the word of the Scripture was vindi- cating itself to be all that it claimed to be, shewing 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 all demands which may be made on it ; that it has in reserve whatsoever any new conditions of the world, 124 LECTURE VIII. [1845. any new shapes of evil, any new, if they be righteous, cravings of the spirits of men, may require. We believe that as the Scripture is an armoury 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 armoury for bringing them to a glorious termination; and the weapons too them- selves 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, 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 confidence that the Truth being ever, in the language of Bacon, THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 125 "an hill not to be commanded," the same those Scriptures, which are Scriptures of very truth, shall shew themselves an hill which shall never be com- manded, but which rather shall itself command all other heights and eminences of the spiritual and in- tellectual world. However high these tower, 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 antichristian forms of society may rise up, promising good, for the moment seeming to keep their promise, consecrating the flesh, breaking down the walls of separation between the holy and the profane, making all profane while they pretend 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 revela- tion 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 attractions 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 discern accurately beforehand the lineaments and 126 LECTURE VIII. [1845. proportions of these latest monstrous shapes which shall ascend from the pit, as neither would this fore- knowledge 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 monarchy of the Father, in the absolute des- potisms of the world, an aping of the economy of the Son, as though he already sat visibly on his throne, in its spiritual despotisms, and eminently in that of Rome ; so there remains 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 free- dom, full of the promise of bringing all things into one ; making war on the family, as something which separates between man and man, breaking down and obliterating all distinctions, the distinctions between nation and nation, between the man and the woman, between the flesh and the Spirit, between the Church and the world. So seems it ; and 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 confirmation of this view which his words more accurately rendered would have given us. He is not simply the wicked one, but o aj/o/xo9, the lawless one ; and the mystery is * 2 Thess. ii. 8. THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 127 not merely a mystery of iniquity but of lawlessness (civo/mias). Law, in all its manifestations, is that which he shall rage against, making hideous misapplication 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 revealed 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 confes- sion of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, shall be saved even in its weakest and simplest mem- ber, 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 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 nations and ages, so 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, perhaps, be born till we be dead, or resolve some 128 LECTURE VIII. [1845. yet unformed doubts, or confound some error that hath not yet a name." And Bishop Butler uses lan- guage 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 undiscovered. For all the same pheno- mena and the same faculties of investigation from which such great discoveries in natural knoAvleclge 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 ; which yet we believe, which indeed yet we know, shall one day be overthrown by the greater power and prevalence of the Truth. For we are sure that the religion 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 THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 129 and error. Such enquiry will, at any rate, not be foreign to our subject ; for that subject being the fit- ness of Holy Scripture for unfolding the spiritual life of men, a great part of that fitness must lie in its capacity to meet and overcome each deadlier form of superstition and error, which, under one name or an- other, cramps and confines, or wholly hinders, the true development of the spirits of men. How profitable were it, in regard of the more effectual 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 with wisdom and insight assail it there, where there were best hope of assailing with success. For every one of these, while their strength is in that fragment of Truth, which, however maimed and marred, with whatever contradictions and under whatever disguises, they hold, have also emi- nently their weak side, that on which they signally deny some great Truth which the spirit of man craves, which 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 armoury ought to be especially advanced against each of these strongholds of confusion, to know not merely that we are strong and they weak, but where and why strong in regard of each, and where and why they are weak ; this is T. H. L. 9 130 LECTURE VIII. [1845. surely a needful, as it is a much-neglected, discipline; this is a duty not indolently to be forgone by a Church like our own, a Church which God's providence and leading has so clearly marked out to do the work 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- 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 de- scribe them all one common charge of belonging to THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 131 the devil on which to arraign them ; instead of recog- nizing, as we 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 made them strong, and enabled them to stand their ground so long, and some of them, saddest of all ! to win ground for a while from Christendom 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 would get much more nearly to the heart of the matter. Thus, the Mohammedan is strong in that he 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 Righteousness, 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, because 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 of the human race, which was made for this union as 92 132 LECTURE VIII. [1845. its highest end and crowning perfection, which will be satisfied with nothing short of this ; and therefore we are sure that 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 shew themselves over all the dark places of the earth mightier than the Koran. We are sure of this, because those Scriptures maintain ah 1 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, 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 unnumbered. For while one incarnation is precious, a thousand are worth nothing; they become mere transient points of contact between God and man, momentary docetic 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 THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 133 holiest, yet soberest, earnest, " The Word was made flesh" and which knows not merely of an Incarna- tion, but of a Resurrection 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 relation 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 perplexed whether to call it a pantheism, or a gigantic atheism, that which in the end loses everything 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 ought 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, 134 LECTURE VIII. [1845. 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 to 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 sides upon which they dumbly 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 an 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 wisdom and patience and love, than to set men free from their superstitions, and yet, with this, not 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- THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 135 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 Eomanism which we 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 shewn them in the light of modern philosophy, the utter absurdity and incoherence of their sacred books, and provoked them to throw uttermost scorn on these, we 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 reverent scholars of Christ. Wiser surely was St. Paul's method, who ever sought a ground common to himself and him whom he would persuade, though it were but an handbreadth, upon which to take his stand who taught men reverently to handle their past selves and their past beliefs, who to the Athe- 136 LECTURE VIII. [1845. nians said, "Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you," and spake of the Cretan poet as "a prophet 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 whatever far land, under whatever unlikely disguises, he found them. Thus, and because he thus dealt, he became, in the language of a Greek father, which contains scarcely an exaggeration, the vvpfya- ywyos Trjs oiKovfJievrjs, he who led up the world as a bride unto Christ. 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 shews itself as fitted for doing from that which it has already done from that which we may believe it will accomplish yet. And this sub- ject 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 between one Gospel or one book of history and an- other, as between Matthew and Luke, Chronicles and Kings, and seek to trouble and perplex us with these, surely the true way to meet them were to bring first THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 137 the whole question into an higher court. Let us put rather the question to be resolved as this, In what traceable connexion do these books, each by itself, each in relation to the whole of the other books, stand to the great purpose of God with humanity ? Can they be shewn evidently 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 shall not make haste." He will be content to wait. For what weakness does it manifest, what inner mistrust 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 shewn 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 world before them, will vanish away in a little while. But to dread anything, to wish that anything which has been patiently sought or honestly won, should be ignored or kept back, betrays an extreme weakness ; Christ has not laid his hand on us with power, or we 138 LECTURE VIII. [1845. should not be so easily persuaded to believe his cause tottering, or his Truth endangered. And, indeed, as regards ought which may be brought forward with purposes hostile to the Faith, may not the past well give us confidence for the future? 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 deceitful flush of a momentary success, oftentimes the cry has gone forth, It is finished; and the fortress of the Faith is held to be so fatally breached, as henceforward to be untenable, and its defenders to have nothing 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 them- selves 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 when such are confidently raised, the unstable are perplexed, and the waverers fall off, and seeds of doubt, to be reaped in an harvest of weakness, are sown in many minds. But let us, brethren, have a sanctuary to retreat to, till each such tyranny is overpast, as 6verpass it surely and shortly will. Let us have that immediate syllogism of the heart, against which no argument is good. Let us be THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 139 able to say, These words, we have found them words of healing-, words of eternal life. This is our sole security 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. CHKIST THE DESIEE OF ALL NATIONS, OE, THE UNCONSCIOUS PBQPHECIES OF HEATHENDOM: BEING THE HULSEAN LECTURES FOR THE YEAR M.DCCC.XLVI. 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 deliver 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 injunc- tions, 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 those injunctions, 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 sub- jects which he has placed in the foremost rank ; from the purpose which kindred foundations, by him esta- blished among us, were evidently meant to serve ; from the especial importance attached by good men in the age wherein he lived, to such defences of our holy faith, have generally concluded that they should best be fulfilling his intention, to which they felt a pious reverence was due, if they undertook the main- tenance of some portion of the truth, which had been especially assailed or gainsayed. Nor do I purpose, on the present occasion, to depart from the practice 144 LECTURE I. [1846. which the example of my predecessors has sanctioned ; having rather chosen for my argument a subject re- commending itself to me, first, by a certain suitable- ness, as I trust will appear, to our present needs, and to controversies of our day, such as are approaching, if we are 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 Nations, 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 implicit 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 ah 1 which the true Eedeemer only could give, for the great facts of his 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 shew that these dreams of the world, so far from helping to persuade us that all which we INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 145 hold is a dream likewise, are rather exactly that which ought to have preceded the world's awaking : that these parhelions do not proclaim everything 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 shew 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 centered at the last. And this it is worth our while to shew : 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 divers times 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 forward with the pur- pose of shewing that it is therefore no such wisdom of God, no such mystery that had been kept secret from the beginning of the world ; that what it pro- fessed to give as a revelation from heaven, men had attained before by the light of reason, by the unas- T. H. L. 10 146 LECTURE I. [1846. 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 which 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, having occasion to speak of one of Christ's most me- morable moral precepts, " Whatsoever ye would 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 * Origen, Con. Cels., 1. 7, c. 68. In like manner Celsus affirmed that our. Lord's words, Matt. xix. 23. were transferred from Plato, De Legg., 1. 5. 742. (Con. Cels., 1. 6. c. 16.) Augustine too (De Doctr. Christ., 1.2, c.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 praedicare coguntur, de Platonis libris eum didicisse. St. Ambrose also, as we learn from Augustine, (.E/>.31,) had found it necessary to write against such ; which he did in a work that now has perished. How excellent is Augustine's own answer (Enarr. in Ps. cxl. 6) : Dixit hoc Pythagoras, dixit hoc Plato .... Propterea si inventus fuerit aliquis eorum hoc dixisse quod dixit et Christus, gratulamur illi, non sequimur ilium. Sed prior fuit ille quam Christus. Si quis vera loquitur, prior est quam ipsa Veritas ? O homo, attende Christum non quando ad te venerit, sed quando te fecerit. INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 147 once indicated the quarter 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 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 shew 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 which by him were again confidently produced as such*. Somewhat later * There is a curious account of a fraud which was played off on him, in Von Bohlen's Das Alte Indien, v. 1, p. 136, connecting itself with a singular piece of literary forgery. A Jesuit missionary, whose zeal led him to assume the appearance 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 kingdom 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 1 2 Christian 148 LECTURE I. [1846. 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 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 way ; they have ransacked all records of ancient religions for such parallels, Christian Books, aud shewing 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. 149 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 marshal- led 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 with an 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, w r e are bidden to believe that ours is but such an ardent desire, fashioning at length a body for itself. Parading a long line of shadows, these adversaries require us to acknowledge the substance we have embraced to be a shadow also ; shewing how much false money is in the world, and has at different times passed current, they demand of 150 LECTURE I. [1846. 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 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 cockcrowing of an intellectual morn, but that this should continue to affront, as boldly and as confidently as ever, even * Tertullian (Apol. 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 Rhadamanthus 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, qua de similitudine fidem infirmarent veritatis. But if the truth was hard to receive with these, might it not have been impossible to receive without them ? INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 151 the light of the world's middle day that each other should have crumbled into nothing at the first touch 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 afterwards to give a point to these charges ; and, not pausing here, to shew that the truth, which, how- ever distorted, is at the bottom of these charges, is one which we may cheerfully and without any mis- giving recognize. And this is not all : for I would fain also shew 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 enquire whether we may not contemplate the rela- 152 LECTURE I. [1846. 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 organic connexion they would be very far from con- INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 153 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 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 154 LECTURE I. [1846. 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 re- claimed 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 revelation of Himself in Christ, as a revelation merely of certain moral truths, it maybe startling to find ought 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 light shining in the darkness, to a divine spark not trodden out in man, to a God nurturing the heathen, with all * Thus Augustine ( De Doctr. Christ., 1. 2, c. 40): Philosophi autem qui vocantur, si qua forte vera et fidei nostrae accommodata dixerunt maxime Platonici, non solum formidanda non sunt, sed ab eis etiam tanquam injustis possessoribus in usum nostrum vindicanda. Sicut enim -flCgyptii non solum idola habebant et onera gravia, quse populus Israel detestaretur et fugeret, sed etiam vasa atque ornamenta de auro et argento, et vestem, quse ille populus exiens de ^Egypto sibi potius tanquam ad usum meliorem clanculo vindicavit, non auctoritate propria, sed praecepto Dei, ipsis -5gyptiis nescienter commodantibus ea, quibus non bene utebantur, sic doctrinae omnes Gentilium non solum simulata et superstitiosa figmenta gravesque sarcinas supervacui laboris habent, sed etiam liberates 'disciplinas usui veritatis aptiores, quod eorum tamquam aurum et argentum, quod non ipsi insti- tuerunt, sed de quibusdam quasi metallis divinse providentiae, quae ubique infusa sunt, eruerunt, debet ab eis auferre Christianus ad usum justum praedicandi Evangelii. Origen (Ep. ad Gregor., 1. 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 taber- nacle of God. INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 155 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 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 -f- : 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 * Grotius indeed says ( De Verit. Rel. Christ., 1. 4, c. 12) : Ejus [sell, religionis Christiana] partes singulae tanta? sunt honestatis, ut suapte luce animos quasi convincant, ita ut inter paganos non defue- rint qui dixerint singula, quse nostra religio habet universa. Lactan- tius 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, Inst. Div., 1. 7, c. 7 : Nullam sectam fuisse tarn deviam, nee philosophorum quendam tarn inanem, qui non viderit ali- quid e vero. Quodsi extitisset aliquis, qui veritatem, sparsam per singulos, per sectasque djffusam, colligeret in unum, et redigeret in corpus, is profecto non dissentiret a nobis. Sed hoc nemo facere, nisi veri peritus ac sciens, potest : verum autem non nisi ejus scire est, qui sit doctus a Deo. t See for instance in Von Bohlen (Das Alte 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. 156 LECTURE I. [1846. 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 Octavius of Minucius Felix, exactly hit the mark, when, to characterize the practical of Christian life as distinguished from the speculative of heathen philosophy, he exclaimed of that sect every where spoken against, to which he belonged, Non eloquimur magna, sed vivimus. And yet, brethren, when we thus trace the miser- able 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- 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 still well skilled to draw a ground-plan, but weak to build any superstruc- ture thereon the virtue loved, till the opportunity INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 157 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, because 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 perceive that according to the very highest idea of Christianity, such there needs must have been. For what do we affirm of Christ '? when do we conceive worthily of Him ? When we conceive of Him, in the prophet's 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 harmony 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, with their mockery of temple and tower, stands for us a city, which hath come down from hea- ven, but whose foundations rest upon this earth of 158 LECTURE I. [1846. ours ; that we have divine facts facts no doubt which are ideal, in that they are the vehicle of ever- lasting truths ; history indeed which is far more than history, for it embodies the largest and most con- tinually recurring thoughts which have stirred the bosom of humanity 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 origin, 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 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 ! 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 no- thing 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 INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 159 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, 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 mag- nificent 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, * Clement of Alexandria on this very matter (Strom., 1. 1, c.5) : Mia f*ev ovv TJ}S tX)0eia 65